The Harder They Fall (4 page)

‘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.’

‘Killer,’ I said, ‘have you ever thought of writing your memoirs?’

Hacking down Eighth Avenue, past the quick lunches, the little tailor shops, the second-hand stores, honest prices for gold, past the four-bit barbershops, the two-bit hotels, the Chinese laundries, the ten-cent movies, I thought of Nick, and of Charles and his Jackson-Slavin fight, the magnificent ebony figure of Peter Jackson with his great classical head, his innate dignity, poised and magnanimous in his moment of triumph. Jackson, black athlete from Australia, a pugilist in the great tradition, worthy descendant of the ancient Sumerians, whose boxing contests are depicted in frescoes that have come down to us through six thousand years; and of Theagenes of Thasos, Olympic Champion, who defended his honour and his life in fourteen hundred contests with steel-pronged fists four hundred and fifty years before Christ; of the great British bare-knuckled forefathers who developed
the manly art of self-defence; John Broughton, first to give the ring a written code, who, egged on by his impatient backer, the Duke of Cumberland, while being beaten to blindness by a powerful challenger, said, ‘Tell me where my man is and I will strike him, sir’; Mendoza the Jew, Champion of England, undersized giant-killer who fought the biggest and best his island could boast, bringing a new technique of movement to the slow, savage game; the mighty Cribb and the indomitable champion, Tom Molineaux, the liberated slave who stood up to Cribb for forty bruising rounds and would have won but for a desperate ruse; Englishmen, Negroes, the Irish, Jews, and in our time Americans with Italian names, Canzoneri, La Barba, Genaro; Filipinos, Sarmiento, Garcia; Mexicans, Ortiz, Arizmendi – all sprung from fighting stock, practising an ancient sport already old in Roman times, a cruel and punishing enterprise rooted deep in the heart of man that began with the first great prehistoric struggles and has come down through the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, the dawn of the Christian Era, medieval times, the
eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century renaissance of pugilism, until at last New York, heir to Athens, Rome and London, has made the game its own, entrusting it to one of its more successful sons, Uncle Mike Jacobs, unchallenged King of Jacobs Beach, perhaps the only unlimited monarch still in business, who, by crossing the boxing racket with ticket speculation has produced a hundred-million-dollars-a-year industry that Daniel Mendoza, poor old Peter Jackson or the blustering John L. would never recognise as their brave old game of winner take all.

Beth drove down with me to Nick’s place over near Red Bank, about forty-five minutes from New York, not very far from Mike Jacobs’ own little Versailles. In fact, if I remember right, he heard of Green Acres through Mike when he was down there for a weekend five or six years ago. It had belonged to a millionaire Wall Street broker whose marriage went on the rocks and who decided to unload it in a hurry. Nick had got it for around fifty thousand. But there must have been an easy hundred thousand sunk in it, with the twenty-three-room house, hundred and twenty acres, swimming pool, tennis court, hothouse, screened-in barbecue, four-car garage and twenty-horse stable.

It was hard to understand what the broker was thinking about when he built the house. It was neo-Gothic, if you could call it anything, an architectural Texas-leaguer that fell somewhere between medieval and modern design,
a formal, urban dwelling that looked out of place in the country and yet would have looked equally incongruous in town. It was beautifully landscaped with smartly trimmed hedges bordering the well-kept lawns dressed up with circular flower beds. We drove around the house to the garage, where Nick’s chauffeur was washing the big black Cadillac four-door convertible. He was bare from the waist up, and although there was a bicycle tyre of fat around his middle, the chest, back, shoulders and over-developed biceps were impressive. He looked up when he saw me and his frank, flattened face opened in a gummy smile.

‘Whaddya say, Mr Lewis?’

‘Hello, Jock. How’s everything?’

‘Ain’t so bad. You know the wife’s home with the new kid.’

‘Yeah? Swell. How many’s that make it?’

‘Eight. Five boys and three goils.’

‘Take it easy now, Jock,’ I said. ‘You never did know your own strength.’

The chauffeur grinned proudly until his eyes, puffy with scar tissue, pressed together in the grimace of a cheerful gargoyle.

‘The boss around?’

‘He’s out horseback ridin’ with Whitey.’

Whitey Williams was the little ex-jockey who won a nice chunk of change for Nick at Tropical Park one season when he booted home forty-five winners. Now he took care of Nick’s horses for him and taught him how to ride. They were out on the bridlepath together almost every Sunday.

‘How about the Duchess?’

That was Ruby. Anybody who had been around the place very long knew whom you meant.

‘I just took her over to ten o’ clock mass. She ’n this big fella from the Argentine.’

‘Oh, he went, too? What does he look like?’

‘Well, if anyone tags him he’s got a long way to fall.’

‘See you later, Jock.’

‘You bet, Mr Lewis.’

‘That’s Jock Mahoney,’ I told Beth as we walked up toward the large lawn that stretched between the main house and the garage, over which Jock, the missus and the seven kids lived in five small rooms. ‘A good second-rate light-heavyweight in the days when Delaney, Slattery, Berlenbach, Loughran and Greb were first rate. Very tough. Could take a hell of a punch.’

