The Harder They Fall (11 page)

‘How do you do, Mr Lewis?’ George said when I came up. He always asked it as if it were really a question.

‘How do you feel, George?’

‘Ready to go,’ George said. I had never known him to give any other answer. The night Gus Lennert banged him
out in one round, when Gus still had something, and George hadn’t come to until he was back in his dressing room, that had still been his answer to ‘How do you feel?’ – ‘Ready to go.’

‘What do you think of Molina, George?’

‘Big man,’ George said.

George never put the knock on anyone. Anger seemed unknown to him and the common expressions of derision and contempt in which nearly all of us indulge were never his way. I’ve often wondered if George hadn’t fought all the meanness and bad temper out of his system, if it hadn’t all been blotted up in the canvas along with his sweat and his blood.

‘Think he’ll ever make a fighter, George?’

His black face creased in a wise smile. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Mr Lewis. I’d like to have the job of working out with him all the time. I’d like that fine.’

As I went into the dressing rooms, George was squaring off with the Irish heavyweight. The big Irish kid fought with a set sneer on his face and neither knew how to nor wanted to pull his punches. He tore into George at the bell and whacked him a terrible punch under the right eye. I saw George smile and work his way into a clinch as the door swung closed behind me.

Inside, Toro was stretched out on one of the rubbing tables and Sam, a bald-headed, muscular fat man was working him over. Toro was so oversized for the ordinary rubbing table that his knees reached the end and his legs dangled down over the side. Danny, Doc, Vince and Acosta were standing around. Acosta turned to me and began a
long-
winded,
excitable explanation. ‘El Toro, today you do not see him on his best. It is perhaps the excitement of his first appearance before such important people. Since the climate is very different from when he fight in Buenos Aires, I think …’

‘I theenk,’ said Vince, exaggerating Acosta’s accent, ‘he’s a bum. But don’t worry, chumo. We’ve made a dollar with bums before.’

‘All right. Out of here! I want everybody out of here,’ Danny said. The only way you could tell he had been at the bottle was that his voice was pitched a little louder than usual. But it wasn’t only the bottle talking. It was Vince, to whom he had given the silent treatment ever since that Sencio affair. It was Acosta, who was getting on Danny’s edgy nerves. It was Toro, this Gargantuan excuse for a fighter.

Nobody moved. Danny became petulant. ‘You think I’m talking for my health? I want everybody the hell out of here!’

Acosta drew himself up to his full five-feet-five. ‘Luis Acosta is not accustom to such insult,’ he said. ‘El Toro Molina is my discovery. Wherever El Toro is, I must be also.’

‘Nick Latka owns the biggest piece of this boy,’ Danny said clearly. ‘I work for Nick. A boy can only have one manager telling him what to do. I don’t want to hurt no feelings, but I’ll see you outside.’

Acosta puffed up as if he were going to do something, but he only bowed his head stiffly and went out.

‘That’s puttin’ the little spic in his place,’ Vince said.

‘I said I want everybody out,’ Danny snapped.

‘Listen, I’m one-a the partners, ain’t I?’ Vince demanded.

Danny never addressed him directly. ‘I’m responsible to Nick for his fighters’ condition. I don’t want to have to tell him people are getting in my way.’

The word
Nick
dropped on Vince like a sandbag. ‘Okay, okay, the bum is yours,’ he said and sauntered out.

‘I think I better go take a look at Grazelli’s hand,’ Doc Zigman said. He and Danny were old friends. He knew the order hadn’t been for him. ‘See you later, Danny.’

I started to follow him out, but Danny said, ‘Stick around, laddie. You handle this boy’s lingo, don’t you?’

I went over to the table and looked down at Toro.
‘¿Puede usted entenderme en español?’
I said.

Toro looked up at me. He had large, liquid, dark-brown eyes.
‘Sí, señor,
’ he said respectfully.

‘Good,’ Danny said. ‘I’ve got a few things I want to tell him about that workout before I forget. But we’ll wait till Sam gets through. A boy’s got to be relaxing completely when he’s being rubbed down. That’s why I ran those guys out of here.’

After Sam finished up, Toro raised himself to a sitting position and looked around. ‘Where is Luis?’ he said in Spanish.

‘He is outside,’ I said. ‘You will see him soon.’

‘But why is he not here?’ Toro said.

I nodded toward Danny. ‘He is your manager now,’ I said. ‘Danny will take very good care of you.’

