The Harder They Fall

  ‘I’ve lost not only one of the best fighters I ever had but one of the best friends I ever had,’ Nick was telling the reporters. ‘As Lennert’s manager, I want to say that I don’t blame Molina. He fought clean. It was just one of those things.’

  He isn’t mourning, he’s working, I thought. He isn’t saying farewell to Gus. He’s too busy protecting himself in the clinches. The credo of Henry Street, the Weltanschauung of the guys on the corner.

  But why wasn’t I speaking up to tell them this wasn’t one of those things, that this was murder, that Gus Lennert had been sacrificed to human greed, his own included? No, I kept my mouth shut. Protecting myself in the clinches, too. An accessory before the fact. As the reporters turned from him, Nick looked over at me in what was almost a wink, a conspiratorial sign. After all, we were both in the same stable.

  A photographer from the Mirror moved in and flashed a picture of Toro. Simultaneously it flashed in my mind that the picture wouldn’t do us any harm; it caught Toro in an effective pose of repentance, saying his beads.

  I had to lead Toro out. He was in a trance. Lennert’s death wasn’t filtered for him, as it was for us, through protective screens of sophistication and rationalisation. Toro took it head on. He had killed a man. He wandered in fear and shock as the victim of an auto accident sleepwalks away from the wreck.

  Mrs Lennert came out while we waited on the kerb for a cab. Nick was sending her home in his car. Toro went over to her. ‘I sad. All my life, sad. All the money I make tonight I give you. Every cent I give. I no want the money.’

  ‘Get away from me, you murderer, you,’ Mrs Lennert said. She wasn’t crying. ‘The fight was fixed and you still had to kill him. You had to show everybody how tough you are. The fight was fixed so poor Gus could get home early because he was sick, and you, you couldn’t even wait. You had to kill him. You filthy, dirty murderer.’

  Then she began to cry. It was an ugly, retching cry, because there was still so much anger in it. Her sons helped her into Nick’s car. As they drove off, Toro stood there, staring after them with his mouth hanging loose. He bowed his head and began to mutter, ‘Jesus Christo … Jesus Christo … Jesus Christo …’ We had to push him into the cab.

  No one said anything for several blocks. Finally Danny broke the silence with something unexpected. ‘You know, when a guy goes, you feel like you owe it to him to say something real nice. But Gus, Gus was never much of a fella in my book. Only now I kinda wish he was. Because in a way, you don’t feel quite as bad about losing a pal as losing a guy you never got around to liking.’

  ‘I liked Gus, alav hashalom,’ Doc said. ‘He sure was one hundred per cent with his wife and kids.’

  ‘You and that Jew-heart of yours,’ Danny said. ‘You like everybody.’

  We pulled up in front of St Malachy’s, the little church that’s squeezed in among the bars and cheap hotels of 49th Street. The garbage men were dragging the big cans along the pavement to their big churning truck. A drunk still living in the night before staggered past and wandered off toward wherever he was going. A hooker whose face wasn’t meant to be seen in the daylight passed us slowly on the way home to catch up on her sleep.

  I have never been much for churches, but I felt easier when we got the sexton to let us inside. The quiet and the candlelight created a better atmosphere for thoughts about the dead. Toro and Danny lit candles to the Virgin Mother. Then Toro went into the sacristy to find the priest.

  ‘I oughta confess too,’ Danny said to me. ‘If I hadn’t had a grudge against the guy, I never would have whipped Toro into the shape he was in. I came up to the fight with hate in my heart, laddie. Maybe that’s what did it, God help me!’

  But Danny didn’t confess, unless you would call me his confessor. He went over to another altar, stuffed a pocketful of bills into the offering box, and knelt in prayer.

  Doc was sitting in one of the rear pews with his head bent. I went over and sat next to him while we waited for Toro to finish. ‘I had a strong hunch Gus had the canaries in his head after Stein,’ Doc said. ‘I knew something was wrong with him. I coulda said.’

  Sure you coulda said, I thought. Danny coulda said. I coulda said. Poor old Gus, counting his annuities, coulda said. We were all as guilty as Cain. All but Toro, in there in his spiritual sweatbox, carrying our burden. Yes, if the Father were really here, Toro would be learning that he was just an innocent bystander, just the boy who happened to be around when the mob decided to cash in on a run-down ex-champion whose name still retained some of its marquee magic.

