The Harder They Fall (3 page)

The reason he kept me on the payroll, I think, was because he thought I had it too. He had the self-made man’s confusion of respect and contempt toward anybody who had read a couple of books and knew when to use
me
and when to say
I
. But whenever he was with me I noticed he cut the profanity down to those words he just didn’t have any respectable synonym for. Even Quinn, who had worked himself up through a logical sequence from ward boss to high-level rackets, didn’t always get the velvet-glove
treatment. And when Nick was dealing with what he considered his inferiors, fighters, other managers, bookies, collectors, trainers, honest but intimidated merchants, the only way to describe his talk would be to compare it with the vicious way Fritzie Zivic used to fight, especially when he was sore, as in the return match with poor Bummy Davis after Bummy had got himself disqualified for conduct even less becoming a gentleman than Zivic’s.

Probably the biggest mistake that Nick had ever made in picking class was very close to home. It was his wife Ruby. When Nick was in the liquor business back in Prohibition he had sat in the same seat for George White’s
Scandals
twenty-seven times because Ruby was in it. Where Ruby had it over the rest of the line was she was beautiful in an unusually quiet way, like a young matron who would look more at home in a Junior League musical than in a Broadway leg-show. On stage, so the boys tell me, even in the scantiest, she carried herself with an air of aloof respectability which had the actual effect of an intense aphrodisiac. The other girls could dance half naked in front of you and, if you thought about anything, you’d wonder how much it would cost. But seeing Ruby with her black lace stockings forming a sleek and silken path to her crotch was like opening the wrong bedroom door by mistake and catching your best friend’s sister.

That’s the effect Ruby had on Nick. And the physiological accident that gave Ruby Latka an austere beauty was accompanied by a personality adjustment that developed a quiet, superior manner to go along with the face. The combination drove all other women out of Nick’s life. Until then he had been giving the Killer competition, but from
the first time he had Ruby he lined up with that small, select group who believe in monogamy and that even more select group who practise it. In fact, the first three years of his marriage Nick had it so bad he hardly ever bothered to look at another woman’s legs. Even now, in an environment which, to put it euphemistically, smiled on adultery, Nick never cheated on Ruby unless it was something very special and he was a long way from home. But the ordinary stuff that was always there, the showgirls and the wives who float around the bars when their husbands are out of town, Nick never bothered with. The ones who simply wouldn’t have minded never got a play, and the ones who had already made up their minds almost always got the brush. Most of it was the way he felt about Ruby. But what made it easier was the way he worked. He was all the time working, in the clinches, between rounds, always moving in, throwing punches, heeling, butting, elbowing, like Harry Miniff, only it was done on the top floor of a great office building and it wasn’t for nickels but for very fancy folding money.

There was a glutton’s hunger for money in him. Maybe it was the pinched childhood, the gutter struggle, the fearful itch of insecurity that drove Nick on to his first hundred thousand and his second. And now, without even letting him sit down to catch his breath and enjoy himself a minute, he was pushing toward his third. If it hadn’t been for Ruby, Nick would never have had that place in Jersey with the riding horses and the swimming pool and the terraced barbecue pit. Ruby, who had been a working girl all her life, found no trouble at all in double-clutching into a life of leisurely hedonism. Nick would enjoy a swim when Ruby
nagged him into it. He liked to get some of the boys out for the weekend and sit up until Sunday morning, playing pinochle. But it’s hard to relax when you’re possessed by a lean, sharp-faced kid from Henry Street who’s always got an eye out to pry the back off another coin machine.

The Killer was on the phone in the outer office when I got there, laying his plans for the evening or vice versa. He had a way of addressing his women in terms of exaggerated endearment that suggested a deeply rooted contempt. ‘Okay, honey chile … Check, sugar … You name it, beauteeful …’ A psychiatrist, observing the Killer’s hopped-up promiscuity and his chronic inability to settle down to any female, probably would have described him as a latent homosexual. But the Killer himself wasn’t at all reticent about pressing his claim not only to the virility championship of Eighth Avenue, but also to the possession of physiological attributes of heroic proportions. He wore the pants of his snugly fitting suit almost skintight, so you couldn’t help noticing. He had short stocky legs and a four-inch chest expansion which he often showed off, even during normal conversation, by suddenly inhaling deeply and holding his breath. If you have ever seen a bantam rooster penned up with a flock of hens you would have a nice sharp picture of Killer Menegheni.

