The Harder They Fall

  The bartender left the bottle in front of Danny and went on about his business. Every few minutes Danny would pour us another one as we talked.

  ‘Well,’ Danny said, ‘don’t we have a dilly? Isn’t he a beaut?’ Danny talked a kind of slang that sounds archaic nowadays. He still said things like ‘dilly’, and he was inclined to refer to beautiful babes as ‘stunners’.

  Danny studied the bottle reflectively. ‘If he just didn’t know anything, laddie, that wouldn’t be so bad. I’ve started from scratch before. Bud Traynor was green as grass when I first got hold of him, but at least there was plenty of fight in Bud. Even when he was a dub he was always dangerous. But this ox’ – he threw off another one – ‘he’s nothing. Just a big clown. Doesn’t even have the moxie for it.’

  He held up his jigger ceremoniously. Danny liked to drink fast, but with a certain amount of formality. ‘Happy days,’ he said.

  There was some colour in Danny’s face now. His eyes were brighter. He wiped his mouth with his hand, and said, ‘You know, laddie, maybe I caught one too many myself, but I still love this damn game. Even with all the things wrong with it, I love this lousy game. Especially when I have a boxer. Give me a new clever kid and let me bring him along nice and slow like I did Greenberg and Sencio and I’m up in heaven. Happy days,’ he said.

  He seemed to be reading the label on the bottle carefully. ‘Yes, laddie, maybe I let them reach me once too often, but there’s nothing I like better in this world than working a corner when I’ve got a nice smart boy who can do all the things I ask him. That’s the way Izzy Greenberg was, up to the Hudson fight. The Hudson fight took something out of Izzy that’s hard to describe, but you’re just no good without. I was like that myself after Leonard. You look good as ever in the gym and it’s not that you’ve got any geezer in you when you climb through the ropes. It’s just that your confidence is shot. Your chemistry, I guess you’d call it. Your chemistry is changed. That’s when I quit. I’d probably be singing nursery rhymes to myself right now if I hadn’t called it a day. That’s why I never regretted that dough I loaned Izzy to set him up in business. I’d rather lose the spondoolicks than see him get his brains knocked loose. Well, happy days.’

  From the bar radio we had been ignoring came the call of the starter’s signal at the track. Danny brushed his hand against his face in that nervous gesture of his and said, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got something good in the first race.’

  ‘In the first at Jamaica,’ the cold, mechanical voice of the announcer said, ‘they were off at two-thirty-seven. The winner, Carburetor. Place, Shasta Lad. Show, Labyrinth. The Gob ran fourth. Track, clear and fast. Time one minute, twelve and four-fifths seconds. The winner paid seven-eighty, four-ninety and four-ten.’

  Danny took a tab out of his pocket and tore it in two.

  ‘Who were you on, Danny?’

  ‘The Gob,’ he said. ‘He figured to win that one. Dropping down in class. Only carrying a hundred and fourteen pounds. And the distance was right.’ He reached for the bottle again. ‘Well, happy days.’

  ‘No, thanks, Danny,’ I said.

  ‘Go ahead, laddie, keep me company.’

  ‘I’ve got to go up and see Nick after a while.’

  ‘Hell with Nick,’ Danny said. ‘That’s the trouble with this lousy game. Too many Nicks in this lousy game.’

  ‘Well, make mine a short one,’ I said.

  ‘Gotta keep me company,’ he said. ‘We’re in this together, laddie. Hell with Nick. It’s Nick that’s driving us to drink, with his lousy freaks he wants us to handle. Happy days.’

  ‘It’s not just Nick,’ I said. ‘I gotta meet my girl later too.’

  ‘Now that’s a different story, laddie. Never let it be said that Danny McKeogh came between a swain and his lady-love. Here, just let me pour you a drop or two, so I don’t have to feel I’m drinking by myself.’

  He held his jigger up in front of him and stared into it. ‘It’s pitiful,’ he said, ‘watching a freak like that. That’s what it is, pitiful.’ He reached for the bottle again. ‘If there’s anything I hate to watch, it’s a fighter with no ability. It rubs me the wrong way. If they really want to punish me for my sins, they should find a gym for me in Purgatory and lock me up with nothing but bad fighters.’ He grinned. He had a nice, boyish grin that made you want to smile with him. He was feeling better. The liquor was good for him. If only he could quit now, he would be all right. Nice and easy and relaxed inside, what they mean by that old definition of happiness: the absence of pain.

