The Professional Read online

“You’re not kidding. You ever notice how he’s always pulling his head away from in close?”

  “I know. He should make up his mind whether he wants to be a fighter or look like a movie actor.”

  “I suppose.”

  There is space enough in that dressing room for the rubbing table and a couple of benches and a couple of those folding wooden chairs. There are hooks on the partitions for clothes and equipment, and there is a door leading into the men’s room. This dressing room was improvised after the men’s room, of course, so over that door there is one of those rectangular frosted-glass lights with the silhouette on it of a man in top hat and tails and looking like he might be a brother of that Johnnie Walker in the whiskey ads. When this became a fight camp, and that dressing room went up, the men’s room was enlarged just enough to hold a shower.

  “Hey there!” somebody said, and it was Polo. His right name was Tony Poli, but everyone called him Polo and he was a helpless, little sallow-skinned mouse of a man who managed Paul Schaeffer. I had seen the two of them, Schaeffer punching the big bag and Polo watching, when we first came into the gym and when we carried the foot locker through, and now he was holding the door open for big Schaeffer, who came through, red-faced and too fleshy and sweating inside a white terrycloth robe.

  “Hey, Polo, Paul,” Eddie said. “You know Frank Hughes?”

  “I know Polo,” I said, shaking hands with him, “but I’ve never met Paul.”

  “Hello,” Schaeffer said, giving me that big paw with the bandages and tape still on, and then sitting down on one of the chairs, sweating and spreading his legs. “I’m tired.”

  “That’s what I tell you,” Polo said, working with the scissors to cut the tape on Schaeffer’s right hand to unwind the dirty gym bandages. “You stay in shape, you don’t get so tired.”

  Schaeffer looked up at Eddie, his face red and wet from the exertion, and winked.

  “He thinks I’m kidding,” Polo said, turning and protesting to me, as if I were the one who was going to solve it for him.

  “When you fighting?” Eddie said.

  “A couple of weeks,” Schaeffer said.

  “He’s fighting that Irish Jimmy Locke, in Holyoke,” Polo said.

  “Are you a manager, or something?” Schaeffer said, looking up puzzled at me.

  “No,” I said, smiling. “I’m a magazine writer.”

  “Oh,” he said and then, after a pause: “That’s a good job, ain’t it?”

  “At times.”

  “What you gonna write about up here?”

  “Eddie.”

  “Yeah?” he said, and then he looked at Eddie. “That’s good.”

  “You’re going to write a magazine article about Eddie?” Polo said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you gonna write?” Schaeffer said.

  “I don’t know. I just got here, Paul.”

  “How would he know what he’s gonna write?” Polo said to Schaeffer. “How would he know that when he just come up here? Why don’t you get undressed and take your shower?”

  “Just let me sit a while, will you, Polo?” Schaeffer said.

  What a pair, I thought.

  4

  The fighters and their handlers eat together at one long table. It is just inside the doorway from the bar and also close to the kitchen. There are about a dozen smaller tables spaced around the room, several of them under the windows that look onto the lake. In each of the two far corners of the room there is another of those artificial palm trees, light-faded and dust grayed, standing in a dirt-filled dark wooden cask.

  “The steak is good, Eddie?” Katie said.

  Katie is Girot’s wife. She is a red-faced, gray-haired, smiling woman who is about the same height as Girot but about twice his size. She does the cooking and, with a couple of women who live on the hill across the road from the hotel, just about everything else in the place. Girot does the ordering and keeps the books and tends bar.

  “It’s good,” Schaeffer said. “I could eat another one.”

  “You could eat anything,” Penna said. “Besides, who’s asking you?”

  “I don’t know,” Schaeffer said, eating.

  “It’s a good steak, Katie,” Eddie said, smiling at her. “Very good.”

  “For the new champion, Eddie,” Katie said, and smiled on him again and went back to the kitchen.

  Eddie was sitting at the head of the table and Penna was sitting at his left and I was at his right. Next sat Schaeffer and Polo, opposite each other, and then Booker Boyd and Cardone, with Barnum between them, at the other end.

  “Boy, what a steak we had in Providence that afternoon, hey, Polo?” Schaeffer said.

  “Who’d you ever fight in Providence?” Penna said.

  “I don’t know,” Schaeffer said, and he looked at Polo. “Who’d I fight?”

  “Ain’t that something?” Polo said, putting his knife and fork down and talking to me. “He don’t remember the guy he fought, but he remembers the steak he ate.”

  “Well, it was a good steak,” Schaeffer said.

  “Whatta you want, Tyrone?” Penna said.

