But Toro wouldn’t acknowledge Doc either. Fernando rubbed Toro’s back possessively as he stepped off the scales in his shorts. ‘We will take care of him,’ Fernando assured us.
Gus got on the scales wearing an old towel that had printed on it in faded letters, Hotel Manx.
‘Well, anyway, Gus, after this fight you oughta be able to go out and buy yourself a towel of your own,’ Vince said as Gus stepped down.
Most of the boys laughed. But Gus was a humourless man at best and this afternoon he was not at his best.
‘At least I don’t do nothing worse than swipe hotel towels,’ he said. It was not so much what he said as the irritable way he said it that infected the atmosphere.
Toro was waiting to step onto the scales as Gus stepped off. This is a moment of importance in the drama of any fight. The reporters watch the faces of the principals to see if the underdog betrays any fear of the favourite, or for those displays of bravado that may be part of a preconceived plan of psychological warfare, or for a sign of some highly publicised hostility, or for that exchange of smiles and good wishes that never fails to delight the sentimentalists.
But between Toro and Gus nothing happened at all. Gus just stepped on and stepped off with the indifference of a man punching in for work in the morning. Not to greet Toro wasn’t snubbing him any more than the man punching in shows any discourtesy by ignoring the fellow behind him. But as Gus walked away, Toro watched him from the scales. Reporters who had no way of knowing what had happened to Toro in the last forty-eight hours may have described his eyes as being full of hate. But Gus had no special significance for Toro as an individual. He had simply become the most immediate target for Toro’s exploding resentment against a world which had tricked and belittled him.
An hour before the fight you could feel the tension growing in the Garden lobby: the late ticket seekers, the sharp-eyed scalpers, the busy little guys making last-minute book, eight-to-five on Toro, five-to-nine on Lennert, playing the percentages.
Around nine, Toro came down from the Waldorf with Pepe and Fernando. Danny wanted to throw them out. Strangers in a dressing room always made him even more nervous. But Toro was stubborn. ‘They are my friends,’ he insisted. ‘If they go, I go too.’
Danny had never paid much attention to what Toro said before, but this time Danny sensed something in Toro that was not to be denied, something wild inside him that wanted violence.
Usually Toro had waited to go down to the ring with the patient amiability of a prize Guernsey standing by to make its appearance at the county fair. But this time he asked how much longer it would be every few minutes. And finally when Doc told him to start warming up with a little shadow-boxing, Toro lashed out at his imaginary opponent with a fury none of us had ever seen in him before.
Lennert was first to enter the ring. As he worked his feet slowly in the rosin box, he responded to the cheers of his supporters with a tight, cheerless smile. His face was ghastly white in the glare of the ring lights.
Toro’s white satin bathrobe with the blue trim and the Argentine flag on back got a tremendous hand as he climbed through the ropes. He didn’t jackknife over the top rung as I had had him do for the previous fights. Something about that omission vaguely worried me. It was a trivial but significant protest against the kind of circus presentation we had set up for him. I didn’t know what could happen, but I had the same sense of apprehension a playwright would feel if one of his actors began the play by speaking unfamiliar lines that were not in the script.
I kept my eyes on Toro while the announcer introduced the usual celebrities, followed by some future attractions – the ‘highly regarded lightweight from Greenwich Village who has emerged victorious in seventeen consecutive contests’, the Bronx middleweight ‘who has recently established himself as a fistic sensation and who never fails to make a spectacular showing’, and several other boys whom Harry Balough managed to describe with artless and incongruous pomposity. Toro sat on the edge of his stool, anxious to begin. Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd and Buddy Stein swung through the ropes and mitted the crowd in a broad, ham gesture, Toro paid no attention. Stein was dressed sharply in a loud-check sports suit that set off his wide shoulders and his trim waist. The body that tired sports writers were always comparing to Adonis’s moved with jaunty arrogance. He trotted over to Lennert’s corner and, instead of the conventional and perfunctory handshake, kissed him on the forehead. The crowd laughed and Stein laughed back. They loved each other. Then he skipped across the ring to shake hands with Toro. Toro just let him lift his glove. He still didn’t seem to see him. He didn’t see anybody but Lennert.
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.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
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.