Champion of the World

by Chad Dundas

  “The three of you were staying in this room together?”

  “Certainly not,” Fritz said. “We have our own rooms a few cars down.”

  The doctor looked them both up and down. “Yes,” he said. “Well, if either or both of you has had any contact with the deceased that you feel could put you at risk, I’d advise you to get yourselves checked immediately. The tests are quite accurate these days.”

  Pepper thought of the hours he’d spent on the wrestling mat with Taft. Close quarters, coming away drenched in sweat, tasting it, sleeping next to him in the garage at night. Then he realized what the doctor meant.

  “I think it’s time for you to go,” he said.

  The doctor paid him no mind, just turned and began patting down Taft’s pockets.

  “Stop that,” Pepper said.

  When the doctor withdrew his hands, all he’d found was a small scrap of thin, waxy paper. He held it under the lamp. “Who is Zdravko Milenkovic?” he said, slaughtering the pronunciation.

  “I beg your pardon?” Fritz said. The doctor passed him the piece of paper and Fritz squinted at it in the low light. He turned it over, shrugged his big shoulders and passed it to Pepper, who didn’t have to look at it.

  “I don’t know who that is,” Pepper said. “Put it back in his pocket.”

  “I hardly see how it matters,” the doctor said.

  “Put it back,” Pepper said, handing him the slip of paper.

  The doctor hesitated, then slid the scrap back into Taft’s left pocket. He cleared his throat. “So,” he said.

  Fritz peeled a few more bills off his roll and passed them over. “We appreciate your discretion,” he said.

  “I’m sure you do,” the doctor said, collecting his things. “When we arrive in New York, you’ll want Public Health to dispose of the remains.”

  With that, he let himself out and they were left alone with Taft’s body again. Fritz sank onto the room’s bench seat and rested his hands on his knees. He was pale, his face slack with the expression of a man who was tired of getting kicked while he was down. “What are we going to do?” he said to the floor. Then, to Pepper: “What are we going to do?”

  “Look me in the eye right now and tell me you didn’t know he was dying,” Pepper said. “Or at least suspect it.”

  Fritz sighed. “We need to focus here, if you don’t mind.”

  “All that stuff about wanting a coach who could teach Taft the catch-as-catch-can style,” Pepper said. “About wanting me because you knew I would work him hard and I was tough enough to stand up to him. You wanted me because you knew I wouldn’t ask too many questions. You knew I’d go along with it because I was desperate to get back in the wrestling business. Hell, we’d already fixed one match together; why not another one?”

  “You believe whatever you like,” Fritz said. “I’m through arguing with you.”

  “Moira was right,” Pepper said. “From the beginning this was all a goddamned scam.”

  Fritz threw his hands up. “What,” he said sharply, “do we do now?”

  Pepper almost laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “We’re fucked.”

  Fritz glanced around, his mind reaching out for something it couldn’t quite catch. “We have to keep this quiet,” he said. “Maybe we can get Stettler and O’Shea to give us the money up front. Some of it, anyway. We do that, I’ll split it with you fifty-fifty. Maybe we can get out of town. Go someplace they won’t look for us.”

  “Listen to yourself,” Pepper said. “You’re bringing a six-foot-four, two-hundred-forty-pound dead man into New York City. You’re going to keep that quiet?”

  Fritz punched the wall. It was like a pistol shot in the room and his fist left a dent in the faux wallpaper. “Help me think,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out our play.”

  “I know our play,” Pepper said.

  He opened the stateroom door. A few of the railroad employees were still loitering around outside. When the door popped open they jumped back, trying to make it appear as though they hadn’t been pressing their ears to the wall.

  “Gents,” Pepper said. “We’ve got a dead man in here. No foul play suspected, but we’re going to need you to alert the authorities when we arrive in the city.”

