The Harder They Fall

by Budd Schulberg

  The way Acosta continued to sit there after Nick had said everything he had to say reminded me of a badly punished fighter who remains in his corner after the last round is over, waiting for enough strength to rise and climb out of the ring.

  ‘All right,’ Nick said. ‘I guess that’s it.’ He beckoned to the Killer. ‘Take Acosta back to the hotel and stay with him until Eddie comes down.’

  ‘But, Meester Latka, this is not right. El Toro …’

  Nick nodded to the Killer. Menegheni took him by the arm and moved him toward the gate. All the formality was crushed out of Acosta now. There were no goodbyes from Nick. The Killer opened the gate with his free arm and pushed Acosta through it.

  Nick stretched luxuriously and lit a fresh cigar. He had forgotten all about Acosta. The moist eyes, the crushed look hadn’t touched him. He tipped his chair back from the table and opened his robe to let the sun beat down on his chest. ‘This sun is for me,’ he said. ‘Take your clothes off and get comfortable, Eddie. I got some shorts you c’d wear.’

  ‘I’m afraid they wouldn’t fit me any more,’ I said.

  ‘I been noticing that,’ Nick said. ‘You oughta take care of yourself, kid. There’s a swell Finnish bath up on Sunset Boulevard. All the stars take their hangovers there. Sweat all that poison outa your system.’

  A little while later we were alone together in the steam room, basking in the pleasant enervation of the moist, hot atmosphere. Nick picked up a limp sports section from the level below him and reread the account of last night’s fight. I had done a little business with the guy who had the byline, and the story read the way we wanted it to read.

  ‘Well, Eddie, we’re on our way,’ Nick said. ‘The write-ups read good this morning. Real good. Let ’em say Toro’s a stinking boxer, call him clumsy if they want to, long as they make the public think he really clouts those guys. That’s what they come for, that, and to see some little guy cut him down.’ He stretched out on his back in an attitude of exaggerated well-being. ‘This is living, isn’t it? California, loafing in the afternoons, money coming in. Latka doesn’t throw you any bad ones, does he?’

  This was the best job I ever had all right. More money, less to do, and the kick of putting something over. Even Acosta didn’t have too much to complain about. Already he had cleared ten thousand, which added up to a lot of pesos for a two-bit circus manager on the village circuit.

  ‘Did I tell you about that kid of mine?’ Nick was saying. ‘He and his partner won the New England scholastic doubles championship. You should see the size-a the cup he got. Must be this big. And it says Nicholas Latka Junior, right on it.’ His face softened with an expression of parental pride. ‘How d’ya like that, Nicholas Latka Junior, right along with all them high-class handles?’

  ‘Have you picked out a college for him yet, Nick?’

  ‘I’m gonna try to get him into Yale. I’ve heard a lot about that Yale. It seems to be a real class joint.’

  The heavy-muscled Swedish masseur opened the door and stuck his head in. ‘Ready for your massage now, Mr Latka.’ I lay there a few minutes longer letting the heat draw the poison through my pores. Later, when I came out into the air after the massage and the cold shower, I felt refreshed. But that feeling only lasted until I got back to the room in the Biltmore that Toro and Acosta shared.

  Acosta was sitting at the window looking out. Toro was reading the funny papers, to which he had recently become addicted. The Killer was playing solitaire. He picked up the cards quickly when he saw me come in. ‘Boy, am I glad to see you! I had a matinee on this afternoon.’

  He ducked out. Acosta didn’t look up from the window.

  ‘Tell him yet?’ I said.

  He shook his head.

  ‘You better tell him,’ I said.

  He looked at me helplessly. Then he turned to Toro, his face dull with resignation. ‘El Toro,’ he said in Spanish, ‘this Thursday, I must go home.’

  ‘But how is that possible? I fight again next week,’ Toro said.

  ‘You must stay here after I leave,’ Acosta said.

  Toro’s comic section slid to the floor. ‘Luis, what are you saying? Why should I stay without you?’

  ‘Because … because it is better that way,’ Acosta said heavily.

  ‘How – how can it be better?’ Toro protested. ‘You promised we would always stay together. And now you would leave me here with these strangers?’

