The Harder They Fall Page 6

  Under the next umbrella sat a couple of gamblers. It sounds like easy generalisation to look at a couple of guys you have never seen before and flip your mind down to G like a card-file, right away, ‘Gamblers’. But I would have laid five-to-one that’s what they were, if I hadn’t learnt my lesson a long time ago never to stake my judgement against the professional players’. One of the gamblers had done too well for a long time and it was all in his face and his belly. The other had started out with a very good physique and still kept a little pride in it. Once in a while, when he got into a bathing suit, he probably felt a twinge of self-consciousness about the surplus fat on him and subjected it to the hard mechanical hands of the steam-bath rubber. They were both dressed in easy, comfortable clothes that added up to the kind of country ensemble that looks expensively cheap. The fatter one was wearing a yellow flannel sports shirt that must have cost sixteen bucks at Abercrombie & Fitch. But there was nothing Abercrombie & Fitch about the short hairy arms, the fat neck and the sweat staining the shirtfront even in the shade. You would think the Scotch or the British or whoever knitted his socks would have known better than to waste pure wool on such corny patterns.

  ‘Gin,’ the leaner one said, pushing back an expensive Panama hat from a low forehead tanned from bending over racing programmes in the sun near the railing.

  The fat man threw his cards down in disgust. ‘Gin,’ he said, nodding his head in weary resignation and turning to us as if we had been there all the time, appealing to us as sympathetic onlookers witnessing a catastrophe. ‘Gin. Every five minutes gin. All the way up from Miami it’s all I hear – gin, gin, gin! Three hundred and two dollars he’s into me before we hit Balteemore. The cards he gives me, I shoulda got off at Jacksonville.’

  ‘You’re breaking my heart,’ the man with the Panama said. ‘How many you got?’

  ‘Twenty-eight,’ the fat man complained, and began to turn the cards over sorrowfully.

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, let me count,’ the other man said. His eyes did a quick recap of the fat man’s cards. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he announced triumphantly, ‘twenty-nine, jerk.’

  ‘So twenty-nine,’ the fat man shrugged. ‘He’s cutting my throat by inches and he’s worried about a little pinch in the behind.’

  This fat one, Barney Winch, made gambling his business; but it was also his recreation. His success was due to the fact that he never allowed the business and the recreation to overlap. Strictly speaking, Barney was in the gambling business the way a saloon keeper is in the drinking business, although he never has one himself until the chairs are on the tables and the door is bolted for the night. If Barney were betting on a football game, he would figure out a way to bet on both teams so there was no chance of losing and yet a better-than-even chance of winning on both. That is how he was supposed to have cleaned up on a Southern Cal-Notre Dame game a few years back. First he had laid two and a half to four on the Irish, to win. Then he had turned around and taken Southern Cal and seven points. Notre Dame won by a single point, and Barney collected on both bets. Barney hedged his fight bets the same way, and he never faded in a crap game unless the percentage was with him. If you ever caught Barney betting only one side of a fight or putting a big wad down on the nose of a horse, you would be safe in assuming that these contests had lost their element of chance.

  What Barney did for recreation was another story. His hands felt empty when they weren’t holding cards. But he wasn’t a particularly expert poker player nor invincible at gin. He never cheated at cards because cards was something he did with his friends, and a man like Barney Winch would never give the business to a friend. If the business was slang, it was highly literal slang, for it meant to Barney exactly what it had to Webster, that which busies or engages one’s time, attention or labour, as a principal serious employment. When something went wrong with Barney’s ‘principal serious employment’ there was never so much as a sigh out of him. There was the time Barney had dropped forty thousand because a certain middleweight of Nick’s who was supposed to fall down for a price double-crossed his managers and the smart money by staying on his feet and winning the decision. Barney took it philosophically. He shrugged and paid off. The double-cross was one of the risks of the business, like unseasonable rain for the farmer. Only as a little ethical reminder to the disobedient pugilist, a couple of goons were waiting for him outside his Washington Heights apartment when he got home after the fight, anxious to convince him of his mistake. They left him lying unconscious in the hallway with a convincing two-inch blackjack wound in his head.

