The Harder They Fall (30 page)

The ring was cleared now. The referee brought the fighters together for final instructions. Gus stood quietly with a towel draped over his head, looking bored as he listened to the routine warnings about foul punching and breaking clean he had heard hundreds of times before. Toro fixed his eves on his opponent’s feet, nodding sullenly as the referee went through his spiel.

Then they were back in their corners, with their bathrobes off, alone and stripped for action. Toro turned to his corner, in a gesture of genuflection, and crossed himself solemnly. Lennert winked at a friend in the working press. The crowd was hushed with nervous excitement. The house lights went down and the white ring was sharply outlined in the darkness.

At the bell, Gus put out his gloves to touch Toro’s in the meaningless gesture of sportsmanship, but Toro brushed him aside and drove him into the ropes. This aroused the fans’ erratic sense of fair play and they booed. Gus looked surprised. Toro was leaning on Gus, flailing his arms with ineffectual fury. When the referee
separated them, Gus danced up and down, flicking his left into Toro’s face and preparing to counter with the clever defensive timing that everyone expected of him. But Toro rushed him into the ropes again, not hitting him cleanly, but roughing him up, punishing him with his great weight, clutching him with one arm and clubbing him about the head with the other.

That was the pattern of the first round. Lennert wasn’t able to make Toro fight his fight. His movements were listless. He lacked the strength to stand off Toro’s wild rushes.

Toro looked even more aggressive as he came out for the second round. Up from the floor he lifted a roundhouse uppercut, the kind Gus had easily blocked and countered a thousand times. But this time he seemed to make no effort to avoid it and it caught him on the side of the head.

He shouldn’t let Toro hit him that easily, I thought. Nobody is going to believe that. But I had to admit Gus put on a very good show. He actually seemed hurt by the blow. At least he fell into a clinch as if to avoid further punishment. Toro kept on trying to hammer at him even in the clinch. He wasn’t what we’d call an in-fighter, but he had enough strength to pull one of his arms free and club away at Gus’s back and kidneys. Gus was talking to him in the clinches, mumbling something into his ear. I wondered what he could be saying. Perhaps, ‘Take it easy, boy. What you so steamed up about? You’re gonna win.’ Whatever it was, Toro wasn’t listening. In his clumsy, mauling way, he was taking the play away from Gus. As we had figured the fight, Gus would outbox Toro for the first two or three rounds and then ease himself out around the sixth,
whenever he caught one that would look good enough for the KO.

But Toro wasn’t giving him a chance to show anything. He was fighting him as if possessed, as if he had to destroy Gus Lennert. Just before the round ended, Toro rushed Gus again, clubbing the smaller man viciously, and his gloved fist came down heavily on top of the
ex-champion’s
head. It wasn’t a punch known to boxing science, just the familiar downward clubbing motion that cops like to use. Gus sagged. Toro clubbed him fiercely again and Gus sank to his knees. The bell sounded. Gus didn’t look badly hurt, but he didn’t get up. He remained on one knee, frowning and staring thoughtfully at the canvas. His seconds had to half-carry, half-drag him back to his corner.

‘He’s a bum, he wants ta quit,’ someone yelled in back of me.

Smelling salts, massage at the back of the neck and a cold wet sponge squeezed over his head brought Gus around by the time the warning buzzer sounded for round three. He opened his eyes and then closed them again and shook his head slowly as if trying to clear it.

‘He’s faking,’ the guy said behind me. ‘Look at him, he wants ta quit.’

Several other sceptics took up the cry.

