The Harder They Fall

by Budd Schulberg

  Toro, unconvinced, finally went to bed and I returned to the hotel. It was a little before three when Fernando called me again. Toro had disappeared. He must have sneaked out into the corridor while they thought he was sleeping. He had left with a suitcase and his portable radio, which would seem as if he was leaving for good

  I tracked Nick down at the Bolero, an East-Side nightclub the syndicate owned. He was surprisingly calm. I had forgotten that essentially he was a man of action. He rose to occasions like this. ‘No, don’t call the police,’ he said, answering my question. ‘It would look too lousy. Might hurt the gate. We’ll find him ourselves. I’ll send some of the boys out. He’s too well known to get very far.’

  Nick’s boys checked all the outlets of the city, the stations, airports and bus terminals, to see if Toro had bought a ticket. Fernando remembered that Toro had made some kind of a threat to go back to Argentina alone if he had to. So Benny, Jock Mahoney, Vince, the Killer and I drove to the waterfront in the white Lincoln. We cruised past the docks of all the lines that had ships going to South America. We asked the watchmen if they had seen him. One of them told us that the American Fruit Company had a freighter leaving in the morning for Buenos Aires – at Pier Six. We rushed down. We stopped at the entrance to the pier, and all of us got out and looked around. There was only a quarter moon and the waterfront was draped in a grey-black fog. The lights on the freighter looked yellow and blurred.

  Suddenly Benny called out, ‘Hey, I think I see the bastard.’ He sprinted toward the huge sliding door that blocked the entrance to the pier. We followed him. It was Toro, all right. He must have been waiting for the gate to open in the early morning. He started running when he saw us. I joined the chase with the others. I was part of the pack running the quarry down. Toro’s movements were as ponderous outside the ring as in. Jock and the Killer caught up with him quickly, grabbed at him and slowed him down. Benny, Vince and I ran up and surrounded him. Toro tried to break out of the circle, but Benny held him from behind, and Jock and Vince closed in from the sides. Toro shook them off, and for a moment he was free, but he had only taken a few steps when they were on him again. He cursed us in Spanish and kept shouting, ‘Ya me voy. Ya me voy,’ I’m going. The Killer reached up and drove his small fist into Toro’s face. Toro roared and wrenched his shoulders back and forth to break our grips but we held on and began to drag him toward the car. He struggled furiously against being pushed back into his Lincoln. In the darkness our milling figures, above which he towered, must have looked like ancient hunters grappling with some prehistoric beast. Suddenly the great beast went limp, and we half-pushed, half-lifted him into the car. Benny slipped his blackjack back into his pocket. ‘The son-of-a-bitch won’t lam no more tuh-night,’ he said.

  Next morning I talked things over with Nick. He was leaving for Florida that afternoon. ‘Tell you what you do,’ he said. ‘Take the big dope and the two greaseballs and go out and have some fun. The Killer will get you all the gash you want. Do anything as long as you don’t let that big bum knock up a high-school girl or get himself a dose. When he’s had his fun, take him out to the country and start training. Maybe that’s what he needs to get over this Lennert business.’ He gave me a thick roll of bills. ‘That oughta cover it. Entertainment. I’ll get Leo to take it off the income tax.’