  The railroad people sealed Taft’s stateroom, and Pepper and Fritz went back to Fritz’s compartment, where the reporters already had their typewriters out. They gave a version of what had happened, saying that Taft had passed away of a sudden illness. The sportswriters riddled them with questions, and this time they honestly didn’t know many of the answers. As soon as the train stopped again, the reporters would all get off to call their stories in to the papers in New York. News of Taft’s death would be everywhere by the time they arrived.

  Fritz wouldn’t speak to him and Pepper didn’t care. The truth was, he already knew what Fritz would do next. There was only one move left. Once they got to New York and he had a chance to meet with Stettler and O’Shea, they would all realize it. After that, there would be plenty of talking.

  Moira and Carol Jean were sitting together on the bench seat when Pepper got back to their room. The light was eerie with the shades pulled shut. There was a flask lying on its side on the table, and because he didn’t know what else to do, he picked it up, found it empty, and set it back down. Moira was saying something very quietly in her ear, and then Carol Jean looked up at him with a sadness so arresting that he had to look away.

  “How could I not have known?” she said, her voice too loud, as if accusing him of something. “All those months he wouldn’t take me to bed, I thought it was just prison. I thought he would snap out of it.”

  Pepper didn’t know if he believed her. It was hard to tell sometimes if this woman was just acting out some part she imagined for herself. Just as he knew there were things Taft had refused to tell him, he wondered if Carol Jean was the same way. Maybe she sensed something was the matter with her husband but would just never admit it. As if saying it out loud would spoil the careful way she’d arranged things in her head. Right then, maybe it didn’t matter. He tried to make his voice easy when he spoke again.

  “None of us knew,” he said. “He hid it from us all.”

  The train shimmied, the floor pulsing under their feet. On other cars, people were repacking their things, laughing, preparing to arrive in New York. In here, though, there was a stillness that made him want to split the seams in his clothes. It felt like ice creeping toward his heart. He wished the walls would fall away and he could be out in the open air again. Back in the mountains, where a sweetness hung in the breeze, tickling his lungs no matter how warm the afternoon got. He was thinking of something else to say when Carol Jean suddenly grew hard, shrinking away, with a disgusted look in her eyes.

  “You men,” she said. “It’s shameful the way you keep each other’s secrets. I was his wife. His wife, and no one thought to tell me what was happening to him.”

  It made him angry, but he tried not to let it show in his face. He thought of all the cold nights he’d spent with Taft in the garage. The talks they’d shared with the fire flickering and the smoke gusting out the big doors at the end of the building. There had been times when it seemed as if Taft was on the verge of admitting things to him but had stopped short. He supposed by then there was nothing to be done, but he still wished Taft had trusted him enough to say something. He didn’t like the idea of him carrying around this secret. It must have been a tremendous burden.

  Moira held Carol Jean’s hand so tightly, both their knuckles went white. “You’ve suffered a great loss,” she said. “We just can’t imagine.”

  Carol Jean’s eyes grew wild and she looked around like she didn’t know where she was. A few strands of her hair had come loose from their tie, reminding Pepper of an animal, of a bag lady on the street. “Where will I go?” she said. “How will I live?”

 
Moira smiled, a look he’d seen her use to calm men who’d lost their fortunes at the poker table. “You’ll come with us to New York, of course,” she said. “They already have a room for you at the Plaza Hotel. You’ll stay with us there and we’ll all figure it out as we go.”

  “They’ll cancel the event now,” Carol Jean said. “They must. Do you think Mr. Mundt would loan me some money? To help me get on my feet, I mean?”

  “You could ask him,” Pepper said. “But I doubt it.”

  His anger had wilted and now he felt heavy and sad for her all over again. It seemed as though her mind couldn’t stay focused on one thing. She was jumping from trouble to trouble, like she couldn’t decide where to start. It was hard to watch. He unbuttoned his jacket and was going to sit down, but Moira looked at him in a way that said, Don’t you dare. He left them like that, sitting side by side on the seat. He went back into the hallway and headed for the observation deck again, a little guilty at the delight he felt to be free.