  Doc Zigman came in and took the empty stool next to Danny.

  ‘Draw a beer for my friend, John,’ Danny called down to the bartender.

  Doc never drank anything stronger than beer. He was dark-complexioned with a high intellectual forehead and a sharp sensitive face that looked damp all the time. Tuberculosis had made his spine rise to a peak between his shoulders and bent him over as if he were under an unbearably heavy weight. It gave him more the appearance of a scientist or a scholar than a member of the boxing fraternity. Maybe that was merely because he was what I always pictured when I thought of Steinmetz. As a matter of fact, Doc just missed being a legitimate MD.

  The orthopaedists tried their best with their rack-like contraptions when he was a kid, and got nowhere. They only succeeded in keeping him out of school long enough to smother his dream of becoming a physician. But what may have hurt more than the ‘cures’ was the progress of his younger brother, now one of the top surgeons in New York. There are hints that Doc is not very welcome in his brother’s home, and I suppose it would be easy for a psychoanalyst to trace the feud back to an early trauma. What’s obvious is that it’s not very easy to subordinate all your ambitions to a kid brother, especially if he is favoured with a straight back.

  I can’t quite remember how he drifted into the boxing racket, but I think it was through a kid from his block – on the Upper East Side – who was fighting main events at St Nick’s. Doc worked like a doctor, more efficiently than a lot of these stuffed-shirts with enough political pull to get themselves appointed medical examiners for the boxing commissions. I’ve never seen anybody stop a cut like Doc. In those short sixty seconds between rounds his long thin fingers worked medical magic. And it’s not only external medicine he knows. He’s made a kind of informal study of punch-drunkenness, with a lot of stuff on concussion and cerebral haemorrhages. The strange thing is that, coming up out of a tough block and being around mugs so much of the time, he doesn’t sound exactly like Doctor Christian and yet I’ve heard him talk to doctors about ‘Parkinsonian syndromes’ and ‘post-traumatic encephalitis’, and from the way they listened, he must know what he’s talking about.

  ‘Well, what do you think of our Superman, Doc?’ I said. ‘How do you figure him physically?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, Eddie, if you want me to level,’ Doc said. ‘For one thing, he’s got the wrong kind of muscles. Big square muscles. He’s done a lot of lifting. There’s no give, no speed to muscles like that. He’s overdeveloped in the biceps. Works like he’s a little muscle-bound. That’s sure to slow him up pretty bad.’

  ‘Happy days,’ Danny said.

  ‘How about his size?’ I said. ‘What makes a guy that big? Can that be natural? Or is that something glandular?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t like to say without knowing more about his history,’ Doc said, just the way doctors always sound. ‘But just from looking at him I’d say he’s what the Medical Centre boys call “acromegalic”.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s not serious,’ Doc said, ‘but overactivity of the pituitary gland isn’t the healthiest condition.’

  ‘Well, what are the symptoms?’ I said. ‘Or the syndromes, or whatever you geniuses call it.’

  ‘A hyper-pituitary,’ Doc said, ‘well, I’ll tell you, a hyper-pituitary usually has a misleading appearance. He is abnormally large, and his nervous system sort of hasn’t had a chance to keep up with
him. So he’s apt to act kind of sluggish, kind of dopey, even though his brain may be perfectly okay. It’s like the wires between the brain and the body aren’t hooked up very good. The chances are he can’t take punishment like the shorter, stockier guys. He’ll probably go into shock faster. His resistance isn’t too good.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘That’s just great. I can see myself selling that one to the sport desks. “See Man Mountain Molina, the Hyper-Pituitary, Argentine’s gift to medical science.”’

  ‘Happy days,’ Danny said.

  We had struck bottom on that bottle. Danny held the empty up to prove his plight to the bartender. ‘John,’ he said.

  The bartender turned to bring up another fifth, and set it in front of Danny. Danny reached into his pocket, brought out a wad of bills and handed it over the bar. ‘Here, John,’ he said. ‘When you close take out what I owe you, keep a fin for yourself, stick the rest in my inside pocket and put me in a cab.’