Toro shook his head and, with wide, thick lips in a child’s pout, he said, ‘I want Luis.’

‘Luis will continue to stay on with you,’ I managed to say. ‘Luis is not going to leave you. But to be a success here you must have an American manager.’

Toro shook his head sullenly. ‘I want Luis,’ he said. ‘Luis is my
jefe
.’

It’s time he heard, I thought. Time for this great hulk of an adopted son to learn the pugilistic facts of life. Better to hear them from me with all the cushion I could give them in my limited Spanish than to pick them up from the gutter-talk of Vince and his brothers, as he was sure to do.

‘Luis no longer owns you,’ I said, wishing I had more words with which to make the subtle shadings. ‘Your contract is divided up among a group of North Americans, of whom Mr Latka has the largest share. You must do everything he says, just as if he were Luis. He knows much more about boxing than Luis or your Lupe Morales, and can teach you many things.’

But Toro just shook his head again. ‘Luis tells me to fight,’ he said. ‘Luis takes me to this country. When we have enough money to build my big house in Santa Maria, Luis will take me home again.’

I looked at Danny. ‘Maybe we better get Acosta back in here to straighten him out,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Call him in. What I got to tell the boy will still be good tomorrow.’

I found Luis pacing up and down on the spectators’ side of the rings. From the way he looked at me I could see his insides were tied into knots. ‘Your boy is all mixed up,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t know what’s happening to him. You better go in and get him straightened out.’

‘You are all jealous of me,’ Acosta said as we walked back toward the dressing rooms. ‘You are all jealous because it is Luis who has discover El Toro and so you want to separate us. You do not understand that I am the only one who can make El Toro fight.’

‘Look, Luis,’ I said, ‘you’re a nice little guy, but you might as well get straightened out yourself. You can’t make Toro fight. There’s nobody in the world who can make Toro fight. If anybody comes close, it’s Danny, because there isn’t a better teacher in the business than Danny McKeogh.’

‘But Luis Firpo himself has tol’ me how magnificent is my El Toro,’ Acosta said.

‘Luis,’ I said, ‘on Sunday I listened to all this crap, because I was trying to be polite. And because I hadn’t seen this overgrown peasant of yours yet. But now you might as well have it between the eyes. Even your Luis Firpo was a bum. All he had was a Sunday punch. He didn’t know enough boxing to get out of his own way.’

Acosta looked at me as if I had insulted his mother. ‘If you will pardon me,’ he said, ‘how do I know that is not just your North American arrogance? Actually Firpo has knock out the great Dempsey that day, but the judges did not want to let the title go to the Argentine.’

‘If you will pardon me,’ I said, ‘that is just pure Argentine horse manure.’

Acosta sighed. ‘For me this is very sad,’ he said. ‘Always I dream of New York. And from the first moment I see El Toro…’

‘I know, I know,’ I cut in impatiently. ‘We’ve had all that.’ And then I thought of that epic figure of a man and
that big trusting puss being cuffed around by an old pro like George Blount and I was seized by the indignity of it and I said, ‘Goddamit, Luis, you’ve pulled him out by his roots. You should’ve left him there in Santa Maria, where he belongs.’

Acosta shrugged. ‘But it was for his own good that …’

‘Oh, if you will pardon me,’ I said, ‘balls! All your life you were a little frog in a little pool. A little frog with big dreams. And all of a sudden you saw a chance, saddled yourself on Toro’s back, to make a big splash in a big pool.’

‘In my country,’ Acosta said pompously, ‘such a remark can lead to a duel.’

‘Don’t take me too seriously, Luis,’ I said. ‘In your country I hear you like to shoot off guns. Here we just like to shoot off our mouths.’

We had reached the door to the rubbing room. ‘Now go in there and explain to Toro how Danny is the boss,’ I said. You could almost hear the air rushing from his deflated ego as he went in. He barely nodded to Danny, who joined me in the hall.

‘Luis,
¿qué pasa
? What happens? Explain to me. I do not understand,’ I could hear Toro saying as the door closed.

I wanted to walk down to Walker’s, which felt like the home-team dugout, but Danny couldn’t wait five blocks for the first-one-today. So we ducked into the nearest of the gloomy little saloons that tunnel off Eighth Avenue. Danny was one of those fellows who could want a drink so badly that it was an effort for him to make polite conversation until he had the first couple under his belt. When the bartender set it up for him – Jameson’s Irish was his drink – he tossed it off with a quick, nervous motion of his wrist. After the second, he exhaled slowly in a gesture of relaxation. Danny was a thin, taut man who acted as if his nerve-ends were on top of his skin. Everything he did, the way he drank, the way he smoked his cigarettes, the tic-like way he had of suddenly brushing his cheek with the back of his hand, the way he talked, had this nervousness in it.