  Acosta rubbed his small hand over his face. ‘I am sorry I cannot stay with you, Toro.’

  ‘You must stay,’ Toro said. ‘You must stay or I go too. I will not stay without you. I will not stay.’

  ‘El Toro, listen to me,’ Acosta said, speaking in a flat, measured voice. ‘You have to stay. It will still be good for you. You will come home as rich as I have always promised. I will come to meet you at the boat.’

  ‘Luis, do not leave me, please do not leave me,’ Toro suddenly begged. ‘I do not like these people. I am afraid of these people. If you go, I go too.’

  Acosta looked at me pleadingly. There was nothing left to do but tell him everything, his listless eyes seemed to say.

  ‘El Toro, you cannot go with me. You cannot go because these men own you. They own you now.’

  Toro’s big face studied Acosta, foolish with confusion. ‘They – own me?’

  He had never been aware of the deals and percentage cuts by which Luis had sold part of his contract first to Vince and then to Nick and Quinn. Acosta had thought it would only bewilder him. Now he looked at Toro with the shame of betrayal and did not know what to say.

  ‘How do they own me, Luis?’ Toro asked again.

  ‘I sold them your contract, El Toro.’

  ‘But why – why did you do that?’

  ‘Because I did not have enough importance to get you up into the big money by myself,’ Acosta explained. ‘This way you will fight in the Madison Square Garden – maybe for the championship. This I did for you, El Toro.’

  Toro’s lips puckered. His eyes betrayed a quick, instinctive fear and then narrowed with suspicion. ‘You sold me, Luis. Then you can buy me back again, please.’

  ‘No, that is impossible – impossible,’ Acosta said, his voice rising irritably. ‘You must stay here. You must.’

  Bewildered, Toro shook his massive head. ‘I thought you my friend, Luis.’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ I interposed. ‘We’ll look after you.’

  Toro turned to look at me in surprise, as if he had forgotten that I was there. He looked at me for several seconds, without saying anything, until I began to feel embarrassed. He shook his head again, this time with a kind of pity. He said nothing more to either of us. Slowly he went to the window, where he stood, his huge back to us, and looked out at the downtown traffic.

  That Thursday night Vince and the Killer came to take Acosta to the ship. Up to the last moment he had been begging me to get Nick to change his mind. He even offered to cut himself down to two and a half per cent, if he were allowed to stay. My promises to talk things over with Nick kept him quietly hopeful until the end. What was the use of letting Acosta know there were never any appeals from Nick’s decisions? His word was always good, for you or against you.

  Neither Vince nor the Killer liked the idea of driving Acosta all the way out to San Pedro, and they treated him more like a man who was being deported for a crime than a man who had been systematically double-crossed. I found myself thinking of a dozen other places I’d rather have been when Acosta said goodbye to Toro. Acosta put his short arms as far around Toro’s great waist as they would go.

  ‘Adios, El Toro mio,’ Luis said almost in a whisper.

  Toro just turned away. I stood there trying to think of something to say. He muttered hoarsely, ‘I thought he was my friend.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I’ll take you to a movie.’

  Toro liked our movies. He was especially fond of music and seemed to enjoy most those big musical extravaganzas with a hundred girls
dancing on a hundred pianos in which Hollywood excels.

  The newsreel included a feature on Toro himself, training at Ojai, with the inevitable newsreel gags showing him square off against a flyweight chinning himself on Toro’s arm, and ending with his huge face grinning into the camera in a gargoyle full-head close-up. As we left the theatre a group of kids surrounded him and asked for his autograph. But neither the dancing girls nor the little taste of glory seemed to do anything for Toro’s state of mind. He withdrew inside himself. On the way back to the hotel, when I tried to break through his silence by saying in Spanish, ‘Don’t worry now. We’re all going to be looking out for you,’ he answered me haltingly in English, as if he refused to share with me the intimacy of his own language. ‘I wish I go home,’ he said.

  The next day we all took the train down to San Diego for the second fight on Toro’s itinerary. Vince had lined up a coloured heavyweight by the name of Dynamite Jones, a local pugilist of established mediocrity who had been winning in the border city. In return for five hundred dollars, Jones had agreed to leave in his dressing room what Dynamite he possessed and to accommodate us with a diveroo in the third.