  “Throw me some toast, will you?” Cardone said.

  “Hey!” Penna said, tossing the slice of toast. “He talks. The silent one has spoke. Noisy Cardone.”

  Barnum and Booker Boyd had not been saying much, either. Once in a while Barnum would say something in a low voice to Boyd and Boyd would seem to answer in a word or two and then they would go back to eating.

  “Well,” I said. “Dumb Dan Morgan used to say that a heavyweight has to have only four moves. He has to be able to walk to the table, sit down, pull up his chair and go with both hands.”

  “He’s right,” Penna said. “Look at Schaeffer and you’re seein’ the new heavyweight champion of the world.”

  “Yeah,” Polo said, looking at me again. “Morgan thought that was funny, but he didn’t have this guy. This fat slob’s eaten into me for eleven hundred bucks by now.”

  “Tell him about the great hotel fire, too,” Penna said, laughing it.

  “Yeah, you think that’s funny, too,” Polo said, looking at him. “Some comic. Some Milton Berle.”

  “What happened?” Eddie said. “What fire?”

  “This wise guy almost burned this place down,” Polo said.

  “Who? Me?” Penna said, dropping his jaw. “I was the hero.”

  “You’re a jerk,” Polo said. “You know what he did?”

  “Not me,” Penna said.

  “Will somebody tell us what happened?” Eddie said, enjoying it.

  “Well, this guy,” Polo said, nodding at Penna, “he started a fire in a wastebasket in our room—one of them metal waste-baskets.”

  “Me?” Penna said.

  “Paul is up there taking a sleep before his workout yesterday.”

  “That’s a workout?” Penna said.

  “So this guy gets a lot of paper and junk in the wastebasket and he sets fire to it. Then he bangs on the door and hollers: ‘Fire! Fire!’”

  “I’m a hero.”

  “Then when Paul wakes up and tries to get up, this guy has tied his shoelaces together. He can’t move his feet.”

  “And then, gentlemen of the press,” Penna said, “I heard these horrible screams so, not even thinking of my own safety, I rushed into the flames and picked up the burning basket and I ran out with it and I put it in the shower and I came back and I rescued the baby and I returned it to its mother’s loving arms.”

  “Remind me to sleep with my clothes on tonight,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Eddie said, laughing though.

  “This place is all wood,” Polo said. “It would go up in a minute.”

  “Relax, relax,” Penna said. “Now I got that practice I’ll save all you dopes.”

  “Yeah,” Schaeffer said, eating. “You did it all right.”

  “I did it? Here’s a guy tryin’ to take my medals away. Why, I’m the guy saved your
appetite for the world. If I don’t save you, Schaeffer, you never eat again. Just think of that.”

  “You did it,” Schaeffer said, still eating.

  “And they bury you six feet under, and the worms eat you. What a feast! Boy, what a feast them worms got to look forward to.”

  “This kid is insane,” Polo said, nodding toward Penna again but talking to me once more. “Believe me, he’s absolutely insane.”

  “Our room still smells from that smoke,” Schaeffer said.

  “Girot gave him hell,” Polo said. “What’d he tell you?”

  “He told me I’m a hero for saving his place,” Penna said. “He told me I’ll always be first with him around here, from now on.”

  After dinner Barnum and Booker Boyd went for a walk and Polo and Schaeffer and Cardone went into the sitting room and, when I looked in, they were sitting in front of the television set, watching a news program. Eddie and Penna were in the bar, playing the pinball machine, one of those electrified quadrupeds with lights that flash on and off and a buzzer that sounds and then a bell that rings if you reach a certain total approximating Louis B. Mayer’s annual income. There seems to be an endless variety of these things, and at first glance they appear so complicated that I never play them because it would be like learning another foreign language and hardly worth it.

  “Now hit for here,” Penna was saying while Eddie was playing it, the lights blinking and the buzzer sounding. “Come down here.”

  “What do you get if you beat this monster?” I said.

  “A big hello from Conrad Hilton,” Penna said, nodding toward Girot, who was standing behind the bar.

  “If you’re drinking,” Eddie said, shooting, “you get a free shot of whatever you’re having. Us, we get two bits.”

  “So that proves Girot serves two-bit whiskey,” Penna said. “Don’t it prove that?”

  I looked at Girot. He just shook his head.

  “Let’s go to the movies,” Eddie said, watching the last ball roll down until it disappeared and the noise within the machine stopped. “What’s playin’?”

  “I seen it,” Penna said. “A good picture. Flight to Our Years. The broad in it is terrific.”