‘Hang on a sec, beauteeful,’ he said into the phone when he saw me come in. ‘Cheez, Eddie, hodja come, by way of Flatbush?’

‘I always ignore rhetorical questions.’

‘Cheez, listen to them words,’ said the Killer.

This had been going on between us ever since we met.
The Killer seemed to take my two years in Princeton as a personal affront.

‘Better get your ass in there,’ Killer waved me in. ‘D’ boss is bitin’ his nails.’

When I went in, Nick was in his private bathroom, shaving. He had a heavy beard that he always shaved twice a day, leaving a smooth blue patina on his face. He always came to his office in the morning from an hour in George Kochan’s barbershop. He was kind of a nut on barbershops. His nails were always trimmed and polished, his black kinky hair was singed and greased and the constant
sunlamp
treatments had given his skin a tanned and healthy look. He wasn’t a handsome man, but the facials, the oil shampoos and the meticulous grooming gave him a smooth, lacquered appearance.

‘Hello, Eddie,’ he said, with his back toward me, wiping the last of the cream from his face as I came up behind him. ‘Sorry to louse up your evening this way, but I got no choice.’ He still pronounced it as
cherce
, but he no longer contracted his
ths
to hard
ds
the way the Killer did.

‘Oh, that’s all right, Nick,’ I said. ‘The evening isn’t dead yet.’

‘But it will be,’ Nick said. ‘Got a big job for you, kid. Think you’re gonna go for it.’

He took a handsome leather-encased bottle from the cabinet and turned around to face me as he applied the toilet water to his face and neck. ‘Great stuff,’ he said, holding the bottle to my nose. ‘Smell.’

Like most things Nick said, it sounded more like a command than a friendly suggestion. I smelt.

‘Hmmmmmm,’ I nodded.

‘Whatta you use?’ Nick said.

‘Oh, anything. Mem’s, sometimes Knize Ten,’ I said.

‘Hmm,’ said Nick. He turned back to the medicine cabinet again. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘The best. Old Leather. It’s yours.’

He handed me a sealed bottle of it. If he liked you, he was always giving away stuff like that. ‘Aw thanks, Nick,’ I said, ‘but it’s your stuff, you like it …’

‘Don’t be a sucker,’ Nick said, and he shoved the bottle into my belly with a gesture so emphatic that it ended the argument. Nick was accustomed to leaning his weight on you, even when he was doing you a kindness. ‘I’ve been able to do a couple of little favours for the chairman of the board of the outfit that puts this stuff out – so he sent me a case of it the other day.’

Nick was always getting or doing little favours he never elucidated, little favours that meant a quick turnover for some favoured party in four, five, maybe six figures. I never knew what they were, and although I had the natural curiosity of anybody working in an atmosphere of big, quick, hushed money, I didn’t let myself get too anxious to nose into subterranean affairs of the syndicate. It was a long time ago but I still remembered what happened to Jake Lingle in Chicago. First you get curious, then you try to find out, then you know too much, then you get paid off, then you get knocked off. It happens. So I just assumed that Nick let this toilet-water king in on a horse that was coming in at Bay Meadows, or maybe it was that waltz in the Garden last Friday night when the gamblers cashed in on the short end or maybe it was girl trouble the big shot
wanted Nick to get Honest Jimmy to fix up with an assistant district attorney who was a buddy-buddy of his. It could be any one of a dozen things because Nick lived in a mysterious world of secret tips and special favours, a two-way street of silk-monogram intrigue that could lead from the cruddiest gin mill to the smartest house in Sutton Place.

Nick led me back into the office, picked up the dark mahogany box full of slender Belindas, offered me one, snipped the end off his with a silver cigar-cutter, and got down to business.

‘I guess you know, Eddie,’ he said, ‘I’ve had the feeling a hell of a long time that your’ – he reached for it – ‘capabilities – hasn’t really been extended by our organisation. It’s like we got a good fast boy – champeenship material – he’s fighting four-round curtain raisers all the time. A guy like you, he’s got something up here, he can write, he’s got whatcha call it, imagination, he needs something he can get your teeth into. Well, Eddie, the dry spell is over. You’re out of the desert. I got a little project for you that will really get your gun off.’