At the bell, Toro ran across the ring. Gus tried to hold him off with a feeble jab, but Toro just pushed it aside and brought his fist down on Lennert’s head again. Gus dropped his hands and turned to the referee. He was muttering something. Whatever it was, the referee didn’t understand
and motioned him to fight on. Toro clubbed him again. Gus stumbled back against the ropes and sat down on the middle strand with his head buried in his arms. There was a wild look in Toro’s eyes. He was going to hit Gus again, but the referee slid between them. Gus continued to sit on the ropes, cowering behind his gloves. The way it looked to the fans, he hadn’t really been badly hurt. It looked as if that guy behind me was right. It looked as if he were doing an el foldo, all right. I couldn’t figure it. Gus had more sense than to quit without going down. Even if he wanted to go home early, he had enough ring savvy to give the crowd the kind of kayo they paid to see. But he just kept sitting there on the rope, with his head bowed in his arms as if he were praying. The referee looked at Gus curiously. Then he raised Toro’s hand and waved him back to his corner. The crowd didn’t like it. The guy behind me was yelling ‘Fake!’ The cry began to spread. Apparently just enough had leaked out about Toro’s record to make some of the cash customers hypercritical. Lennert’s handlers jumped into the ring and led Gus back to his corner. He slumped down on his stool and his head fell forward on his chest. Part of the crowd had begun to file out, muttering their disappointment to each other. But thousands were still standing around, booing and crying, ‘Fake!’

‘This act oughta bring vaudeville back,’ the comic behind me shouted. People around him were still laughing when Gus suddenly pitched forward and slid off his stool. His head hit the canvas heavily and he lay still.

The powerful lights beating down on Gus’s inert, expressionless face gave it a ghostly hue. A couple of news
cameramen shoved their cameras at him through the ropes and flashed their pictures. The crowd wasn’t booing any more. Around the ring curiosity seekers were pressing forward for a closer look.

The house doctor, portly, genial, inefficient Dr Grandini, bustled into the ring. The handlers grouped themselves anxiously around the doc. This sort of thing didn’t happen very often and they were frightened.

The guy behind me who first started yelling ‘Fake!’ was pushing past me to get a better view of Gus. ‘He’s hurt bad,’ he was telling a companion. ‘I knew there was something funny the way he sat down on those ropes.’

‘He just can’t take it any more,’ his companion declared.

‘I seen him put up some great battles here in the Garden,’ someone said.

‘Well, he sure stunk up the joint tonight,’ said a gambler who had bet Lennert to stay the limit.

Barney Winch, and one of his lieutenants, Frankie Fante, came along.

‘Hi, there, Eddie,’ Barney grinned behind his fat cigar. ‘How’s my boy?’

‘Looks like something’s wrong with Gus,’ I said.

‘Come on, Barney,’ Fante said. ‘We c’n see it at the Trans-Lux. We gotta meet those fellas outside.’

‘Have a big night?’ I asked Barney.

‘Not bad,’ Barney said.

Not bad, for Barney, meant twelve, fifteen thousand, maybe twenty.

They were carrying Gus out now. They carried him up the long aisle to the dressing rooms, with his white face
staring sightlessly at the fans who had been abusing him with their cynical catcalls a few minutes before.

In our dressing room, Pepe was inviting everybody to be his guest at El Morocco. Vince had managed to place the fifty grand for him and Pepe wanted us all to help him start spending it. But Toro was more excited than anybody else. He grabbed me when I came in and shouted, ‘Toro no joke. Toro real fighter. You see tonight, huh?’

‘Everyone in Argentina will be talking about you tonight,’ Fernando said, coming in from somewhere. ‘This is a great victory for
Argentinidad,
for the pride of Argentina.’

For the pride of Toro Molina, I thought. That’s all that was at stake, and that’s enough.

Doc came in from the hall. Nobody had missed him in the excitement. His hunchback and his damp, pale face framed in the doorway, he looked like a herald of doom. His nasal voice knifed through the celebration din.

‘Gus is still out,’ he said. ‘He’s going to the hospital.’

We all drove over to St Clare’s Hospital in Pepe’s car. I wished it had been just a cab, for somehow it seemed profane to use a jazzed-up Mercedes-Benz when you were going over to visit a guy in critical condition. Nobody said anything. Even Pepe knew enough to be quiet.

In the waiting room Doc talked to one of the nurses. The patient was still in a coma, she said. Lennert’s doctor had called in a brain specialist. It was a haemorrhage of the brain; that’s all she could tell him.

