The Killer was on the phone in the outer office when I got there, laying his plans for the evening or vice versa. He had a way of addressing his women in terms of exaggerated endearment that suggested a deeply rooted contempt. ‘Okay, honey chile … Check, sugar … You name it, beauteeful …’ A psychiatrist, observing the Killer’s hopped-up promiscuity and his chronic inability to settle down to any female, probably would have described him as a latent homosexual. But the Killer himself wasn’t at all reticent about pressing his claim not only to the virility championship of Eighth Avenue, but also to the possession of physiological attributes of heroic proportions. He wore the pants of his snugly fitting suit almost skintight, so you couldn’t help noticing. He had short stocky legs and a four-inch chest expansion which he often showed off, even during normal conversation, by suddenly inhaling deeply and holding his breath. If you have ever seen a bantam rooster penned up with a flock of hens you would have a nice sharp picture of Killer Menegheni.
‘Hang on a sec, beauteeful,’ he said into the phone when he saw me come in. ‘Cheez, Eddie, hodja come, by way of Flatbush?’
‘I always ignore rhetorical questions.’
‘Cheez, listen to them words,’ said the Killer.
This had been going on between us ever since we met. The Killer seemed to take my two years in Princeton as a personal affront.
‘Better get your ass in there,’ Killer waved me in. ‘D’ boss is bitin’ his nails.’
When I went in, Nick was in his private bathroom, shaving. He had a heavy beard that he always shaved twice a day, leaving a smooth blue patina on his face. He always came to his office in the morning from an hour in George Kochan’s barbershop. He was kind of a nut on barbershops. His nails were always trimmed and polished, his black kinky hair was singed and greased and the constant sunlamp treatments had given his skin a tanned and healthy look. He wasn’t a handsome man, but the facials, the oil shampoos and the meticulous grooming gave him a smooth, lacquered appearance.
‘Hello, Eddie,’ he said, with his back toward me, wiping the last of the cream from his face as I came up behind him. ‘Sorry to louse up your evening this way, but I got no choice.’ He still pronounced it as cherce, but he no longer contracted his ths to hard ds the way the Killer did.
‘Oh, that’s all right, Nick,’ I said. ‘The evening isn’t dead yet.’
‘But it will be,’ Nick said. ‘Got a big job for you, kid. Think you’re gonna go for it.’
He took a handsome leather-encased bottle from the cabinet and turned around to face me as he applied the toilet water to his face and neck. ‘Great stuff,’ he said, holding the bottle to my nose. ‘Smell.’
Like most things Nick said, it sounded more like a command than a friendly suggestion. I smelt.
‘Hmmmmmm,’ I nodded.
‘Whatta you use?’ Nick said.
‘Oh, anything. Mem’s, sometimes Knize Ten,’ I said.
‘Hmm,’ said Nick. He turned back to the medicine cabinet again. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘The best. Old Leather. It’s yours.’
He handed me a sealed bottle of it. If he liked you, he was always giving away stuff like that. ‘Aw thanks, Nick,’ I said, ‘but it’s your stuff, you like it …’
‘Don’t be a sucker,’ Nick said, and he shoved the bottle into my belly with a gesture so emphatic that it ended the argument. Nick was accustomed to leaning his weight on you, even when he was doing you a kindness. ‘I’ve been able to do a couple of little favours for the chairman of the board of the outfit that puts this stuff out – so he sent me a case of it the other day.’
Nick was always getting or doing little favours he never elucidated, little favours that meant a quick turnover for some favoured party in four, five, maybe six figures. I never knew what they were, and although I had the natural curiosity of anybody working in an atmosphere of big, quick, hushed money, I didn’t let myself get too anxious to nose into subterranean affairs of the syndicate. It was a long time ago but I still remembered what happened to Jake Lingle in Chicago. First you get curious, then you try to find out, then you know too much, then you get paid off, then you get knocked off. It happens. So I just assumed that Nick let this toilet-water king in on a horse that was coming in at Bay Meadows, or maybe it was that waltz in the Garden last Friday night when the gamblers cashed in on the short end or maybe it was girl trouble the big shot wanted Nick to get Honest Jimmy to fix up with an assistant district attorney who was a buddy-buddy of his. It could be any one of a dozen things because Nick lived in a mysterious world of secret tips and special favours, a two-way street of silk-monogram intrigue that could lead from the cruddiest gin mill to the smartest house in Sutton Place.