  If it was business, Barney never bellyached. The day he won enough to shoot up into the highest income brackets (if such profits were declared), he could be weeping because he was a sixty-one-dollar loser in a rummy game.

  Barney rearranged his new hand, looked it over and shook his head with the clucking sound of self-pity. ‘Jacksonville,’ he said, ‘I shoulda got off at Jacksonville.’

  Just a hot, quiet Sunday morning at Green Acres, Nick off on the bridlepath, Ruby at church and none of the usual Sunday-dinner crowd out of bed this early. We walked out toward the tennis court, where Junior Latka, slender and full of grace and conceit in his white ducks and white jersey with the school crest over the heart, was in the middle of a long and well-played rally with another young man almost his equal. Junior hit a hard deep forehand drive which his opponent had to return as a lob that Junior put away with an overhead smash. The other boy ran back and made a futile pass at it as it bounced high over his head.

  Behind the tennis court was a carefully cultivated flower garden where a weather-beaten, runty old man was working quietly on his knees. He looked up when we passed and waited for us to admire his flowers. He had the face of a kid, with big ears and small, grinning eyes.

  ‘The flowers look good this year, Petey,’ I said.

  ‘T’anks, Mr Lewis,’ he said. ‘I started dem earlier dis year. Dese white bride roses is comin’ out better’n I expected.’

  He went back to his weeding as we walked on. ‘How old do you think he is?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, forty-eight, fifty,’ Beth guessed.

  ‘He stayed twenty rounds with Terry McGovern before we were born,’ I said. ‘He must be crowding seventy. Petey Odell, a great old-time featherweight.’

  ‘I suppose he wound up better than most of them,’ Beth said. ‘At least he’s here in Nick’s old fighters’ home.’

  ‘They come up to Nick’s all the time to put the bite on him. I guess it makes Nick feel good to take care of some of them. And of course it pays off. Nick’s charities always pay off. They’re grateful slobs, these old fighters. Good-hearted, loyal as hell and work like fools. Especially if you show an interest in what they’re doing. That Jock Mahoney. I think he loves that Caddy more than he does his wife. All you have to do to make him happy is ask him how he manages to get such a high polish on those fenders. Old Petey’s the same way about his garden. If he saw us go by and we didn’t say anything about that garden he’d sulk all day. Just a little punchy.’

  ‘What a business!’ Beth said. The more she saw of it, the less ‘fascinating’ it seemed.

  ‘Mahoney or Hayes, they aren’t so bad. They know what day it is. Give them a definite job to do and they’ll throw themselves into it. But just the same when you talk to them about anything but the job or maybe their families, you hit something fuzzy, as if they’ve got a layer of cotton around their brains.’

  ‘It’s a filthy business,’ Beth said suddenly. ‘In your heart you know it’s a filthy business.’

  ‘Last Friday night you were yelling your head off,’ I reminded her.

  ‘That’s true,’ she admitted. ‘I was rooting for the coloured boy. He looked so thin and weak compared to the other one. When he started to rally, when he actually had that big Italian boy groggy, well’ – she had to smile – ‘I guess I got excited.’

  ‘It’s been exciting people a hell of a long time. Look at Greek mythology – ful
l of boxers. Wasn’t it Hercules who fought that very tough boy who grew stronger each time he was knocked down because the earth was his mother? What was his name?’

  ‘Antaeus,’ Beth said.

  ‘That’s why it pays to court a Life researcher,’ I said. ‘Antaeus. Homer wrote a hell of a piece about that fight. And Virgil covered one of the first great comebacks of a retired champ. Remember how the old champ doesn’t want to accept the challenge of the young contender from Troy because he complains he is way out of condition and all washed up, a sort of ancient Greek Tony Galento? But when he’s finally goaded into fighting he puts up a hell of a battle, has his man on the verge of a kayo when the King steps between them like Arthur Donovan and gives it to the old champ on a TKO. Of course, Virgil made it sound a little more poetic, but that was the guts of it.’

  Beth smiled. ‘You shouldn’t be a tub-thumper for a stable of fighters. You should write essays for The Yale Review.’

  ‘Nick pays me for the tub-thumping,’ I said. ‘This kind of talk I have to do for free.’