Doc came back and gave us the news. ‘Is that …? Is that …?’ everybody wanted to know. Doc didn’t know either. ‘I heard of cases recovering,’ he said. ‘Like when a scab forms on the brain. The patient lives, only he’s got paralysis agitans; what we mean when we call a guy punchy.’

Some people feel better when they keep talking. That’s
the way Doc was. Danny just sat in a corner biting his lip and fingering his hat. Toro held his crucifix in his hands. His eyes were half-closed and his face was a mask. His lips moved slowly. He was saying his beads.

‘I didn’t think Toro could hit him hard enough for this,’ I said to Doc.

‘Chances are, Toro had nothing to do with it,’ Doc answered. ‘Gus probably came out of the Stein fight with those haemorrhages, see. Multiple haemorrhages. They can be awful small, no bigger than a pinpoint. But it just takes a little tap to start them. Or even getting a little too excited would be enough to do it.’

‘Gus was talking about a headache when I saw him the other day,’ I said.

‘That sounds like it,’ Doc said. ‘That could be it.’

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘I heard of guys recovering,’ Doc said.

A little while later Mrs Lennert and her two eldest sons came out of the elevator. They went right by us, down the corridor to Lennert’s room. Toro looked up as they passed and then hung his head again. With his grave bent head, his sad brown eyes and the beads clutched desperately in his enormous hand, he looked like a battered monolith.

About two o’clock in the morning they wheeled Gus down the hall to the elevator. Mrs Lennert was crying. Doc went over and asked one of the interns what the score was. He came back worried. ‘They’re going to try to relieve the pressure,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, try?’ I said.

‘Well, these brain things are tricky,’ he said. ‘You see,
they’ve got to try to drain off the excess cerebrospinal fluid…’

‘Goddam it, quit trying to show off your medical knowledge and tell me so I can understand,’ I said.

‘Okay, okay,’ Doc said, ‘I thought you wanted me to tell you.’

He was always sensitive on this point, but I couldn’t help it. Danny came over and said, ‘What’re the odds on this thing upstairs, Doc?’

‘I wouldn’t want to say,’ Doc told him.

Danny went back to his corner, sat down and started leafing through a
National Geographic
he didn’t seem to be looking at.

At three o’clock Pepe and Fernando got tired and decided to go back to the Waldorf. They wanted to take Toro with them, but he just shook his head and bent over his beads. A little later Nick and the Killer came in. Nick was wearing a double-breasted blue pinstripe and a sombre tie. He must have dressed for the occasion. He looked very serious and yet I had the feeling his attitude was as carefully put on as his clothes. The expression on the Killer’s face was a carbon of Nick’s, only not quite as convincing. Nick walked over to the window where I was looking out over the monotonous rooftops.

‘Do the best you can with the stories in the morning papers,’ he said.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘how can you worry about the angles with Gus up there with a tube in his head?’

‘I feel bad too,’ Nick said. ‘But someone’s gotta keep his head. This could look very lousy for us. If the papers
play up the angle that Gus was all through after the Stein fight … You know what I mean.’

‘Sure I know what you mean. Try to make ’em think Gus was a suitable opponent and not a beat-up old man with his brains full of blood.’

‘Take it easy,’ Nick said.

I could feel the pressure lifting when I blew off at Nick. After all, if anything happened, that’s where the blame lay. It was Nick’s baby. All I did was make the public buy it. If it hadn’t been Eddie Lewis, Nick could have had ten other guys.

The hours ticked by. Nick paced restlessly, the Killer moving with him, slightly behind him, like a well-trained dog. A reporter from the
News
came up. Nick gave him what he wanted. ‘Gus has got off the floor plenty of times before,’ I heard him say. ‘But I’ll be in his corner right to the end.’

He didn’t say anything about being in Toro’s corner too. That wasn’t public knowledge yet. I was all set to break the news of Nick’s purchase of Toro’s contract after Gus announced his retirement. If Gus kicked off, I found myself thinking, we’d better hold up the contract story until people began to forget a little bit.

Jesus, Gus was still on the table with the surgeons trying to get his brains back together, and here I was, burying the guy. Not only burying him, but beginning to work out a way to cover Nick. What do you call that, reflex action, psychological conditioning, or just plain depravity? Writing Gus off and realising I was already working out the best way to sell his death to the public, it didn’t come as quite so much of a shock when Doc came in and told us.