  Pepe liked the idea and there was nothing Fernando wouldn’t do for his country. So we started that afternoon. Pepe broke out a case of champagne and the Killer sent up six girls, including a couple of spares, in case some of them went flat, he said. What we started that afternoon may have lasted a week or maybe it went for three, I never knew for sure. I think I remember Pepe betting Toro a hundred dollars he couldn’t drink a bottle of champagne without stopping and Toro falling asleep on the floor and Pepe having one of the girls wake him up in a way that made us laugh. I think I remember all of us breaking in on Fernando and catching him in his BVDs, the old-fashioned kind, shoes, socks and garters, looking like the straight man in a pornographic movie. It seems to me there was a showgirl of Amazonian proportions sent up expressly for Toro, and I think we all watched and cheered them on. There was a night in Philadelphia, or maybe it was Boston, for I guess we were moving around, when we all seemed to be in a large bed together. I think it must have been in a house because I vaguely remember a mirror on the ceiling. There was a girl named Mercedes who came from Juarez and claimed to be one of Pancho Villa’s numerous daughters, who taught us, among other things, the Mexican anthem, and there seemed to be an endless switching of partners and good-natured comparing of notes. There were girls who were spiritlessly accommodating and there were girls who were impersonally tempestuous. There were girls who would submit to the most extreme indignities but would not allow their ears to be assaulted with profanity. There were girls who did not hesitate to assume conventional postures but primly drew the line at variations. And there were girls who indulged in entertainments that are not to be described. For some reason I remember a girl named Olive who talked a lot about her little son, Oliver, and who, at the moment when it could be least appreciated, suddenly burst into tears. I remember a pretty little Irish girl who wouldn’t go into the bedroom with Toro because he frightened her. And there was a prematurely grey woman of obvious breeding whom we picked up in the hotel lounge falling down drunk and who confided to me that she had had a secret yen for Toro from the first time she read about him. There was the morning I came downstairs for breakfast and found it was dark outside and already time for cocktails. I went back to our rooms and there was Toro, nude, asleep on a bed. Fernando was snoring in the other bed. He looked very ugly with his bloated face and his squat, hairy body in his underwear. But Toro, even in that dishevelled hotel room, among the stale glasses and the mashed cigarette butts, didn’t belong in the backwash of a debauch. He was too big for the room, too big for the bed, stretched prone like a tremendously larger-than-life statue that had somehow come loose from its base and toppled over. I wondered if I should wake Toro, so he could eat something. Fernando could lie there until he rotted, for all I cared. I wondered where Pepe was. I was pretty wide awake for so early in the morning. Or was it evening? Awake. A wake. A wake for Gus Lennert. We are really having us a wake, Gus. I’m awake, a wake, a wake for Gus Lennert. The Mexican Indians bury their dead and get drunk in the cemetery and sing songs and tell bawdy stories and have themselves a time. And who is to say there’s a better way? But that is a pure wake, like the drunken wake of the Irish, and this is a lewd wake, a wake for the depraved and degraded, a wake to call forth devils and summon witches, a stewed crude nude lewd debauch of a wake, to copulate ourselves into such deadening stupor that we no longer see the self-accusing fingers of guilt pointing at our eyes.

  Toro was lying on the bed in his immense nakedness. It was evening instead of morning and I was wondering if I should rouse him. He was sleeping heavily. As I watched, he rolled over on his side. ‘Ya me voy, Papá. Ya me voy,’ he was muttering. Let him sleep, I thought, let him sleep, let him think he’s home.

  When I came out of it, I didn’t know where I was. The inside of my mouth felt like lumpy cotton and a maddening tom-tom was beating in my head. ‘Take this,’ Doc said. ‘It’ll settle your stomach.’ It wasn’t my stomach coming up; it was remorse. I could feel it heaving up from my belly, that terrible, dragging, end-it-all sense of remorse. The restless succession of women, no more remembered than chain-smoked cigarettes, Fernando with his garters, the daily seduction of Toro Molina, the whole empty, frenetic saturnalia closed in and threatened to crush me.

  A picture on the bureau came slowly into focus. It was staring at me, a nice, cool face, staring at me. My picture of Beth. I was in my own room. ‘Where is everybody?’ I said.

  ‘You saw Pepe off at the boat last night,’ Doc said. ‘He’s coming back with a crowd in time for the Stein fight. Fernando has gone out to Pompton Lakes with Molina. We’ll just sweat him out the next couple of weeks.’

  ‘How about Danny
?’

  ‘Danny’s down there too. But I don’t think we better count on Danny too much. Danny’s been on the flit so long he’s sweating alcohol.’

  Doc put his hand on my forehead and then he felt my pulse. His hands were amazingly alive, damp and nervous, and yet strangely reassuring.

  ‘Thanks, Doc.’

  But I guess I didn’t have to thank him. Doc liked to play doctor.

  I didn’t bother going out to the camp very often. Nothing much was happening there. When you visit a camp you can tell right away what the morale is, whether the place is taut and businesslike, or loused up with lushes and gamblers, whether it’s dully methodical, slothful and lackadaisical or keyed-up and confident. The atmosphere around Toro was listless. Usually it’s either the purpose of the manager or the energy of the fighter that sparks a camp. But this time Danny was squandering his time and his money in the grog shops and the horse rooms and Toro walked through his workouts like a somnambulist.