  Toro returned from the confession booth, lit another candle to the Virgin Mary and dropped on his knees in front of the shrine. He stayed that way for several minutes. When we came out onto the street again, a cold grey light was settling over the city. A few early-risers were going to work with sleep-heavy but freshly shaved faces.

  ‘I’m going home and crack my best bottle of Irish,’ Danny said. Home was a room and bath he kept in a shabby hotel off Broadway.

  ‘I better call my mother,’ Doc said. ‘She worries about me.’

  When we dropped Danny off, we bought the morning papers from a listless middle-aged newsboy. Gus and Toro had the headlines. On the front of the News were big pictures of Gus lying on the canvas, Gus on a stretcher being carried to the ambulance, and Toro with his head bent, saying his beads. I turned to the story on page three. The Boxing Commission would investigate the death, but as far as the Chairman could see, ‘It seems to be a tragic accident for which nobody is to blame.’

  Well, maybe so. And maybe Jimmy Quinn had gotten to the good Commissioner. Maybe the Commissioner didn’t actually have his hand out. Maybe he just wasn’t very bright.

  The story went on to say that Toro would be arraigned on the usual manslaughter charge. I hustled Toro down to the headquarters of our city’s finest. Toro was frightened when they brought him before the police judge. He didn’t understand what I meant when I told him all this was mere technicality.

  The bail was nominal, just a G to save the face of the Department with those taxpayers who think prizefighting is organised mayhem and should be run out of bounds. But Toro had the peasant’s fear of officialdom. If it were necessary to pay out all this money, he reasoned, the Government must consider him a criminal.

  I took him up to the suite in the Waldorf Towers, thinking Pepe and Fernando might be able to cheer him up, but he just sat there in a daze. Pepe talked about Santa Maria and the great three-day celebration they would have when Toro made his triumphant return.

  ‘But I kill a man,’ Toro said, ‘I kill him.’

  ‘My friend,’ Fernando said smoothly, ‘there are some things worse than death. There is weakness and cowardice. That this poor fellow should die is most unfortunate, of course. But think what you are doing for our country! Every youth from Jujuy to Tierra del Fuego will want to be big and strong and victorious like the great El Toro Molina.’

  Toro’s enormous, vulnerable chin lay on his chest. ‘But I kill this man. I do not even talk with him before, and I kill him.’

  ‘Maybe you should come back to Santa Maria before you fight again,’ Pepe suggested. ‘You can be my house guest.’

  ‘But I kill this man,’ Toro said. ‘For no reason, I kill him.’

  ‘Pepe is right,’ Fernando said. ‘After a few months’ rest, you can have a tune-up fight in Buenos Aires. Perhaps we can bring down a Yankee, some second-rater …’

  It made him smile to think of this public demonstration of Argentine supremacy. But Toro wasn’t with him. Toro shook his head slowly. ‘I go home now. I fight no more. That I do not injure any other man.’

  Personally, I think I would have given up my cut in the Stein fight to see him go home. But Nick had him signed for the Stein fight in the ball park. And Nick was a stickler for contracts, when they worked his way.

  The next day we all attended the funeral over in Trenton. Nick took care of all the expenses, and he really did it right. Everybody ag
reed that, as funerals go, it was just about tops. Nick was one of the pall-bearers, along with five ex-champions. Nick’s floral wreath was in the form of a huge squared ring of white carnations with red carnations spelling out the words, ‘God Bless You, Gus’. At the grave, the minister told us what a great man Gus had been, a man who never abused his strength, a home-loving, God-fearing, clean-living champion whose life should be a model to young America. After Gus was laid to rest, everybody stood around telling one another what a great guy he had been. Even people who had been up and down Jacobs Beach for years, putting the knock on him, were slobbering about what a pal they had lost.

  As I came out of the cemetery with Toro, I saw Nick helping Ruby into their limousine. He was wearing a black homburg and looked distinguished, if you didn’t see him too close. She was very attractive in black with a black chiffon snood. If she noticed Toro, she gave no indication. The Killer drew a fur car robe over them. I looked in at her as the car drove away. Her face was sombre, to befit the occasion.

