IT WAS TWO DAYS
after Elijah had got his clock cleaned at the public workout. I was driving little Anthony to his special hearing class when I heard that rattling sound again and realized the gun I’d used to kill Nicky was still in the glove compartment. I didn’t know why I was taking so long to get rid of it. Maybe I wanted to get caught. We hit a bump in the road and I heard the gun slide toward the front of the compartment. Anthony Jr. looked down like he was thinking about opening it.
Just to distract him, I put on the radio. The first thing we heard after the weather was a sports report saying Meldrick Norman would be getting the title shot against Terrence Mulvehill in October, not Elijah. I almost drove off the road. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was putting my balls on the line—literally, if you believed Danny Klein—and they were running a train over them.
For a few seconds, I don’t know what I said or did. All I know is when I looked up, my little Anthony was cowering in the backseat. He looked like he’d seen one of those scary green monsters from his nightmares take the wheel.
“Hey, Anthony, take it easy.” I reached back to pat his knee. “Daddy was just fooling.”
But he shied away from my touch.
I dropped him off at the hearing school and drove right over to John B.’s house. He was crazed too, running around in his underwear with the cellular phone in his hand. He had no idea why his brother was out and Meldrick was in. Just the other day, the doctors had cleared Elijah to keep fighting, even after what had happened at the workout. For a second, I considered whether John might’ve just pocketed all the money without paying off the right people. But then he mentioned Elijah’s name and got that reverent look in his eyes again, and I knew he’d never do anything to hurt his big brother. His only role in life was to be the loyal younger sibling, forever carrying Elijah’s robe.
So we headed over to the Doubloon to try to find out what went wrong.
We found Frank Diamond the promoter standing in the lobby, talking to a bunch of reporters by the elevators. His shaved head looked newly waxed and buffed and his custom-made gabardine suit fit even more snugly around his barrel chest and broad shoulders.
“What’s up?” John B. asked crisply.
“What’s up?” Diamond turned to share a smile with the reporters like John was the butt of some joke he’d been telling. “Balloons are up. The sky is up. I’m up. If you had my stock portfolio, you would be too.”
They all laughed. John B. gave him a stone face. For the first time I saw a resemblance between him and his brother.
“Say, my man. We got business to discuss.”
“My man. My man.” Frank Diamond did a Stepin Fetchit–y imitation of the way John talked. “Hey, John, it’s thirty years since Martin Luther King, how come you’re still talking like a Pullman train porter? Didn’t you go to high school or anything?”
If I were John, I might have smacked him. But John just kept giving him that slow-burning look.
“We had a deal,” he said to Diamond. “I already worked this out with the boxing federation and the cable TV people.”
The reporters leaned in a little closer. Until a second ago, they’d been just casually bullshitting with Frank. Now they were getting ready to reach for their notebooks.
“Would you gentlemen excuse me a moment?” he asked the press.
They groaned a little and he took us into the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea coffee shop just by the entrance. We sat at a table in the corner.
“We had a deal as of yesterday,” said John B. “So why I gotta hear about Meldrick Norman today on the radio?”
“Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth,” Frank Diamond explained carefully.
“But we had a handshake.”
Frank Diamond sighed and asked the waitress to bring him a coffee with some Sweet’N Low. He rubbed the top of his bald head. Maybe he missed his hair.
“Listen, John,” he said with the kind of measured impatience you’d have talking to a senile grandparent. “I am going to make it very simple for you. Your brother isn’t worth as much to me as Meldrick Norman.”
He sat back and fixed the silk polka-dotted handkerchief in his breast pocket. He might as well have been licking our blood off a butcher knife.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “We’ve already paid the sanctioning fees and made our arrangements with the boxing federation people. Why do you get final say to knock it all down?”
“Because I am the promoter.” Frank flicked his hand through the air haughtily. “You’ve been dealing with the stage managers. I own the actors. Right now I have the champion, Terry Mulvehill, under contract. Anyone who fights him has to give me options on their next six fights. Now, Meldrick Norman is twenty-eight years old and relatively drug-free, as far as I know. So if he happens to knock my guy out, I’ve still got the champion another two or three years. Understand? Meldrick Norman becomes my fighter.”
I nodded. It was a daisy-chain operation. My father and Teddy would’ve been impressed. No matter who won, Frank remained the promoter, entitling him to revenues from the TV rights and ticket sales.
He poured half a packet of Sweet’N Low into his coffee and then folded the rest of the packet in half and left it next to his cup. Fish designs swam around the dark blue border of his saucer. To me they looked like sharks.
“Now, I like your brother, but he is an old over-the-hill warhorse,” he told John. “And if by some chance he managed to throw a lucky punch and knock my guy out, what would I be left with? An old man ready to retire.”
“But we had a handshake with the boxing federation,” John B. insisted.
“Not worth the paper it isn’t written on,” Frank said, stirring in the powder with the end of his spoon.
He rubbed the top of his head again. And smiled.
I felt my heart sinking. I’d borrowed sixty thousand dollars from Danny Klein and most of it was already spent on fees and expenses. I had no way to pay it back. Which meant Danny would be sure to tell my father and Teddy. I felt my balls retracting into some cavity within my body.