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr McKeogh,’ John said respectfully. With an air of solid dependability he ripped a strip off a newspaper, scribbled Danny’s initials on it, fixed it to the wad with a rubber band and rang up No Sale to deposit it in the cash register.

  The starter’s call came over the radio again. Danny leant forward just a little. ‘The second race at Jamaica. Off at three-ten and one-half. The winner, Judicious. Place, Uncle Roy, Show, Bonnie Boy. El Diablo ran fourth. The time …’

  While the announcer gave the rest of the details, Danny reached into his breast pocket and tore up another tab.

  ‘Who’d you have that time?’ I said.

  ‘Uncle Roy, on the nose,’ Danny said. He tilted the fresh bottle. ‘Gentlemen, happy days.’

  From the other end of the bar a guy in a shabby suit came toward us with the jerky, telltale gait of the punch-drunk. His pug-nose, ageless face bore the marks of his former profession: the eyes drawn back to oriental slits, a puffy ear, the nose spread over his face and a mouth full of store teeth. He threw his arms around Danny’s neck and rocked him back and forth with muscular affection. ‘Hul-la-la-lalo, Danny, old b-b-boy-oh-b-b-boy-oh-boy,’ he said. As the words came up out of his throat they seemed to stick on the roof of his mouth and he’d twist his head to the side in a spastic motion to dislodge them.

  ‘Hello, Joe,’ Danny said. ‘How you feeling, Joe?’

  ‘Oh s-s-s-s-s-swell, Danny, oh-boy-oh-boy-b-boy,’ Joe said.

  When he talked you tried not to watch the muscles in his neck that tightened in the effort of human speech.

  ‘Hey, John,’ Danny called the bartender, ‘set up a glass for Joe Jackson.’

  The way Danny said that name you could tell he still liked the sound of it. He had won plenty of fights with Joe Jackson.

  Danny lifted his jigger and tapped it nicely against his old fighter’s. ‘Happy days,’ he said. ‘God bless you, Joe.’

  We had to pretend not to notice how Joe spilt a little off the top as his shaky hand brought the jigger to his lips. He set it down with a laugh. ‘Boy-oh-boy-oh-boy, that sure h-h-h-h, that sure h-h-h-h, that sure h-its the spot,’ he said. He started to laugh again, and then he stopped himself with his mouth suddenly twitching to one side – Doc’s ‘Parkinsonian syndrome’ – and he started to say, ‘Hey, Danny, c-c-c-c-c, c-c-c-c-c—’ but this one really stuck to the roof of his mouth, caught up there by some shapeless inhibition that stirred in his punished brain.

  ‘Sure,’ Danny said. ‘How’s a double sawbuck? You c’n owe it to me.’

  ‘I’ll p-p-p, I’ll p-p-p, I’ll let you h-have it back Monday,’ Joe said.

  Joe threw his arms around Danny again. ‘Thanks a m-million, Danny, oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy,’ he said and he lurched back to his place farther down the bar.

  ‘He’s getting worse,’ Doc said.

  ‘Looks like he’s got a one-way ticket to the laughing academy,’ I said.

  ‘Were you in the house the night he fought Callahan?’ Danny said. ‘Oh, was he a sweetheart the night he fought Callahan. He was right up there with the gods that night, laddie.’

  ‘This must get kind of expensive,’ I said.

  Danny shrugged. ‘What’s the diff? It’s only money.’

  When I got up to Nick’s office, his secretary, Mrs Kane, said would I please sit down and wait, Mr Latka was in conference at the moment. Mrs Kane always managed to make Nick’s conferences sound at the very least like a meeting with the mayor to decide the city’s budget. Her voice always dipped in a respectful little curtsey when she mentioned Nick’s name. She was a plump, happy-faced, handsome woman, who, on Nick’s insistence, corseted her body into smartly tailored suits. Nick had kept her with him for years, not only for her personal loyalty but because she was Gus Lennert’s sister and the wife of Al Kane, who fought as a heavyweight before Nick put him on the payroll as a collector in Prohibition days. Nick figured that with that kind of a family, Emily Kane would have less trouble beating off the wolves. Nick didn’t like that kind of stuff around the office. If he overlooked it in the Killer, it was because the Killer, in addition to his numerous other duties, had the leeway of a court-jester.