Nick led me back into the office, picked up the dark mahogany box full of slender Belindas, offered me one, snipped the end off his with a silver cigar-cutter, and got down to business.
‘I guess you know, Eddie,’ he said, ‘I’ve had the feeling a hell of a long time that your’ – he reached for it – ‘capabilities – hasn’t really been extended by our organisation. It’s like we got a good fast boy – champeenship material – he’s fighting four-round curtain raisers all the time. A guy like you, he’s got something up here, he can write, he’s got whatcha call it, imagination, he needs something he can get your teeth into. Well, Eddie, the dry spell is over. You’re out of the desert. I got a little project for you that will really get your gun off.’
‘What are you handing me, Nick, the Latka Fellowship for Creative Writing or something?’
‘Don’t worry. Nick never steered you wrong, did he? You’re my guy, ain’t you? I’m handing you a new deal, Eddie. Forget all about Harry Glenn and Felix Montoya and Willie Faralla and the rest of the bums we got in the stable. Don’t even bother with old man Lennert.’
That was Gus Lennert, the ex-heavyweight champ who, for want of anything better, was still rated No. 2 in the heavyweight division. Gus wasn’t really a fighter any more. He was just a businessman who went to work occasionally in bathrobe and boxing gloves when the price was right. After dropping his crown seven years ago to a rough aggressive boy he could have put away any time he wanted to in his fighting days, Gus had hung up his gloves. He was pretty well fixed with a couple of trust funds and a popular little bar and grill in his home town, Trenton, NJ called ‘Gus’s Corner’. But when we got down to the bottom of the barrel and Mike Jacobs was drawing big gates with heavyweight main events between alleged title contenders who had been spar-boys or washed up a year or so before, Gus couldn’t resist the temptation to come back for a little of the easy scratch. Under Nick’s guidance, Gus had easily outboxed three or four bums who were masquerading as headliners in the Garden. With me beating the drums about how the great Gus Lennert had come back to realise his dream of being the first heavyweight champion to regain his title we were on our way into working poor old Gus into a shot at it.
‘Forget Lennert,’ Nick said. ‘Get Lennert out of your mind. I got something better. I got Toro Molina.’
‘I never heard of Toro Molina.’
‘Nobody ever heard of Toro Molina,’ Nick said. ‘That’s where you come in. You are going to make everybody hear of Toro Molina. You are going to make Toro Molina the biggest thing to hit the fight racket since Firpo came up from the Argentine, or teen or however the hell you say it, and dropped Dempsey into the ringside seats.’
‘But where’d you get this Molina, who sold him to you?’
‘Vince Vanneman.’
‘Vince Vanneman, for Christ sake!’
As Kid Vincent, Vanneman had been a pretty fair middleweight back in the twenties until he crawled into the wrong bed one night and crawled out again with a full set of spirochaeta pallida, known to the world as syphilis and to the trade as cupid’s measles. The docs didn’t know how to clean it up in five and a half seconds, more or less, the way they do today. As a result Vince’s case was developing into what the medics called the tertiary stage, when it begins to get to your brain. Par
don me, Vince’s brain. But a little thing like a decaying brain cell or two didn’t seem to have anything like a deleterious effect on Vince’s ability to turn a dishonest dollar. So I was a little surprised that Nick, whose larceny was on such a high level that it approached the respectability of finance capitalism, would get himself involved with a minor-league thief.
‘Vince Vanneman,’ I said again. ‘A momser from way back. You know what the boys call him – The Honest Brakeman. He never stole a boxcar. When Vince Vanneman goes to sleep he only closes one eye so he can watch himself with the other.’
When Nick was impatient he had the habit of snapping alternately the thumb and second finger of each hand in nervous staccato rhythm. I’ve seen him do that when he wanted his man to start carrying the fight to his opponent and the boy couldn’t seem to get going. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me about Vanneman. The day I can’t handle Vanneman I turn over the business to the Killer. I made a nice deal with Vince. We only give him five Gs for Molina and he rides with us for five per cent of the profits. The South American jerk, who brought the boy up here, Vince gives him twenty-five hundred and we also cut him in for five per cent.’