‘He doesn’t talk as if he has a brain full of scrambled eggs,’ Beth said.

‘They don’t all come out of it talking to themselves,’ I said. ‘Take McLarnin, fought the toughest – Barney Ross, Petrolle, Canzoneri – and his head’s as clear as mine.’

‘This morning probably clearer,’ Beth said.

I was still thinking about Mahoney. Old fighters will always get me. There is nothing duller than an old ball player or an old tennis star, but an old fighter who’s been punched around, spilt his blood freely for the fans’ amusement only to wind up broke, battered and forgotten has got the stuff of tragedy for me.

‘The only thing soft about Mahoney is the way he laughs,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is look at him and he laughs. That’s usually a sign you’re a little punchy. The time
Berlenbach tagged him with the first punch he threw in the third round, Jock was out so completely he went over to Berlenbach’s corner and flopped down. But the way he was grinning and laughing, you’d’ve thought he was home in an easy chair reading the funny papers.’

‘That’s what I don’t like about it,’ Beth said. ‘The way they laugh.’

‘When they laugh, Beth, it usually means they’re hurt,’ I said. ‘They just want to show the other guy that they aren’t hurt, that everything’s okay.’

‘I read something about laughter once,’ Beth said. ‘The idea was that laughter is just a display of superiority. Laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel, for instance, or gets a face full of pie. Or take the whole line of Scotch-Jewish-Darky jokes. The thing about them that makes people laugh is the warm feeling that they aren’t as tight as the Scotchman, as beaten down as the Negroes and so on.’

‘But if we follow that theory,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t the fellow who does the laughing be the one who throws the punch, not the one who catches it?’

‘It’s not that simple,’ Beth insisted. ‘Maybe the guy who gets hurt laughs to hang on to his superiority – or is that what you said in the first place?’

‘That’s the trouble with you psychologists,’ I said. ‘You can take either side and sound just as scientific.’

We had reached the lawn nearest the house, where a row of round metal tables had been set out with brightly coloured beach umbrellas rising through the centres. Lying on the grass in the shade of one of these umbrellas was a
slight, middle-aged man with grey hair and a sickly white face, eyes closed in the heavy stupefaction of alcoholic sleep. A folded
Racing Form
he had used as an eyeshade had slipped off his forehead. He was snoring strenuously through a badly broken nose, the only punished feature in an otherwise unmarked face.

‘There’s Danny McKeogh,’ I said. Around Stillman’s they call it ‘McCuff’.

‘Is he alive?’ Beth asked.

‘Slightly,’ I said.

‘He’s got a sad face,’ Beth said.

‘He’s one of the right guys in this business,’ I said. ‘He’d give you his shirt if you needed it, even if he didn’t have a shirt and had to go borrow one off somebody else. Which has happened.’

‘A generous member of this profession? I didn’t know there was such an animal.’

As we walked along the volcanic career of Danny McKeogh registered its peaks and valleys in my mind.

He never took a drink until the night he fought Leonard. Danny was a beautiful gymnasium fighter, a real cutie from way back. He never made a wrong move in a gym. He wasn’t a cocky kid ordinarily, but he was sure he could take Leonard. Nobody had done it yet, not even Lew Tendler, but Danny felt sure. He studied Leonard in all his fights and even went to see movies of him. Kind of a nut on the subject, like Tunney with Dempsey, only with a different ending. After all the build-up, Leonard knocked him cold in one minute and twenty-three seconds of the first round. Got his nose busted in the bargain. That was curtains for
Danny as a fighter. Almost curtains in other ways too. For the next couple of years he gave a convincing imitation of a man who was trying to drink up all the liquor there was in New York.

Then, one day, hanging around the gym with a bad breath and a three-day growth – it was up on 59th Street at the time – he happened to see a skinny little East-Side Jewish boy working out with another kid. Right away Danny decided to get a shave and sober up. It was love at first sight. The boy was Izzy Greenberg, just a punk skinny sixteen-year-old kid then, training for a newsboy tournament. Danny must have seen himself all over again in that kid. Anyway he stayed on the wagon. He worked with Izzy every day for a year or more, boxing with him, showing him, very patient, showing him again – and there’s no better teacher in the world than Danny when he’s sober. Even drunk he still makes more sense than almost anybody around.

Danny brought Izzy right to the top. He looked like another Leonard, one of those classy Jewish lightweights that keep coming up out of the East Side. Three years of consistent wins and they’ve got the championship. They travel around the world, picking up easy dough, meeting the Australian champion, the Champion of England, the Champion of Europe, which is not as much trouble for Izzy as slicing matzoh balls with a hot knife. Then they come back to the big town, and Izzy defends his title in the old Garden against Art Hudson, a slugger from out West. Danny, who always backed his fighters heavily
old-fashioned
that way – had his friends cover all the Hudson
money they could find. They only found ten thousand dollars. Sixty thousand if Danny lost. But Danny liked the bet, called it easy money.