  When they arrived in New York, he sent Moira and Carol Jean ahead to the hotel, while he and Fritz stayed behind to deal with Public Health. It seemed to take forever even though there really wasn’t much to be done. A couple of cops came on the train and asked some questions while Pepper and Fritz signed their names to the necessary forms. Then a team of white-jacketed men who never introduced themselves came and took Taft away on a stretcher, covering him with a sheet so that he looked like some massive piece of cargo. One of the cops asked about next of kin and Pepper gave them Carol Jean’s name. He hoped that Moira was able to keep her away from the reporters and, if not, that they were going easy on her.

  It was well after dark by the time their cab let them off in front of the Plaza. Despite the cold, the sidewalks were busy with couples out for a stroll in the park. A few of the great horse-drawn tour wagons were still running, and Pepper saw smiling, rosy-faced people bundled up in blankets riding in them, waving to the folks on the sidewalk as they clip-clopped past.

  Fritz went straight through the crowd into the lobby, his head down, not looking around. They stood in line at the front desk, got their room keys and took the stairs up, parting ways in the upstairs hall without saying a word. Moira was already there when he let himself into their room. She was under the covers of the big hotel bed but was still awake, the bedside lamp the only light burning.

  He asked her how Carol Jean was doing and Moira just shook her head. He stretched out next to her and she switched off the light. He closed his eyes and wondered how long it would be before they came for him. He knew Fritz would go straight up to talk with Stettler and Lesko. O’Shea, too, if he was in town.

  “What are you going to tell them?” Moira said in the dark. Her voice sounded thin and hollow. Of course, she’d figured it out, too.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m looking forward to watching them squirm.”

  He hadn’t expected to like Taft, but in the end he had. Now that the man was dead, he was sorry for it, but also felt as though it brought a kind of clarity to things. For the first time in a long time, he felt like he was ahead of the game. He knew with absolute certainty what would happen when they came. He knew what he would say to them and what the looks on their faces would be when he said it. He was looking forward to it.

  The knock came after one in the morning and he cracked the door to find Fritz standing in the hallway, looking grim and bloodshot in a vest and shirtsleeves. They climbed the stairs up to the penthouse level, the entire hotel sleeping around them, the railing creaking under their weight. Fritz leaned on it especially hard, it seemed to Pepper, like a man twice his age.

  “I thought you’d be happier to see me,” he said as they went out into the top-floor hallway. “Considering I’m about drag your ass out of the fire.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Fritz said.

  It was the biggest hotel room Pepper had ever seen, and it was terribly bright for the time of night. Stettler, Lesko and O’Shea were all there, all of them looking tired and edgy. Stettler offered him a drink.

  “Make it a double,” Pepper said, grinning at Lesko as they all gathered in a sitting area surrounded by doors to other, unseen rooms.

  Of the three, O’Shea seemed to be the one most saddened by Taft’s death. The circumstances of the illness were especially troubling to him.

  “You wouldn’t know it to look at him,” O’Shea complained. “He was such a big fellow. Stout.”

  “No,” Pepper said, trying and failing to catch Fritz’s eye. “Who could’ve known?”

  Fritz was the one who laid it out for him. Tickets for the match had already sold out and they were up against it, having paid the building fee and sold advertising inside the arena and done weeks of press and promotion. Taft’s death was tragic, he said, but at this point they couldn’t afford a cancellation. It would ruin them all from a promotional standpoint, not to mention the financial hit. They’d talked about it at length and kept coming back to the same conclusion.

  “With consideration to public interest and the press coverage we’re expecting, there’s only one attraction that won’t result in heavy refunds and won’t make us a laughingstock in the papers,” Fritz said. “We want you to step in for Taft and wrestle Lesko for the world’s heavyweight championship.”

  Pepper took a slow drink of scotch and savored the feeling, waiting for the silence to get a little uncomfortable before he answered.

  “I know you do,” he finally said.

  “And?” Fritz said.