‘But if this – what’s-his-name, Molina? – is such a find, what’s Vince doing selling out so fast?’ I asked. ‘Vince may be suffering from paresis, but he’s not so dumb he doesn’t know a meal ticket when he sees one.’
Nick looked at me as if I were a high-grade moron, which, in this business, I was. ‘I had a little talk with Vince,’ Nick said.
I could picture that little talk – Nick cool, immaculate, quietly implicit; Vince with his tie loosened so he could open his shirt and let his fat neck breathe, the sweat coming out of his fleshy face as he tried to wriggle off Nick’s hook – just a talk between two businessmen concerning lump sums, down payments and percentages, just a quiet little talk and yet the atmosphere tense with unheard sounds, the blackjack’s thud, the scream torn from the violated groin, the spew of blood and broken teeth.
‘Anything I want to do is a hundred per cent okay with Vince,’ Nick said.
‘But I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Why all this trouble about Molina? Who’d he ever lick? What’s so special about Molina?’
‘What is so special about Molina is he is the biggest son-of-a-bitch who ever climbed into a ring. Six feet seven and three-quarters inches tall. Two hundred and eighty-five pounds.’
‘You all right, Nick?’ I said. ‘Not on the stuff or anything?’
‘Two hundred and eighty-five pounds,’ Nick said. ‘And no belly on him.’
‘But he could be a bum,’ I said. ‘Two hundred and eighty-five pounds of bum.’
‘Listen for Chri’sakes,’ Nick said. ‘The Statue of Liberty, does she have to do an adagio to draw crowds every day?’
‘Come one, come all, see the human skyscraper,’ I said. ‘Captured alive in the jungles of Argentina – Gargantua the Great.’
‘You laugh,’ Nick said. ‘Maybe I never went to college, but I sure in hell can add better ’n you. Not two ’n two neither. Two hundred Gs and two hundred Gs. Tell you what I’m gonna do with you, wise guy. You’ll get your straight C every week and on top of that I’ll cut you in for five per cent of our end. If we do two hundred thousand the first year, you’ll make a little money.’
‘Two hundred thousand!’ One hundred thousand was a good year’s take for a name who packs the Garden. Anything over that was big-name heavyweights in outdoor shows. ‘Pass that opium pipe around and let’s all take off.’
‘Listen, Eddie,’ Nick said, and his voice had the self-satisfied tone it always took on when he took himself seriously, like a self-made Kiwanian explaining his success to his fraternal brothers. ‘I learnt one thing when I was a kid – to do big you got to think big. When we used to jimmy those penny machines, for instance, you know, peanuts, chewing gum, hell, we was always getting caught. Then I got the idea of mugging the collector who went from one machine to another every Friday, emptying out the coin boxes. It was safer to get him on his way back to the office at night, and hit the jackpot, than it was to work those machines over in broad daylight and pick up a few pennies. That’s what I mean. If you got to think, think big. What the hell, it don’t cost you nothing to think. So why think fifty grand when you can think a hundred and fifty grand? Now tomorrow I got this Molina and his spic manager, Acosta, coming out to the country. You better come too. Bring the broad along if you want. Take Acosta aside and get the story – you know, how the big guy was discovered and all that crap. Then we’ll sit down together and work out the angles. Wednesday morning I wanna hit the papers. The suckers open their papers and right away like this’ (he snapped his fingers) ‘there’s a new contender for the championship.’
Nick stood up and put his hand on my arm. He was excited. He was thinking big. ‘Eddie,’ he said, ‘you gotta work like a son-of-a-bitch on this. You make with the words, I work the angles and if that big Argentine bastard gives us anything at all, we’ll all make a pisspot full of dough.’
If I ever got five thousand dollars ahead, I was always thinking, I’d throw up my job, get a little cabin in the mountains somewhere, take a year off and write. Sometimes I was going to write a bright, crisp, wisecracking comedy, the George Abbott type, and make a hatful of dough. And sometimes I was going to pour out everything I had seen and learnt and felt about myself and America, a great gushing river of a play that would get me a Pulitzer prize. After the play opened, Beth and I would take a honeymoon cruise around the world, while I outlined my next …
‘How about a shot?’ Nick said. He rose, pressed a button in the wall near his desk and a panel rolled back, revealing a small, well-fitted bar, and brought out a bottle of Ballantine’s, the twenty year old.
