‘When I tell El Toro we will take a boat to North America, he is very frighten. He remembers that the old man of the village says the people of North America do not like the dark skins. The parents of El Toro are of Spanish blood, but there is from the grandfather a little of the Negro, perhaps a drop or two. The skin of El Toro is yellow-brown, from standing so many years in the Andean sun. El Toro has heard that in your country they burn the dark ones. He has not the intelligence to understan’ that this is not an occurrence of every day.
‘So I say to El Toro, “You know the great house of the de Santos that rises from the highest hilltop overlooking your village and the Rio Rojas. When you come back with me from North America, you will have money enough to build a house of such elegant proportions on the other side of the valley. The people of your village will lift their eyes to the casa de Molina and say ‘Look, it is even greater than the casa de Santos.’” To El Toro this sounds like the biggest of all dreams, but he has learn to have faith in his Luis and to follow him like an obedient son. So at last we are here in North America, four thousand miles from the village of Santa Maria. When you put it in the papers, please write how proud is Luis Acosta to introduce to your great country the first authentic giant to climb through the rope and seek the championship of the world.’
‘Is that all you have to say for publication this morning?’ I said.
‘One more little thing,’ Acosta said. ‘When you spell my first name please be so kind as not to put an o in the middle – just the four letters, please: L-u-i-s, pronounce Looeeess.’
‘I’ll remember,’ I said.
‘Thank you very much,’ Acosta said. He was an intense, self-centred little man who obviously loved to hear himself tell this story over and over again. His personality was compounded of romanticism and materialism, benevolence, acquisitiveness and too many years of unsatisfied vanity, all resolved now in his paternal and profitable creation.
‘And now there is just one little personal matter of which I will ask your advice,’ Acosta said. ‘It is the matter of the percentage. When I come to New York I have very much difficulty arranging a match for El Toro. To get a good match, you need to have very often your name in the papers. You must have much money for the build-up. And to fight in the Garden, it is necessary to know Mr Jacobs.’
‘How long you been around here now, Acosta?’ I said.
‘We are now in your country nine weeks.’
‘You’re doing all right,’ I said.
‘Twenty-five years in the circus business,’ Acosta said. ‘I learn to fool the people and not myself. I see very quick the American boxing business is closed tight for Luis. It is entirely necessary to have partner who has what you call the “in”. I meet Meester Vanneman in the gymnasium. From the way he talk he is a manager of very big importance. So I sell him fifty per cent of El Toro for twenty-five hundred dollars. But a week later I am astonish to hear that Meester Vanneman has sell forty per cent of his share to Meester Latka for thirty-five hundred dollar. Then Meester Latka sends for me. Meester Vanneman cannot get El Toro into the Garden, Mr Latka say to me. He is the only one who has the connection to do that, he say. So he makes me the offer to buy forty per cent of my share for thirty-five hundred dollars also. Only, if you will excuse me for saying, it is not exactly an offer. If I do not give him this forty, Meester Latka says to me, I might as well take my El Toro back to Argentina. It seems he has the power to keep me out of the Garden and any other place. So you see, Meester Lewis, for me the position is very difficult. For all my work I am left with only ten per cent. And from this I have promise to pay half to Lupe Morales. I did not come for money only, but to me this is a very great disappointment.’
I ran through the stockholders in my mind, eighty per cent of the manager’s end to Latka, which meant 40-40 for him and Quinn, ten for McKeogh, ten for Vanneman, ten for me, five for Acosta, five for Morales, added up to 120 per cent. A little complicated. Not as complicated as some of Nick’s deals, but well beyond simple arithmetic. Not the kind of equation to figure in your head, unless you had Nick’s head, in which case you didn’t worry about such mathematical problems as how to cut a pie into five quarters. Either Nick’s head or Nick’s bookkeeper, Leo Hintz. Leo was a neat, serious, middle-aged man who looked like a small-city bank-teller. In fact that’s what he had been, in Schenectady, until his thirty bucks a week made him feel that a change was necessary. Unfortunately for Leo the change he decided to make was a slight alteration in some of his entries, a little matter of a digit here and there that added up to an extra zero on the end of Leo’s $1560 a year. Not long afterwards, however, Leo’s income was suddenly cut to fifty cents a day, which is what the State of New York pays the inhabitants of Sing Sing prison. Leo was a sort of mathematical genius with a natural talent for quiet larceny, the modern highwayman who has swapped his black mask for a green eyeshade.