  When he talked about Toro, George shook his bronze-moulded head. ‘I’m worried about him,’ he told me. ‘He fights like a zombie. He just ain’t there at all. That’s no way to get ready for Stein. The big fella’s gotta be up to stay in there with Stein.’

  I went out again for the last workout before they came into town and I could see why George was worried. This kid, Gussman, giving away around eighty pounds, had to pull up so he wouldn’t knock Toro’s head off right in front of the reporters. Toro was hog-fat in the belly because Fernando had more or less taken over the camp by default, and let the big slob put away too much fattening food.

  The day before the fight there wasn’t a hotel room to be had in New York. Fans had driven in from all over the country. A delegation from Stein’s home town came in on a special train, with everybody from the Mayor to the favourite madam, and took over a midtown hotel. Variety’s list of ‘Ins’ was almost twice as long as on an ordinary Wednesday. Pepe and his Argentine delegation of assorted millionaires, politicos and playboys staged a big luncheon at the Ritz. The Argentine Consul General welcomed his countrymen, and Fernando spoke for the Argentine Athletic Association. The Giant of the Andes was rising in the fistic firmament, he said, just as Argentina herself, the land of giants, was rising in the Pan-American firmament. They must have applauded that one for two full minutes. Throughout all the speeches Toro’s name was waved like a flag, the blue-and-white of our contentious neighbour to the south. Then Toro was called on to say a few words. His face was stolid. There was no belligerence in him, nationalistic or otherwise. ‘I do my best,’ he said. ‘Then I go home.’

  All the Broadway restaurants were full of guys talking fight, laying or taking the nine to five on Stein. There must have been an easy million ready to change hands by six o’clock.

  By seven there was already a tremendous crowd milling around the ball park. There was the last-minute scramble for tickets, the scalping, the squatters’ rush for the unreserved section, the gamblers working the suckers right up to the opening gong. Walking up and down in front of one of the entrances was a blind man with a tin cup and a sandwich sign over his shoulders. ‘Kid Fargo,’ it said, ‘Former Heavyweight Contender. Used to Spar with Jack Dempsey.’

  The smart money was going on Stein because it had to ride with him until he was licked. There hadn’t been a puncher like him since Dempsey. But there was plenty of Molina money, from people impressed by mere size, ballyhoo and the manslaughter of Gus Lennert.

  Lumbering into the ring were the first of the brace of muscular mediocrities Uncle Mike always foisted on his public when he knew the main attraction was so good he didn’t have to bolster it with expensive preliminaries. The Stadium was a sell-out, all the way up to the gallery gods on the top tier who paid five dollars for the privilege of being able to say that they had attended a ring classic. And even above them were the thousands of curious bargain hunters who paid top-storey dwellers a dollar to watch the spectacle from the windows or rooftops. And beyond them were the millions of radio listeners in swank metropolitan apartments, lower middle-class homes, slums, small-town houses and farms from coast to coast.

  The ringside – or what Uncle Mike cagily called ringside – fanned out for three hundred rows, a true cross-section of the prosperous, including the Governor, the Mayor, the Chief of Police, Broadway headliners, Hollywood stars, and all the representatives of the best legal and illegal rackets, the Wall Street boys, industrial tycoons, the socialites, insurance men, advertising executives, judges, prominent lawyers, big-time gamblers and the top mobsters who never get their name in the papers. Nobody who was anybody was missing a chance to be seen at ringside.

  The crowd was laughing at the antics of two barrel-chested incompetents who were waltzing through the curtain-raiser. ‘Turn out the lights, they wanna be alone,’ a big voice bellowed from the mezzanine. It still got laughs. Someone ought to write new material for the fight fans. The same old saws to express the old derision, the displeasure with bloodless, painless, actionless battle. ‘Can I have the next dance?’ … ‘What we got, da Ballet Russe?’ … ‘Are you bums brother-in-laws?’ … ‘Careful, you goils might hoit each other!’ But the protests were still relaxed and good-natured. The crowd was working up to its excitement slowly. The catcalls were still without real contempt. The most high-tensioned of all American sports crowds hadn’t roused itself yet. It was still behaving as if this were merely a sport.

