The Harder They Fall (23 page)

‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this is great. This is just great. This is just what we needed, like a hole in the head.’

Vince started to blubber and bluster through an explanation, but Nick’s hard, sharp voice knifed through his defence.

‘I’m not inarested,’ he said. ‘When I was a kid I learnt
one thing and I learnt it good. Never do nothing halfass. Whatever it is, if you’re gonna do it, do it. The kid who stole an apple off the pushcart and ran away, he’s the dope the cop always caught. The guy who followed the old man home, bopped him in the hallway and took his whole goddam pushcart, he’s the one who got away. That’s been a principle with me ever since. Like this build-up we’re giving Molina. You say you slipped the nigger two-fifty to lay down.’ (It had been five hundred when I heard it, but maybe Vince held out the other half.) ‘Hell, make it worth his while. It’s worth it to us. Don’t be a piker. Think big. Give ’em a grand. Only give it to ’em after the fight. No dive, no dough. You got that? Now this time I let it go. Maybe this sun is making me soft in the head, but I let it go. Next time you fumble you’re out on your ass.’

‘Yeah, but we gotta contract,’ Vince pouted.

‘Sure we gotta contract,’ Nick agreed, ‘But give me trouble and see how quick I tear up the contract. I got Max Stauffer,’ he said, mentioning the Darrow of corruption. ‘You louse me up and rightaway Max has ten reasons why the contract’s no good that’ll stand up in court.’ He opened his closet drawer and paused discriminatingly over his impressive collection of hand-painted ties. ‘Now screw, both of you,’ he said. ‘Pat Drake is bringing a couple of big men over from the studio, and you guys don’t look dressed good enough.’

The investigation dragged on for a couple of weeks and I had a job on my hands trying to make it look as good as possible in the papers. One of the things working for us was the convincing way Toro reacted to the charges. ‘Me no
fight feex,’ he insisted. ‘I no crook. I try hard.’

Vince also expressed indignation that his professional integrity should be impugned. The whole thing wound up with the Commission exonerating Toro and his managers completely, but finding Benny Mannix guilty and suspending his licence to second fighters in the State of California for twelve months. Benny had admitted throwing in the towel because he had placed a large bet on Toro, which he was afraid he might lose. This handful of verbal sand in the eyes of the Commission hiked our overhead up five hundred bucks, which was Benny’s price for taking the rap. The Commission ruling was only binding so far as California was concerned, so Vince sent Benny on to Las Vegas, where we had a date with a full-blooded Indian Miniff had dug up for us by the name of Chief Thunderbird. Chief Thunderbird, Miniff was insisting with characteristic whimsicality, was the heavyweight champion of New Mexico.

Now that the Commission loosened the strings on the San Diego purse, Toro wanted his money. He wanted to send a chunk home to the family in Santa Maria. He wanted them to realise down there what a rich man he was becoming in North America. But Vince explained to him that there couldn’t be any pay-off until Nick’s bookkeeper Leo figured out Toro’s net take after overhead and managerial cuts had been deducted. ‘Meanwhile here’s another fifty,’ Vince said. ‘Any time you need money, just ask me.’

Toro was very pleased. He had all the money he wanted. All he had to do was ask Vince. And as soon as his percentage was figured out, he would send enough to his father to begin building that home that was going to
put the de Santos mansion to shame. Perhaps he would even go back for a vacation – I held out the hope that this was possible when he was well-enough established – and sanctify his relationship with the lovely Carmelita.

While we were waiting for the Commission to make up their minds about that San Diego business, I was walking down Spring Street with Toro one afternoon. Toro could never go by a music store without stopping to press his nose against the window and gaze wonderingly at the radios, phonographs and musical instruments. This time he said, ‘I come back pronto,’ and darted into a music store. In a few minutes he returned with a portable radio in his hand, loudly broadcasting a swing band. ‘Feefty dollar. I buy,’ Toro said happily. People kept turning around to stare at us, not only for Toro’s size but for the volume of the unexpected music.

‘Toro, turn that thing off,’ I said. ‘Nobody plays a radio in the street.’