The first round looked like curtains for Hudson. Izzy left-handed him to death, and that jab of his wasn’t just scoring points; it could carve you up like a steak knife. Thirty seconds before the end of the round Hudson went down. Izzy danced back to his corner, winking at Danny, nodding to friends around the ring, waving a glove at the large Jewish following that was letting itself go. He’s all ready to go in and get dressed. And Danny’s already thinking of how to parlay the ten grand. But somehow or other Hudson was on his feet at nine and rushing across the ring. He was really a throwback to Ketchell and Papke. All he knew about boxing was to keep getting up and keep banging away. Izzy turned toward him coolly, did a little fancy footwork and snapped out that fast left to keep Hudson away. But Hudson just brushed it aside and banged a wild left to the body and a hard roundhouse right to the jaw.

Izzy was out for twenty minutes. His jaw had been broken in two places. A reporter who was there in the dressing room told me Danny was crying like a baby. He rode with Izzy up to the hospital and then he went out and had a drink. That time he stayed drunk for almost three years.

Then one day at the Main Street gym out in LA, where Danny looks like any other flea-bitten bum, he spots another little kid, Speedy Sencio. Same thing all over again. On the wagon. Fills the little Filipino full of everything he knows. Cops the bantamweight crown and everything’s copasetic
until Speedy goes over the hump and starts going downhill. Danny goes back on the flit again.

By this time Danny has made a couple of hundred thousand, gone mostly to the horses. He is also a great little cheque-grabber and highly vulnerable to the touch, especially when it comes from one of the fighters who used to win for him. Like Izzy Greenberg. Danny put fifteen thousand in a haberdashery business Izzy was starting, and six months later the business went the way of all Greenberg enterprises. He is not nearly the flash in business he was in the ring. But Danny gave him ten thousand more and he went into ladies’ wear on Fourteenth Street.

The crash put the finisher on Danny’s chips. The only chance he saw of getting it back fast was the horses, and the only way of getting enough for the horses was finding a friend to put it on the cuff. Nick Latka turned out to be the friend, and he seemed to be all cuff where Danny was concerned. Danny didn’t know there was a catch to it until he was into Nick for around twenty Gs. ‘Who’s worried about it?’ Nick had said every time Danny mentioned something about hoping to clean up enough soon to pay some of it back. Then one day Nick sends for Danny and all of a sudden wants his dough. Danny is just back from Belmont, where his tips have been worse than his hunches. So Nick says, ‘Tell you what I’ll do with you, baby. You come to work for me for two fifty a week, building up a stable and handling the boys. You keep a C for yourself and one and a half cuts back to me until we’re even. And just to show you how I feel about you, I’ll put you down for a bonus of ten per cent on everything we make over fifty Gs a year.’

So that’s where Danny’s been ever since. Even if he developed another Greenberg or a Sencio it wouldn’t be his any more. So the incentive to say no to the bottle is practically nil. Now it’s reflex action for him to reach for one in the morning, and he tosses them off in quick nervous motions until somebody puts him to bed. He has never been known to come in loaded on fight night when he is working a corner. But when he is sober everybody wishes he would take one to relax. He’s so sober he gets the shakes. It’s really a heroic and terrible effort for Danny to be sober, but he does it, because, for all the disappointments, he’s still got his heart in the game. There’s nobody hops into a ring at the end of a round faster than Danny and there is something wonderful about the loving way he leans over his fighters, rhythmically rubbing the neck, the small of the back, with his thin, nervous lips close to his boy’s ear, keeping up a quiet running patter as he improvises new tactics for the boy’s defence and spots holes in the opponent’s.

A great manager, Danny McKeogh, in the big tradition of great managers. Johnston, Kearns, Mead. Or at least he was a great manager before Nick Latka brought him into bondage.

As I stood there looking down at him, thinking about him, a fly lit on his nose, was brushed away, only to return to his forehead. Danny shook his head, let a crack of light into his eyes and saw me standing there. He sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes.

‘Hello, laddie.’

Everybody he liked he called laddie. For people he didn’t like, it was mister.

‘Hello, Danny. How’s the boy?’

Danny shook his head. ‘Pretty tough,’ he said, ‘pretty tough.’

‘By the way, Miss Reynolds, Mr McKeogh.’

Danny began to tuck one foot under him as if he were going to rise. Beth put her hand out to stop him. ‘You look much too comfortable,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to such gallantry.’

That kind of courtesy was part of Danny, drunk or sober. He had that big Irish thing about women, reverent when he mentioned his mother, sore at guys who profaned in the presence of ladies, which was the entire opposite sex in Danny’s book, regardless of rep or appearance. But Danny didn’t have that other Irish thing, the three-drink belligerence. When he drank himself into a stupor he did so quietly and gradually like the death of Galsworthy’s patriarch in
Indian Summer of a Forsyte
. No fuss and never any fights, even when goaded by a champion like Vince Vanneman. He was one of the few men I’ve ever known who could pass out and not lose either his cookies or his dignity.

‘Seen your new heavyweight yet?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I been pounding my ear. You see him?’