Rich Man, Poor Man (37 page)

After three minutes, Dominic dropped his hands and said, ‘Okay, that’s enough.’ He had rapped the kid pretty hard a few times and had tied him up when he came in close, but with all that, the kid was awfully fast and the twice he had connected it had hurt. The kid was some kind of fighter. Just what kind of fighter Dominic didn’t know, but a fighter.

‘Now listen, kid,’ Dominic said, as Charley undid the laces on his gloves. This isn’t a barroom. This is a gentlemen’s club. The gentlemen don’t come here to get hurt. They come to get some exercise while learning the manly art of self-defence. You come swinging in on them the way you did with me, you wouldn’t last one day here.’

‘Sure,’ the kid said, ‘I understand. But I wanted to show you what I could do.’

‘You can’t do much, Dominic said. ‘Yet. But you’re fast and you move okay. Where you working now?’

‘I was over in Brookline,’ the kid said. ‘In a garage. Td like to find something where I can keep my hands clean.’

‘When you figure you could start in here?’

‘Now. Today. I quit at the garage last week.’

‘How much you make there?’

‘Fifty a week,’ the kid said.

‘I think I can get you thirty-five here,’ Dominic said. ‘But you can rig up a cot in the massage room and sleep here. You’ll have to help clean the swimming pool and vacuum the mats and stuff like that and check the equipment.’

‘Okay,’ the kid said.

“You got a job,’ Dominic said. “What’s your name?’

‘Thomas Jordache,’ the kid said.

‘Just keep out of trouble, Tom,’ said Dominic.

He kept out of trouble for quite some time. He was quick and respectful and beside the work he had been hired to do, he cheerfully ran errands for Dominic and the members and made a point of smiling agreeably, at all times, with especial attention to the older men. The atmosphere of the club, muted, rich, and friendly, pleased him, and when he wasn’t in the gym he liked to pass through the high-ceilinged, dark, wood-panelled reading and gaming rooms, with their deep leather armchairs and smoked-over oil paintings of Boston during the days of sailing ships. The work was undemanding, with long gaps in the day when he just sat around listening to Dominic reminisce about his days in the ring.

Dominic was not curious about Tom’s past and Tom didn’t bother to tell him about the months on the road, the flophouses in Cincinnati and Cleveland and Chicago, about the jobs at filling stations, or about the stretch as a bellboy in the hotel in Syracuse. He had been making good money at the hotel steering whores into guests’ rooms until he had to take a knife out of a pimp’s fist because the pimp objected to the size of the commission his girls were passing on to the nice babyfaced boy they could mother when they weren’t otherwise occupied. Thomas didn’t tell Dominic, either, about the drunks he had rolled on the Loop or the loose cash he had stolen in various rooms, more for the hell of it than for the money, because he wasn’t all that interested in money.

Dominic taught him how to hit the light bag and it was pleasant on a rainy afternoon, when the gym was empty, to tap away, faster and faster, at the bag, making the gym resound with the tattoo of the blows. Once in a while, when he was feeling ambitious, and there were no members around Dominic put on the gloves with him and taught him how to put together combinations, how to straighten out his right hand, how to use his head and elbows and slide with the punches, to keep up on the balls of his feet and how to avoid punches by ducking and weaving as he came in instead of falling back. Dominic still didn’t allow him to spar with any of the members, because he wasn’t sure about Thomas yet and didn’t want any incidents. But the squash pro got him down to the courts and in just a few weeks made a fair player of him and when some of the lesser players of the club turned up without a partner for a game, Thomas would go in there with them, He was quick and agile and he didn’t mind losing and when he won he learned immediately not to make the win too easy and he found himself collecting twenty to thirty dollars a week extra in tips.

He became friendly with the cook in the club kitchen, mostly by finding a solid connection for buying decent marijuana and doing the cook’s shopping for him for the drug, so before long he was getting all his meals free.

He tactfully stayed out of all but the most desultory conversations with the members, who were lawyers, brokers, bankers,

and officials of shipping lines and manufacturing companies. He learned to take messages accurately from their wives and mistresses over the telephone and pass them on with no hint that he understood exactly what he was doing.