‘I like carry music,’ Toro said.

Beth should see me now, I thought, playing nursemaid to an elephantine idiot. Everywhere we went, Toro carried that silly radio around, always turned on with the volume up. When we went to a restaurant he placed it tenderly on an empty chair and smiled at it lovingly as he ate while it filled the room with the nasal music of cowboy songs. ‘In Santa Maria no music in box,’ he said. ‘I bring back many to my village for give away.’

I don’t think Toro knew there was any way of changing those bills. You either had to buy something for fifty dollars, it seemed to him, or you might as well throw it away. He
blew the second fifty all at once in the arcade of the hotel and hurried to show me his latest acquisition. It was a tiny gold key in a miniature heart-shaped gold lock.

‘Who’s this for?’ I said.

‘For Señora Latka,’ he said.

I looked at it more closely. On the back of the lock was engraved in small letters, ‘The key to my heart.’

‘You can’t give her this,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ Toro wanted to know. ‘She nice lady. I like very much.’

‘Her husband likes her very much too,’ I said.

‘I like her too,’ Toro protested. ‘She nice to me. Good lady. Go to church every Sunday.’

Well, finally there was nothing to do about it but take him up to Beverly Hills, so he could present his little trinket to Ruby. Nick was out playing golf with Pat Drake, as it happened, and she was home alone. Although the sun was shining, we found her inside drinking her way through a batch of sidecars. ‘Why, Toro, that’s sweet of you, that’s awfully sweet of you,’ she said, and she pinned the locket over her heart in a provocative gesture.

While I drank along with her for a little while, Toro just sat there silently staring at her in simple-minded shamelessness. She was a stunning woman, with the agelessness of the full-blown voluptuary. Though her behaviour was above reproach and almost studiously ladylike, I wondered if it was the influence of the sidecars which made me sense that Toro’s presence was stimulating her to a more animated charade than usual.

Just as we were leaving, Nick came in with Pat Drake and
he seemed pleased to be able to show off his giant protégé to the film star. If he were at all disturbed by Toro’s present to Ruby there was no hint of it in his reaction. ‘The guy shows pretty classy taste,’ he said good-naturedly, looking at the locket. He poked Toro playfully in the ribs. ‘All set for that guy in Oakland, Man Mountain?’

‘I ponch. He go boom,’ Toro said.

In Oakland we polished off in four a character called Oscar DeKalb and in Reno an alleged heavyweight by the name of Tuffy Parrish collapsed from a vicious slap on the chest, which added another five thousand to the take of the corporation. By the time we came into Las Vegas, ‘with the new scourge of the heavyweights, the Giant of the Andes, seeking his fifth straight knockout victory’, the East was beginning to rise to the bait and AP wanted fifty words on the outcome of the Chief Thunderbird fight.

‘Turn that goddam radio off,’ Danny said on our way up to the hotel. The more success we had the more irritable Danny seemed to be getting. Larceny just didn’t come naturally to him the way it did to Vince. He fought it all the time.

Toro was still hanging on to his radio. Jazz, cowboy music, spirituals, Latin songs – he didn’t seem to care what
it was as long as it was something that came out of a box he could carry around.

As soon as we were settled, Doc and George took Toro out to stretch his legs. Danny ducked out to find a place to bet a couple of good things he thought he had at Belmont. Vince was on the phone trying to get hold of a broad he used to know in Las Vegas and I was in the bathtub reading the
New Yorker
when Miniff popped in.

By the time I finished the story and came out with a towel around my middle, they were already in an argument.

‘But this Mex is no second-rate bum,’ Miniff was insisting. ‘He’s a first-rate bum. Why, he coulda been a contender if he was managed right.’

‘You mean back in the days of Corbett?’ I said.

Miniff’s ferret eyes turned on me reproachfully. ‘Aahh,’ he said in rebuttal. ‘He’s oney twenty-eight year old. Whaddya thinka that?’

‘I think in that case he must have fought his first professional fight when he was six,’ I said. ‘I looked him up in the record book.’