The bartender left the bottle in front of Danny and went
on about his business. Every few minutes Danny would pour us another one as we talked.

‘Well,’ Danny said, ‘don’t we have a dilly? Isn’t he a beaut?’ Danny talked a kind of slang that sounds archaic nowadays. He still said things like ‘dilly’, and he was inclined to refer to beautiful babes as ‘stunners’.

Danny studied the bottle reflectively. ‘If he just didn’t know anything, laddie, that wouldn’t be so bad. I’ve started from scratch before. Bud Traynor was green as grass when I first got hold of him, but at least there was plenty of fight in Bud. Even when he was a dub he was always dangerous. But this ox’ – he threw off another one – ‘he’s nothing. Just a big clown. Doesn’t even have the moxie for it.’

He held up his jigger ceremoniously. Danny liked to drink fast, but with a certain amount of formality. ‘Happy days,’ he said.

There was some colour in Danny’s face now. His eyes were brighter. He wiped his mouth with his hand, and said, ‘You know, laddie, maybe I caught one too many myself, but I still love this damn game. Even with all the things wrong with it, I love this lousy game. Especially when I have a boxer. Give me a new clever kid and let me bring him along nice and slow like I did Greenberg and Sencio and I’m up in heaven. Happy days,’ he said.

He seemed to be reading the label on the bottle carefully. ‘Yes, laddie, maybe I let them reach me once too often, but there’s nothing I like better in this world than working a corner when I’ve got a nice smart boy who can do all the things I ask him. That’s the way Izzy Greenberg was, up to the Hudson fight. The Hudson fight took something
out of Izzy that’s hard to describe, but you’re just no good without. I was like that myself after Leonard. You look good as ever in the gym and it’s not that you’ve got any geezer in you when you climb through the ropes. It’s just that your confidence is shot. Your chemistry, I guess you’d call it. Your chemistry is changed. That’s when I quit. I’d probably be singing nursery rhymes to myself right now if I hadn’t called it a day. That’s why I never regretted that dough I loaned Izzy to set him up in business. I’d rather lose the spondoolicks than see him get his brains knocked loose. Well, happy days.’

From the bar radio we had been ignoring came the call of the starter’s signal at the track. Danny brushed his hand against his face in that nervous gesture of his and said, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got something good in the first race.’

‘In the first at Jamaica,’ the cold, mechanical voice of the announcer said, ‘they were off at two-thirty-seven. The winner, Carburetor. Place, Shasta Lad. Show, Labyrinth. The Gob ran fourth. Track, clear and fast. Time one minute, twelve and four-fifths seconds. The winner paid seven-eighty, four-ninety and four-ten.’

Danny took a tab out of his pocket and tore it in two.

‘Who were you on, Danny?’

‘The Gob,’ he said. ‘He figured to win that one. Dropping down in class. Only carrying a hundred and fourteen pounds. And the distance was right.’ He reached for the bottle again. ‘Well, happy days.’

‘No, thanks, Danny,’ I said.

‘Go ahead, laddie, keep me company.’

‘I’ve got to go up and see Nick after a while.’

‘Hell with Nick,’ Danny said. ‘That’s the trouble with this lousy game. Too many Nicks in this lousy game.’

‘Well, make mine a short one,’ I said.

‘Gotta keep me company,’ he said. ‘We’re in this together, laddie. Hell with Nick. It’s Nick that’s driving us to drink, with his lousy freaks he wants us to handle. Happy days.’

‘It’s not just Nick,’ I said. ‘I gotta meet my girl later too.’

‘Now that’s a different story, laddie. Never let it be said that Danny McKeogh came between a swain and his lady-love. Here, just let me pour you a drop or two, so I don’t have to feel I’m drinking by myself.’

He held his jigger up in front of him and stared into it. ‘It’s pitiful,’ he said, ‘watching a freak like that. That’s what it is, pitiful.’ He reached for the bottle again. ‘If there’s anything I hate to watch, it’s a fighter with no ability. It rubs me the wrong way. If they really want to punish me for my sins, they should find a gym for me in Purgatory and lock me up with nothing but bad fighters.’ He grinned. He had a nice, boyish grin that made you want to smile with him. He was feeling better. The liquor was good for him. If only he could quit now, he would be all right. Nice and easy and relaxed inside, what they mean by that old definition of happiness: the absence of pain.