  Pepe and Fernando took Toro back to the hotel with them. He didn’t seem to be coming out of it. I went down the street to a beer joint I had made a mental note of as we approached the cemetery. Some of the trade from the funeral had had the same idea. Danny was in the corner with a very full load. He hadn’t changed his clothes since we dropped him off at the hotel the morning before, and the front of his suit was spotted because his hand had not been steady enough. His face looked bloodless; the light blue irises of his eyes were so washed out that they blended into the whites. The Irish gift for parlaying a deep sense of guilt into a marathon drunk had possession of Danny. ‘Never liked the bastard,’ he was saying to whoever would listen. ‘Never liked the bastard. So what? Drink to ’im anyway. Whatsamatter, anything wrong with that? Maybe you think I got no right to drink to ’im, huh, Mister? Well, le’s drink to ’im anyway, even if he was a selfish, tightwad bastard.’

  An Irishman at a funeral who can’t love the guy they’re burying is in a terrible way. Especially when he figures he’s been credited with an assist in putting the deceased where he is.

  I didn’t want to go from bar to bar with Danny and maybe run into fight reporters who would be trying to pump me on the Lennert business. So I went back to my room. I tried War and Peace, but I had forgotten who Marya Dmitrievna was again, and I didn’t have enough patience to go back and find out. I tossed that aside and started reading ‘The Rich Boy’ by Fitzgerald, but it was too probing for the way I felt. I wondered what Beth was doing. I could imagine what she thought now that this had happened. But dammit, people are getting themselves killed all the time.

  What was I thinking? I was just tired from the strain of the last few days. I closed the door to the bathroom. I raised the shades to let more light into the room. I wished I could call Beth. I didn’t have Beth to call any more. I should have married Beth. I shouldn’t have kept this lousy job so long. I should have written my play. Well, maybe it still wasn’t too late.

  I didn’t want to stay in my room alone any longer. I walked over to 52nd Street, where the music was hard and loud and restless to the breaking point, a musical score to accompany the doubts and frustrations and villainies of Eddie Lewis, I thought.

  Next morning I went up to the office to pick up my weekly retainer. Nick was talking to Kewpie Harris, who had Buddy Stein. Nick was wearing a soft-brown English tweed with a black armband. After Kewpie left, Nick went to his mirror and inspected himself carefully. Then be turned to me.

  ‘Do you see a blackhead here?’ He pointed to a spot near his mouth. It was there all right, but what did he think I should do, squeeze it out for him? He must have thought so, for he said, ‘Don’t bother with it, Eddie. Oscar down in the barber shop has a way of taking ’em out without leaving a mark.’ He went back to his desk and swung his feet onto it.

  ‘I just been trying to talk Kewpie into cutting it thirty-thirty when we go against Stein,’ Nick said. ‘He wants it thirty-three and a half, twenty-six and a half. He says Stein’s beaten better fellas. I have to give him that, but not even Stein and the champ c’d draw like Stein and Molina. I figure with any kind of breaks we ought to do a million four, maybe a million six if we get really lucky. That means a nice half a million for us to kick around.’

  ‘In other words about three hundred thousand for Toro himself,’ I said.

  ‘Or in other words at least twenty-five thousand for you personally,’ Nick answered.

  ‘There’s a slight hitch,’ I said. ‘Toro wants out. He told me he doesn’t want to fight any more. He wants to go home.’

  ‘Who cares what Toro wants? He’s got a contract with me. And I’ve got a contract with Mike and Kewpie for the ball park June nineteenth. Toro’s gonna be there if we have to carry him into the ring.’

  ‘Maybe you better talk to him,’ I said.

  ‘I got more important things to do,’ Nick said. ‘Ruby and I are going to Palm Beach for six weeks. I haven’t been spending enough time with her lately. A wife like I got, you just can’t treat her like any dumb broad. She says we gotta have companionship.’ He looked proudly at the picture on his desk, a photograph taken many years earlier. ‘Jesus, it used to be all a wife needed to keep her happy was a new fur coat every year and a rub-of-the-brush once in a while. Now she’s gotta have companionship.’ He tried to pass it off as a joke, but his respect for Ruby was too deep. ‘She even wants me to read her goddam books.’