  I went back to the dressing room to see Toro. Fernando and George were helping him get ready. Danny was there too. He was mumbling. He was trying to tell Toro something. But Fernando pushed him away. Toro removed his clothes slowly, as if reluctant to change into a fighter again. He didn’t say anything to me when I came in. He wasn’t saying anything to anybody.

  ‘I think he’s full of geezer tonight,’ Doc whispered to me. ‘He’s had the trots all day.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just scared this’ll be another Lennert,’ I said.

  ‘I just hope it isn’t the other way,’ Doc said.

  Pepe came in with some of his Argentine pals. They all made a fuss over Toro, gave him the big embrace, told him how much money they had going on him and went out to enjoy the semi-final. They were full of ready laughter and carefree rooting-section enthusiasm. Toro didn’t say anything to them. It was just as George said: he wasn’t really there at all.

  Nick came in with the Killer and Barney Winch. All three were wearing tailored camel-hair topcoats. Toro was sitting on the table in his bathrobe. Doc was rubbing his back.

  Nick set himself in front of Toro. ‘Listen, you bum,’ he said in a hard, quiet voice. ‘I just wanted to let you know something. My wife’s told me all about you.’

  Toro looked up slowly, waiting for the blow like a slaughter-house steer.

  ‘She told me you came over to the house one day and tried to get fresh with her. I ought to kick your head in, you double-crossing crud, you. But I don’t have to take the trouble. This fight tonight is the first one you ever fought for me on the dead square. So I don’t have to mess up my manicure on you. I can just sit out there in the front row and have the pleasure of seeing Stein beat your goddam brains out. I hope he kills you.’

  He slapped Toro once sharply across the face. Toro just stared at him. For several minutes after they went out, Toro continued to stare stupidly into space. Chick Gussman, who was fighting the six-round special, came in after a win by TKO in three, exhilarated by his showing. He tapped Toro playfully and said, ‘Looks like a big night for the Latka stable, kid.’ But Toro didn’t even see him. The semi-final was over, in a hurry, and it was Toro’s turn to go down. For the first time since I could remember Danny wasn’t in shape to work the corner, so Vince took over with Doc and George, who was holding the bottles.

  ‘Well, good luck, Toro.’ I tried to put something into it, but my voice sounded flat and hollow. My hand was extended and Toro took it in a soft handshake. That was when I noticed he was trembling.

  Buddy Stein entered the ring first.
The crowd roared and screamed its approval as he danced around in a blue silk bathrobe with a white bath towel draped over his head. He reached down over the ropes with his taped hands and shook hands with lots of people, Jack Dempsey, Bing Crosby, Sherman Billingsley … A beautiful blonde in the third row pursed her lips as if she were kissing him, and he winked. There were more women than usual tonight. Both fighters were good draws with women. Stein was dark, curly-haired, unusually handsome for a fighter. He had one of those broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped builds, tapering down to surprisingly graceful legs. He was a vain bully boy with the personality of a show-off and the stage presence of the matinee idol accustomed to adoration. He had often been complimented on his smile – the Stein grin, it was called sometimes – though actually it was the nasty smile of a man who had found a way of channelling his natural cruelty into a profitable career.

  In spite of the hamming and clowning with the crowd, Stein was a serious practitioner of assault and battery, trained to a sharp fighting edge. He pranced around the ring with an ominous, pent-up vigour, warming up with short, shadow-boxing hooks that shot viciously into the air.

  The reception for Toro was friendly but reserved, and there were a few scattered boos from sceptics and from old Lennert fans who clung to the primitive notion that the ex-champion’s death was in some way due to an excess of brutality on Toro’s part. Actually, as Doc and George pulled off his flashy bathrobe, I was reminded once more of the enormity of the joke nature had played on this giant. His colossal shoulders, bulging muscles and record chest expansion would seem too great an advantage against even the most formidable opponent, and yet his menacing physique contained a gentle, placid disposition with less fighting instinct than the average ten-year-old boy, and considerably less aptitude.