  We had almost reached the house. Nick and Whitey Williams were just coming up the driveway, at a slow trot. In contrast to Whitey, who sat his horse as if it were an overstuffed easy chair, and looked as much at home, Nick’s seat was very erect, a little ill at ease, and when he posted you felt he was conscious of doing so with perfect form, which always results in something less than perfect in sport technique.

  He swung off his horse, a big, deep-chested bay, and handed the reins to Whitey, who led both horses back to the stable. Nick was wearing Irish boots, chamois breeches and a brown polo shirt.

  ‘How long you two been here?’ he said pleasantly.

  ‘About half an hour, Nick,’ I said. ‘Wonderful day.’

  ‘It must be a sweat-box in town,’ Nick said, gloatingly. ‘We useta knock the head off the fire plug an’ take a shower bath in the street.’ He gave a little laugh, thinking how far he had come. ‘Eddie been showing you around the joint?’

  ‘It’s perfectly beautiful,’ Beth said.

  ‘Didja show her the vegetable garden?’ Nick said. ‘We got a thousand tomato plants. Raise all our own stuff. You like corn, miss? I’ll betcha never tasted corn like this. Corn like this, you’ll never get it in the stores. When you go home take some with you, all you want.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ Beth said.

  ‘Aah, it’s nothing,’ Nick waved it aside. ‘This place is lousy with stuff. If you don’t take it, my bums will eat me out of it anyway. That Jock Mahoney, he sits down to corn, he doesn’t get up till he’s finished thirteen-fourteen ears. He’d rather eat ’n…’ He looked at Beth and stopped. ‘Even when he was supposed to be trainin’, he ate like a pig.’

  We were back on the terrace. Danny McKeogh was still sleeping, his legs spread apart and his arms outstretched, like a man who had been run over. The gamblers were still hunched over their cards.

  ‘How’s it going, Barney?’ Nick said.

  The fat man’s body rose and fell in an exaggerated sigh. ‘Don’t ask. He’s murdering me. There oughta be a law against what he’s doing to me.’

  Nick laughed. ‘No wonder Runyon called him the Town Crier,’ he said. ‘Even when he wins, he cries, because it wasn’t bigger.’

  He dropped his hand on my shoulder. ‘This fella Acosta is inside on the screen porch. This oughta be a good time to talk. Come on in.’ Then he remembered Beth. ‘Sorry to grab the boyfriend away,’ he said with what was for Nick a very courtly gesture. ‘Ruby oughta be back in a couple of minutes. There’s plenty of papers on the terrace if you feel like readin’. And if you wanna drink, just call the butler, the guy with the little black bow tie.’

  ‘Who is he, Gene Tunney?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Tooney,’ Nick said, ‘Tooney gives me a pain in the … excuse me, miss, but I’d throw Tooney the hell off the place.’

  He manoeuvred me toward the door. ‘Just do anything you feel like, take anything you want like it was your own home.’

  ‘You boys go ahead,’ Beth said. ‘I’ll amuse myself.’

  I watched her for a moment as she started back across the terrace. She was wearing a yellow-brown linen skirt, only a shade darker than her tanned legs and arms. Even in the city, where the only exercise most people get is running for a bus or hailing a cab, she always got down to the courts at Park and 39th at least twice a week when the weather was right. She looked very sharp from where we stood, not the dream figure, a little too athletic maybe, a little too thin in the legs and not quite enough in front. But there was something attractively capable about the way she walked. I made a mental note to mention this to her later.

  She puzzled me. She was the kind of girl to whom I was always going to say something nice a little later. What kept me back, perhaps, was that she would only half believe what I told her, always holding something in reserve. Maybe it was her upbringing, the kind that demands a strict balance all the time. Maybe it was the old Puritan strain in her. Maybe it was a bad inheritance of fierce convictions. Whatever it was, a nice girl like Beth, good respectable family, good schooling, good brain, was still a question mark to me. Passion and restraint, in equal portions, end up in a no-decision fight.

