The Harder They Fall (8 page)

‘Meester Lewis,’ Acosta continued, showing his small, white teeth in an anxious, mirthless smile, ‘since you are so
simpático
I will take the liberty to ask a very big favour. Meester Latka likes you very much, so I am thinking perhaps if you will be so kind to ask him please to make a little bigger my share of the …’

‘Look,
amigo
,’ I said. ‘Don’t give me that
simpático
crap. In Mexico every time somebody told me I was
simpático
I got taken. Nick likes me because he needs me. But he doesn’t need me that much. You’ve got your deal. If you want my opinion, you were lucky to come out with ten per cent. Maybe that’s his idea of the Good-Neighbour Policy.’

Acosta crossed one short leg over the other, drawing up his pants carefully to protect the creases. He must have been a sharp little businessman in Mendoza. Here he was
just another peddler. ‘But ten per cent, which I must share with Lupe Morales, is like the droppings of a fly. Especially when it is my idea, the big idea of putting boxing gloves on a giant, a conception that will make much money for Meester Latka. He will be grateful, yes?’

‘He will be grateful, no,’ I said. ‘Now
useful
he understands, but grateful, that’s too abstract.’

Acosta shook his head in uneasy bewilderment. ‘You North Americans, you are so direct. You not only say what you mean but you say it immediately. In my country’ – he indicated a large circle in the air with his cigarette holder – ‘we say things like this, instead of – he bisected his imaginary circle with a sharp downward stroke – ‘like
that
.’ He closed his eyes, massaging the right lid with his thumb, the left with his forefinger, as if his head ached. Here he was, four thousand miles from Santa Maria, with only five per cent of a dream.

When you saw Toro Molina for the first time he was so big you had to focus on him in sections, the way a still camera photographs a skyscraper. The first shot took in no features at all, just an impression of tremendous bulk, like the view a man has of a mountain when he’s standing close to its base. Then, as Nick led him into the sun-room, where Acosta and I had been waiting for them, I made an effort to look up at the face which rose a full foot above mine. I felt like a kid in a sideshow peering up at the Tallest Man in the World.

When I stared at Toro that first time the word
giant
that Acosta had been beating me over the head with didn’t occur to me at all. It was
monster
that was in my mind. His hands were monstrous, the size of his feet was monstrous and his oversized head instantly became my conception of the Neanderthal Man who roamed this world some forty thousand years ago. To see him move, slowly, with an
awkward loping gait, into the sun-room, bending almost double to come through the doorway, was as disconcerting as seeing one of the restored fossils of primitive man in the Museum of Natural History suddenly move toward you and offer a bony hand in greeting. But if anyone were making book on who was the most disconcerted, he would have had to string along with Toro.

Toro acted like a large field animal, a bull or a horse, that has suddenly been lassoed and led into a house. But when he saw Acosta he looked relieved. Acosta said, quickly in Spanish, ‘El Toro, come over here, I want you to meet a new friend of ours,’ and Toro came obediently, placing himself a little behind Acosta, as if seeking protection from the pudgy little man who would have to stand on his tiptoes to tap him on the shoulder. That brown suit with the red and blue stripes that Acosta had bought for him in Buenos Aires was pinched in the shoulders; the pants were tight and the sleeves fell short several inches above the wrist. Looking at him more closely as the first shock was wearing off, I remember having the impression of seeing a trained monkey of nightmare proportions dressed up like a man mechanically going through his act under the watchful eye of the organ-grinder. Only in this case Luis Acosta didn’t need an instrument strapped over his shoulder. He played his own music and wrote his own words and apparently could grind them out tirelessly.

‘El Toro,’ Acosta said (and even the way he snapped the name out and paused a moment reminded me of the way an animal trainer fixes the attention of his beast before giving the command), ‘shake hands with Meester Lewis.’

Toro hesitated a moment, just the way you’ve seen them do it hundreds of times in the animal act, and then obeyed. I was afraid it was going to be like putting my hand in a meat-grinder, but he didn’t grasp it very hard, wasn’t sure enough of himself, I guess. Instead it felt like the end of an elephant’s trunk pushing into your hand when you’re feeding it peanuts, heavy and calloused, unnatural, and with a strange massive gentleness.

‘
Con mucho gusto
,’ I said, throwing six months of Mexico into the breach.

Toro just nodded perfunctorily. After we shook hands he stepped back behind Acosta again, looking down at him inquisitively, as if waiting for the next command.

‘Whadya think of him, Eddie?’ Nick said. ‘Think we oughta start renting him out by floors like the Empire State?’

That was the first of the Toro Molina jokes. This time I laughed, but, oh, how weary I was to become of those jokes about Molina’s size!

When Nick made jokes he was feeling good. ‘Well, did you get everything you want?’ he asked me. ‘Did the little guy talk?’

