The Harder They Fall (31 page)

As I came out of the cemetery with Toro, I saw Nick helping Ruby into their limousine. He was wearing a black homburg and looked distinguished, if you didn’t see him too close. She was very attractive in black with a black chiffon snood. If she noticed Toro, she gave no indication. The Killer drew a fur car robe over them. I looked in at her as the car drove away. Her face was sombre, to befit the occasion.

Pepe and Fernando took Toro back to the hotel with them. He didn’t seem to be coming out of it. I went down the street to a beer joint I had made a mental note of as we approached
the cemetery. Some of the trade from the funeral had had the same idea. Danny was in the corner with a very full load. He hadn’t changed his clothes since we dropped him off at the hotel the morning before, and the front of his suit was spotted because his hand had not been steady enough. His face looked bloodless; the light blue irises of his eyes were so washed out that they blended into the whites. The Irish gift for parlaying a deep sense of guilt into a marathon drunk had possession of Danny. ‘Never liked the bastard,’ he was saying to whoever would listen. ‘Never liked the bastard. So what? Drink to ’im anyway. Whatsamatter, anything wrong with that? Maybe you think I got no right to drink to ’im, huh, Mister? Well, le’s drink to ’im anyway, even if he was a selfish, tightwad bastard.’

An Irishman at a funeral who can’t love the guy they’re burying is in a terrible way. Especially when he figures he’s been credited with an assist in putting the deceased where he is.

I didn’t want to go from bar to bar with Danny and maybe run into fight reporters who would be trying to pump me on the Lennert business. So I went back to my room. I tried
War and Peace
, but I had forgotten who Marya Dmitrievna was again, and I didn’t have enough patience to go back and find out. I tossed that aside and started reading ‘The Rich Boy’ by Fitzgerald, but it was too probing for the way I felt. I wondered what Beth was doing. I could imagine what she thought now that this had happened. But dammit, people are getting themselves killed all the time.

What was I thinking? I was just tired from the strain of the last few days. I closed the door to the bathroom. I raised
the shades to let more light into the room. I wished I could call Beth. I didn’t have Beth to call any more. I should have married Beth. I shouldn’t have kept this lousy job so long. I should have written my play. Well, maybe it still wasn’t too late.

I didn’t want to stay in my room alone any longer. I walked over to 52nd Street, where the music was hard and loud and restless to the breaking point, a musical score to accompany the doubts and frustrations and villainies of Eddie Lewis, I thought.

Next morning I went up to the office to pick up my weekly retainer. Nick was talking to Kewpie Harris, who had Buddy Stein. Nick was wearing a soft-brown English tweed with a black armband. After Kewpie left, Nick went to his mirror and inspected himself carefully. Then be turned to me.

‘Do you see a blackhead here?’ He pointed to a spot near his mouth. It was there all right, but what did he think I should do, squeeze it out for him? He must have thought so, for he said, ‘Don’t bother with it, Eddie. Oscar down in the barber shop has a way of taking ’em out without leaving a mark.’ He went back to his desk and swung his feet onto it.

‘I just been trying to talk Kewpie into cutting it thirty-thirty when we go against Stein,’ Nick said. ‘He wants it thirty-three and a half, twenty-six and a half. He says Stein’s beaten better fellas. I have to give him that, but not even Stein and the champ c’d draw like Stein and Molina. I figure with any kind of breaks we ought to do a million four, maybe a million six if we get really lucky. That means a nice half a million for us to kick around.’

‘In other words about three hundred thousand for Toro himself,’ I said.

‘Or in other words at least twenty-five thousand for you personally,’ Nick answered.

‘There’s a slight hitch,’ I said. ‘Toro wants out. He told me he doesn’t want to fight any more. He wants to go home.’

‘Who cares what Toro wants? He’s got a contract with me. And I’ve got a contract with Mike and Kewpie for the ball park June nineteenth. Toro’s gonna be there if we have to carry him into the ring.’

‘Maybe you better talk to him,’ I said.

‘I got more important things to do,’ Nick said. ‘Ruby and I are going to Palm Beach for six weeks. I haven’t been spending enough time with her lately. A wife like I got, you just can’t treat her like any dumb broad. She says we gotta have companionship.’ He looked proudly at the picture on his desk, a photograph taken many years earlier. ‘Jesus, it used to be all a wife needed to keep her happy was a new fur coat every year and a rub-of-the-brush once in a while. Now she’s gotta have companionship.’ He tried to pass it off as a joke, but his respect for Ruby was too deep. ‘She even wants me to read her goddam books.’

He went to the door and called out, ‘Hey, Killer, tell Oscar I’ll be down in ten minutes.’ He went to the humidor and gave me one of his cigars. I tore the band off it and was going to throw it away when he said, ‘Read it, read it.’ It said, ‘Made exclusively for Nick Latka by Rodriguez, Havana.’