‘Meester Lewis,’ Acosta continued, showing his small, white teeth in an anxious, mirthless smile, ‘since you are so simpático I will take the liberty to ask a very big favour. Meester Latka likes you very much, so I am thinking perhaps if you will be so kind to ask him please to make a little bigger my share of the …’
‘Look, amigo,’ I said. ‘Don’t give me that simpático crap. In Mexico every time somebody told me I was simpático I got taken. Nick likes me because he needs me. But he doesn’t need me that much. You’ve got your deal. If you want my opinion, you were lucky to come out with ten per cent. Maybe that’s his idea of the Good-Neighbour Policy.’
Acosta crossed one short leg over the other, drawing up his pants carefully to protect the creases. He must have been a sharp little businessman in Mendoza. Here he was just another peddler. ‘But ten per cent, which I must share with Lupe Morales, is like the droppings of a fly. Especially when it is my idea, the big idea of putting boxing gloves on a giant, a conception that will make much money for Meester Latka. He will be grateful, yes?’
‘He will be grateful, no,’ I said. ‘Now useful he understands, but grateful, that’s too abstract.’
Acosta shook his head in uneasy bewilderment. ‘You North Americans, you are so direct. You not only say what you mean but you say it immediately. In my country’ – he indicated a large circle in the air with his cigarette holder – ‘we say things like this, instead of – he bisected his imaginary circle with a sharp downward stroke – ‘like that.’ He closed his eyes, massaging the right lid with his thumb, the left with his forefinger, as if his head ached. Here he was, four thousand miles from Santa Maria, with only five per cent of a dream.
CHAPTER FIVE
When you saw Toro Molina for the first time he was so big you had to focus on him in sections, the way a still camera photographs a skyscraper. The first shot took in no features at all, just an impression of tremendous bulk, like the view a man has of a mountain when he’s standing close to its base. Then, as Nick led him into the sun-room, where Acosta and I had been waiting for them, I made an effort to look up at the face which rose a full foot above mine. I felt like a kid in a sideshow peering up at the Tallest Man in the World.
When I stared at Toro that first time the word giant that Acosta had been beating me over the head with didn’t occur to me at all. It was monster that was in my mind. His hands were monstrous, the size of his feet was monstrous and his oversized head instantly became my conception of the Neanderthal Man who roamed this world some forty thousand years ago. To see him move, slowly, with an awkward loping gait, into the sun-room, bending almost double to come through the doorway, was as disconcerting as seeing one of the restored fossils of primitive man in the Museum of Natural History suddenly move toward you and offer a bony hand in greeting. But if anyone were making book on who was the most disconcerted, he would have had to string along with Toro.
Toro acted like a large field animal, a bull or a horse, that has suddenly been lassoed and led into a house. But when he saw Acosta he looked relieved. Acosta said, quickly in Spanish, ‘El Tor
o, come over here, I want you to meet a new friend of ours,’ and Toro came obediently, placing himself a little behind Acosta, as if seeking protection from the pudgy little man who would have to stand on his tiptoes to tap him on the shoulder. That brown suit with the red and blue stripes that Acosta had bought for him in Buenos Aires was pinched in the shoulders; the pants were tight and the sleeves fell short several inches above the wrist. Looking at him more closely as the first shock was wearing off, I remember having the impression of seeing a trained monkey of nightmare proportions dressed up like a man mechanically going through his act under the watchful eye of the organ-grinder. Only in this case Luis Acosta didn’t need an instrument strapped over his shoulder. He played his own music and wrote his own words and apparently could grind them out tirelessly.