He didn’t like to drink, and the members, as they downed their post-exercise whiskies at the bar, commented favourably on that, too.

There was no plan to his behaviour; he wasn’t looking for anything; he just knew that it was better to ingratiate himself with the solid citizens who patronised the club than not. He had knocked around too much, a stray in America, getting into trouble and always finishing in brawls that sent him on the road again. Now the peace and security and approval of the club were welcome to him. It wasn’t a career, he told himself, but it was a good year. He wasn’t ambitious. When Dominic talked vaguely of his signing up for some amateur bouts just to see how good he was, he put the old fighter off.

When he got restless he would go downtown and pick up a whore and spend the night with her, honest money for honest services, and no complications in the morning.

He even liked the city of Boston, or at least as much as he had ever liked any place, although he didn’t travel around it much by daylight, as he was pretty sure that there was an assault and battery warrant out for him as a result of the last afternoon at the garage in Brookline, when the foreman had come at him with a monkey wrench. He had gone right back to his rooming house that afternoon and packed and got out in ten minutes telling his landlady he was heading for Florida. Then he had booked into the YMCA and lain low for a week, until he had seen the article in the newspaper about Dominic.

He had his likes and dislikes among the members, but was careful to be impartially pleasant to all of them. He didn’t want to get involved with anybody. He had had enough involvements. He tried not to know too much about any of members, but of course it was impossible not to form opinions, especially when you saw a man naked, his pot belly swelling, or his back scratched by some dame from his last go in bed, or taking it badly when he was losing a silly game of squash.

Dominic hated all the members equally, but only because they had money and he didn’t Dominic had been born and brought up in Boston and his a was as flat as anybody’s, but in spirit he was still working by the day in a landlord’s field in Sicily, plotting to burn down the landlord’s castle and cut the throats of the landlord’s family. Naturally, he concealed his dreams of arson and murder behind the most cordial of manners, always telling the members how well they looked when they came back after a vacation, marvelling about how much weight they seemed to have lost, and being solicitous about aches and sprains.

‘Here comes the biggest crook in Massachusetts,’ Dominic would whisper to Thomas, as an important-looking, grey-haired gentleman came into the locker room, and then, aloud, to the member. ‘Why sir, it’s good to see you back. We’ve missed you. I guess you’ve been working too hard.’

‘Ah, work, work,’ the man would say, shaking his head sadly.

‘I know how it is, sir.’ Dominic would shake his head, too. ‘Come on down and I’ll give you a nice turn on the weights and then you take a steam and a swim and a massage and you’ll get all the kinks out and sleep like a babe tonight’

Thomas watched and listened carefully, learning from Dominic, useful dissembler. He liked the stony-hearted ex-pug, committed deep within him, despite all blandishments, to anarchy and loot.

Thomas also liked a man by the name of Reed, a hearty, easygoing president of a textile concern, who played squash with Thomas and insisted upon going on to the courts with him, even when mere were other members hanging around waiting for a game. Reed was about forty-five and fairly heavy, but still played well and he and Thomas split their matches most of the time, Reed winning the early games and just losing out when he began to tire. ‘Young legs, young legs,’ Reed would say laughing, wiping the sweat off his face with a towel, as they walked together towards the showers after an hour on the courts. They played three times a week, regularly, and Reed always offered Thomas a coke after they had cooled off and slipped him a five dollar bill each time. He had one peculiarity. He always carried a hundred dollar bill neatly folded in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. ‘A hundred dollar bill saved my life once,’ Reed told Thomas. He had been caught in a dreadful fire one night in a night club, in which many people had perished. Reed had been lying under a pile of bodies near the door, hardly able to move, his throat too seared to cry out. He had heard the firemen dragging at the pile of bodies and with his last strength he had dug into his pants pocket, where he kept a hundred dollar bill. He managed to drag the bill out and work one arm free. His hand, waving feebly, with the bill clutched in it had been seen. He had felt the money being taken from his grasp and then a fireman had moved the bodies

lying on him and dragged him to safety. He had spent two weeks in the hospital, unable to talk, but he had survived, with a firm faith in the power of a single one hundred dollar bill. When possible, he advised Thomas, he should always try to have a hundred dollar bill in a convenient pocket.