He took his double-breasted herringbone overcoat off a hanger and gave it to me to hold for him. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said as he slipped his arms through, ‘break the news of
my buying the Molina contract from Vanneman a couple of weeks after I’m gone. I don’t have to tell you how to handle it. You know. Everything in good taste. Class, Eddie.’

He put his hand on my arm confidentially. ‘You know, Eddie, it may sound cokey, but we could go as high as two million with this fight. God knows I never wished Gus any hard luck, but … well, this thing that happened isn’t doing us any harm. Some of these columnist boyscouts who’ve been wondering out loud about Toro’s opposition. Well, you can’t make it look any squarer than killing a guy, can you?’

‘No, that should quiet any suspicions,’ I said.

‘Nobody would ever believe a guy checked out while trying to take a dive,’ Nick said. ‘So we’ll have that going for us.’

‘Yes, that’s a break,’ I said.

‘And it makes your job a helluva lot easier, selling that
mazo
punch. You know how the public is, they’ll all be there to see if maybe he can kill another guy.’

‘Yes, it’s great,’ I said. ‘Lennert sure did us a favour. We had no more use for him anyway. He might as well be pushing up daisies.’

But Nick wouldn’t even permit me the luxury of anger. ‘I know how you feel, kid,’ he said. ‘I guess you think I’m doing handsprings because Gus went out when it could do us the most good. Hell, I always took care of Gus. I threw him everything I could. But I figure, when a thing happens, it happens. We still gotta live. That’s my psychology.’

Next morning we broke the story of the Stein-Molina fight. It broke big all right. Nick hadn’t overestimated the value of the Lennert tragedy. Every heavyweight fight is a simulated death-struggle. Those fans who rise up in primeval bloodlust and beg their favourite to ‘Killim! Killim!’ may be more in earnest than they know. Death in the ring is not an everyday occurrence, not every month or even every year. But it always adds a titillating sense of danger and drama to all the matches that follow. For the sadism and cruelty of the Roman circus audience still peers out through eyes of the modern fight crowd. There is not only the conscious wish to see one man smash another into insensibility, but the subconscious, retrogressive urge to witness violent tragedy, even while the rational mind of the spectator turns away from excessive brutality.

These psychological factors, combined with Stein’s authentic
viciousness and Toro’s bogus savagery, made their coming bout another Battle of the Century. Even the sports writers, who were calling Toro the ‘Man Monstrous’ and ‘El Ponderoso’, had to admit that the Stein fight would be worth seeing as Toro’s first real test. And the hacks, who are always along for the ride, were pulling out all the stops conjuring up the Dempsey-Firpo thriller and passing on to their readers our pitch about Toro’s ambition to avenge the defeat of the Wild Bull of the Pampas.

When the phone rang, I was lying in bed, wondering how Nick figured to do business with Kewpie Harris and Stein. It was Fernando. I must come right over. Toro had just seen the papers. He was very angry. He said he was not going to fight Stein. He was not going to fight anybody. He was going home.

I threw my clothes on, grabbed a cab and hurried over to see Toro. I wasn’t as convincing as I should have been because I didn’t entirely blame him. But I tried to show him how there was no way out of the Stein fight. Nick and the Garden had his name on the dotted. The Stein clause had been written into the Lennert contract. If he took a run-out powder now, Toro would end up in the river, wrong side up. And since he had come this far, it didn’t seem sensible to pass up the six-figure dough finally coming his way.

But all Toro said when I wound up my oratory was, ‘No. I go home.’

Pepe and Fernando tried to reason with him too, but he just sat there, shaking his huge, solemn head, saying over and over again with maddeningly childish monotony, ‘No. I go home.’

I told Pepe to take him out to a midnight movie, or a call house or whatever else he could think of – anything to get Toro out of himself. But there seemed to be no temptations left for Toro any more. All he wanted was to be away from us, to be home and at peace again. If it had been up to me, I think I would have let him go. But I knew, for his own good, he had to stay. He didn’t know Nick and the boys as well as I did, friendly fellas until you crossed them.

Toro, unconvinced, finally went to bed and I returned to the hotel. It was a little before three when Fernando called me again. Toro had disappeared. He must have sneaked out into the corridor while they thought he was sleeping. He had left with a suitcase and his portable radio, which would seem as if he was leaving for good

I tracked Nick down at the Bolero, an East-Side nightclub the syndicate owned. He was surprisingly calm. I had forgotten that essentially he was a man of action. He rose to occasions like this. ‘No, don’t call the police,’ he said, answering my question. ‘It would look too lousy. Might hurt the gate. We’ll find him ourselves. I’ll send some of the boys out. He’s too well known to get very far.’

