The Harder They Fall (9 page)

On the lawn Nick was introducing Acosta and Toro to Danny McKeogh, who appraised them sourly, and to the Killer and the little pekinese-faced hat-check girl from the Diamond Horseshoe who had just arrived in the Killer’s yellow Chrysler roadster. Acosta kissed the doll’s hand and bowed easily to the others. Toro stood uncomfortably at his side. The Killer stepped into a fighting pose and feinted with his left as if he were going to lay one on Toro. Everybody laughed except Toro, who just stood there waiting for Acosta to tell him what to do.

When we sat down to lunch in the formal dining room, with its marble statue of Diana with her bow, I took a quick census that totalled twenty-three of us – a typical Latka Sunday dinner. Nick sat at one end of the table, still in riding clothes, Ruby at the other. Next to Nick were the
Quinns who flanked a gentleman who maintained a strict anonymity. Then came Vince Vanneman, Barney Winch and his lieutenant. Farther down were the Lennerts, the Killer, the pekinese, Junior and his tennis partner, Danny McKeogh, then Toro and Acosta, with Beth and me on either side of Ruby. The men had not bothered to put on their coats, and Nick tilted back in his chair as he always did in the office, but if the butler, elegant in tuxedo, felt any contempt for this motley assembly, he hid his feelings behind a carefully cultivated deadpan and served each diner, regardless of posture or grammar, with the impersonal solicitude and excessive formality that mark his trade.

The anonymous gentleman had a thick, shrewd face, with dark, heavy jowls set in a permanent expression of inscrutability. Nick did not trouble to introduce him to the company and he sat silently rolling breadcrumbs. When Vanneman spoke to him it was with an awed deference and without any expectation of response. My first guess, later confirmed, that he was topman in a mob that had muscled in on Nick’s racket was based on no more than a hunch. I did learn, subsequently, a little about him. He was wanted for questioning in connection with a murder one of his boys was supposed to have pulled off on the Upper East Side. At one time he had just about cornered the market on first-rate middleweights and he was still a good man to have on your side if you wanted to get the breaks in the Garden. Just what he was to Nick or Nick to him, it would be healthier not to ask.

‘Everything you’re gonna eat came right off this place,’ Nick shouted down the table. ‘It’s all our own stuff, even the meat.’

‘Your own steer, huh?’ Quinn said. He turned to Barney and the other gambler, beginning to laugh already. ‘Hey, fellers, you don’t think Nick would give us a bum steer?’ He roared with laughter, looking around at everyone to see that they were with him, then repeated himself and was off again. Toro ate his fruit salad hungrily, keeping his head down like a child who has been told not to intrude on adult conversation.

Nick looked down at Toro and nodded. ‘You’re lucky you don’t understand English, kid. The rest of us have to laugh at Jimmy’s lousy jokes.’

The Killer began the laughter like a claque. Everyone looked at Toro, nodding and snickering. Toro stopped and stared around questioningly. From where he sat, it must have seemed as if they were laughing at him. He pressed his thick lips together and his eyes sought Acosta with confusion. Acosta said a few hurried words in Spanish and Toro nodded and went on eating. I watched his big face work as he chewed. It wasn’t the face of Colossus, noble and magnificent. It was essentially a peasant face with soft brown eyes, heavy-lidded, a bulbous nose, a big, sensuous mouth with dark hollows pressing in on either side of it, suggesting some unhealthiness, glandular perhaps, and an elongated jaw. It was a head for El Greco to have painted in his dark, moody yellows, with the model already magnified and distorted by the artist’s astigmatism. If he looked up at all, I noticed, he stole quick, furtive glances at Ruby. This was understandable, for Ruby had magnetism in her white diaphanous silk, with back-swept hair and jade earrings swaying as she talked animatedly, half Park Avenue, half Tenth.

‘Isn’t that a swell book?’ Ruby was saying. ‘I can hardly
wait to see the movie. Who do you think oughta play Desirée? I read in Danton Walker where it says Olivia de Havilland. Can you see her as Desirée? Paulette Goddard, all the time I was reading I could see Paulette Goddard.’