‘He’s a real tough bum,’ Miniff said. ‘Six-four, weighs two-twenny-five. He’s a man-mountain hisself. He’ll look real good in there with your guy. Lettum go for seven, huh boys?’

‘One round, pal, one round,’ Vince said.

‘One round!’ Miniff wailed. ‘Nail me to the cross, go ahead crucify me, one round! Seven rounds, it looks like your bum is knocking over real opposition. One round, it’s a farce. That’s what it is, a lousy farce.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ I said. ‘Do you want the whole town to know what round we got it greased for?’

‘Seven rounds, I could maybe make myself some money with this Indian,’ Miniff whimpered. ‘Whatsa matter with you guys, you never wanna let me make no money?’

‘For Chrisake you’re gettin’ a thousand from the club and another five from us for the act,’ Vince said. ‘Three months ago your ass was hanging out. What more d’ya want?’

‘For goin’ so quick I wanna grand,’ Miniff said. ‘One grand for the hoomiliation.’

‘Listen to him, he wants,’ Vince said to me with righteous derision. ‘A punched-up greaseball he picks up in a poolroom and alluva sudden he wants!’ His mouth opened in a mocking laugh.

Miniff did want. He wanted desperately. He never seemed to be able to get out of the petty-cash department.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you,’ Vince turned to Miniff in sudden imitation of Nick. ‘I’ll give you an extra two-fifty you c’n keep for yourself. Your bum don’t have to know anything about it. That way you come out the same as when you split an extra five down the middle.’

And that’s the way they settled that, with Vince saving us two-bits (which he probably pocketed) by convincing Miniff to hold out on his fighter. The next afternoon I was in our room sipping a rye highball and bending over a hot typewriter whipping up some porridge about this fight’s being for the Latin Heavyweight Championship of the World when Miniff came in crying the blues louder than ever. It was a hot fall day, but he still kept his hat on and the heat of the sun plus his own internal fires brought the shine of perspiration to his small, unhealthy face. All the
way through the bedroom Miniff kept up his miserable soliloquy. ‘No wonder I got the bite in the belly. It’s these bums, these stinking bums. Oh, Jesus, I wish I had as much money as I can’t stand them bums.’

‘What’s the matter, Harry?’ I said. ‘Relax.’ I pointed to the bottle. ‘Help yourself.’

‘The amber?’ He recoiled in horror. ‘I haven’t got enough troubles! Why, my ulcer is havin’ ulcers! You wanna know why, you take this bum of mine, this Chief Thunderbird he calls hisself.’

Vince was still lying in bed, in his underwear, sleeping off a big night. He rolled over irritably. ‘Whatsmatter? Whatsmatter?’ he said.

‘My bum, he’s off his nut,’ Miniff said. ‘He says he don’ wanna quit to your bum. Alla sudden he talks like he ain’t already been belted out thirty-eight times already.’

‘What’s the matter, doesn’t he think he’s getting enough dough?’ I said.

‘It ain’t the dough,’ Miniff said, and then he hesitated as if he were ashamed to say it. ‘He says it’s his pride.’

Vince sat up in bed, scratched his hairy chest and reached for a cigar. ‘Pride, for Christ sake! Whaddya mean, pride?’

‘That’s what he says, pride,’ Miniff shrugged. ‘He hasn’t got to eat, he has to have pride yet. The whole trouble starts when he sees this Molina work out in the gym yesterday. “Why, he’s a bum like me,” he says right away. And then, you know these punchy guys, he begins to get sore about it. He’s almost as big as your guy, so he gets to thinking how different things’d been if his managers had greased things for him the way you’s doing with Molina. Gets to feelin’
real sorry for hisself, see? An’ on toppa that, some a his relatives off the reservation is comin’ in to see the fight. He says he’s ashamed for ’em to see a dog like Molina belt him out in one. He says for dough he don’ want it, he says. He says he’s still got his pride.’

‘Shove his pride,’ Vince said. ‘You think he’s the only tanker in Las Vegas?’

‘But the fight’s the night after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We got all this publicity working for us. There’s seventy-five hundred already in the house. We’re out of pocket if this sensitive fellow doesn’t keep his word like a gentleman.’