Nick’s boys checked all the outlets of the city, the stations, airports and bus terminals, to see if Toro had bought a ticket. Fernando remembered that Toro had made some kind of a threat to go back to Argentina alone if he had to. So Benny, Jock Mahoney, Vince, the Killer and I drove to the waterfront in the white Lincoln. We cruised past the docks of all the lines that had ships going to South America. We asked the watchmen if they had seen him. One of them told us that the American Fruit Company had a
freighter leaving in the morning for Buenos Aires – at Pier Six. We rushed down. We stopped at the entrance to the pier, and all of us got out and looked around. There was only a quarter moon and the waterfront was draped in a grey-black fog. The lights on the freighter looked yellow and blurred.

Suddenly Benny called out, ‘Hey, I think I see the bastard.’ He sprinted toward the huge sliding door that blocked the entrance to the pier. We followed him. It was Toro, all right. He must have been waiting for the gate to open in the early morning. He started running when he saw us. I joined the chase with the others. I was part of the pack running the quarry down. Toro’s movements were as ponderous outside the ring as in. Jock and the Killer caught up with him quickly, grabbed at him and slowed him down. Benny, Vince and I ran up and surrounded him. Toro tried to break out of the circle, but Benny held him from behind, and Jock and Vince closed in from the sides. Toro shook them off, and for a moment he was free, but he had only taken a few steps when they were on him again. He cursed us in Spanish and kept shouting,
‘Ya me voy. Ya me voy,’
I’m going. The Killer reached up and drove his small fist into Toro’s face. Toro roared and wrenched his shoulders back and forth to break our grips but we held on and began to drag him toward the car. He struggled furiously against being pushed back into his Lincoln. In the darkness our milling figures, above which he towered, must have looked like ancient hunters grappling with some prehistoric beast. Suddenly the great beast went limp, and we half-pushed, half-lifted him into the car. Benny slipped his blackjack
back into his pocket. ‘The son-of-a-bitch won’t lam no more tuh-night,’ he said.

Next morning I talked things over with Nick. He was leaving for Florida that afternoon. ‘Tell you what you do,’ he said. ‘Take the big dope and the two greaseballs and go out and have some fun. The Killer will get you all the gash you want. Do anything as long as you don’t let that big bum knock up a high-school girl or get himself a dose. When he’s had his fun, take him out to the country and start training. Maybe that’s what he needs to get over this Lennert business.’ He gave me a thick roll of bills. ‘That oughta cover it. Entertainment. I’ll get Leo to take it off the income tax.’

Pepe liked the idea and there was nothing Fernando wouldn’t do for his country. So we started that afternoon. Pepe broke out a case of champagne and the Killer sent up six girls, including a couple of spares, in case some of them went flat, he said. What we started that afternoon may have lasted a week or maybe it went for three, I never knew for sure. I think I remember Pepe betting Toro a hundred dollars he couldn’t drink a bottle of champagne without stopping and Toro falling asleep on the floor and Pepe having one of the girls wake him up in a way that made us laugh. I think I remember all of us breaking in on Fernando and catching him in his BVDs, the old-fashioned kind, shoes, socks and garters, looking like the straight man in a pornographic movie. It seems to me there was a showgirl of Amazonian proportions sent up expressly for Toro, and I think we all watched and cheered them on. There was a night in Philadelphia, or maybe it was Boston, for I guess we
were moving around, when we all seemed to be in a large bed together. I think it must have been in a house because I vaguely remember a mirror on the ceiling. There was a girl named Mercedes who came from Juarez and claimed to be one of Pancho Villa’s numerous daughters, who taught us, among other things, the Mexican anthem, and there seemed to be an endless switching of partners and
good-natured
comparing of notes. There were girls who were spiritlessly accommodating and there were girls who were impersonally tempestuous. There were girls who would submit to the most extreme indignities but would not allow their ears to be assaulted with profanity. There were girls who did not hesitate to assume conventional postures but primly drew the line at variations. And there were girls who indulged in entertainments that are not to be described. For some reason I remember a girl named Olive who talked a lot about her little son, Oliver, and who, at the moment when it could be least appreciated, suddenly burst into tears. I remember a pretty little Irish girl who wouldn’t go into the bedroom with Toro because he frightened her. And there was a prematurely grey woman of obvious breeding whom we picked up in the hotel lounge falling down drunk and who confided to me that she had had a secret yen for Toro from the first time she read about him. There was the morning I came downstairs for breakfast and found it was dark outside and already time for cocktails. I went back to our rooms and there was Toro, nude, asleep on a bed. Fernando was snoring in the other bed. He looked very ugly with his bloated face and his squat, hairy body in his underwear. But Toro, even in that dishevelled hotel room,
among the stale glasses and the mashed cigarette butts, didn’t belong in the backwash of a debauch. He was too big for the room, too big for the bed, stretched prone like a tremendously larger-than-life statue that had somehow come loose from its base and toppled over. I wondered if I should wake Toro, so he could eat something. Fernando could lie there until he rotted, for all I cared. I wondered where Pepe was. I was pretty wide awake for so early in the morning. Or was it evening? Awake. A wake. A wake for Gus Lennert. We are really having us a wake, Gus. I’m awake, a wake, a wake for Gus Lennert. The Mexican Indians bury their dead and get drunk in the cemetery and sing songs and tell bawdy stories and have themselves a time. And who is to say there’s a better way? But that is a pure wake, like the drunken wake of the Irish, and this is a lewd wake, a wake for the depraved and degraded, a wake to call forth devils and summon witches, a stewed crude nude lewd debauch of a wake, to copulate ourselves into such deadening stupor that we no longer see the
self-accusing
fingers of guilt pointing at our eyes.