‘El Toro,’ Acosta said (and even the way he snapped the name out and paused a moment reminded me of the way an animal trainer fixes the attention of his beast before giving the command), ‘shake hands with Meester Lewis.’
Toro hesitated a moment, just the way you’ve seen them do it hundreds of times in the animal act, and then obeyed. I was afraid it was going to be like putting my hand in a meat-grinder, but he didn’t grasp it very hard, wasn’t sure enough of himself, I guess. Instead it felt like the end of an elephant’s trunk pushing into your hand when you’re feeding it peanuts, heavy and calloused, unnatural, and with a strange massive gentleness.
‘Con mucho gusto,’ I said, throwing six months of Mexico into the breach.
Toro just nodded perfunctorily. After we shook hands he stepped back behind Acosta again, looking down at him inquisitively, as if waiting for the next command.
‘Whadya think of him, Eddie?’ Nick said. ‘Think we oughta start renting him out by floors like the Empire State?’
That was the first of the Toro Molina jokes. This time I laughed, but, oh, how weary I was to become of those jokes about Molina’s size!
When Nick made jokes he was feeling good. ‘Well, did you get everything you want?’ he asked me. ‘Did the little guy talk?’
‘To fill a book,’ I said.
‘Hey, that ain’t such a bad idea, a book,’ Nick said. ‘Maybe one of those comic books. Like this Superman. Know what Superman sells? Eight, ten million copies. At a dime a throw, not bad.’
Some day, when they put out a new edition of old Gustavus Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes you may be reading how Nicholas Latka (‘illustrious great-great-grandfather of Nicholas Latka III’) got his. It may be right in there with the Vanderbilts and the Goulds and the rest of the fancy who knew when to break a law and when to make one.
‘Come on out,’ Nick said. ‘I wanna show him around to the boys.’ He nodded toward Toro with a laugh. ‘Follow me, half-pint.’
Acosta leant over and said under his breath, ‘Follow him.’ Toro nodded, in the obedient peasant way he had, carrying out Acosta’s imperative literally and walking directly in Nick’s footsteps with that slow awkward lope. Suddenly Nick stopped and said, half-kidding, ‘Tell ’im, for Christ sake, to stop walkin’ behind me. Makes me feel like I’m being tracked down by a neliphant.’
Acosta translated and Toro must have taken it for censure, for he hurried to catch up with Nick. In his haste, one of his ponderous feet tripped over a lamp wire and he lurched forward, almost losing his balance. He flailed the air clumsily to right himself. He was definitely no Nijinsky. But you couldn’t always tell by that. I’ve seen quite a few flat-footed, awkward fellows look pretty shifty and smart inside the ropes.
‘What was that, Eddie,’ Nick said, ‘a clean knock-down or just a slip?’
He turned to me with a wink and tapped me playfully on the jaw.
Beth was sitting on the terrace, alone and a little bewildered, for Beth.
‘Sorry to be so long,’ I said. ‘Everything okay?’
‘I’m glad I came,’ she said ambiguously. ‘But next time I think I’ll let you go alone.’
Maybe it had been a mistake to throw Beth in with Nick’s crowd. She was a girl who had made an easy adjustment from Amherst to New York, but you didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to see that this was a world she never knew and didn’t want to know. And yet, in spite of herself, she found herself curiously attracted to all this, as to a sideshow of freaks. She telegraphed me a quick smile with a suggestion of panic in it.
‘What are the amenities about the hostess in this party?’ she asked.
‘Oh, Ruby can take her guests or leave them. I kind of like Ruby.’
‘She makes me nervous. I haven’t been able to talk with her. I tried my best, and it wasn’t good enough to take her away from the book she was reading.’
I took Beth by the arm and led her over to Ruby, who was stretched out on a lawn couch on wheels. When she looked up at us, I said, ‘What book you reading?’
She held it up for us to see. ‘It’s the Number One Bestseller,’ Ruby said. It was one of those eight-hundred-page packages with the cover featuring a seventeenth-century Hedy Lamarr bursting her bodice. The Countess Misbehaved, this one was called.