Frank sat back and sipped his coffee. His eyes scanned the rest of the green-and-red coffee shop, like he was searching for someone else to fleece. The late-afternoon crowd was starting to thin out. I wondered if the casino deliberately made the food unpalatable here so people would spend less time eating and more time gambling.
I put up the best argument I could make, spur-of-the-moment. “Don’t you think you’re being kind of shortsighted? I mean, Elijah Barton’s a name with worldwide recognition. No one’s heard of Meldrick Norman.”
Frank Diamond wrinkled his brow. “Excuse me, but who are you anyway?”
“This is my partner, Mr. Russo.” John B. lowered his eyes and swallowed his words again. In his mind, he was already flat on his back painting boats again.
Frank Diamond gave him a long look, like John B. had just let his Rottweiler shit on his putting green.
“Well, Mr. Russo, let me explain something to you,” he said. “Elijah Barton couldn’t draw flies to a dump.”
I started to interrupt, but he held up his hand.
“I’m not running a nostalgia business,” he said, thrusting out a jaw so big you could have boiled coffee in it. “I am an attorney and a fight promoter. I have a fiduciary responsibility to go out there and try to make the best deal. As it stands, we’re barely going to sell out the seats in the arena, but that’s okay. The casino will make its money back at the tables. I am not, however, going to associate my good name with a third-rate production.”
It was a little bit like talking to Teddy. Except instead of eating the pancakes off my plate, he was just tasting them and spitting them back in my face.
Frank ran his hand over his smooth scalp once more. Hedidn’t miss his hair. He was jerking off his head because putting us down felt so good.
“People all over the world love my brother!” John B. protested.
“He couldn’t draw flies,” Frank Diamond repeated slowly with a level stare. “The sooner you understand that, the better off we’ll all be. Especially your brother. It doesn’t do a man his age any good getting himself hurt in the ring. We all saw what happened at the workout the other day.”
My head was spinning. I couldn’t imagine what Teddy would do to me when he found out I’d borrowed another sixty thousand on top of the amount I owed him. Stomping on my balls wouldn’t satisfy him. He’d probably want to pour battery acid on them.
I wanted to fall on my knees and beg Frank Diamond for mercy. But Vin had taught me there were limits to what a real man would do. And a real man would never debase himself in front of another.
So I reached over to grab Frank’s wrist. “Promises were made to us.”
Frank swatted my hand away. “You know, you people are too much. You live in this dreamworld where somehow everything’s going to come true and work out if you wish hard enough.”
I was about to jab a finger in his face and warn him not to talk to us like that, but instead I knocked over my water glass and broke it.
Frank Diamond flapped his hands dismissively, like he’d had enough of this tomfoolery. “Maybe it’s too much sun or too much saltwater taffy. The rest of the business world’s not like Atlantic City. One day you have to wake up and face the reality that what you’ve got isn’t worth anything to anybody else.”
“You oughta watch it,” I said, as my lap got soaked and my future sailed over the cliff like a junked car. “One day you might just need the people you’re stepping on.”
“When I need something I call room service,” Frank Diamond said as he got up to leave. “Otherwise, I don’t want to be disturbed.”
TEDDY SAT ON AN
examination table. Dr. Josephson, a thin, wiry-haired urologist, adjusted his glasses and looked at his chart.
“I see you’ve already had a checkup, so this is just another step in the process,” he said. “I notice Dr. Lawrence examined you. We went to med school together.” He smiled.
Another bloodsucking parasite, Teddy thought. Doctors and lawyers. Burt Ryan estimated his legal bills would be well into six figures by the end of the year. And who knew how much this clown was going to charge? They were already down to under thirty-seven thousand dollars in the coffers.
“I’m going to give you a prostate exam,” said the doctor. “You’ve had one of these before, haven’t you?”
Teddy shook his head nervously. He’d avoided going to the doctor for years, as much out of superstition as frugality. If they didn’t find anything wrong, there wouldn’t be anything wrong. But since that little breakdown the other day in Burt Ryan’s office, he’d realized he couldn’t put off the visit any longer.
The doctor took a deep breath and slipped on a rubber glove. “Please lower your pants and lie on your side.”
Teddy inched away from him. “What’re you gonna do?”
“It’s a routine digital exam.”
“You’re gonna put a finger in my ass?”
The doctor opened a jar of Vaseline. “I can assure you there’s nothing unusual about it.”
Teddy couldn’t believe his ears. He’d once had a man beaten unconscious with a crowbar for making fun of his weight, and now he had to let this creep stick a finger up his butt. It was like being back in reform school. The things theother boys would do to him in the showers. Uncle Benoit in his first foster home. A little bit of that clammy, weak feeling spread down to his knees. For years, the extra weight had been like a layer of insulation, protecting him from the pain and humiliation. But here was someone trying to get inside him again.
He closed his eyes and bit the interior wall of his mouth. What was this world coming to?
