NEXT MORNING, WHILE TORO went to church with Ruby, I took Acosta up to see Nick. With nothing else to write about, the sports pages had given Toro a big play, with one write-up spotting Acosta’s running patter of exhortation through the ropes. This public recognition fattened his pride. All the way out to Beverly Hills I had to listen to his vainglorious variations on an already too-familiar theme. “You see, Luis tol’ the truth when he say El Toro will make us all very rich and famous,” Acosta said as we walked along the row of palm trees to Nick’s bungalow.
Nick was having breakfast with the Killer in the patio. He was sitting in his monogrammed bathrobe, smoking a cigar and reading the papers. Acosta gave him his cordial little bow and his most ingratiating smile and began to word one of those flattering greetings when Nick cut him off. Nick always took the quick way.
“Killer, did you find out when that boat leaves for Buenos Air-ees?” he said.
“Thursday midnight from Pedro,” Killer said.
“That’s the boat you go home on,” Nick said.
Acosta looked at him unbelievingly. “Please? I do not understan’…”
Nick looked at me. “You wanna tell him in his own language?”
“No, no,” Acosta said, desperate-eyed, “I understan’ the English. It is just that I do not understan’…”
“Well, if you understand English, that’s it,” Nick said. “Thursday at midnight we put you on the boat.”
“No, no, I will not go. You cannot do this. I belong with El Toro. I stay with him!” Acosta cried.
“Shhh,” Nick quieted him with his hand. “This is a classy joint. The guy next door is a bigshot. What d’ya want him to think I am, a bum?”
“But El Toro and I, we come together, we stay together, or he goes back with me,” Acosta insisted.
“That’s not the way it’s gonna be,” Nick said quietly. “Jimmy Quinn and me, we own Molina. If you want to take your five percent back with you, that’s your business. But ninety-five stays here with me.”
“But he’s mine. He belongs to me. You took him from me. You cannot push me out like this,” Acosta screamed.
“We put you on the boat Thursday night,” Nick said.
“But why you make me go?” Acosta demanded. “What I do, what I do wrong?”
“You’re a pest,” Nick said. “You’re not satisfied to sit back and take your lousy five percent.”
The blood of anger was rising into Acosta’s face. “I stay here,” he yelled, “I fight. I see a lawyer. I get El Toro back.”
Nick calmly poured himself another cup of coffee. “No, you go Thursday. Your visa runs out next week. You can’t get an extension on your work visa because we don’t need you. My partner’s already explained that to a friend of his who’s got an in with the State Department. So we only got an extension for Molina. My bookkeeper’ll mail you your five percent.”
I was sitting off a little to one side, watching the conflict rise to its sorry climax as if it were a play I was seeing from a front-row seat. It would have been nice if my involvement in the action had been cut off cleanly at the fall of the third-act curtain. Nice, but unprofitable. No, I wasn’t in the audience, I was on stage, no matter how close to the wings I tried to inch my chair.
“No visa,” Acosta said, the fight gone out of him, pursing his small lips as if he were going to cry. “You fix it so I get no visa. You fix it so I must leave El Toro here.” The little eyes were moist with frustration now. The jaunty arrogance, the elaborate self-importance had been torn away from him, leaving him as small and scrawny and absurdly pathetic as a defeathered bluejay.
“Now I’ll tell you what I’m going to do for you,” Nick said. “I’m going to give you a five-thousand-dollar advance against your percentage. You’ll get that in cash on the boat Thursday if you tell Toro you want him to stay here with us and that we’ll look after him. Have we got a deal?”
Acosta looked at him dully.
“Don’t forget, if you don’t tell Toro, he stays, and you go just the same,” Nick said. “Only without the five G’s.”
“I understan’,” Acosta said.
I couldn’t look at his face. Somehow I had the crazy feeling my complicity would increase the more I looked at that face.
“Well, you want that dough?” Nick said. His voice was unemotional, business-like. “Is it a deal?”
Acosta nodded slowly, almost as if he had become disinterested. “All right, a deal,” he said with the boredom of the defeated.