  Toro’s training in the San Diego gym attracted capacity crowds to every session, even though he looked even more listless than he had at Ojai. Danny was so disgusted he devoted most of his time to the local bars and horse rooms, leaving Doc to continue Toro’s education in the manly art. Doc did what he could. He had enough liking for Toro to want to teach him how to take care of himself in case he ever got in there with someone with the handcuffs off. But Toro lacked either the primitive drive of a rough-and-tumble killer or the systematised consecration of the athlete. He was lethargic and moody and dreaded the sweaty monotony of road work and the daily grind at the gym. He obeyed Doc’s instructions with reluctant obedience. But except for learning to hold his left out in the more or less established way, and to move around with slow, graceless orthodoxy, there wasn’t much improvement in his boxing ability. George obligingly permitted himself to be knocked over occasionally to keep alive the myth of Toro’s punching powers, but our Man Mountain still hadn’t learnt to hit hard enough to bother a healthy featherweight.

  I had the fight reporter of the only morning paper up to the room a couple of times and sized him up as a nice guy on the lazy side with about as much integrity as I had, who would just as soon shove my stuff in with his name on it as grind it out himself. So I sat up there at the Hotel Grant, making with the adjectives.

  There wasn’t a day when I didn’t have a qualm or two for what I was doing. At the same time I had to admit that on the bottom level I was getting a real kick out of putting this big oaf across as the world’s most dangerous heavyweight. The morning of the fight, for instance, when I read the copy in the first column of the sports section under Ace Mercer’s byline, it handed me a laugh, I suppose a laugh of superiority.

  Fresh from his sensational two-round knockout victory over highly touted Cowboy Coombs, Man Mountain Molina, the Giant of the Andes, 275-pound human piledriver, faces Dynamite Jones, the pride of San Diego, in ten rounds or less at the Waterfront Arena tonight.

  Although outweighed by eighty-five pounds and standing only six-feet-one, just a little guy when you’re looking down from Molina’s stratospheric six-foot-seven, Jones and his manager ‘Whispering’ Al Mathews have been going up and down cauliflower alley grabbing up all the short money they can find. ‘We ain’t afraid of nobody,’ Whispering Al confided courageously to this writer after Dynamite’s final workout yesterday.

  Dynamite is well known to San Diego fans, who have yet to see the dusky battler down for the full count. He will be meeting a lethal puncher of superhuman strength in the Giant of the Andes who is already being spoken of as a championship contender …

  Jones was a tall, rangy boy with more stuff than I would have expected from a second-rater out there in the sticks. He came out of his corner as if he really meant to make a fight out of it, with stiff jabs that made Toro look clumsy and flat-footed. Toro threw a wild right that almost knocked himself down as Jones ducked. The crowd laughed. Ten seconds before the end of the round, Jones feinted to the body, sucking Toro into dropping his hands, and crossed him with a straight right to the jaw. Toro’s knees buckled, and if Doc and Danny hadn’t jumped through the ropes at the bell, he might have gone down.

  The crowd was on its feet, cheering Jones as the coloured fighter danced confidently back to his corner. That was part of Toro’s appeal of course. They came not only to see the brute flatten his opposition but also with the deeply rooted hope that just once, the little guy, the underdog, the dimly realised symbol of themselves would triumph over the Giant as David the eternal short-ender felled Goliath.

  Toro staggered back to his corner in a daze. Doc had to use smelling salts to sharpen his dimming senses.

  ‘What goes with this Jones?’ I asked Vince.

  ‘If the jig tries anything,’ Vince said, ‘he ends up in the bay.’

  ‘Maybe he just wants to make it look good for a round or two and doesn’t know how little Toro can take.’

  ‘If that jigaboo tries to cross us, we got protection,’ Vince said. ‘I got my guy workin’ his corner.’

  That was the first time I realised what a really thorough fellow Vince Vanneman was. It wouldn’t win any merit badges for any of us, but if it hadn’t been for his foresight things would have turned out even worse than they did.

