The Professional

by W. c. Heinz

“I wouldn’t mind managing a fighter named Eddie Brown myself.”

  “Not today. With that television today, you’ve got no chance. You’re not a manager, you’re an agent. They tell you who you have to fight and where you’re gonna fight him and when.”

  Doc had a name for Eddie. To his face he called him Edward, but to others he always referred to him as the Pro.

  “Suppose the Pro gets licked,” he said. “In the old days you could take him to Chicago or Des Moines or St. Louis, and bring him back. They never saw him before. Today, if you get licked, you get licked in front of the whole country. Where are you gonna take him? They all say: ‘Ah, we saw him get licked in his last fight on television.’ You want another drink?”

  “I’ll have one more, if we can find Girot.”

  Doc walked out to the lobby and came back with Girot. Girot made the drinks and stood listening now.

  “Television,” Doc said. “Four weeks ago the Pro is in the Garden. Fifteen million people see it, and we get four grand for the TV and half that off the gate. In the old days we’d have put a hundred thousand dollars in there, and come away with twenty-five, at least. You put nine years of your life into a fighter, and the pay-off is in Indian beads.”

  “That’s supposed to be progress.”

  “Progress? You read that story in the papers after the fight, about the guy on Central Park West?”

  “What guy?”

  “A big shot. The Pro is fighting in the Garden, so this guy is gonna be a big shot. He and his wife invite a half-dozen friends in to watch the fight. In the old days a guy like that would buy eight ringsides. Today what do we get out of him? Nothing. He pours out some whiskey, and that’s all it costs him.”

  “I read the story. Somebody turned him over for $25,000.”

  “Well, that’s what the papers said, but it’ll probably come to fifteen. They’re in there watching the fight and somebody works the fire escape and gets into a bedroom and lifts three fur coats and the dame’s jewels.”

  “I refuse to celebrate the conquests of the forces of evil.”

  “I celebrated it. It serves him right. I read it in the paper the next day, and I called the guy up. I said: ‘My name is Doc Carroll, and I manage Eddie Brown, who fought in the Garden last night. It serves you right.’ He said: ‘What?’ I said: ‘If you’d brought your friends to the fight this wouldn’t have happened. Let that be a lesson for you.’ He said: ‘What? Who is this?’ I said: ‘Doc Carroll, and I manage Eddie Brown. It serves you right.’ And I hung up.”

  “The poor guy probably thought it was all part of the plot.”

  “Poor? Like I’m rich, but you’re right. He thinks I brought the Pro along and finally got him into the Garden just to set up the heist.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t have visitors from the law.”

  “Cops? Cops can’t find anything. They can’t even find their shoes and socks in the morning.”

  “I thought they sleep with them on.”

  “I had a brother was a cop. My old lady thought that was great. One of New York’s Finest. I was a young fella, living home then. My brother and I slept in the same room, and he was a great cop. Handsome. Upright. A great parader, and with a twelve-inch eye. You know the twelve-inch eye?”

  “No.”

  “He could walk along a sidewalk and tell whether a guy was parked twelve and a quarter inches from the curb, and give him a ticket. That takes talent. One night I came home, feeling a little high, and he’s in the hay, getting his good nine hours, and he’s got the uniform and everything laid out for the morning. I took his shoes and his socks and I tied them together and I hung them on the light in the middle of the ceiling.

  “When I wake up it’s just about getting light and he’s making this racket, moving things around the room. He’s on his hands and knees, looking under the bed, and he’s in and out of the closet. I said: ‘What are you doing, Sherlock?’ He says: ‘I can’t find my shoes and socks. I put them right under that chair.’ By now the old lady’s there, too, looking.

  “I’m lying in bed, and I said: ‘Don’t panic. Remember what they taught you. Make a systematic checkout.’ He says: ‘I did. I always leave them under that chair. I looked everywhere they could be.’ I said: ‘That’s the trouble with you cops. You can’t cope with the unexpected. Look someplace where they shouldn’t be. Look up there on the ceiling. Maybe they’re hanging from the light. Look.’ He looked up there, and there they were. My old lady blew her top.”

  “But with that lesson he made a great detective.”

  “He died a detective. On West Forty-ninth Street, at one o’clock one morning, with a slug in his guts.”

  “Your brother was killed?” Girot said.

  “Sure,” Doc said, sipping his drink. “That was his kid drove me up here today.”

  Girot just shook his head.

  “Speaking of law and order,” I said after a while. “A couple of months ago I saw that an old friend of yours died.”

  “Who?”

  “Pete Martin.”

  “Yeah,” Doc said.

  “I suppose you sent flowers.”

  “You want to know the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “I sent him a wreath marked ‘Bon Voyage.’ I’m not kidding. It cost me twenty-five fish.”

  “I like that for a finish.”

  “Do you remember that night?”

  “I’ll never forget it,” I said.

  9

  I shall remember it as long as I live. I was young then, and I had been on the paper about three years. They had me teething on boxing, and I had hit it off with Doc. Doc had a good-looking heavyweight at the time, a big blond, out of Des Moines and named Al Fraley.