Beth caught my eye for a second but she didn’t say anything. I mean she didn’t say any of the obvious things you could have said to Ruby. There was something touching about Ruby’s discovery of literature, and Nick’s pride in this, that made the easy wisecrack catch in your throat. It was like the Dead End Kid who glides up and down in the gutter crying out in wonder
Look at me, I’m dancin’! I’m dancin’!
For Ruby it was
Readin’! I’m readin’
!

‘I’m just nuts about history,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s so much more interesting than what’s going on today. I try to get Nick to read sometimes, but he’s hopeless.’

‘Hey, baby,’ Nick yelled down from the other end of the table, gesticulating with a big cob of yellow corn in his hand. ‘Everything under control on your end, baby?’

Ruby gave him an indulgent smile and looked at us apologetically. You had a pretty good idea of what there was between them in that smile and that look. Nick was a wonderful husband, a good provider and still nuts about Ruby. She wished he would begin to get over these crudities. All these books, the decorum of social life, the polished manners of the cavaliers had given her a point of view from which to criticise Nick and his loudmouth friends.

‘Look at Ruby,’ Nick laughed. ‘She thinks I’m making a bum out of myself in front of Albert.’ Albert was passing the roast beef around again. Not a muscle in his face betrayed his having heard his name brought into this. As
he lowered the big silver platter to Nick’s place, Nick said, ‘Just because I eat with my fingers and don’t put my coat on, you don’t think I’m a bum, do you, Albert?’

‘No, sir,’ Albert said, and moved on to serve Quinn, who took three more pieces of roast beef and two large potatoes.

‘There, whaddya think of that, Ruby?’ Nick shouted down the table. ‘The best-dressed guy in the joint and he takes my side.’

Nick knew better than this, a little better than this, but he liked to put the mug act on sometimes to show off for his friends and annoy Ruby. It didn’t exactly fit with the clothes, the ‘class’ he always wanted or his attitude toward Ruby. I used to wonder at this at first, but I finally decided why Nick seemed to delight in publicly degrading himself sometimes. It provided measurement by which to judge his progress. For he timed these gaucheries to the moment of his most lordly circumstance, such a moment as this when he sat at the head of a twenty-three-place table, presiding over a lavish feast that would have satisfied the greediest tyrant. ‘Look,’ his actions seemed to say, ‘don’t forget that the master of this mansion with the marble statue, the formal butler, his own beef hanging in his own cold-storage plant, is still Nick Latka the hustler from Henry Street.’

When we finally managed to get up from the table after an hour of overeating, Nick came over and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Want to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Let’s go out to the sun-house.’

The sun-house was just behind the swimming pool, a circular stucco job with no roof. Inside were sun-mats and rubbing tables. Nick took off his clothes and stretched out
on his back on one of the mats. He inhaled deeply, seeming to take sun and air in at the same time. His body had a dark even tan and was in wonderful condition for a man in his early forties. It looked lean and energetic everywhere except at the belly, where there was the beginning of a paunch.

‘Tell the Killer I want him,’ Nick said.

I went out and shouted up to the Killer. He came right away. ‘Wot’s on yer mind, boss?’ he said.

‘That sun oil,’ Nick said, ‘that new stuff I got. What’s it called?’

‘Apple erl,’ the Killer said.

‘Yeah, rub some on me. And bring an extra bottle for Eddie,’ he called when the Killer had reached the medicine chest.

The Killer handed me a bottle and began to anoint Nick’s chest and shoulders. I looked at the label. ‘Apolloil’ it was called. ‘This not only gives you a tan but it puts vitamins into yer skin,’ Nick said. ‘Works right into yer pores. Real high-class stuff. Put out by the same outfit that makes that toilet water I gave yer.’ He took another deep, healthful breath. ‘Now lower, Killer. Pour some down there.’ He looked at me and winked. ‘It’s supposed to be good for that too,’ he said.

While the Killer rubbed the oil into Nick’s thighs, Nick said, ‘Well, let’s get down to business. Acosta give you any ideas?’

‘Well, the way he found him is colourful enough,’ I said.

‘I don’t want this long-winded crap,’ Nick said. ‘You know the fight business as good as I do. It’s show business with blood. The boys who fill the house aren’t always the
best fighters. They’re the biggest characters. Of course nothing helps your character like a finishing punch. But the fans like a name they can latch on to. Like Dempsey the Manassa Mauler. Greb the Pittsburgh Windmill. Firpo the Wild Bull of the Pampas. Something to hit the fans over the head with. A gimmick.’