  He went to the door and called out, ‘Hey, Killer, tell Oscar I’ll be down in ten minutes.’ He went to the humidor and gave me one of his cigars. I tore the band off it and was going to throw it away when he said, ‘Read it, read it.’ It said, ‘Made exclusively for Nick Latka by Rodriguez, Havana.’

  He took his double-breasted herringbone overcoat off a hanger and gave it to me to hold for him. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said as he slipped his arms through, ‘break the news of my buying the Molina contract from Vanneman a couple of weeks after I’m gone. I don’t have to tell you how to handle it. You know. Everything in good taste. Class, Eddie.’

  He put his hand on my arm confidentially. ‘You know, Eddie, it may sound cokey, but we could go as high as two million with this fight. God knows I never wished Gus any hard luck, but … well, this thing that happened isn’t doing us any harm. Some of these columnist boyscouts who’ve been wondering out loud about Toro’s opposition. Well, you can’t make it look any squarer than killing a guy, can you?’

  ‘No, that should quiet any suspicions,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody would ever believe a guy checked out while trying to take a dive,’ Nick said. ‘So we’ll have that going for us.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a break,’ I said.

  ‘And it makes your job a helluva lot easier, selling that mazo punch. You know how the public is, they’ll all be there to see if maybe he can kill another guy.’

  ‘Yes, it’s great,’ I said. ‘Lennert sure did us a favour. We had no more use for him anyway. He might as well be pushing up daisies.’

  But Nick wouldn’t even permit me the luxury of anger. ‘I know how you feel, kid,’ he said. ‘I guess you think I’m doing handsprings because Gus went out when it could do us the most good. Hell, I always took care of Gus. I threw him everything I could. But I figure, when a thing happens, it happens. We still gotta live. That’s my psychology.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Next morning we broke the story of the Stein-Molina fight. It broke big all right. Nick hadn’t overestimated the value of the Lennert tragedy. Every heavyweight fight is a simulated death-struggle. Those fans who rise up in primeval bloodlust and beg their favourite to ‘Killim! Killim!’ may be more in earnest than they know. Death in the ring is not an everyday occurrence, not every month or even every year. But it always adds a titillating sense of danger and drama to all the matches that follow. For the sadism and cruelty of the Roman circus audience still peers out through eyes of the modern fight crowd. There is not only the conscious wish to see one man s
mash another into insensibility, but the subconscious, retrogressive urge to witness violent tragedy, even while the rational mind of the spectator turns away from excessive brutality.

  These psychological factors, combined with Stein’s authentic viciousness and Toro’s bogus savagery, made their coming bout another Battle of the Century. Even the sports writers, who were calling Toro the ‘Man Monstrous’ and ‘El Ponderoso’, had to admit that the Stein fight would be worth seeing as Toro’s first real test. And the hacks, who are always along for the ride, were pulling out all the stops conjuring up the Dempsey-Firpo thriller and passing on to their readers our pitch about Toro’s ambition to avenge the defeat of the Wild Bull of the Pampas.

  When the phone rang, I was lying in bed, wondering how Nick figured to do business with Kewpie Harris and Stein. It was Fernando. I must come right over. Toro had just seen the papers. He was very angry. He said he was not going to fight Stein. He was not going to fight anybody. He was going home.

  I threw my clothes on, grabbed a cab and hurried over to see Toro. I wasn’t as convincing as I should have been because I didn’t entirely blame him. But I tried to show him how there was no way out of the Stein fight. Nick and the Garden had his name on the dotted. The Stein clause had been written into the Lennert contract. If he took a run-out powder now, Toro would end up in the river, wrong side up. And since he had come this far, it didn’t seem sensible to pass up the six-figure dough finally coming his way.

  But all Toro said when I wound up my oratory was, ‘No. I go home.’

  Pepe and Fernando tried to reason with him too, but he just sat there, shaking his huge, solemn head, saying over and over again with maddeningly childish monotony, ‘No. I go home.’

  I told Pepe to take him out to a midnight movie, or a call house or whatever else he could think of – anything to get Toro out of himself. But there seemed to be no temptations left for Toro any more. All he wanted was to be away from us, to be home and at peace again. If it had been up to me, I think I would have let him go. But I knew, for his own good, he had to stay. He didn’t know Nick and the boys as well as I did, friendly fellas until you crossed them.