Nick indicated me with his cigar. “Eddie’ll sit in with you when you tell Toro,” he told Acosta. “Just so I’ll know.”
Acosta turned around to include me in his distrust of Nick. I could feel myself being dragged from the wings onto the middle of the stage. I looked down at my lap. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, that I wouldn’t have done this, that I understood what identifying himself with Toro had meant to him. But what was the percentage? Was there any use dealing myself out of Nick’s favor when I couldn’t do anything for Acosta anyway?
Some day, if I played my cards right, things would be different. By then, maybe I’d have bought myself enough time off to finish my play. And if it clicked, Beth and I could…But meanwhile, here in the hot sun of the patio in Beverly Hills, things were happening the way Nick wanted them to happen and all I could do was vote Ja.
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 good-byes 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 re-read the account of last night’s fight. I had done a little business with the guy who had the by-line, 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 percent, 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 good-bye 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 colored 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 systematized consecration of the athlete. He was lethargic and moody and dreaded the sweaty monotony of roadwork 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 learned 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 by-line, 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 pile-driver, 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 super-human 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 colored 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 realized 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 realized 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 blood-thirsty 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’ corner seemed to be doing plenty of talking. He was leaning through the ropes with his sweaty, larcenous face close to Jones’ 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 percent not worth one of Danny’s torn-up bookie tabs. It made me realize 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 smalltime. 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 colored 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 wide-open target.
But when he arose 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, programs 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 fraternize 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.
“This jig comes back after the first round cocky as hell, see,” Benny began in an injured tone. “ ‘Christ, I didn’ know that big fella was such a bum,’ he says. ‘An’ I thought I was layin’ down to save myself punishment.’
“ ‘Don’t get no fancy ideas,’ I tells him, ‘or you’ll get a helluva lot more punishment ’n you figured on.’
“But when the jig goes out for round two, he’s still full of wrong ideas, see? ‘This guy’s got nothin’,’ he says, ‘I c’n stiffen this guy. The hell with them five C’s,’ he says to Mathews. ‘We c’n make more flattening this joker.’
“Well, I tries to tell him if he keeps up the wise talk he’s sucking around for a hole in the head, but the jig don’t scare so easy. He’s got this giant-killin’ on his mind. So when I’m massagin’ him I try to squeeze his muscles so they’ll go dead on him and when I wipe off his face I accidentally rub some alcohol in his eyes, so when we send him out for Three he’s brushing his eyes and he ain’t quite the weisenheimer he was when he came in from Two. But even then he’s beatin’ your guy real bad when he goes down from that slip. So I figures, what the hell, this jig is just wrong enough to get up off the floor and belt the big jerk out. So I sees my chance and throws in the towel.”
Danny sucked out the last of a pint bottle of rye. “I don’ like it,” he said. “Twen’y years in the racket I never have a run-in with the Commish. All that’s gotta happen now is I lose my license.”
“Aah, shet up your bellyachin’,” Vince said. “Always cryin’ about your goddam license. Shove the commissions, both of ’em. Leave Jimmy and Nick take care of ’em.”
“But damn it, if you’re gonna set these fights up, why don’t you do it right?” Danny demanded. “The woods are full of bums ready to fall down for a price. But you, the great fixer, gotta pick a guy who likes to win.”
“Aah, go shove yourself, spithead,” Vince said in rebuttal. “What am I, a mind reader for Chrisake? How the hell should I know what goes on in that dinge’s double-crossin’ brain?”
“If I lose my license, I’m dead,” Danny said. “You, you can always go back to pimping.”
“Why you son-of-a-bitch!” Profanity spewed from Vince’s fleshy mouth as he lunged heavily toward Danny, starting a wild punch that Danny blocked neatly. Danny made no effort to retaliate as Benny, George, Doc and I grabbed parts of Vince’s aroused anatomy and pulled him away.
“Never do that,” Danny said quietly, his face strangely white, his thin lips drawn to an angry line.
“Yeah, well, no jerk is gonna call me them names like that,” Vince blubbered.
“Whatta you wanna do, wake Molina?” Doc said. “Let the guy sleep. He needs his sleep.”