‘To fill a book,’ I said.

‘Hey, that ain’t such a bad idea, a book,’ Nick said. ‘Maybe one of those comic books. Like this Superman. Know what Superman sells? Eight, ten million copies. At a dime a throw, not bad.’

Some day, when they put out a new edition of old Gustavus Myers’
History of the Great American Fortunes
you may be reading how Nicholas Latka (‘illustrious great-great-grandfather of Nicholas Latka III’) got his. It
may be right in there with the Vanderbilts and the Goulds and the rest of the fancy who knew when to break a law and when to make one.

‘Come on out,’ Nick said. ‘I wanna show him around to the boys.’ He nodded toward Toro with a laugh. ‘Follow me, half-pint.’

Acosta leant over and said under his breath, ‘Follow him.’ Toro nodded, in the obedient peasant way he had, carrying out Acosta’s imperative literally and walking directly in Nick’s footsteps with that slow awkward lope. Suddenly Nick stopped and said, half-kidding, ‘Tell ’im, for Christ sake, to stop walkin’ behind me. Makes me feel like I’m being tracked down by a neliphant.’

Acosta translated and Toro must have taken it for censure, for he hurried to catch up with Nick. In his haste, one of his ponderous feet tripped over a lamp wire and he lurched forward, almost losing his balance. He flailed the air clumsily to right himself. He was definitely no Nijinsky. But you couldn’t always tell by that. I’ve seen quite a few flat-footed, awkward fellows look pretty shifty and smart inside the ropes.

‘What was that, Eddie,’ Nick said, ‘a clean knock-down or just a slip?’

He turned to me with a wink and tapped me playfully on the jaw.

Beth was sitting on the terrace, alone and a little bewildered, for Beth.

‘Sorry to be so long,’ I said. ‘Everything okay?’

‘I’m glad I came,’ she said ambiguously. ‘But next time I think I’ll let you go alone.’

Maybe it had been a mistake to throw Beth in with Nick’s crowd. She was a girl who had made an easy adjustment from Amherst to New York, but you didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to see that this was a world she never knew and didn’t want to know. And yet, in spite of herself, she found herself curiously attracted to all this, as to a sideshow of freaks. She telegraphed me a quick smile with a suggestion of panic in it.

‘What are the amenities about the hostess in this party?’ she asked.

‘Oh, Ruby can take her guests or leave them. I kind of like Ruby.’

‘She makes me nervous. I haven’t been able to talk with her. I tried my best, and it wasn’t good enough to take her away from the book she was reading.’

I took Beth by the arm and led her over to Ruby, who was stretched out on a lawn couch on wheels. When she looked up at us, I said, ‘What book you reading?’

She held it up for us to see. ‘It’s the Number One Bestseller,’ Ruby said. It was one of those eight-hundred-page packages with the cover featuring a seventeenth-century Hedy Lamarr bursting her bodice.
The Countess Misbehaved
, this one was called.

Ruby spent most of her time in the country reading novels like this Countess business. I know Nick was rather proud of her intellectual pursuits, the way she went through these books week after week. ‘We’ve got a hell of a library out there,’ Nick had told me. ‘I’ll bet Ruby knocks off three books a week. Remembers what she reads too.’ So Ruby, who had never exposed her lovely, unlined face to
the pressure of literature until she got out in the country and didn’t know what to do with herself, had developed an intimate relationship with European history. She could talk with as much authority about the back-stair affairs of the hot-blooded ladies-in-waiting at the court of Charles I as she could about the marital difficulties of Ethel her cook.

When Ruby wasn’t consuming her marshmallow history, she was either driving to church in her station wagon or drinking Manhattans. Her life in the country seemed to break up into those three phases. She was sentimental about her religion and retained a schoolgirl’s admiration and sense of responsibility to her devotions. The only thing that would get her out of bed before noon was church services, if her hangover wasn’t too bad. The nipping usually started around three. I stayed out there through a week once to get some work done, and Ruby would come down for cocktails every evening with a good three-hour start. An outsider might not have been able to tell the difference. She handled it well enough, but her eyes became very set and moist and, depending on what mood she was in when she started drinking, she usually brought the conversation around to religion or sex, working her way up to the latter by way of Metternich’s mistress or Napoleon’s sister or some other full-bosomed footnote to history. When this happened she had a way of leaning toward you, talking feverishly with her face closer and closer to yours, which made you feel it could happen if you really tried.

This may be an injustice. Nothing ever happened between us and I wouldn’t have been too surprised if Ruby had turned out to be as virtuous as she felt on her way
home from church on Sunday morning. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if she had turned out to be any or all of the things the gossips had her figured for. Her manner was always composed and ladylike, but there was something about her eyes, black and unusually dilated, which left you with the uneasy impression of a deep, controlled instability.

