Champion of the World (22 page)

“For your records,” he said, urging him to take the stack.

Eddy nodded and made Livermore wait while he pulled on his driving gloves.

T
he trucks came at night, waking Moira from a dream about her father. In the dream the two of them were standing in a room she couldn't quite see, but from the way the floor listed under her feet, she knew they were on the riverboat. Her father wore his gold vest with blue starbursts spangling the back. His hair was full and pomaded, a younger version of himself than she had known in life. He smiled at her, saying something she couldn't hear, and as she reached for him he vanished, leaving her alone in a cold mountain cabin a thousand miles from home. When she opened her eyes, she could hear the low growl of engines and the sound of gravel crunching under slow-rolling wheels. It was so warm in the bed and so cold out of it that she almost drifted back to sleep, but then a car door slammed and another and another, and she sat up. What in the world . . . ?

Wrapping the quilted hunting jacket over her nightdress, she went out to have a look. On the road near the old horse barn she could see lights and a cloud of dust pluming into the sky. At first her groggy mind thought stupidly it must be the carnival, but the commotion wasn't nearly big enough. There was only one truck parked in the shadows of the barn, with a single sedan idling nearby. The shapes of men darted in and out of the headlamps, and even from
this distance she recognized James Eddy up there directing traffic. The other men were strangers. Pulling on her shoes, she hiked up the hill to see what was happening, but only got as far as the lodge before she found Carol Jean leaning against the steps, smoking a cigarette. Ten minutes later they were sitting at the table in the parlor, cups of steaming coffee pressed between their palms.

“Who are they?” Moira said.

“Who's to say?” Carol Jean said. “And really, who are we to ask?” As she spoke she swirled her drink to confirm what Moira had already guessed. The trucks were hauling booze.

“Oh, honey, you should see your face,” Carol Jean went on. “Like someone rode in and told you there is no Santa Claus.”

Moira took a drink of coffee; bitter, maybe a day old. “How often does this happen?” she asked.

“Honestly, I thought you would've figured things out ages ago,” Carol Jean said. “Smart girl like you. Maybe you don't see as many of the angles as you thought, hey?”

“And the rest of it,” Moira said. “Me, you, our husbands, Fritz Mundt, the supposed wrestling camp—what are we? A front? Some gangster's cover story?”

“Don't be dramatic,” Carol Jean said. “You're here, aren't you? It costs a lot of money to keep those boys in tights and boots. What would be the point if it were all just a put-on? No, honey, I assure you, Mr. Mundt's belief in my husband as a drawing card is very real.”

Moira filled in the rest, trying to put herself in Fritz's shoes. Abe Blomfeld died and left him the gym, but the wrestling business was in the tank and Fritz didn't know the first thing about being a promoter. It took all of six months for the operation to go belly-up. He must've been desperate by the time Garfield Taft showed up on his doorstep, claiming he was ready for his big comeback. Fritz would have to be down to his last dime to bet on a long shot like a black
man getting a crack at the world's heavyweight champion, but maybe he didn't have any other choice. Win or lose, a match against Strangler Lesko would put them all on easy street if it actually happened. He would need start-up capital and enough regular cash coming in to keep a training camp running. Where did a two-bit wrestling promoter go when he needed that kind of money? Not the bank, she thought. He didn't waltz into J. P. Morgan and invite the loan officer to squeeze Taft's biceps.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew from the moment I saw him again that Freddy was in over his head.”

“You know what your problem is?” Carol Jean said. “You refuse to see the good in people. Even when they're trying to help you out.”

“Does Mr. Taft know about this?” Moira asked.

“Of course he knows,” Carol Jean said. “I mean, there's no telling what these men understand from one moment to the next. Their whole lives are a giant game of tag, all about who got who last, everybody keeping score in their heads all the time.”

“Where is he now?” Moira asked. The whole time she'd been sitting in the parlor she hadn't heard the floorboards creak overhead.

“He doesn't sleep,” Carol Jean said. “He walks. Ever since he got out of prison, he just walks and walks and walks.”

“What do you mean he doesn't sleep?” Moira said.

Anger bloomed on Carol Jean's face. “It doesn't strike me as a particularly hard concept to grasp,” she said. “He tosses and turns, he gets restless, he goes out. I don't pry, because, unlike you, I strive for optimism. I just thank my stars he's home at all and not locked up in some box somewhere.”

Moira fought back the urge to snap at her—the oblivious sea captain whose ship had set a course for the edge of the earth. This thing they'd both spent so much time pining for. They weren't going to get it. Moira knew that now. Maybe it had taken hearing it from someone else's mouth to make her realize there was no going back to their
old lives. They could only move forward. But with Pepper off on Fritz Mundt's Chicago adventure, Carol Jean was the closest thing Moira had to an ally at the hunting camp. So that she wouldn't tell her how silly it all sounded, she took a deep breath and held it, thinking carefully about what she would say next.

“I know what it's like, you know. To have to start over.”

“Oh,” Carol Jean said, like she didn't believe it. “What would you know about it?”

“My father died when I was fairly young,” she said. “After that, I left home and went to St. Louis. I had nothing, I knew no one, maybe like you that first night you wandered into the Olympia Ballroom. But I made it. I made a little life for myself and then I met Pepper and I expect the rest would sound very familiar to you. For a while we had a lot. Now we don't have a thing.”