  ‘She’s all right,’ Nick said. ‘You got yourself something there. Plenty of class.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We walked through the spacious living room, an overdecorated hall of mirrors that looked unlived-in, to the sun-porch. When he saw us, the little Argentinian rose quickly to his feet, stiffly formal, his teeth showing in a rehearsed smile. He was a short dumpy man with a large nose, a swarthy complexion and a half-dozen strands of hair angled back from his forehead in a strategic but unsuccessful effort to hide his baldness. He wore spats, a white-chequered vest and the kind of four-button sports suit belted in the back we haven’t seen around here in quite a while. On the fourth finger of his short stubby hand was what might have been a ruby.

  ‘Eddie,’ Nick said, not bothering to introduce me, ‘this is Acosta. You guys got some work to do, so I’ll leave you alone.’

  Acosta began a little bow and started to say something like ‘Charmed…’ or ‘Very pleased …’ but Nick caught him in the middle of it. The courtesies were all right with Nick, if they didn’t get in the way of business. ‘I dialled out on you,’ he said to Acosta, ‘because I don’t hafta hear all that crap about the village and the wine barrels. I’m a businessman. I take one hinge at the boy and I see he’s got something. I can sell him. But,’ Nick squeezed my shoulder affectionately, ‘I want you to give my boy here the full treatment.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understan’,’ Acosta said, bowing slightly toward Nick again, as if what he had just said had been graciously friendly.

  ‘Don’t forget now, the full treatment,’ Nick said, using the same tone on Acosta he used on the bums around the office. ‘Including dessert and the finger bowls.’

  ‘Meester Latka, he has a very smart head for business,’ Acosta said to me when Nick left us alone. ‘Very strong mind, very intelligent. When El Toro and I come to North America I never even have the dream to be the partner of such a big man as Meester Latka.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He reached into his inside pocket and brought forth a silver case from which, with an elaborate gesture, he offered me a cigarette. ‘Perhaps you do not mind smoking an Argentinian cigarette,’ he said. ‘Very mild, very nice smoke. If you will pardon me for saying, I like better than your Chesterfield and Lucky Strike.’ Again he smiled with his teeth to show that this was not an issue of nationalist rivalry but merely a little joke, and fitted his cigarette nicely into a slender tortoiseshell holder. He spoke better English than the Killer or Vanneman, but with a strong affinity for the present tense and a tendency to louse up his present and past perfects.

  ‘Meester Lewis,’ Acosta began, ‘for me to meet you is a very great pleasure. Meester Latka, he has tell me about you the many good things. You are a very great writer, yes? You will make
very famous my great discovery El Toro Molina and his little manager Luis?’

  This was said with a little laugh, as if to show we both understood that Luis was not nearly so aggressive and self-seeking as he made himself sound. Luis had shrewd little eyes that appraised you too carefully all the time he was smiling at you. For all the Argentine schmaltz, it wasn’t too difficult to see him promoting up and down Jacobs Beach with the best of them, spats and all.

  Well, the overture is over and the curtain’s going up, I thought.

  ‘Tell you what you do, Mr Acosta,’ I said. ‘Give me the whole thing. From the beginning. Where the guy comes from, how you found him, when he started fighting, the works.’

  ‘Please?’ Acosta said.

  ‘You know, the whole story, complete in this issue.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes I understan’,’ Acosta said. ‘It is very very interesting the story of El Toro and I. Very romantic. Very dramatic. But first if you please I will warn you of something. El Toro Molina, he is a very young boy. He does not have yet twenty-one years. He comes from a very little village in the Andes, above Mendoza. All the people there, they are of very simple minds. Not loco you understan’, just of simple minds. All their life they work in the vineyards of the great estancia de Santos. Of the world outside, they know nothing, not even of the capital of their state, Mendoza. Buenos Aires, it is not as real as heaven to them, and North America it is as far away as the stars.’

  Acosta smiled for Toro’s innocence.

  ‘So it is of this matter that I will warn you, if you please, Meester Lewis. I cannot make El Toro come to North America without I promise to take care of him with very great fidelidad, er …’

  ‘Faithfulness,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, ¿habla usted español?’

  ‘Un poco,’ I said. ‘Muy poco. Seis meses en Méjico.’

  ‘Good, very good,’ he said warmly. ‘Su acento de usted es perfecto.’