Free Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow

faces, white or black, and some of them strode and some of them scurried and one of them limped, but the thing was they all carried brown paper bags going in and when they came out they had nothing.
    Now you would think it was easy to find a paper bag lying around on the sidewalk or down an alley or in a trash can, but for some reason this was not so on 149th Street, to get my hands on one I actually had to locate a grocery store and go in and spend money to buy something. And then I curled the mouth of the bag closed just like they did, folded it over a couple oftimes so that it looked wrinkled, and then I took a deep breath and though I was a block away, just to get into the mood of it I loped along like all those guys and got up a good sweat and pushed my way through the doors of the building into the dark urinal of a lobby and bounded up wooden stairs that you could hear a cockroach walk on, and I knew they would be at the very top, it was what made sense, and the higher I got the lighter it got, and at the top floor was a skylight covered by a rusty grating, and at the end of the landing was a plain steel door that had a number of peculiar gashes and dents in it, and the knob had been chopped off so I just nudged it with my finger and it swung open and in I went.
    I don’t know what I was expecting but I found a short empty corridor with splintery floor and another door, a brand-new unpainted steel door this time with a little peephole and it did not give way to the touch so I knocked and stood back a foot or so so the guy could see my bag and I waited. Could they hear my heart banging to be let in, louder than a sledgehammer, louder than an ax on steel, louder than a dozen cops rushing up four flights of wooden stairs?
    And then the door unclicked and swung open an inch or two so what the hell, I found myself in a pleasant large room with several old beat-up desks and a man at each desk counting slips of paper, or stacks of bills, and they all lick their thumbs when they do this, and a phone was ringing, and I stood at a counter that came up to my chest looking in at all of this with my bag proffered and tried not to mind the guy who had opened the door standing behind me six feet tall and noisy of breath, the kind of person who snore-breathes, and I could smell the garlic, and I didn’t yet know his name but it was Lulu Rosenkrantz, and he had this oversized head with unkempt black hair in need of a cutting, and little eyes practically hidden by his shaggy brows and a nose broken into blossom and blue cheeks all sunken in on their pockmarks, and each wave of garlic he exhaled I imagined as fire coming out of his throat. I didn’t see Mr. Schultz anywhere, the fellow who came over to the counter was a bald man with rubber bands billowing his shirtsleeves above theelbow and he looked at me for a second curiously and took the bag and turned it over and emptied it out. I remember the look on his face when a dozen or so packages of cellophane-wrapped Dugan’s cupcakes, two to a package, poured out on the counter: suddenly pale and alarmed in the eyes he was, and stupid with the effort to comprehend, all in the second before he held the bag upside down and shook it to see if anything would flutter out and then for good measure looked up inside it to see the trick hidden there. “What the fuck is this?” he shouted. “What the fuck are you bringing me!”
    People stopped working and grew quiet and one or two rose and came over to look. Lulu Rosenkrantz moved up behind me. We all stood there in silence looking at these cupcakes. And it was nothing I had intended, I wouldn’t have bought them if I’d found a bag in the street, I’d have blown up the bag with air, so that it looked as if I was carrying something, and then when you do that to paper bags you know you can pop them, hit them like a guy playing the cymbals, you hold the neck with one hand and punch out the bottom, and supposing I had done that, exploded the