‘What are you handing me, Nick, the Latka Fellowship for Creative Writing or something?’

‘Don’t worry. Nick never steered you wrong, did he? You’re my guy, ain’t you? I’m handing you a new deal, Eddie. Forget all about Harry Glenn and Felix Montoya and Willie Faralla and the rest of the bums we got in the stable. Don’t even bother with old man Lennert.’

That was Gus Lennert, the ex-heavyweight champ who, for want of anything better, was still rated No. 2 in the heavyweight division. Gus wasn’t really a fighter any more. He was just a businessman who went to work occasionally in
bathrobe and boxing gloves when the price was right. After dropping his crown seven years ago to a rough aggressive boy he could have put away any time he wanted to in his fighting days, Gus had hung up his gloves. He was pretty well fixed with a couple of trust funds and a popular little bar and grill in his home town, Trenton, NJ called ‘Gus’s Corner’. But when we got down to the bottom of the barrel and Mike Jacobs was drawing big gates with heavyweight main events between alleged title contenders who had been spar-boys or washed up a year or so before, Gus couldn’t resist the temptation to come back for a little of the easy scratch. Under Nick’s guidance, Gus had easily outboxed three or four bums who were masquerading as headliners in the Garden. With me beating the drums about how the great Gus Lennert had come back to realise his dream of being the first heavyweight champion to regain his title we were on our way into working poor old Gus into a shot at it.

‘Forget Lennert,’ Nick said. ‘Get Lennert out of your mind. I got something better. I got Toro Molina.’

‘I never heard of Toro Molina.’

‘Nobody ever heard of Toro Molina,’ Nick said. ‘That’s where you come in. You are going to make everybody hear of Toro Molina. You are going to make Toro Molina the biggest thing to hit the fight racket since Firpo came up from the Argen
tine
, or
teen
or however the hell you say it, and dropped Dempsey into the ringside seats.’

‘But where’d you get this Molina, who sold him to you?’

‘Vince Vanneman.’

‘Vince Vanneman, for Christ sake!’

As Kid Vincent, Vanneman had been a pretty fair
middleweight back in the twenties until he crawled into the wrong bed one night and crawled out again with a full set of
spirochaeta pallida
, known to the world as syphilis and to the trade as cupid’s measles. The docs didn’t know how to clean it up in five and a half seconds, more or less, the way they do today. As a result Vince’s case was developing into what the medics called the tertiary stage, when it begins to get to your brain. Pardon me, Vince’s brain. But a little thing like a decaying brain cell or two didn’t seem to have anything like a deleterious effect on Vince’s ability to turn a dishonest dollar. So I was a little surprised that Nick, whose larceny was on such a high level that it approached the respectability of finance capitalism, would get himself involved with a minor-league thief.

‘Vince Vanneman,’ I said again. ‘A
momser
from way back. You know what the boys call him – The Honest Brakeman. He never stole a boxcar. When Vince Vanneman goes to sleep he only closes one eye so he can watch himself with the other.’

When Nick was impatient he had the habit of snapping alternately the thumb and second finger of each hand in nervous staccato rhythm. I’ve seen him do that when he wanted his man to start carrying the fight to his opponent and the boy couldn’t seem to get going. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me about Vanneman. The day I can’t handle Vanneman I turn over the business to the Killer. I made a nice deal with Vince. We only give him five Gs for Molina and he rides with us for five per cent of the profits. The South American jerk, who brought the boy up here, Vince gives him twenty-five hundred and we also cut him in for five per cent.’

‘But if this – what’s-his-name, Molina? – is such a find, what’s Vince doing selling out so fast?’ I asked. ‘Vince may be suffering from paresis, but he’s not so dumb he doesn’t know a meal ticket when he sees one.’

Nick looked at me as if I were a high-grade moron, which, in this business, I was. ‘I had a little talk with Vince,’ Nick said.

I could picture that little talk – Nick cool, immaculate, quietly implicit; Vince with his tie loosened so he could open his shirt and let his fat neck breathe, the sweat coming out of his fleshy face as he tried to wriggle off Nick’s hook – just a talk between two businessmen concerning lump sums, down payments and percentages, just a quiet little talk and yet the atmosphere tense with unheard sounds, the blackjack’s thud, the scream torn from the violated groin, the spew of blood and broken teeth.