‘Well,’ I said, half-kidding, ‘I suppose we could call Molina the Giant of the Andes.’

Nick sat up and looked at me. ‘Not bad. The Giant of the Andes.’ He repeated it. ‘It’s got something. We’re making money already. Keep thinking.’

‘You mean this kind of stuff,’ I said. I ad-libbed: ‘Up from the Argentine charged the Wild Bull of the Pampas to knock Dempsey through the ropes and come within a single second of bringing the world’s championship home with him. Now comes his protégé, the Giant of the Andes, to avenge Luis Ángel Firpo, his boyhood idol.’

‘Keep talking, baby,’ Nick said. ‘Keep talking. You’re talking us into a pisspot full of dough.’

I thought this would be as good a time as any, so I said, ‘By the way, Nick, Acosta doesn’t seem too happy about the split.’

‘There’s a law says he has to be happy?’ Nick said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but the little guy did put a hell of a lot into this. He really discovered Molina, gambled on him, and …’

‘You feel so sorry for him maybe you want to give him your ten per cent.’

Life was much less complicated when you agreed with Nick.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but …’

‘How do you like that little greaseball!’ said Nick, a great non-listener when you weren’t speaking for his benefit. ‘He hasn’t enough connections to get Molina into a pay-toilet in the Garden. Any more crap out of him and we take him down to the boat and kiss him off.’

He rolled over and let the Killer massage his back. ‘Keep your mind on your racket,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of mine.’

When we came out, everybody had moved down to the pool. The gamblers were at it again, at a table under the awning. Barney Winch, the fatter one, was finally winning. ‘Only two,’ he was protesting to the world. ‘When I gin, he’s got only two. What’ve I done to anybody I deserve such punishment?’ Gus Lennert and the three boys were back on the lawn tossing the ball around. ‘Alla way, Pop,’ the youngest one was shouting. Quinn was sleeping in a deckchair with his straw hat pulled down over his face. Junior and his guest had apparently gone back to the court. Beth was in the water, swimming a relaxed crawl. The Killer’s little pekinese blonde was lying on the edge of the pool working on her tan. She wore black, modern-shaped sunglasses and she had untied the bra of her dainty
two-piece
bathing suit so as to expose to the sun as much of her provocative little body as possible. Danny McKeogh was talking to Acosta. He looked a little more alive since he had eaten, but from where I stood his watery light-blue irises hardly stood out at all from the white of his eyes, giving his face a deathly quality. He was back on his favourite subject, training. He really knew how to train fighters and liked to work them hard.

‘When I was a kid the boys were in much better shape,’ he
was saying. ‘Imagine any of these punks today going thirty, forty tough rounds like Gans, Wolgast or Nelson? They’d drop dead. They don’t like to work as hard as we used to, and they haven’t got the legs. Too much riding around, taxis, subways…’

Ruby was lying in the hammock reading
The Countess Misbehaved
. Who would play Desirée? On the opposite side of the pool a portable radio was blaring loudly, but nobody seemed to be listening to the comic whose formula jokes were punctuated by the feverish applause of an enthralled studio audience.

I wondered where Toro was. I looked around for him, but I didn’t see him right away because he was standing so quietly, staring into the lattice archway of the grape arbour beyond the pool. His enormous head almost reached the top of the arch, and with his back to the sun his extraordinary size cast a mountainous image that overshadowed the entire arbour. I wondered what was in his mind. Did these dark ripe grapes evoke the sight and smell of home, of friendly Santa Maria, of his mother and father, of Carmelita, of the cheers that rose from the throats of fellow-villagers when he lifted his wine barrels, of the warmth and security of being born into, working and dying in an isolated, intimate community? Or was Toro’s mind computing the conspicuous riches of the Latka estate and dreaming of the day he would return to Santa Maria in triumph to build the castle that would rival the very de Santos villa which the barefooted peasants of his village had always looked up to as the ultimate in luxurious shelter, at least in this life and perhaps in the next?