Miniff wiped his forehead nervously. ‘The aggravations I gotta put up with from these stumblebums.’

‘Maybe you could slip the guy a mickey,’ Vince suggested.

‘Whatta you think I am, a crook?’ Miniff demanded. ‘Eighteen years in the business, I never got mixed up in no rough stuff. No mickeys and no beatin’ up guys. I got principles.’

‘You’re breakin’ my heart,’ Vince said. ‘You’re breakin’ my heart. Oney I’m gonna break your little neck if this creep-a yours gives us any trouble.’

Miniff’s hairy little hand shoved his hat back farther on his head and wiped his face in a convulsive gesture.

‘I tell ya the guy won’t budge.’ He turned to me as the more reasonable listener. ‘I’m talkin’ to a wall. His brain is jammed like somebody dropped a rock in the machinery.’

‘Tell you what you do,’ I said. ‘Bring the fellow here after his workout this afternoon. Maybe we can get somewhere with him.’

In a couple of hours Miniff was back with his problem
child. He looked like a full-blooded Indian, all right, a tall, powerfully built man, with the long, impressive head of a Navajo warrior. In another time, you couldn’t help thinking, he might have been a great tribal chieftain, but now he was just another scuffed-up pug, the nobility of his face hammered into a caricature of the eternal palooka, the high-bridged, Roman schnoz pushed into his face, ears on him that would look like cauliflowers even to a cauliflower and sunken eyes overhung with scar tissue. Only he had a way of fixing you with those eyes, sort of proud-like and melancholy, that made you want to look away.

‘What seems to be the matter, Chief?’ I said.

‘Molina don’t knock me out,’ he said.

‘Why, you good-for-nothing bum,’ Vince said. ‘What record are you protecting, for Christ’s sweet sake? I suppose you never took a dive before. Why, you been in the tank so long you’re starting to grow fins.’

The Indian seemed numb to abuse. He didn’t say anything.

‘It’s just business,’ I said. ‘There’s no disgrace to it, Chief.’

The Indian just sat there looking out at us from the depth of his battered dignity. Miniff screamed, Vince threatened and I reasoned, but he just shook his head. Miniff was right, it was just as if a rock had fallen into the mental machinery and the brain had jammed. He sat there immune to abuse, bribery and the danger of physical violence. Maybe it was only a dim protest against a life of profitless punishment that made him slam his mind against us and refuse to submit to further humiliation at the hands of these
white-faced
jackals riding high on the towering shoulders of an oversized, overrated bum.

The morning of the fight the Indian was still holding out and all of us were jittery – all, that is, except Toro, who was really beginning to think that boxing came as naturally to him as Luis Acosta had once told him it did. I ponch and he go boom – that’s the way it seemed to Toro as one opponent after another flopped down beneath his ludicrous onslaught.

As soon as Nick got in, we ran over to his suite to dump our troubles in his lap. The manicurist was just putting the finishing touches on his nails as we entered. Ruby met us at the door on her way downstairs to the beauty parlour, although she looked more as if she had just stepped out of one. The Killer was on the phone making a date for Nick with Joe Gideon, who ran the casino downstairs. Apparently the syndicate had an interest in the joint.

‘So you two geniuses can’t handle one dopey fighter,’ Nick said. ‘What would you do if I wasn’t around? You know, that’s why eventually we have to have all the money.’ He looked at his trim, polished fingernails. ‘Tell Miniff to send his boy to me.’

We went over to the arena, where Toro and the Chief were weighing in. Vince whispered the word to Miniff, who passed it on to the Indian under his hand. At first, Miniff told us, Thunderbird didn’t want any part of it. But Miniff impressed him with what a big man this Latka was and hinted that he might be interested in buying Thunderbird’s contract and taking him East to fight in the Garden. Hope is the blind mother of stupidity, and the big jerk went for it.

I went back to the dressing room and sat with Toro while he put his clothes on after the weigh-in. He had hit the scales at 279, four pounds more than the last fight. Toro was putting on the grey, double-breasted plaid I had picked out for him in LA. He looked at himself in the mirror and smiled at the well-groomed, well-tailored figure he presented.