He also told Thomas to save his money and invest in the stock market, because young legs did not remain young forever.

The trouble came when he had been there three months. He sensed that something was wrong when he went to his locker to change after a late game of squash with Brewster Reed. There were no obvious signs, but he somehow knew somebody had been in there going through clothes, looking for something. His wallet was half out of the back pocket of his trousers, as though it had been taken out and hastily stuffed back. Thomas took the wallet out and opened it There had been four five dollar bills in it and they were still there. He put the five dollar bill Reed had tipped him into the wallet and slipped the wallet back in place. In the side pocket of his trousers there were some three dollars in bills and change, which had also been there before he had gone to the courts. A magazine which he had been reading and which he remembered putting front cover up on the top shelf was now spread open on the shelf.

For a moment Thomas thought of locking up, but then he thought, hell, if there’s anybody in this club so poor he has to steal from me, he’s welcome. He undressed, put his shoes in the locker, wrapped himself in a towel and went to the shower room, where Brewster Reed was already happily splashing around.

When he came back after the shower, there was a note pinned on to the inside of the locker door. It was in Dominic’s handwriting and it read, ‘I want you in my office after closing time. D. Agostino.’

The curtness of the message, the fact of its being written at all when he and Dominic had passed each other ten times an afternoon, meant trouble. Something official, planned. Here we go again, he thought and almost was ready to finish dressing and quietly slip away, once and for all. But he decided against it, had his dinner in the kitchen, and afterward chatted unconcernedly with the squash pro and Charley in the locker room. Promptly at ten o’clock, when the club closed, he presented himself at Dominic’s office.

Dominic was reading a copy of Life, slowly turning the pages on his desk. He looked up, closed the magazine and put it neatly to one side of the desk. He got up and looked into the hall to make sure it was empty, then closed his office door. ‘Sit down, kid,’ he said.

Thomas sat down and waited while Dominic sat down opposite him behind the desk.

‘What’s up?’ Thomas asked.

‘Plenty,’ Dominic said. The shit is hitting the fan. ‘I’ve been getting reamed out all day.’

‘What’s it got to do with me?’

‘That’s what I’m going to find out,’ Dominic said. ‘No use beatin’ around the bush, kid. Somebody’s been lifting dough out of people’s wallets. Some smart guy who takes a bill here and there and leaves the rest. These fat bastards here’re so rich most of ‘em don’t even know what they have in their pockets and if they do happen to miss an odd ten or twenty here or there, they think maybe they lost it or they made a mistake the last time they counted. But one guy is sure he don’t make no mistakes. That bastard Greening. He says a ten dollar bill was lifted from his locker while he was working out with me yesterday and he’s been on the phone all day today talking to other members and now suddenly everybody’s sure he’s been robbed blind the last few months.’

‘Still, what’s that got to do with me?’ Thomas said, although he knew what it had to with him.

‘Greening figured out that it’s only begun since you came to work here.’

That big shit,’ Thomas said bitterly. Greening was a cold-eyed man of about thirty who worked in a stock broker’s office and who boxed with Dominic. He had fought light-heavy for some school out West and kept in shape and took no pity on Dominic, but went after him savagely for three two minute rounds four times a week. After his sessions with Greening, Dominic, who didn’t dare really to counter hard, was often bruised and exhausted.

He’s a shit all right,’ Dominic said. He made me search your locker this afternoon. It’s lucky thing you didn’t happen to have any ten dollar bills there. Even so, he wants to call the police and have you booked on suspicion.’

“What did you say to that?’ Thomas asked.

‘I talked him out of it,’ Dominic said. ‘I said I’d have a word with you.’

‘Well, you’re having a word with me,’ Thomas said. ‘Now what?’

‘Did you take the dough?’

‘No. Do you believe me?’

Dominic shrugged warily. ‘I don’t know. Somebody sure as hell took it.’

‘A lot of people walk around the locker room all day. Charley, the guy from the pool, the pro, the members, you…’