  Fraley’s old man had been a Methodist minister, and that made a natural for Doc. The big kid was devout enough, but Doc made him wear dark suits and black ties and carry a Bible into the dressing room, and he called him Deacon Fraley. It was an era when you sold a fighter to the public in every way that you could.

  This was right after Tunney retired with the title, and there was that confusion in the heavyweight ranks. There were three or four of the battleships with a chance, but the best of them all was the Deacon—or, rather, the Deacon and Doc.

  When a kid starts out to become a fighter and, somewhere, walks into a gym, bag in hand, he is like a rough-cut block of marble emerged from the quarry that is the mass of man. In any block a stone mason can see many things, but a master sculptor can see but one. In his eye no two blocks of marble are alike, and the thing he sees is the thing for which the block was created and that is the way Winged Victory comes about.

  That is the way it has always been, too, with Doc. In the boxing business, as in any business, there are hundreds of masons and three or four master sculptors, and the best was Doc. I watched him for years, with a dozen fighters, working carefully with reason and inspiration, shaping slowly and stepping back and looking at what he had done, hiding his excitement and his fear, too, behind that cynical front.

  Until Eddie Brown came along, Deacon Fraley, even more than Rusty Ryan, was the one. The greatest sculptor in the world, working in marble, cannot add a thing. If it is not there, it is not there. No man makes it, and so no man is truly creative, but by subtraction from the whole he reveals it. That is the nearest that man can come to creation, and that is why the great are afraid. Only they can see all of it, and they are afraid that, in their process of subtraction, they will not reveal the all of it, and what is hidden will remain hidden forever. They are even more afraid that, in the process, they will cut too far and destroy that much of it forever. It is that way in the making of all things, including the making of a fighter.

  At that time, Doc had the Deacon living in a boardinghouse on West Ninety-second Street, and Doc and I happened to be living in the same hotel. It was on West Forty-eighth Street, but it is not there any more, which is just
as well. It was not much of a hotel.

  It was in the fall of the year. At about 10:30 that night the phone in my room rang and it was Doc. He asked me to come down to his room, and when I got there the door was open and I walked in. He came out of the bathroom, pressing a strip of adhesive over a strip of gauze on his right hand.

  “What happened to you?” I said.

  “I’ve just had a visit from the Almighty,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Razor Pete Martin,” he said.

  It was a misnomer. I supposed he shaved with a razor, but he never used one in his work. Some romanticist named him and it stuck, but he definitely did not use a razor. He used a penknife, and he honed the tip of the blade until it was as sharp as a razor. He would grasp it about a quarter of an inch below that tip, so that it would not go any deeper than that, and he would slit you from the cheekbone to the jaw. It was always the right cheek, because he was left-handed. He was an enforcer.

  This was, of course, during Prohibition, and two or three of the people in the mobs were playing with fighters. It was never quite as serious as they have made it in the bad books and motion pictures. It was rather the way a man of means will keep a show dog. It was a point toward prestige.

  “What happened?” I said to Doc.

  “Al Mele is trying to buy into my fighter.”

  “What did he offer?”

  “What difference does it make what he offered? He offered me twenty-five grand. I told him: ‘Look, Al, I put too much into a fighter to be satisfied with half. I’ve got to have all of any fighter I manage, and that goes for the Deacon.’”

  “What did he say?”

  “What did he say? He’s not a debater. He’s a thug. It was friendly.”

  “What happened with Pete?”

  “I heard this knock on the door and I opened it and he was standing there. I stuck out my hand and he went for my cheek. I got my hand up, and I took it right there. It’s not too bad. I hit him a hook in the belly as hard as I could, and when he dropped his hands I hit him a right on the chin.”

  Doc had wanted to be a fighter when he was a kid, but he had been too frail for it. His body could not take it, but knowing it and teaching it as he could, he could punch very well for his weight.

  “You knock him out?”

  “No, but the hook in the belly made him feel real bad. I’m lucky it’s warm out and he didn’t have a topcoat on. He’d have cut me sure, if the belly punch didn’t fold him.”

  “Then what?”

  “I picked his hat up and I helped him up and I took him to the elevator.”

  “Noblesse oblige. What did he say?”

  “We didn’t say a damn word. From the time he knocked on the door we didn’t say a word. I just realized that.”

  “I believe that.”

  “What were we going to talk about?” Doc said, and he tossed something on the bed in front of me. “Here.”

  It was a small gold penknife, with the gold loop at one end to be attached to a watch chain. It was still open, the tip of the blade, as I have said, like a razor.

  “Am I to have this?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Let me have it again.”

  I handed it back to him. He was standing by the bathroom door and he pressed the tip of the blade against the door trim.

  “Look out,” I said. “When that blade breaks it may fly.”

  It snapped as I said it. I caught a glimpse of it in the light, and then it disappeared to the carpet.

  “You’ll enjoy stepping on that with your bare feet,” I said.

  “That would be the pay-off,” Doc said, looking for it now.

  “There it is, right by the leg of the bed.”

  Doc picked it up. He went into the bathroom and I heard the toilet go and he came out.

  “I flushed it down the toilet,” he said.

  “Good.”

  “Before I called you,” he said. “I called Fred Gardner.”