THE SKY HAD NEVER
seemed so low and the Atlantic Ocean had never looked so cold. I was standing next to Rosemary on the Boardwalk, watching the parade before the Miss America Pageant.
“This is it,” I said. “My life is over. They’re going to cut my heart out and throw it in the ocean.”
“Can’t you get your money back?”
“It’s already spent.”
With Frank Diamond kicking us out of the fight, I now owed Teddy over a hundred thousand dollars and had no way to pay it back.
“Maybe you could sue the promoter,” Rosemary said. “Breach of contract.”
“By the time the lawyers got through, my corpse would be rotting.”
Miss Virginia rode by in a red convertible, kicking a leg out of her blue satin gown, so the crowd could see the whole of her thigh. Rosemary’s daughter Kimmy ran up and down in front of the spectator seats on the other side of the Boardwalk. I half wished the police would ride up and arrest me for killing Nicky, to spare me the agony of what would happen next.
“You know, Terry Mulvehill came by the club again me other night,” Rosemary said.
I found myself wincing. “Yeah? What’d he want?”
“The usual. Go back to his hotel, screw our brains out, get high on cocaine.”
Just the words made my stomach hurt. “So what’d you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t want to do that. I’m with you.”
The back of my neck was burning. “You know, I oughtto tell those boxing commission people he gets high. They’d probably take the title away from him.”
“So why don’t you?” She looked through her handbag for her daughter’s sunblock.
“Who’d believe me?”
A dozen men dressed as turkeys walked by strumming “You’re a Grand Old Flag” on banjos.
“It just makes me so mad.” Rosemary rubbed her hands together and pulled on her fingers. “Maybe if I went up there and got high with him, they’d believe me,” she said casually, as if she was talking about renting a car. “They have those tests to prove it, you know.”
I just looked at her. “I couldn’t ask you to do that. That’d be like making you a whore again.”
She took a deep breath and put on a pair of sunglasses. “Look, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“What?”
“I want to have everything straight between us.” She peered around, looking for her daughter, and then turned back to me. “That ship has already sailed. I’ve been with him before.”
She might as well have cracked me across the face with a baseball bat.
“When was this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.” She tried waving Kimmy over, but the little girl was having too much fun dancing up and down in front of the grandstand. “It was a long time ago. Before I met you. Back when I was turning tricks.”
“So you’d go back up there now?”
The corners of her mouth turned down as she began to think about it seriously. “I don’t know ... I was just talking before ... I really just wanted to get it off my chest about Terry and me, because we’re starting to get close ...”
“You know, it’s not a bad idea,” I interrupted.
Now she was frowning. She hadn’t really thought I’d take her up on her offer, but she didn’t understand how truly desperate I was. I’d been lied to, betrayed, and hustled by everyone I knew, including her, it seemed. I was in a corner and I needed to get out.
Miss Iowa drove by in a red Ford, followed by a man dressed as a frankfurter.
“I know somewhere I could score some coke,” I said.
Her sunglasses hid her eyes, but her hands were still torturing each other. “Oh, I don’t know, Anthony,” she said in a squeamish voice. “The more I think about it, the more it doesn’t seem right. We’re talking about blackmail here.”
“No, we’re talking about people who broke an agreement with me three weeks before a fight and put my neck on the chopping block. Literally.”
“So you want me to sleep with him again?”
The old guy wearing a Budweiser hat in the deck chair next to us looked up, realizing this was getting to be a pretty unusual conversation.
“Keep your voice down. I’m not saying you have to sleep with him. I’m just saying you could drop by and see what he’s up to. That doesn’t require you going to bed with him, does it?”
She rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Oh Anthony, how could you be so naive?” But I wasn’t being naive. I knew what I was asking. I was just trying to sugarcoat it.
With each thing I’d done in the last few weeks, I was taking another step away from the person I wanted to be. It was as if by breaking faith with Carla, I’d broken through my own skin. Killing Nicky, borrowing money from Danny Klein, and pimping my girlfriend were the secondary infections. Now I was sick and I didn’t know how to get better.
“You know what it would require,” she said with her mouth drawn tight. “Is that what you’re about, Anthony?”
“What?”
“Being a shakedown artist. Like your father. You want me to go by there and get him to do some blow with me, so you can blackmail him with a drug test and get your fighter back in the ring. It stinks, Anthony. And you know what really stinks about it? You always say you’re not going to be like the people in your family, and here you are, pulling the exact same kind of scam.”
“I didn’t make the world the way it is,” I said. “I take it the way I find it. All I want is for them to keep to their agreement to fight Elijah. This is the only way I know tomake them do it. If my father had been a used car salesman, maybe I’d know how to sell cars.”
“And that is bullshit!” Rosemary said vehemently, kicking the railing. “You are responsible for everything you say and do in this life. You can try to make all the excuses in the world, but the truth is no one else can make you live in the gutter if you don’t want to.”
“Well, maybe that’s where I belong.”
She clamped her mouth shut and steam seemed to rise from the top of her head. Miss Nevada drove by in a Cadillac, coyly flashing a giant set of playing cards.
“At least think about it,” I said.