‘To Señor Molina,’ I said.
‘And to us,’ Nick said.
He filled the two pony glasses again. ‘That girl you got, she’s a writer too, ain’t she?’ he said. The only serious reading Nick ever did was the Morning Telegraph and the Racing Form but he always got an earnest, respectful note in his voice when he spoke about writers. ‘A smart girl like that, she must make out pretty good,’ he said. ‘What does she make on Life, eighty, ninety a week?’
‘You’re high,’ I said. ‘Took her three years to get up to fifty.’
‘Fifty,’ Nick said. ‘Jesus, a preliminary boy in the Garden gets a hunerd’n fifty.’
‘Beth figures she’ll last longer,’ I said.
‘You oughta marry a dame like that,’ Nick said. Whenever Nick hit a mellow stretch he liked to concern himself with matrimony and legitimate genesis. ‘No kidding, you should get yourself hitched. Hell, I was in the saddle with a different tomato every night until I got hitched. You oughta settle down and start having some kids, Eddie. Them kids, that’s what makes you want to work like a bastard.’
From his inside pocket, Nick drew a handsome leather wallet, initialled in gold, N.L. Jr. ‘Here’s what I’m giving Junior for his graduation – he finishes the lower form up at NYMA next week.’
I took the wallet and turned it over in my hand. It was from Mark Cross, the best. Inside was a brand-new hundred-dollar bill. ‘He’s a smart kid,’ Nick said. ‘Been skipped twice. He’s the company commander’s orderly or adjutant or whatever the hell it is. Pretty good athlete too. Plays on the tennis team.’
You couldn’t help liking Nick sometimes, the way he said things. That tennis, for instance. The awe and the wonder of it. Nick, who played punchball on Henry Street against tenement walls decorated in chalk with a childish scrawl of grown-up obscenities, the ball bouncing back into the crowded streets, over pushcarts, under trucks honk-honking drivers’ hot disgusted shouting Git outa there you little son-of-a-bitch; and Junior white as the saints in his flannels and sports shirt with the school crest over his heart, the warm silence broken only by the sharp crack of racket and ball and the gentlemanly intrusion of the judge on his high cool seat, Game, to Mr Latka. He leads, first set, five games
to two. Old Nick and Young Nick, Henry Street and Green Acres, the military school on the Hudson and PS 1 on the corner of Henry and Catherine Streets battleground of Wops and Yids invading Polacks and crusading Micks energetic young Christians brandishing rock-filled stockings crashing down upon the heads of unbaptised children falsely accused of murder committed nineteen hundred years ago. Your serve. Sorry, take another. Please take two.
‘Killer,’ Nick called into the outer office, ‘hang up on that broad and get Ruby on the phone. Tell her to hold that steak for me, I’ll be out ina nour.’
He tapped me lightly on the side of the jaw with his knuckles. It was one of his favourite signs of affection.
‘See ya mañana, Shakespeare.’
After Nick left I sat down at his desk to call Beth. There was a small telephone pad near the phone, with Nick’s name printed in the upper left-hand corner. There was something in Nick that desired constant re-establishment of his identity. Shirts, cufflinks, cigarette lighters, wallets, hatbands were all smartly initialled. The matchbooks he handed you said ‘Compliments of Nick Latka’.
Nick had been doodling. The top page of the pad was full of large and small ovals representing punching bags: the long sand-filled heavy bags and the smaller, inflated light bags. All the bags were covered with little pencil flecks that looked like miniature s’s. I looked at them more carefully and saw that two thin vertical lines ran through them. All the punching bags had broken out in a hive of dollar signs.
As I left, the Killer was just putting on his coat, a form-fitting herringbone with exaggerated shoulders. ‘Jeez, have I got something lined up for myself tonight,’ he was saying. ‘The new cigarette girl at the Horseshoe. Knockers like this. And loves it like a rabbit.’