  While I was waiting, I wandered down to the little office between the reception room and Nick’s sanctum, which said ‘Executive Secretary’ on the door. That’s where the Killer hung out. The Executive Secretary was lying on the couch combing back his black shiny hair with a comb he always carried in his breast pocket. The Killer was a vain little man, given to running a comb through his hair so often that it became a kind of nervous habit.

  ‘Hello, Killer,’ I said, ‘who’s in there with the boss?’

  ‘Copper O’Shea.’

  ‘Oh, hell, and she calls that a conference. That isn’t even a meeting.’

  Copper was just one of Nick’s legmen. He got that name from the time he put in on the Police Force before one of those seasonal reform shake-ups exposed his connections with the mob. After they took the shield off him, he made it official by going to work for Nick, or rather continuing to work for Nick.

  I started into Nick’s office, but the Killer waved me back. ‘Better hold it up. The Boss is pinnin’ Copper’s ears back. He don’t like nobody to go in when he’s runnin’ off at the mouth like that. I guess he likes everybody to think he’s a sweet, lovable character.’

  ‘What’s the matter with Copper?’

  ‘Aw, the Copper’s just dumb,’ the Killer said. ‘He don’ know howta adjust. That’s what the boss says. The Copper’s out sellin’ the music, see? Well, some of them hash joints, they don’ want the music. So Copper hangs one on the guy. He can’t get useta the new way a doin’ business, see? This burns the boss. The boss just won’t buy the rough stuff no more.’

  The door opened and Copper O’Shea came out. Like so many of his former buddies on the Force, he was a big man with a hard, beefy face and a belly that hung over his belt. ‘I gotcha now, boss,’ he was saying. ‘I gotcha. I gotcha.’

  Nick looked mean and aroused. ‘I only say things once. I don’t want you to hit nobody. One more time and you’re off my list. You know that, don’t you?’

  Copper knew it. One thing about Nick, he always kept his word. Whether it was a promise to do you a favour, or to fix your little red wagon, Nick always came through.

  Nick just turned away from Copper as if he weren’t there any more and put his arm around me. ‘Come on inside, Eddie,’ he said with a friendly wink, as he led me into his office. ‘Sorry to make so much noise about that. Those stupid bastards. All they know about psychology is to pull a guy’s coat off his shoulders to tie up his arms and then kick him in the nuts. They’d rather make four bits and crack somebody’s skull than make a legitimate buck.’ He took a Belinda from his silver-edged mahogany humidor, and offered me one. ‘But I got my lesson learnt. Why waste all that time and dough messing around with the cops and the courts, putting in the fix here, paying off a guy there, when I can get richer playing strictly legitimate? Just the jukeboxes and the gambling
, a couple of concessions and some big-money fighters – that’s all I need to get along. I don’t want to hurt nobody and I don’t want to wind up with a nice little room on the third tier. I had that already.’

  A long time ago Nick had done a ten-month stretch on some kind of technical charge, one of those delicious legal fictions our Justice Department dreams up. Except for the temporary inconvenience, his business had been so well organised that he was able to conduct it smoothly right from his cell by means of visiting-day meetings with his lieutenants.

  ‘Nick,’ I said, ‘I’ve got no ambition to share that tier with you. That’s why I’m worried. If you stay with your idea of building this Molina into a big-time heavyweight, I think we’ve all got a good chance of being held as accessories to a murder.’

  ‘You mean Molina’s liable to kill somebody?’ Nick grinned.

  ‘I mean Molina’s liable to catch pneumonia and die from the draught he creates missing all those punches. Seriously, Nick, this guy is a joke. I watched him work this afternoon. He hasn’t got a thing. All those big beautiful muscles and he doesn’t hit hard enough to break an egg.’

  ‘Look, Eddie,’ Nick said, ‘I want you to go out and sell Toro Molina. Let me worry about how he lives up to his publicity.’

  ‘But you don’t seem to understand, Nick. I’m telling you this guy can’t lick a lollipop. Why, any professional fighter who knows his trade – even old Gus Lennert – is liable to murder Molina. And I mean the coroner stuff, not the kind you read about in Variety.’

  ‘Molina will get along all right,’ Nick said.