As she talked, Carol Jean put her coffee cup down and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Mine was a saloon owner,” she said. “My daddy. Had a little corner bar down in Lexington. The kind that always kept a picture of John L. Sullivan in one of those little oval frames, like some long-lost member of the family? Well, you can imagine how he reacted when he found out about Garfield. The last time I talked to him, he blamed me for the death of my mother—said I killed her with a broken heart. Really, it was cancer, but I'm not sure he was thinking straight by that point. Thought it was some kind of divine message that he'd been right all along when Gar got sent away.”

She was running again, so Moira got out of her way.

“We weren't married, of course, when he went to prison; but at first I didn't know how I would survive it,” Carol Jean said. “They took him up to Dayton for the trial and I followed. Those nights alone in the hotel room, the not knowing and the loneliness. Those were probably my lowest points. And then of course the waiting while he served his time. I suppose the silver lining, if there was one,
was that I proved capable of hanging around longer than the previous Mrs. Taft could manage.”

“Three years is a long time,” Moira said.

“Not for the man you love,” Carol Jean said. “A blink of the eye.”

“Still,” Moira said. “I suppose anything seems preferable by comparison.”

“Certainly you can't expect someone who's gone through that kind of hardship to come out unchanged,” Carol Jean said. “But I'm hopeful things will get better. Maybe even go back to the way they were before.”

“Changed how?”

“He's a harder man now,” Carol Jean said. “Less interested. He barely rests, just wanders.”

“What you said that first night at dinner,” Moira said. “You indicated the papers got it wrong about Mr. Taft.”

Carol Jean laughed, a booming slap of a laugh. “Complete lies, my dear, trumped-up nonsense. My Gar was no more a pimp than he was president of the United States.”

“How can you be sure?” Moira asked. She found herself fascinated, in a strange way, by this woman. She seemed at once the boss of the house and also a fraud, every pose and facial expression studied, as if she had spent considerable time learning where to place her words, her arms, her breasts. Her energy bordered on manic, a look in her eyes that said if she ever stopped swimming, she would drown.

“I know my husband,” Carol Jean said, leaning over to lay a hand across Moira's arm. “The truth is, the whole thing had nothing to do with prostitution or whatever else they said in court. It was wrestling, plain and simple. A group of promoters got together and decided not to let Garfield Taft win the world's heavyweight championship. They knew if they let that happen, a white man would never lay hands on it again. It was just a couple of months out from
when he was supposed to wrestle Joe Stecher at Comiskey Park, you see. It took more than a year for Gar to get Stecher to sign the contract, and, well, the whole wrestling world was just terrified. So they had him arrested and Stecher went to Omaha and wrestled Stanislaw Lesko instead. They fought to a five-hour draw in front of thirty thousand people. Not as big a crowd as they would've drawn with Garfield on the bill, but still, the gate was almost two hundred thousand dollars. Can you imagine?”

“It sounds like quite a conspiracy.”

“My dear,” Carol Jean said. “When all you need is one Negro locked up in a cell somewhere, it's not like murdering Caesar. It's just a matter of which bagman leaves which bag in whose hotel room. Remember, there was a lot more money to be made in wrestling back then.”

This brought Moira back to Eddy, who was of course one of the main reasons she'd walked up here in the first place. She asked Carol Jean about him again, if he was the kind of man who might leave a suitcase full of cash in some important man's hotel room. “My husband said he's a gangster,” Moira said, trying not to feel like she was betraying a trust by saying it.

Carol Jean drank and chuckled. “A pitiful one, maybe. To nab a cherry assignment like this? He can't be anyone's favorite, whoever is the boss of him.”

“It's so strange,” Moira said. “All of it.”

“Any stranger than anything else we've done?” Carol Jean said.

Moira pointed her coffee cup at the window. “These creatures. How long will they be in our midst?”

Carol Jean said the mountain roads would be too dangerous for the men to travel after dark. They'd stay the night to guard their treasure and leave in the morning.

“Wonderful,” Moira said, and again Carol Jean sighed.

“Sweetheart,” she said. “I'm going to tell you what Mr. Herman Cohn told me when I asked what to do the first time a customer at the Olympia Ballroom put his hand up my dress.”

“Which was?”

“Hold your nose and hope the check clears.”

S
he intended to go straight back to the cabin, but after leaving Carol Jean to finish the dregs of the coffee, Moira circled around the far end of the lodge and crept up the hill toward the horse barn. It was even colder out than she had first thought, a stiff wind biting into her ankles, blowing up under the hem of her jacket. She wrapped herself tighter as she went, picking her way to the boarded-up gym where the men were supposed to spend their days training. In the shadows there she stopped to let her eyes adjust to the gloom, hoping to get a better look at what was happening. The doors to the horse barn were flung open and the truck was already backed up close, the sedan hunkering nearby with its motor still running. She counted six men working to unload wooden crates, the sound of their voices carrying in the dark, but the words washed out by the wind. She could no longer see Eddy up there with them and wondered if he'd gone off to settle some other business.

Before long she saw figures coming through the darkness toward her. At first she thought they were carrying shovels or axes, but as they got closer she saw each man had a shotgun propped against his hip. A surge of panic seized her, the urge to run, to scurry off and hide in the underbrush. She fought it down and immediately regretted it, wondering how many people got themselves killed for fear of looking foolish. By then it was too late. There were four of them, the lead man big and round-faced, his collar turned up to his ears. He was the only one not carrying a shotgun but instead had a large lamp,
like something a miner might use, hanging from one fist. As his light fell on her, she could tell they were surprised to find she was a woman.