Ruby spent most of her time in the country reading novels like this Countess business. I know Nick was rather proud of her intellectual pursuits, the way she went through these books week after week. ‘We’ve got a hell of a library out there,’ Nick had told me. ‘I’ll bet Ruby knocks off three books a week. Remembers what she reads too.’ So Ruby, who had never exposed her lovely, unlined face to the pressure of literature until she got out in the country and didn’t know what to do with herself, had developed an intimate relationship with European history. She could talk with as much authority about the back-stair affairs of the hot-blooded ladies-in-waiting at the court of Charles I as she could about the marital difficulties of Ethel her cook.
When Ruby wasn’t consuming her marshmallow history, she was either driving to church in her station wagon or drinking Manhattans. Her life in the country seemed to break up into those three phases. She was sentimental about her religion and retained a schoolgirl’s admiration and sense of responsibility to her devotions. The only thing that would get her out of bed before noon was church services, if her hangover wasn’t too bad. The nipping usually started around three. I stayed out there through a week once to get some work done, and Ruby would come down for cocktails every evening with a good three-hour start. An outsider might not have been able to tell the difference. She handled it well enough, but her eyes became very set and moist and, depending on what mood she was in when she started drinking, she usually brought the conversation around to religion or sex, working her way up to the latter by way of Metternich’s mistress or Napoleon’s sister or some other full-bosomed footnote to history. When this happened she had a way of leaning toward you, talking feverishly with her face closer and closer to yours, which made you feel it could happen if you really tried.
This may be an injustice. Nothing ever happened between us and I wouldn’t have been too surprised if Ruby had turned out to be as virtuous as she felt on her way home from church on Sunday morning. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if she had turned out to be any or all of the things the gossips had her figured for. Her manner was always composed and ladylike, but there was something about her eyes, black and unusually dilated, which left you with the uneasy impression of a deep, controlled instability.
It was this undefined but vivid impression, I think, rather than anything one could be sure of, that started rumours about Ruby. Felix Montoya, the Puerto Rican lightweight, one of Nick’s boys, had told me a tall one about something he claimed had happened while he was out training at the place. Nick has his own gym out there with a ring and nice equipment. Felix was there for three weeks when he was getting ready for his title bout with Angott. What Felix told me is that he had Ruby every night except the weekends when Nick came down. What Felix also told me is the part I keep thinking about. Felix paid her the highest compliment he knew when he said that her response compared very favourably with the best Puer
to Rico had to offer. But it made him very nervous, he said, when, as they lay in her great double bed, she would reach her arm out to the phone on the bed-table and call Nick in New York. Then, while holding Felix to her with one arm but giving him the sign to be as quiet as possible, she would hold a typical wifely conversation with Nick. ‘Hello, honey. How’s everything in the city? … What time will you be out Friday? … Anything special you want me to get you for dinner? … Sure, I miss you, silly … Be a good boy now … Bye-bye, honey.’
Of course that’s Felix’s story, and Felix sleeps with every woman he meets, if you listen to Felix. If he hadn’t left his fighting strength in somebody’s bed, I didn’t know how else to account for the farce he made with Angott. On the basis of Felix’s waltz, I was half inclined to buy his story. But that telephone business was too wild to be credible. Yet, I’d slug toe-to-toe with myself in this one-man debate; it was so bizarre that it didn’t seem probable that Felix would have the imagination to dream up such a fantasy.
At any rate, no matter where the needle really pointed, Nick was satisfied. If he were to hear these stories from anyone it would have been the Killer, and Ruby was the only woman in the world about whom the Killer observed strict discretion. So Nick still felt as he had when he married Ruby, that this was the smartest thing he ever did. Those were the words he often used to describe it, as if Ruby were a prize member of Nick’s stable. And Ruby was a good wife to Nick, always there when he wanted her, warm and gracious as a hostess, well spoken, beautifully groomed, with plenty of class in her choice of clothes and her way of wearing them, a good girl who went to church every Sunday and read books.
The Harder They Fall Page 8