  Fred was writing the sports column even then. He has never made an enemy in his life, and he knew Doc and respected him and Al Mele knew Fred and respected him.

  “I told him the whole story,” Doc said. “I told him what I told you. Now I’m going over to see Mele, and I want you along.”

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I haven’t heard that he’s trying to buy into typewriters.”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” Doc said. “I want Fred and you for protection. These people aren’t afraid of cops. They respect newspapers.”

  Mele had a cellar trap on East Fifty-third Street. The eye knew Doc, and after he let us in he disappeared and came back and led us to a small table in the back of the room where Mele was sitting with one of his sidearms.

  It was a small room with a small band, a comedian, a canary and twelve legs in the line. Mele was not one of the suave ones. He was the almost complete thug. He did not become the complete thug until two years later when they found him in the gutter on the Lower East Side with enough lead in him to write his name down the middle of the Lincoln Highway from Paoli, Pennsylvania, to Point of Rocks, Wyoming. There are such places, you know.

  “Hello, Doc,” he said, not getting up. “Sit down.”

  “This is Frank Hughes, the sports writer,” Doc said.

  “I read your stories,” Mele said.

  “Thank you.”

  There were two empty chairs at the table and we sat down.

  “You write good,” Mele said to me. “You write like Fred Gardner.”

  “I try not to,” I said, “but he’s so damn good I can’t help myself.”

  “He writes good because he’s a good guy,” Mele said.

  “I just had Fred on the phone,” Doc said.

  “Yeah?” Mele said. “I never see him, except at fights. He never comes in here. He’s one of them family men. He’s all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Doc said. “I told him you were interested in buying into Fraley. Then I told him I just had a visit from Pete Martin. I told him I still don’t want to sell.”

  “Yeah?” Mele said. “You could be right. I don’t want to buy no more, either.”

  “Good,” Doc said, “and give this to Pete.”

  He tossed the knife on the table. Mele shoved it over to the sidearm, who picked it up and looked at it and closed the broken blade and put the knife in his pocket.

  “You want a drink?” Mele said.

  “You want a drink?” Doc said to me.

  “I’ll have one.”

  We stayed for two drinks. We didn’t talk boxing. Mele wanted to talk baseball with me; he was a Cubs fan. Two weeks later they got to Deacon Fraley and he found a soft spot in the ring at the Garden and lay down on it until he was counted out. I was at the fight and I was in Doc’s room in the hotel an hour later when he paid the Deacon off.

  “I still have two years on your contract,” he said, with the big blond kid sitting on the bed, still frightened and staring at the floor. “I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t even want to see you any more. You’re through.”

  That was the last time I ever saw him and I last saw Pete Martin on a hot summer afternoon about two years before Doc and I stood at Girot’s bar. There was a red-haired kid from a magazine who had the assignment to shoot some pictures to go with a piece of mine. He could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five, and he knew nothing about boxing and I took him up to the gym and introduced him to Lou Stillman. Lou winked at me and abused him to see how he would shape up, and when he made it Lou gave him the run of the place.

  He must have shot fifty pictures, and when he was done I was going over to complain about life to my agent and we walked east together in the heat on West Fifty-fourth Street. When we came to Broadway and turned north I spotted Pete by the Automat, leaning against the glass. He looked like he was going to die right there.

  He was never robust, but now his hair was absolutely white and his face looked gray. In all that heat he had on a good, but heavy, brown he
rringbone worsted suit, and he was even wearing a vest with a thin gold watch chain looped across it. It was obvious he was in trouble and I walked up to him with the red-haired kid following me.

  “Hello, Pete,” I said. “I’m Frank Hughes.”

  “Hello,” he said, putting out his hand, but breathing in gasps. He had asthma and a bad heart and he was sixty-five at the time.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he said, gasping. “I’ll be all right.”

  I introduced him to the red-haired kid and he gave him his hand. He was still leaning against the building.

  “Let’s go into the Automat where it’s cool,” I said.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “Come on,” I said, because I was afraid he was going to die right there.

  I took him by the arm, and the photographer held the door open and we went to the first table. I sat Pete down, and the photographer and I sat down.

  “Let me get you some iced tea?” I said.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I don’t care for tea.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  “Please don’t bother. I’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll get it,” the photographer said.

  He went away and came back with a glass of water. He put it down on the table in front of Pete.

  “Thank you, young man,” Pete said, still breathing hard.

  “You’re welcome,” the kid said.

  “Go ahead and drink it,” I said.

  Pete picked up the glass, and his hand was shaking. He took it in both hands and took a couple of sips and set it down again. As hot as it was that day, though, and with that heavy suit and vest on, he wasn’t sweating.

  “Can I take you somewhere?” I said.

  “No, thank you. I’m just going home.”

  “Let me take you.”

  “No, thank you. I’ll be all right now.”

  “I’ll call you a cab.”

  “No. I’ll just rest here awhile. I’ll be all right.”

  “Take some more of that water.”

  We sat with him for five or six more minutes. Then I stood up and the kid stood up.

  “If I can’t take you home, Pete, or get you a cab, we’ll be going. Rest here now, will you?”