Americans are still an independent and rebellious people – at least in their reaction to signs. Stillman’s gym, up the street from the Garden, offers no exception to our national habit of shrugging off small prohibitions. Hung prominently on the grey, nondescript walls facing the two training rings a poster reads: ‘No rubbish or spitting on the floor under penalty of the law.’ If you want to see how the boys handle this one, stick around until everybody has left the joint and see what’s left for the janitor to do. The floor is strewn with cigarettes smoked down to their stained ends, cigar butts chewed to soggy pulp, dried spittle, empty match cases, thumbed and trampled copies of the
News
,
Mirror
and
Journal
, open to the latest crime of passion or the race results, wadded gum, stubs of last night’s fight at St Nick’s (managers’ comps), a torn-off cover of an Eighth Avenue restaurant menu with the name of a new matchmaker in
Cleveland scrawled next to a girl’s phone number. Here on the dirty grey floor of Stillman’s is the telltale debris of a world as sufficient unto itself as a walled city of the Middle Ages.

You enter this walled city by means of a dark, grimy stairway that carries you straight up off Eighth Avenue into a large, stuffy, smoke-filled, hopeful, cynical, glistening-bodied world. The smells of this world are sour and pungent, a stale gamey odour blended of sweat and liniment, worn fight gear, cheap cigars and too many bodies, clothed and unclothed, packed into a room with no noticeable means of ventilation. The sounds of this world are multiple and varied, but the longer you listen, the more definitely they work themselves into a pattern, a rhythm that begins to play in your head like a musical score: The trap-drum beating of the light bag, counterpointing other light bags; the slow thud of punches into heavy bags, the tap-dance tempo of the rope-skippers; the three-minute bell; the footwork of the boys working in the ring, slow,
open-gloved
, taking it easy; the muffled sound of the flat,
high-laced
shoes on the canvas as the big name in next week’s show at the Garden takes a sign from his manager and goes to work, crowding his sparring partner into a corner and shaking him up with body punches; the hard breathing of the boxers, the rush of air through the fighter’s fractured nose, in a staccato timed to his movements; the confidential tones the managers use on the matchmakers from the smaller clubs spotting new talent,
Irving, let me assure you my boy loves to fight. He wants none of them easy ones. Sure he looked lousy Thursday night. It’s a question of styles. You
know that Ferrara’s style was all wrong for him. Put ’em in with a boy who likes to mix it an’ see the difference
; the deals, the arguments, the angles, the appraisals, the muted Greek chorus, muttering out of the corner of its mouth with a nervous cigar between its teeth; the noise from the telephones; the booths ‘For Outgoing Calls Only’,
Listen, Joe, I just been talking to Sam and he says okay for two
hundred for the semi-final at
… the endless ringing of the ‘Incoming Calls Only’; a guy in dirty slacks and a cheap yellow sports shirt, cupping his hairy hands together and lifting his voice above the incessant sounds of the place:
Whitey Bimstein, call for Whitey Bimstein, anybody seen
Whitey
…; the garbage-disposal voice of Stillman himself, a big, authoritative, angry-looking man, growling out the names of the next pair of fighters to enter the ring, loudly but always unrecognisably, like a fierce, adult babytalk; then the bell again, the footwork sounds, the thudding of gloves against hard bodies, the routine fury.

The atmosphere of this world is intense, determined, dedicated. The place swarms with athletes, young men with hard, lithe, quick bodies under white, yellow, brown and blackish skins and serious, concentrated faces, for this is serious business, not just for blood, but for money.

I was sitting in the third row of the spectators’ seats, waiting for Toro to come out. Danny McKeogh was going to have him work a couple of rounds with George Blount, the old Harlem trial-horse. George spent most of his career in the ring as one of those fellows who’s good enough to be worth beating, but just not good enough to be up with the contenders. Tough but not too tough, soft but not too
soft – that’s a trial-horse. Old George wasn’t a trial-horse any more, just a sparring partner, putting his big,
shiny-black
porpoise body and his battered, good-natured face up there to be battered some more for five dollars a round. There were sparring partners you could get for less, but George was what Danny called an honest workman; he could take a good stiff belt without quitting. To the best of his ringwise but limited ability he obliged the managers with whatever style of fighting they asked for. He went in; he lay back; he boxed from an orthodox stand-up stance, keeping his man at distance with his left; he fought from out of a crouch and shuffled into a clinch, tying his man up with his club-like arms and giving him a busy time with the in-fighting. Good Old George, with the gold teeth, the easy smile and the old-time politeness, calling everybody mister, black and white alike, humming his slow blues as he climbed through the ropes, letting himself get beaten to his knees, climbing out through the ropes again and picking up the song right where he had left it on the apron of the ring. That was George, a kind of Old Man River of the ring, a John Henry with scar tissue, a human punching bag, who accepted his role with philosophical detachment.