Doc Zigman came in and took the empty stool next to Danny.

‘Draw a beer for my friend, John,’ Danny called down to the bartender.

Doc never drank anything stronger than beer. He was dark-complexioned with a high intellectual forehead and a sharp sensitive face that looked damp all the time.
Tuberculosis had made his spine rise to a peak between his shoulders and bent him over as if he were under an unbearably heavy weight. It gave him more the appearance of a scientist or a scholar than a member of the boxing fraternity. Maybe that was merely because he was what I always pictured when I thought of Steinmetz. As a matter of fact, Doc just missed being a legitimate MD.

The orthopaedists tried their best with their rack-like contraptions when he was a kid, and got nowhere. They only succeeded in keeping him out of school long enough to smother his dream of becoming a physician. But what may have hurt more than the ‘cures’ was the progress of his younger brother, now one of the top surgeons in New York. There are hints that Doc is not very welcome in his brother’s home, and I suppose it would be easy for a psychoanalyst to trace the feud back to an early trauma. What’s obvious is that it’s not very easy to subordinate all your ambitions to a kid brother, especially if he is favoured with a straight back.

I can’t quite remember how he drifted into the boxing racket, but I think it was through a kid from his block – on the Upper East Side – who was fighting main events at St Nick’s. Doc worked like a doctor, more efficiently than a lot of these stuffed-shirts with enough political pull to get themselves appointed medical examiners for the boxing commissions. I’ve never seen anybody stop a cut like Doc. In those short sixty seconds between rounds his long thin fingers worked medical magic. And it’s not only external medicine he knows. He’s made a kind of informal study of punch-drunkenness, with a lot of stuff on concussion and cerebral haemorrhages. The strange thing is that, coming
up out of a tough block and being around mugs so much of the time, he doesn’t sound exactly like Doctor Christian and yet I’ve heard him talk to doctors about ‘Parkinsonian syndromes’ and ‘post-traumatic encephalitis’, and from the way they listened, he must know what he’s talking about.

‘Well, what do you think of our Superman, Doc?’ I said. ‘How do you figure him physically?’

‘I’ll tell you, Eddie, if you want me to level,’ Doc said. ‘For one thing, he’s got the wrong kind of muscles. Big square muscles. He’s done a lot of lifting. There’s no give, no speed to muscles like that. He’s overdeveloped in the biceps. Works like he’s a little muscle-bound. That’s sure to slow him up pretty bad.’

‘Happy days,’ Danny said.

‘How about his size?’ I said. ‘What makes a guy that big? Can that be natural? Or is that something glandular?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t like to say without knowing more about his history,’ Doc said, just the way doctors always sound. ‘But just from looking at him I’d say he’s what the Medical Centre boys call “acromegalic”.’

‘Is that bad?’ I said.

‘Oh, it’s not serious,’ Doc said, ‘but overactivity of the pituitary gland isn’t the healthiest condition.’

‘Well, what are the symptoms?’ I said. ‘Or the syndromes, or whatever you geniuses call it.’

‘A hyper-pituitary,’ Doc said, ‘well, I’ll tell you, a hyper-pituitary usually has a misleading appearance. He is abnormally large, and his nervous system sort of hasn’t had a chance to keep up with him. So he’s apt to act kind of sluggish, kind of dopey, even though his brain may be
perfectly okay. It’s like the wires between the brain and the body aren’t hooked up very good. The chances are he can’t take punishment like the shorter, stockier guys. He’ll probably go into shock faster. His resistance isn’t too good.’

‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘That’s just great. I can see myself selling that one to the sport desks. “See Man Mountain Molina, the Hyper-Pituitary, Argentine’s gift to medical science.”’

‘Happy days,’ Danny said.

We had struck bottom on that bottle. Danny held the empty up to prove his plight to the bartender. ‘John,’ he said.

The bartender turned to bring up another fifth, and set it in front of Danny. Danny reached into his pocket, brought out a wad of bills and handed it over the bar. ‘Here, John,’ he said. ‘When you close take out what I owe you, keep a fin for yourself, stick the rest in my inside pocket and put me in a cab.’

‘Yes, sir, Mr McKeogh,’ John said respectfully. With an air of solid dependability he ripped a strip off a newspaper, scribbled Danny’s initials on it, fixed it to the wad with a rubber band and rang up No Sale to deposit it in the cash register.