“Aah, shove him too,” Vince said. He settled back on the couch with a crumpled copy of Crime he had picked up on the train down to San Diego.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette in peace. Across the highway the surf pounded on the beach with relentless monotony. The sky was clear and moonlit. Looking up into it, the tension of the smoke-filled Motel room seemed as foolish and far away as an argument you had with your brother when you were eight. In a few minutes George Blount came out and joined me. “Man, oh, man!” he said and chuckled softly.
“One of these days Danny’s going to clip him,” I said.
“Mister McCuff’s like me,” George said. “Don’ want to fight nobody ’cept for money.”
“Why do you think it is, George?” I said. “Why is it most you guys don’t go in for these grudge matches?”
“I don’ know,” George laughed. “Maybe you go roun’ punchin’ fellows and catchin’ punches so long you just get it all outa your system. Maybe every man’s got just so many punches in him and when you get rid of ’em all in the ring you just don’t want to hit nobody no more.”
I walked down the road a quarter of a mile or so with him, not saying much of anything but conscious as always of his deep serenity.
“Boy, we really stank up the joint tonight,” I said.
“That fella oughta go home,” George said. “That fella oughta go home before something bad happen.”
That was easy to say, when all you were getting out of it were three squares and a little pocket-money. But Toro Molina had already turned them away in two cities. He was an oil well just beginning to come in and you don’t turn off a profitable flow just because your hands are getting a little dirty, not where I come from.
As soon as we read the papers next morning we knew we had troubles. The State Boxing Commission had tied up the purses of both fighters, pending an investigation. The fight we had lined up for Oakland was postponed. Toro couldn’t read the papers well enough to learn what had happened, so at least he was happy. Only he wanted to know where the money was that he had earned. Vince slipped him fifty dollars. He had never had a large American bill of his own and he seemed content with it. “Feefty bocks, hokay,” he kept saying.
You could have chipped the air up for ice cubes when Nick came in.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “this is great. This is just great. This is just what we needed, like a hole in the head.”
Vince started to blubber and bluster through an explanation, but Nick’s hard, sharp voice knifed through his defense.
“I’m not inarested,” he said. “When I was a kid I learned one thing and I learned it good. Never do nothing halfass. Whatever it is, if you’re gonna do it, do it. The kid who stole an apple off the pushcart and ran away, he’s the dope the cop always caught. The guy who followed the old man home, bopped him in the hallway and took his whole goddam pushcart, he’s the one who got away. That’s been a principle with me ever since. Like this build-up we’re giving Molina. You say you slipped the nigger two-fifty to lay down. (It had been five hundred when I heard it, but maybe Vince held out the other half.) Hell, make it worth his while. It’s worth it to us. Don’t be a piker. Think big. Give ’em a grand. Only give it to ’em after the fight. No dive, no dough. You got that? Now this time I let it go. Maybe this sun is making me soft in the head, but I let it go. Next time you fumble you’re out on your ass.”
“Yeah, but we gotta contract,” Vince pouted.
“Sure we gotta contract,” Nick agreed. “But give me trouble and see how quick I tear up the contract. I got Max Stauffer,” he said, mentioning the Darrow of corruption. “You louse me up and rightaway Max has ten reasons why the contract’s no good that’ll stand up in court.” He opened his closet drawer and paused discriminatingly over his impressive collection of hand-painted ties. “Now screw, both of you,” he said. “Pat Drake is bringing a couple of big men over from the studio, and you guys don’t look dressed good enough.”
The investigation dragged on for a couple of weeks and I had a job on my hands trying to make it look as good as possible in the papers. One of the things working for us was the convincing way Toro reacted to the charges. “Me no fight feex,” he insisted. “I no crook. I try hard.”