In front of me, sparring in the rings and behind the rings, limbering up, were the fighters, and behind me, the non-belligerent echelons, the managers, trainers, matchmakers, gamblers, minor mobsters, kibitzers, with here and there a sports writer or a shameless tub-thumper like myself. Some of us fall into the trap of generalising about races: the Jews are this, the Negroes are that, the Irish something else again. But in this place the only true division
seemed to be between the flat-bellied, slender-waisted, lively-muscled young men and the men with the paunches, bad postures, fleshy faces and knavish dispositions who fed on the young men, promoted them, matched them, bought and sold them, used them and discarded them. The boxers were of all races, all nationalities, all faiths, though predominantly Negro, Italian, Jewish, Latin-American, Irish. So were the managers. Only those with a bigot’s astigmatism would claim that it was typical for the Irish to fight and Jews to run the business, or vice versa, for each fighting group had its parasitic counterpart. Boxers and managers, those are the two predominant races of Stillman’s world.

I have an old-fashioned theory about fighters. I think they should get paid enough to hang up their gloves before they begin talking to themselves. I wouldn’t even give the managers the 33⅓ per cent allowed by the New York Boxing Commission. A fighter only has about six good years and one career. A manager, in terms of the boys he can handle in a lifetime, has several hundred careers. Very few fighters get the consideration of racehorses which are put out to pasture when they haven’t got it any more, to grow old in dignity and comfort like Man o’ War. Managers, in the words of my favourite sports writer, ‘have been known to cheat blinded fighters at cards, robbing them out of the money they lost their eyesight to get.’

I still remember what a jolt it was to walk into a foul-smelling men’s room in a crummy little late spot back in Los Angeles and slowly recognise the blind attendant who handed me the towel as Speedy Sencio, the little Filipino
who fought his way to the top of the bantamweights in the late twenties. Speedy Sencio, with the beautiful footwork who went fifteen rounds without slowing down, an artist who could make a fight look like a ballet, dancing in and out, side to side, weaving, feinting, drawing opponents out of position and shooting short, fast punches that never looked hard, but suddenly stretched them on the canvas, surprised and pale and beyond power to rise. Little Speedy in those beautiful double-breasted suits and the cocky, jaunty but dignified way he skipped from one corner to the other to shake hands with the participants in a fight to decide his next victim.

Speedy had Danny McKeogh in his corner in those days. Danny looked after his boys. He knew when Speedy’s timing was beginning to falter, when he began running out of gas around the eighth, and when the legs began to go, especially the legs. He was almost thirty, time to go home for a fighting man. One night the best he could get was a draw with a tough young slugger who had no business in the ring with him when Speedy was right. Speedy got back to his corner, just, and oozed down on his stool. Danny had to give him smelling salts to get him out of the ring. Speedy was the only real moneymaker in Danny’s stable, but Danny said no to all offers. As far as he was concerned, Speedy had had it. Speedy was on Danny all the time, pressing for a fight. Speedy even promised to give up the white girl he was so proud of if Danny would take him back. With Danny it was strike three, you’re out, no arguments. Danny really loved Speedy. As a term of endearment, he called him ‘that little yellow son-of-a-bitch’. Danny had an old fighter’s respect
for a good boy and although it would make him a little nauseous to use a word like dignity, I think that is what he had on his mind when he told Speedy to quit. There are not many things as undignified as seeing an old master chased around the ring, easy to hit, caught flat-footed, old wounds opened, finally belted out. The terrible plunge from dignity is what happened to Speedy Sencio when Danny McKeogh tore up the contract and the jackals and hyenas nosed in to feed on the still-warm corpse.