The starter’s call came over the radio again. Danny leant forward just a little. ‘The second race at Jamaica. Off at three-ten and one-half. The winner, Judicious. Place, Uncle Roy, Show, Bonnie Boy. El Diablo ran fourth. The time …’

While the announcer gave the rest of the details, Danny reached into his breast pocket and tore up another tab.

‘Who’d you have that time?’ I said.

‘Uncle Roy, on the nose,’ Danny said. He tilted the fresh bottle. ‘Gentlemen, happy days.’

From the other end of the bar a guy in a shabby suit came toward us with the jerky, telltale gait of the punch-drunk. His pug-nose, ageless face bore the marks of his former profession: the eyes drawn back to oriental slits, a puffy ear, the nose spread over his face and a mouth full of store teeth. He threw his arms around Danny’s neck and rocked him back and forth with muscular affection. ‘Hul-la-
la-lalo,
Danny, old b-b-boy-oh-b-b-boy-oh-boy,’ he said. As the words came up out of his throat they seemed to stick on the roof of his mouth and he’d twist his head to the side in a spastic motion to dislodge them.

‘Hello, Joe,’ Danny said. ‘How you feeling, Joe?’

‘Oh s-s-s-s-s-swell, Danny, oh-boy-oh-boy-b-boy,’ Joe said.

When he talked you tried not to watch the muscles in his neck that tightened in the effort of human speech.

‘Hey, John,’ Danny called the bartender, ‘set up a glass for Joe Jackson.’

The way Danny said that name you could tell he still liked the sound of it. He had won plenty of fights with Joe Jackson.

Danny lifted his jigger and tapped it nicely against his old fighter’s. ‘Happy days,’ he said. ‘God bless you, Joe.’

We had to pretend not to notice how Joe spilt a little off the top as his shaky hand brought the jigger to his lips. He set it down with a laugh. ‘Boy-oh-boy-oh-boy, that sure h-h-h-h, that sure h-h-h-h, that sure h-its the spot,’ he said. He started to laugh again, and then he stopped
himself with his mouth suddenly twitching to one side – Doc’s ‘Parkinsonian syndrome’ – and he started to say, ‘Hey, Danny, c-c-c-c-c, c-c-c-c-c—’ but this one really stuck to the roof of his mouth, caught up there by some shapeless inhibition that stirred in his punished brain.

‘Sure,’ Danny said. ‘How’s a double sawbuck? You c’n owe it to me.’

‘I’ll p-p-p, I’ll p-p-p, I’ll let you h-have it back Monday,’ Joe said.

Joe threw his arms around Danny again. ‘Thanks a m-million, Danny, oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy,’ he said and he lurched back to his place farther down the bar.

‘He’s getting worse,’ Doc said.

‘Looks like he’s got a one-way ticket to the laughing academy,’ I said.

‘Were you in the house the night he fought Callahan?’ Danny said. ‘Oh, was he a sweetheart the night he fought Callahan. He was right up there with the gods that night, laddie.’

‘This must get kind of expensive,’ I said.

Danny shrugged. ‘What’s the diff? It’s only money.’

When I got up to Nick’s office, his secretary, Mrs Kane, said would I please sit down and wait, Mr Latka was in conference at the moment. Mrs Kane always managed to make Nick’s conferences sound at the very least like a meeting with the mayor to decide the city’s budget. Her voice always dipped in a respectful little curtsey when she mentioned Nick’s name. She was a plump, happy-faced, handsome woman, who, on Nick’s insistence, corseted her
body into smartly tailored suits. Nick had kept her with him for years, not only for her personal loyalty but because she was Gus Lennert’s sister and the wife of Al Kane, who fought as a heavyweight before Nick put him on the payroll as a collector in Prohibition days. Nick figured that with that kind of a family, Emily Kane would have less trouble beating off the wolves. Nick didn’t like that kind of stuff around the office. If he overlooked it in the Killer, it was because the Killer, in addition to his numerous other duties, had the leeway of a court-jester.

While I was waiting, I wandered down to the little office between the reception room and Nick’s sanctum, which said ‘Executive Secretary’ on the door. That’s where the Killer hung out. The Executive Secretary was lying on the couch combing back his black shiny hair with a comb he always carried in his breast pocket. The Killer was a vain little man, given to running a comb through his hair so often that it became a kind of nervous habit.