‘I’ve lost not only one of the best fighters I ever had but one of the best friends I ever had,’ Nick was telling the reporters. ‘As Lennert’s manager, I want to say that I don’t blame Molina. He fought clean. It was just one of those things.’

He isn’t mourning, he’s working, I thought. He isn’t saying farewell to Gus. He’s too busy protecting himself in the clinches. The credo of Henry Street, the
Weltanschauung
of the guys on the corner.

But why wasn’t I speaking up to tell them this wasn’t one of those things, that this was murder, that Gus Lennert had been sacrificed to human greed, his own included? No, I kept my mouth shut. Protecting myself in the clinches, too. An accessory before the fact. As the reporters turned from him, Nick looked over at me in what was almost a wink, a conspiratorial sign. After all, we were both in the same stable.

A photographer from the
Mirror
moved in and flashed a picture of Toro. Simultaneously it flashed in my mind that the picture wouldn’t do us any harm; it caught Toro in an effective pose of repentance, saying his beads.

I had to lead Toro out. He was in a trance. Lennert’s death wasn’t filtered for him, as it was for us, through protective screens of sophistication and rationalisation. Toro took it head on. He had killed a man. He wandered in fear and shock as the victim of an auto accident sleepwalks away from the wreck.

Mrs Lennert came out while we waited on the kerb for a cab. Nick was sending her home in his car. Toro went over to her. ‘I sad. All my life, sad. All the money I make tonight I give you. Every cent I give. I no want the money.’

‘Get away from me, you murderer, you,’ Mrs Lennert said. She wasn’t crying. ‘The fight was fixed and you still had to kill him. You had to show everybody how tough you are. The fight was fixed so poor Gus could get home early because he was sick, and you, you couldn’t even wait. You had to kill him. You filthy, dirty murderer.’

Then she began to cry. It was an ugly, retching cry, because there was still so much anger in it. Her sons helped her into Nick’s car. As they drove off, Toro stood there, staring after them with his mouth hanging loose. He bowed his head and began to mutter, ‘Jesus Christo … Jesus Christo … Jesus Christo …’ We had to push him into the cab.

No one said anything for several blocks. Finally Danny broke the silence with something unexpected. ‘You know, when a guy goes, you feel like you owe it to him to say something real nice. But Gus, Gus was never much of a fella in my book. Only now I kinda wish he was. Because in a way, you don’t feel quite as bad about losing a pal as losing a guy you never got around to liking.’

‘I liked Gus,
alav hashalom
,’ Doc said. ‘He sure was one hundred per cent with his wife and kids.’

‘You and that Jew-heart of yours,’ Danny said. ‘You like everybody.’

We pulled up in front of St Malachy’s, the little church that’s squeezed in among the bars and cheap hotels of 49th Street. The garbage men were dragging the big cans along the pavement to their big churning truck. A drunk still living in the night before staggered past and wandered off toward wherever he was going. A hooker whose face
wasn’t meant to be seen in the daylight passed us slowly on the way home to catch up on her sleep.

I have never been much for churches, but I felt easier when we got the sexton to let us inside. The quiet and the candlelight created a better atmosphere for thoughts about the dead. Toro and Danny lit candles to the Virgin Mother. Then Toro went into the sacristy to find the priest.

‘I oughta confess too,’ Danny said to me. ‘If I hadn’t had a grudge against the guy, I never would have whipped Toro into the shape he was in. I came up to the fight with hate in my heart, laddie. Maybe that’s what did it, God help me!’

But Danny didn’t confess, unless you would call me his confessor. He went over to another altar, stuffed a pocketful of bills into the offering box, and knelt in prayer.

Doc was sitting in one of the rear pews with his head bent. I went over and sat next to him while we waited for Toro to finish. ‘I had a strong hunch Gus had the canaries in his head after Stein,’ Doc said. ‘I knew something was wrong with him. I coulda said.’