Vince also expressed indignation that his professional integrity should be impugned. The whole thing wound up with the Commission exonerating Toro and his managers completely, but finding Benny Mannix guilty and suspending his license to second fighters in the State of California for twelve months. Benny had admitted throwing in the towel because he had placed a large bet on Toro, which he was afraid he might lose. This handful of verbal sand in the eyes of the Commission hiked our overhead up five hundred bucks, which was Benny’s price for taking the rap. The Commission ruling was only binding so far as California was concerned, so Vince sent Benny on to Las Vegas, where we had a date with a full-blooded Indian Miniff had dug up for us by the name of Chief Thunderbird. Chief Thunderbird, Miniff was insisting with characteristic whimsicality, was the heavy-weight champion of New Mexico.
Now that the Commission loosened the strings on the San Diego purse, Toro wanted his money. He wanted to send a chunk home to the family in Santa Maria. He wanted them to realize down there what a rich man he was becoming in North America. But Vince explained to him that there couldn’t be any pay-off until Nick’s bookkeeper Leo figured out Toro’s net take after over-head and managerial cuts had been deducted. “Meanwhile here’s another fifty,” Vince said. “Any time you need money, just ask me.”
Toro was very pleased. He had all the money he wanted. All he had to do was ask Vince. And as soon as his percentage was figured out, he would send enough to his father to begin building that home that was going to put the de Santos mansion to shame. Perhaps he would even go back for a vacation—I held out the hope that this was possible when he was well-enough established—and sanctify his relationship with the lovely Carmelita.
While we were waiting for the Commission to make up their minds about that San Diego business, I was walking down Spring Street with Toro one afternoon. Toro could never go by a music store without stopping to press his nose against the window and gaze wonderingly at the radios, phonographs and musical instruments. This time he said, “I come back pronto,” and darted into a music store. In a few minutes he returned with a portable radio in his hand, loudly broadcasting a swing band. “Feefty dollar. I buy,” Toro said happily. People kept turning around to stare at us, not only for Toro’s size but for the volume of the unexpected music.
“Toro, turn that thing off,” I said. “Nobody plays a radio in the street.”
“I like carry music,” Toro said.
Beth should see me now, I thought, playing nursemaid to an elephantine idiot. Everywhere we went, Toro carried that silly radio around, always turned on with the volume up. When we went to a restaurant he placed it tenderly on an empty chair and smiled at it lovingly as he ate while it filled the room with the nasal music of cowboy songs. “In Santa Maria no music in box,” he said. “I bring back many to my village for give away.”
I don’t think Toro knew there was any way of changing those bills. You either had to buy something for fifty dollars, it seemed to him, or you might as well throw it way. He blew the second fifty all at once in the arcade of the hotel and hurried to show me his latest acquisition. It was a tiny gold key in a miniature heart-shaped gold lock.
“Who’s this for?” I said.
“For Señora Latka,” he said.
I looked at it more closely. On the back of the lock was engraved in small letters, “The key to my heart.”
“You can’t give her this,” I said.
“Why not?” Toro wanted to know. “She nice lady. I like very much.”
“Her husband likes her very much too,” I said.
“I like her too,” Toro protested. “She nice to me. Good lady. Go to church every Sunday.”
Well, finally there was nothing to do about it but take him up to Beverly Hills, so he could present his little trinket to Ruby. Nick was out playing golf with Pat Drake, as it happened, and she was home alone. Although the sun was shining, we found her inside drinking her way through a batch of side-cars. “Why, Toro, that’s sweet of you, that’s awfully sweet of you,” she said, and she pinned the locket over her heart in a provocative gesture.
While I drank along with her for a little while, Toro just sat there silently staring at her in simple-minded shamelessness. She was a stunning woman, with the agelessness of the full-blown voluptuary. Though her behavior was above reproach and almost studiously lady-like, I wondered if it was the influence of the side-cars which made me sense that Toro’s presence was stimulating her to a more animated charade than usual.
Just as we were leaving, Nick came in with Pat Drake and he seemed pleased to be able to show off his giant protégé to the film star. If he were at all disturbed by Toro’s present to Ruby there was no hint of it in his reaction. “The guy shows pretty classy taste,” he said good-naturedly, looking at the locket. He poked Toro playfully in the ribs. “All set for that guy in Oakland, Man Mountain?”
“I ponch. He go boom,” Toro said.