Strangely enough, it was Vince Vanneman who managed Speedy out of the top ten into the men’s can. Vince had him fighting three and four times a month around the small clubs from San Diego to Bangor, any place where ‘former bantamweight champion’ still sold tickets. Vince chased a dollar with implacable single-mindedness. I caught up with him and Speedy one night several years ago in Newark, when Speedy was fighting a fast little southpaw who knew how to use both hands. He had Speedy’s left eye by the third round and an egg over his right that opened in the fifth. The southpaw was a sharpshooter and he went for those eyes. He knocked Speedy’s mouthpiece out in the seventh and cut the inside of his mouth with a hard right before he could get it back in place. When the bell ended the round Speedy was going down and Vince and a second had to drag him back to his corner. I was sitting near Speedy’s corner, and though I knew what to expect from Vince I felt I had to make a pitch in the right direction. So I leant over and said, ‘For Christ sake, Vince, what do you want to have, a murder? Throw in the towel and stop the slaughter, for Christ’s sweet sake.’

Vince looked down from the ring where he was trying
to help the trainer close the cuts over the eyes. ‘Siddown and min’ your own friggin’ business,’ he said while working frantically over Speedy to get him ready to answer the bell.

In the next round Speedy couldn’t see because of the blood and he caught an overhand right on the temple and went down and rolled over, reaching desperately for the lowest strand of the rope. Slowly he pulled himself up at eight, standing with his feet wide apart and shaking his head to clear the blood out of his eyes and his brain. All the southpaw had to do was measure him and he was down again, flat on his back, but making a convulsive struggle to rise to his feet. That’s when Vince cupped his beefy hands to his big mouth and shouted through the ropes, ‘Get up. Get up, you son-of-a-bitch.’ And he didn’t mean it like Danny McKeogh. For some reason known only to men with hearts like Speedy Sencio’s, he did get up. He got up and clinched and held on and drew on every memory of defence and trickery he had learnt in more than three hundred fights. Somehow, four knockdowns and six interminable minutes later, he was still on his feet at the final bell, making a grotesque effort to smile through his broken mouth as he slumped into the arms of his victorious opponent in the traditional embrace.

Half an hour later I was having a hamburger across the street, when Vince came in and squeezed his broad buttocks into the opposite booth. He ordered a steak sandwich and a bottle of beer. He was with another guy, and they were both feeling all right. From what Vince said I gathered he had put up five hundred to win two-fifty that Speedy would stay the limit.

When I paid my cheque I turned to Vince’s booth because I felt I had to protest against the violation of the dignity of Speedy Sencio. I said, ‘Vince, in my book you are a chintzy, turd-eating butcher!’

That’s a terrible way to talk and I apologise to anybody who might have been in that short-order house and overheard me. The only thing I can say in my defence is that if you are talking to an Eskimo it is no good to speak Arabic. But what I said didn’t even make Vince lose a beat in the rhythmical chewing of his steak.

‘Aaah, don’t be an old lady,’ Vince said. ‘Speedy’s never been kayoed, so why should I spoil his record?’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘don’t spoil his record. Just spoil his face, spoil his head, spoil his life for good.’

‘Go away,’ Vince said, laughing. ‘You’ll break my frigging heart.’

The bell brought me back from Newark, from Speedy Sencio with his lousy job in that crapper and, I thought, from Vince Vanneman. Then I saw Vince himself coming in. I realised this must have been one of those times when the mind seems to sense someone before the image strikes the eye so that it appears a coincidence when the very man you’re thinking about comes in the door. He was wearing a yellow linen sports shirt, open at the neck, worn outside his pants. He came up behind Solly Prinz, the matchmaker, and gave him the finger. Solly seemed to rise up off the ground and let out an excited, girlish scream. Everybody knew Solly was very goosey. It got a good laugh from the circle Solly was standing with. With the rest of his fingers bent
toward his palm, Vince held the assaultive middle finger lewdly. ‘See that, girls?’ he said. ‘That’s what a Chicago fag means when he says he’ll put the finger on you.’ That got a laugh too. Vince was a funny guy, a great guy for laughs, just a big fun-loving kid who never grew up.