  “And,” he said, “if you think for one minute that I’m going to go out there in front of ten thousand people and lie down for this sorry sack of shit, you can all go fuck yourselves. I threw a match once for you bastards and it damn near ruined my life. I won’t do it again. Any deal you had with Taft died with him. The real tragedy in all of this is that he was never going to get a level chance to go out and whip Lesko in front of the whole world. If I owe that man’s memory anything, as imperfect as he was, it certainly won’t be served by me taking a dive. That’s never going to happen, so just forget it. Do I make myself clear?”

  This outburst did not have the effect he had planned. He expected them to get mad, maybe just throw him out right then and there. Instead, Stettler and O’Shea looked amused, while Fritz stared at a spot on the carpet a few inches in front of his own feet. Pepper wasn’t sure Lesko moved at all.

  “He’s a presumptuous little fellow,” O’Shea said. “I admire his fire.”

  Stettler smiled what looked like his most patient smile. “I think you may have jumped to an unfortunate conclusion here, Pepper,” he said. “The truth is, we talked it over and we all agree that we’d like you to win.”

  The three of them sat across from him, looking pleased with themselves. Only Lesko’s expression hadn’t changed. The heavyweight champion just folded his arms, unfolded them, and then stood up to fix himself a drink. Pepper followed him with his eyes, feeling a flash of irritation at the thought they might be having him on. He hadn’t figured on this.

  “Are you serious?” he said.

  “Think of it,” Fritz said. “The former lightweight champion of the world, outweighed by nearly one hundred pounds, comes out of retirement and wins the heavyweight title. It’s the perfect underdog story.”

  Pepper reminded himself to go slowly, to think. He nodded at Lesko. “What about you?” he said. “Are you ready to sign off on the perfect underdog story?”

  Lesko’s eyes focused on the wall behind his head. “Whatever Billy says,” he said. “So long as my money’s right.”

  Pepper wished he’d woken Moira when Fritz had come to get him, wished she was with him now. He’d thought he had their scheme figured out, but now they’d re-schemed it on him. He sneered at Lesko. “Whatever Billy says,” he repeated. Then back to Stettler: “I don’t get it. No one would willingly give up the world’s heavyweight c
hampionship. It’s like a license to print your own money. What’s the angle here?”

  “We’ve already got a capacity crowd paid in the hopes of seeing Taft get a beating from Lesko,” Stettler said. “With you in the mix, it’ll be the exact opposite. People will want to see if you can win. When you do, they’ll go absolutely nuts for it. We’ll make a mint on the rematch.”

  “Whoa, hold on,” Pepper said. “Don’t I have to sign off on the first one before we start talking about the rematch?”

  Fritz tried out a little laugh. “Don’t be rash,” he said. “We’re talking about big money here.”

  “If you won’t do it, somebody else will,” Stettler shrugged. “We’ve already rented the Newcastle Ballroom next month in Philadelphia. No matter what you decide, Lesko loses the title this weekend and wins it back then.”

  Pepper put his hands up. “You’re going to have to back up and explain what’s going on,” he said. “Remember, I’m just a dumb wrestler. I’m over my head with all you geniuses.”

  The three promoters passed a glance as slowly as if it were a flask of liquor, and Lesko found something interesting to look at in the bottom of his drink.

  “Tell him,” O’Shea said finally.

  A queasy feeling crept into his belly. “Tell me what?” he said.

  “Listen,” Stettler said, his seat groaning as he shifted. “What we’re talking about here is a whole new kind of wrestling show. Fritz, Stan and me, we’re putting together a team of talented men who can travel the country together performing nightly”—he searched the ceiling for the right word—“exhibitions, from town to town. No more one-off bouts that take months to put together. Our men would each work a whole program of bouts together. Two wrestlers—say, you and Lesko—could perform in Philadelphia one night, New York the next, New Jersey the night after that.”

  “Like a traveling carnival troupe,” Fritz added. They all looked at Pepper as if he were a man on a high wire. Waiting to see if he would make it to the next platform, or if he might teeter off and fall. “What do you say?”