The newspaper nearly went beneath a wagon before I got it across the street. A wheel caught the loose corner, and I snatched it back with a strip missing. I had bought it for the account of the March appellate decision, but by then I had folded and unfolded the sheet so often that the print broke along its creases. After the 1936 trial, Buchalter's conviction in the Protective case had been reversed; Shapiro's had been affirmed. Those were different outcomes for different men. Nothing on the damaged page told me what would happen to my own shop troubles.
It was spring 1937, and I still believed access could spare a man a public humiliation. I had lost Esther's trust and Ruth's company within hours. Bell could make the loss of my work follow them. So I went looking for a door I had once been allowed through, carrying a public legal report as though it gave my private errand some respectable shape. At the building entrance I wiped street mud from my shoes against the iron scraper. My right knee hurt where the chair had struck it. I climbed slowly enough to arrive without showing my breath.
The private encounter I describe here is imagined, as is my working association with Buchalter. It is not a recovered conversation or an account of what the public proceedings established. In the room of this story, I waited beside a table while a man went inside to ask whether I would be received. There was no place to sit except a low chair with a split seat. I remained standing. A clock on the wall had stopped, which made every sound from the inner room seem like movement toward an answer.
When I was admitted, Buchalter looked first at the newspaper in my hand. I folded it smaller. I had come hoping the familiar shape of a working man with a grievance would make my request easy to hear. Instead I found myself explaining Esther's removal badly, then correcting myself. “I stopped the fellows following her,” I said. “I thought I was keeping them from a fight.” He listened without helping me toward a better account. I did not know what he had heard elsewhere, if anything, and I had no right to fill that silence with certainty.
“What do you want now?” he asked. “Distance from Morris. Enough to work without his hand on my shoulder.” Saying Bell's first name made the request sound smaller than it was. I wanted protection against the man whose protection I had accepted for years. Buchalter shifted the folded paper away from the edge of the table with two fingers. “You and he have worked together a long time.” I said that was why I had come. He gave me no promise to carry back, no assurance that Bell would leave Feld's door alone. I waited, and the waiting did not change it.
For a moment I considered asking a different question: whether I could tell Morris that we had spoken. That much would have been true, while everything I intended him to understand would have been false. I pictured Bell's face closing, the young men stepping aside, my own hand restored to the shop latch. Then I saw Ruth taking my fingers off her tool case. “I'll settle my own place,” I said. I put the newspaper inside my coat and left before I could ask for something vaguer and more useful. Nobody stopped me on the stairs.
Bell stood outside beside a parked car, turning a match between his fingers. Whether he had waited for me or arrived on some other errand, I could not know. “Get what you came for?” he asked. I kept walking until we were clear of the entrance. “Esther's not to be shut in any room again.” His mouth tightened. “She's walking around, isn't she?” I told him that wasn't an answer. He dropped the match and ground it beneath his shoe. People passed close enough to hear us, and he lowered his voice. “You're speaking very large for a man looking for help.”
I could have let him believe I had found it upstairs. Instead I said, “Nobody sent me down to tell you anything.” His gaze moved from my face to the coat pocket holding the paper. He seemed to settle more comfortably on his feet. I had surrendered the only uncertainty that might have helped me. “Then listen for yourself,” he said. “Be at Feld's entrance when the next shift comes.” I asked what he expected me to do. “Keep the door straight.” He walked away before I could make him say what that meant. I stayed by the curb, with the newspaper stiff against my chest.