Sure you coulda said, I thought. Danny coulda said. I coulda said. Poor old Gus, counting his annuities, coulda said. We were all as guilty as Cain. All but Toro, in there in his spiritual sweatbox, carrying our burden. Yes, if the Father were really here, Toro would be learning that he was just an innocent bystander, just the boy who happened to be around when the mob decided to cash in on a run-down ex-champion whose name still retained some of its marquee magic.

Toro returned from the confession booth, lit another candle to the Virgin Mary and dropped on his knees in
front of the shrine. He stayed that way for several minutes. When we came out onto the street again, a cold grey light was settling over the city. A few early-risers were going to work with sleep-heavy but freshly shaved faces.

‘I’m going home and crack my best bottle of Irish,’ Danny said. Home was a room and bath he kept in a shabby hotel off Broadway.

‘I better call my mother,’ Doc said. ‘She worries about me.’

When we dropped Danny off, we bought the morning papers from a listless middle-aged newsboy. Gus and Toro had the headlines. On the front of the
News
were big pictures of Gus lying on the canvas, Gus on a stretcher being carried to the ambulance, and Toro with his head bent, saying his beads. I turned to the story on page three. The Boxing Commission would investigate the death, but as far as the Chairman could see, ‘It seems to be a tragic accident for which nobody is to blame.’

Well, maybe so. And maybe Jimmy Quinn had gotten to the good Commissioner. Maybe the Commissioner didn’t actually have his hand out. Maybe he just wasn’t very bright.

The story went on to say that Toro would be arraigned on the usual manslaughter charge. I hustled Toro down to the headquarters of our city’s finest. Toro was frightened when they brought him before the police judge. He didn’t understand what I meant when I told him all this was mere technicality.

The bail was nominal, just a G to save the face of the Department with those taxpayers who think prizefighting
is organised mayhem and should be run out of bounds. But Toro had the peasant’s fear of officialdom. If it were necessary to pay out all this money, he reasoned, the Government must consider him a criminal.

I took him up to the suite in the Waldorf Towers, thinking Pepe and Fernando might be able to cheer him up, but he just sat there in a daze. Pepe talked about Santa Maria and the great three-day celebration they would have when Toro made his triumphant return.

‘But I kill a man,’ Toro said, ‘I kill him.’

‘My friend,’ Fernando said smoothly, ‘there are some things worse than death. There is weakness and cowardice. That this poor fellow should die is most unfortunate, of course. But think what you are doing for our country! Every youth from Jujuy to Tierra del Fuego will want to be big and strong and victorious like the great El Toro Molina.’

Toro’s enormous, vulnerable chin lay on his chest. ‘But I kill this man. I do not even talk with him before, and I kill him.’

‘Maybe you should come back to Santa Maria before you fight again,’ Pepe suggested. ‘You can be my house guest.’

‘But I kill this man,’ Toro said. ‘For no reason, I kill him.’

‘Pepe is right,’ Fernando said. ‘After a few months’ rest, you can have a tune-up fight in Buenos Aires. Perhaps we can bring down a Yankee, some second-rater …’

It made him smile to think of this public demonstration of Argentine supremacy. But Toro wasn’t with him. Toro shook his head slowly. ‘I go home now. I fight no more. That I do not injure any other man.’

Personally, I think I would have given up my cut in the Stein fight to see him go home. But Nick had him signed for the Stein fight in the ball park. And Nick was a stickler for contracts, when they worked his way.

The next day we all attended the funeral over in Trenton. Nick took care of all the expenses, and he really did it right. Everybody agreed that, as funerals go, it was just about tops. Nick was one of the pall-bearers, along with five ex-champions. Nick’s floral wreath was in the form of a huge squared ring of white carnations with red carnations spelling out the words, ‘God Bless You, Gus’. At the grave, the minister told us what a great man Gus had been, a man who never abused his strength, a home-loving, God-fearing, clean-living champion whose life should be a model to young America. After Gus was laid to rest, everybody stood around telling one another what a great guy he had been. Even people who had been up and down Jacobs Beach for years, putting the knock on him, were slobbering about what a pal they had lost.