It was this undefined but vivid impression, I think, rather than anything one could be sure of, that started rumours about Ruby. Felix Montoya, the Puerto Rican lightweight, one of Nick’s boys, had told me a tall one about something he claimed had happened while he was out training at the place. Nick has his own gym out there with a ring and nice equipment. Felix was there for three weeks when he was getting ready for his title bout with Angott. What Felix told me is that he had Ruby every night except the weekends when Nick came down. What Felix also told me is the part I keep thinking about. Felix paid her the highest compliment he knew when he said that her response compared very favourably with the best Puerto Rico had to offer. But it made him very nervous, he said, when, as they lay in her great double bed, she would reach her arm out to the phone on the bed-table and call Nick in New York. Then, while holding Felix to her with one arm but giving him the sign to be as quiet as possible, she would hold a typical wifely conversation with Nick. ‘Hello, honey. How’s everything in the city? … What time will you be out Friday? … Anything special you want me to get you for dinner? … Sure, I miss you, silly … Be a good boy now … Bye-bye, honey.’

Of course that’s Felix’s story, and Felix sleeps with every woman he meets, if you listen to Felix. If he hadn’t left his
fighting strength in somebody’s bed, I didn’t know how else to account for the farce he made with Angott. On the basis of Felix’s waltz, I was half inclined to buy his story. But that telephone business was too wild to be credible. Yet, I’d slug toe-to-toe with myself in this one-man debate; it was so bizarre that it didn’t seem probable that Felix would have the imagination to dream up such a fantasy.

At any rate, no matter where the needle really pointed, Nick was satisfied. If he were to hear these stories from anyone it would have been the Killer, and Ruby was the only woman in the world about whom the Killer observed strict discretion. So Nick still felt as he had when he married Ruby, that this was the smartest thing he ever did. Those were the words he often used to describe it, as if Ruby were a prize member of Nick’s stable. And Ruby was a good wife to Nick, always there when he wanted her, warm and gracious as a hostess, well spoken, beautifully groomed, with plenty of class in her choice of clothes and her way of wearing them, a good girl who went to church every Sunday and read books.

From where we sat we watched the crowd that had gathered on the terrace and the lawn beyond. Nick’s partner, Jimmy Quinn, and his wife and Mrs Lennert, the wife of the old heavyweight champion, were chatting together. Quinn’s face and figure, his baldness, his clothes and the way he had of laughing from his belly, are what we have come to expect from too many Irish politicians. In his youth it must have been a strong, aggressive face, but years of ease and self-indulgence had softened the hard lines with fat and a hearty red complexion, which was really high blood pressure but gave him the cheery benevolent look of a beardless Santa Claus.
He was ostentatiously good-humoured and, faithful to the conviction that all Irishmen are great wits, he was addicted to puns and hoary dialect stories. Quinn’s concession to country life had been to remove the coat of his single-breasted
three-button
suit, and now he was sitting with his collar open in white suspenders and white arm-garters that hiked up his sleeves, high-laced black shoes and a snap-brim straw hat. Quinn had just said something intended for humour, for he threw his head back and belly-laughed while the women smiled obligingly. When he caught me looking over he waved affably and said, ‘How ya, young fella?’ with his big vote-getting grin. There was nothing mechanical about the cordiality of Honest Jimmy Quinn. He slapped your back, shook your hand and made you chuckle as if he really enjoyed it. He was one sweet guy, Jimmy Quinn, that’s what everybody said, one sweet guy. There was nothing in the world Honest Jimmy wouldn’t do for you if you asked him, unless you happened to have the misfortune of being a yid, a jigaboo, a Republican or unable to return a favour.

Mrs Quinn was a formidable, bosomy lady. She always referred to her husband as ‘the Judge’ because he had had the boys put him up for the municipal bench in the early days when he couldn’t afford to carry the Party work without being on somebody’s payroll.

By contrast, Mrs Lennert was a plain, quiet woman who looked more like the wife of a truck-driver or a coal-miner than of a famous pugilist. She didn’t drink. She sat patiently with an attitude of polite boredom, only breaking her silence with an occasional, ‘Gus, a little quieter,’ or ‘Paul, not so much noise,’ as she kept a motherly eye on her three
sons, aged fourteen, twelve and eight, who were out on the lawn throwing a softball around with their old man.

Big Gus was a good all-around athlete who had done a little pitching for Newark before he broke into the fight game. Boxing was just bread-and-butter. His real love was baseball. I don’t think the Yanks have played a
doubleheader
at home for years without Gus and the three kids being up there in their usual seats, behind first base. Gus wasn’t the most popular fellow in the sports world because word had gotten around that he would back up from a waiter’s cheque as if it threatened to bite his hand. Gus was a businessman. He knew he had just so many fights left in him, so many purses, and he wanted to make sure he had a little more than enough when he settled down to the restaurant business again.