  Jones came out for the second round as if the understanding we thought we had was actually made between two other guys. He wouldn’t stand still for Toro to connect with his ponderous rights. As he kept moving around Toro he was scoring with sharp punches that had the crowd on its feet, begging for a knockout, defying the slow-moving giant with bloodthirsty abuse, ‘Knock the big bum out! Send him back to Argentina! Attaboy, cut him down to your size!’

  Fortunately, Jones was a punishing but not a finishing puncher or he would have written an untimely 30 to our whole campaign. But when the second round ended, Toro wandered back to his corner with blood dripping from his mouth and his eyes staring uselessly. Doc worked over him with his educated fingers, massaging the back of his neck, while a handler squeezed a spongeful of cold water over his head, and checked with vaseline the trickle of blood that ran from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘It’s the business all right,’ Vince said.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘This is some tank artist, this Jones.’

  ‘My guy’s talkin’ to him,’ Vince said. ‘My guy’s a real tough fella. He’ll tell that nigger what’ll be if he don’t splash this round.’

  The representative of our interests Vince had placed in Jones’s corner seemed to be doing plenty of talking. He was leaning through the ropes with his sweaty, larcenous face close to Jones’s ear, pouring it to him. But when Jones came out for the third round he was still trying. He knocked Toro off balance with a smart left jab to the mouth and followed up with a straight right that sent Toro stumbling back against the ropes. Any moment I expected to see Toro start caving in, in sections, and my lousy five per cent not worth one of Danny’s torn-up bookie tabs. It made me realise for the first time how hungry I was for that dough, just as hungry as Nick, or Vince or Luis Acosta out there on the high seas on his way home to the small-time. Just like Acosta I found myself up on my feet begging Toro to stay with him.

  Jones was getting wild now, with the disobedient urge to knock Toro out. His left hand shot over Toro’s shoulder and Toro brought up a looping right from the floor that caught Jones on the chin. It didn’t hurt Jones so much as it caught him off balance, and Toro, trying clumsily to follow up his advantage, shoved Jones with both hands, and the coloured fighter half-slipped, half-fell to the canvas. As long as he was down and the referee (with whom Vince had done a little business) began to count, Jones decided to rest on one knee until the count of six, for he was beginning to be arm-weary from throwing so many punches at his wideopen target.

  But when he aro
se at six, a towel came fluttering up out of his corner. Vince’s guy was working overtime to earn his fifty clams. Jones tried to kick the towel out of the ring and go on fighting, but the referee grabbed him and led him back to his corner. Then he came back and raised the hand of our bewildered superman. A terrible roar of protest rose from the crowd. In a second the air was full of flying cushions, programmes and bottles. Some of the fans in their wrath started breaking up their seats and hurling the pieces into the ring. With police running interference we hustled Toro back to the dressing room. With a quick fifty to the sergeant, we got away in his police car.

  ‘What happen?’ Toro asked me in innocent confusion.

  ‘Don’t worry, you won the fight fair,’ I told him. ‘It’s just that the people aren’t satisfied until they see you kill somebody. So they didn’t want the fight stopped so soon.’

  Toro smiled through his bloody lips. ‘One ponch and he goes boom,’ he said. ‘Just like first time.’

  For once in my life I had no desire to fraternise with reporters. So instead of going back to the hotel or catching a train, we went straight to a garage and hired a car. We drove up the coast until we thought we were safely out of range of the little stink bomb we had exploded and stopped at a small auto-court, or motel, as they like to call them in Cal. The guy Vince had working for us in the other corner was with us too. His name was Benny. He was one of those ex-lightweights who blow up into heavyweights as soon as they come off the training and get on the beer. As soon as Doc put Toro to bed after a warm bath and a light massage, so he’d rest easier, Benny gave us the lowdown on the little comedy (in the Greek sense) that had been going on in his corner. It was a hot night and he was on his third beer when he opened his sweat-stained shirt, revealing a fat, hairy chest on which were tattooed the words, ‘Pac. Coast lt-wt champ, 1923’, and the exaggerated nude figure of a woman called Edna embracing an Adonis-like creature in boxing trunks, boxing gloves and a sailor hat captioned Battling Benny Mannix. The Battler managed to raise the group’s morale somewhat by inhaling and exhaling his fatty diaphragm in such a way that the tattooed figures undulated together with impressive realism.