‘You look mighty sharp there, boy,’ I said.

‘You take picture?’ Toro said. ‘I send picture to Mama and Papa to show them I am dress up like a de Santos.’

‘Sure, we’ll send all you want,’ I said.

‘Señora Latka, she is also here?’ Toro asked me as we left the dressing room.

‘Yes, she’s here with Nick,’ I said.

‘I go see her now,’ Toro said.

‘Take it easy. You’ll see her when you see Nick.’

‘We go for walk. We talk.’

‘I noticed that,’ I said. ‘I suppose Nick’s noticed it too. What do you find to talk about?’

‘We talk … nice,’ Toro said.

‘In Spanish,’ I said. ‘Tell me in Spanish.’

‘The Señora is very kind and sympathetic,’ Toro explained. ‘She is more like the ladies of Argentina. I like to go to church with her. And after church I tell her something about the life of my village. About my family. About the
Día del Vino,
the first full moon of the harvest time, when the fountain in the village runs wine for all to drink and even the village beggars stagger like lords.’

Maybe that was all it was, I thought. Ruby, in her instinctual way of reaching out to men, was more like the
women of Toro’s village. Perhaps Ruby was only supplying the personal touch which the rest of us were too lazy, too selfish or too busy to supply. But the fear – completely unjustified by anything I had seen and lurking only in the evil back alleys of my mind – that her touch might become too personal prompted me to say, ‘Go a little slow with her, Toro. I’ve seen Nick when he’s mad. I wouldn’t want him mad at me.’

‘But there is nothing wrong in what we do,’ Toro said in Spanish. ‘She is a good woman. She goes to church. We do no one any harm.’

We walked back to the hotel together. ‘This man I fight tonight – big fellow?’ he said.

‘Yes, he’s big,’ I said, ‘but you ought to beat him, all right. Just keep throwing punches.’

I wondered how Nick was making out with that Indian. The Indian wasn’t much, easy to hit and as muscle-bound as Toro, but he was more of a fighting man, with better coordination, and I hated to think what he might do to Toro if he held out on his refusal to go in under wraps.

Ruby was still down in the beauty parlour, so Toro went up to his room to put away those three chops that would have to sustain him until fight time. I thought it would be interesting to see how Nick was jockeying the Indian, but when I put my head in the door Nick told me this was strictly between him and the boy and to go take a powder for myself. At the bar I met Miniff, who hadn’t been allowed in either. ‘Jeez, I’m worried,’ he said with a sigh of venality. ‘You gotta admit it, my bums has always been
reliable. When I say they go, that’s when they go. If this jerk crosses me, it’s terrible for my reputation.’

About half an hour later, the Indian came down. Miniff beckoned him to the privacy of the men’s room off the bar.

‘Well, what happened? Give,’ Miniff begged.

‘He told me I shouldn’t say nothing to nobody,’ the Indian said.

‘But you’re not gonna ootz us out of that extra dough? You and Nick got together?’

‘He’s a pretty smart fella,’ was all the Indian would say.

Half an hour from fight time I was still as much in the dark as the cash customers. When Benny Mannix came in from the Indian’s dressing room to go through the motions of watching Doc bandage Toro’s hands, I asked him if he knew what was going on.

Benny shook his head with irritable bewilderment. ‘It beats the hell outa me. Know what the guy does? He takes me aside ’n tells me to go out ’n get him a little piece a chicken wire. Chicken wire, the guy wants! So a couple minutes later when I run down the wire, he says, “That’s good. Now go get a pair of pliers and meet me in the can.” I think the guy’s crossing over to the silly side a the street, so I try to con him out of it. “Okay,” he says, “okay, after the fight I’ll just tell Nick you din wanna cooperate.” “You mean this is Nick’s idea?” I says. “Who else aroun’ here has any ideas?” this Thunderbird comes right back. So I shut my mouth before I catch any more flies and I meet him in the can with the pliers like he asks.’