Toro was lying on the bed in his immense nakedness. It was evening instead of morning and I was wondering if I should rouse him. He was sleeping heavily. As I watched, he rolled over on his side.
‘Ya me voy, Papá. Ya me voy,’
he was muttering. Let him sleep, I thought, let him sleep, let him think he’s home.

When I came out of it, I didn’t know where I was. The inside of my mouth felt like lumpy cotton and a maddening tom-tom was beating in my head. ‘Take this,’ Doc said. ‘It’ll settle your stomach.’ It wasn’t my stomach coming up;
it was remorse. I could feel it heaving up from my belly, that terrible, dragging, end-it-all sense of remorse. The restless succession of women, no more remembered than chain-smoked cigarettes, Fernando with his garters, the daily seduction of Toro Molina, the whole empty, frenetic saturnalia closed in and threatened to crush me.

A picture on the bureau came slowly into focus. It was staring at me, a nice, cool face, staring at me. My picture of Beth. I was in my own room. ‘Where is everybody?’ I said.

‘You saw Pepe off at the boat last night,’ Doc said. ‘He’s coming back with a crowd in time for the Stein fight. Fernando has gone out to Pompton Lakes with Molina. We’ll just sweat him out the next couple of weeks.’

‘How about Danny?’

‘Danny’s down there too. But I don’t think we better count on Danny too much. Danny’s been on the flit so long he’s sweating alcohol.’

Doc put his hand on my forehead and then he felt my pulse. His hands were amazingly alive, damp and nervous, and yet strangely reassuring.

‘Thanks, Doc.’

But I guess I didn’t have to thank him. Doc liked to play doctor.

I didn’t bother going out to the camp very often. Nothing much was happening there. When you visit a camp you can tell right away what the morale is, whether the place is taut and businesslike, or loused up with lushes and gamblers, whether it’s dully methodical, slothful and lackadaisical or keyed-up and confident. The atmosphere around Toro was listless. Usually it’s either the purpose of the manager or the
energy of the fighter that sparks a camp. But this time Danny was squandering his time and his money in the grog shops and the horse rooms and Toro walked through his workouts like a somnambulist.

When he talked about Toro, George shook his bronze-moulded head. ‘I’m worried about him,’ he told me. ‘He fights like a zombie. He just ain’t there at all. That’s no way to get ready for Stein. The big fella’s gotta be
up
to stay in there with Stein.’

I went out again for the last workout before they came into town and I could see why George was worried. This kid, Gussman, giving away around eighty pounds, had to pull up so he wouldn’t knock Toro’s head off right in front of the reporters. Toro was hog-fat in the belly because Fernando had more or less taken over the camp by default, and let the big slob put away too much fattening food.

The day before the fight there wasn’t a hotel room to be had in New York. Fans had driven in from all over the country. A delegation from Stein’s home town came in on a special train, with everybody from the Mayor to the favourite madam, and took over a midtown hotel.
Variety
’s list of ‘Ins’ was almost twice as long as on an ordinary Wednesday. Pepe and his Argentine delegation of assorted millionaires, politicos and playboys staged a big luncheon at the Ritz. The Argentine Consul General welcomed his countrymen, and Fernando spoke for the Argentine Athletic Association. The Giant of the Andes was rising in the fistic firmament, he said, just as Argentina herself, the land of giants, was rising in the Pan-American firmament. They must have applauded
that one for two full minutes. Throughout all the speeches Toro’s name was waved like a flag, the blue-and-white of our contentious neighbour to the south. Then Toro was called on to say a few words. His face was stolid. There was no belligerence in him, nationalistic or otherwise. ‘I do my best,’ he said. ‘Then I go home.’

All the Broadway restaurants were full of guys talking fight, laying or taking the nine to five on Stein. There must have been an easy million ready to change hands by six o’clock.