  “That’s where that song came from, isn’t it?” Eddie said.

  “‘Our love is forever,’” Penna said, raising his voice to a tenor and throwing his arms out, “‘no flighty, transient thing.’”

  “You want to go?” Eddie said to me.

  “Anything you want. I’m with you.”

  “You want to see it again, Penna?”

  “I got nothing else to do. I’ll give you a break.”

  “Be my guest,” Eddie said. “We’ll walk.”

  “The man said walk?”

  “It’s only a mile and a half,” Eddie said. “I always walk.”

  “Not me. I’m sorry,” Penna said.

  “All right,” Eddie said. “Tonight I drive, but after this we walk.”

  It was what the motion-picture critics call a Technicolor triumph, and with swelling sound. When we came in, she was emitting beauty and elegance, and he good looks and character, and they were standing in a bedroom with small-flowered white wallpaper and fluffy, snow-white curtains. It evolved that the room was in a white colonial inn, with a tall-pillared portico, and she was saying that suddenly now it all made her feel unclean, and it wasn’t supposed to be that way at all because it was supposed to be beautiful. Then he said that it wasn’t unclean, it was very beautiful, and she said that it wasn’t and then he became angered and shouted at her and she began to cry.

  Well, they made up, right there, and it eventually became clear that she was married and he was not. He was a transatlantic airline pilot, but she had a young daughter at boarding school and a husband who was older and a New York department-store head, prominent and continually busy and heading charity fund-raising drives and hoping someday to become Governor.

  It went on and on, in color, and I presume her husband thought her whole trouble was headaches, and finally there was Flight 104. Her husband had to go to Paris on business and she knew her pilot was flying 104 and did not want to go to the airport. She could see, however, that her husband wanted her to see him off and so, while the chauffeur drove them, he suggested that she was just generally rundown, dear, and that she should visit her sister in Connecticut while he was gone.

  At Idlewild airport the loud-speaker was calling Flight 104 and her husband was talking and her pilot walked by, in his uniform and cap and trench coat and carrying a brief case. He looked at her and she looked at him and her husband went on talking about what he hoped to accomplish in Paris and finally kissed her and went through the gate.

  The next morning she was having coffee and toast when her maid came in and said a gentleman was there from the airline. It took a little acting then, when the airline man said that the plane had crashed and that her husband had been killed and when she asked if there were any survivors and the airline man said there were none.

  When the airline man left he met a colleague, who was waiting in the lobby of the apartment house, and he remarked how well she took it and what a remarkable woman she was to have concern about the others on board at a time like this. In the final scene she walked out onto the terrace, high above the city, and the sky was pure blue and crossing it was a four-motor plane, silver in the sunlight, and she looked up at it and the plane was the last thing you saw as the music swelled into that song.

  “You wanna see the beginning?” Penna said, when the theater lights came on. “I can tell you the beginning.”

  “Let’s see it,” Eddie said. “It can’t be too long.”

  I had started watching the people sliding along the rows of seats and walking up the aisle and out of Neverland. I was thinking of those women, going back to their dishpans, and their men, in their plaid mackinaws, going back to their service stations or their chicken houses.

  “You want to see it, Frank?”

  “Sure, Eddie.”

  Certainly, I thought, I must see it. I must find out how Leander and Hero and Tristan and Isolde and the Prince and Rapunzel met. I am making book with myself that she dropped her glove and he said: “I believe this must belong to you.”

  They met in the canteen at the airport in Reykjavik, Iceland. There were Icelandic soldiers walking around in Russian-looking uniforms with shoulder boards and high collars, and she was flying back from Europe and he was buying a doll in native costume for his niece. She saw it and asked for one like it and it was the only one the woman running the counter had, so he insisted that she take it.

  “That was all right,” Eddie said, as the three of us walked up the small main street to his car. “I thought that was a pretty good picture.”

  “How about that broad?” Penna said. “How about a classy broad like that?”

  “You like the picture, Frank?”

  “Sure. It was fine.”

  “‘Our love is forever,’” Penna sang, raising his voice again, “‘no flighty, transient thing.’”

  Yes, probably as forever as the ocean, I thought, and the mountains and the sky and have a small cry. There is no extra charge. That is the trouble with this business. I have a right to my ego, every man has, but no, you must establish what those psychiatrists and psychologists and those social-working people call rapport. Eddie must believe that you like what he likes and that you believe what he believes and then, without realizing it, he will believe in you and you will get out of him all that is in him and the editor won’t know what it was like or that it was dishonest. He will think that you did it all with the questions and the typewriter, and why aren’t they all so clever?

  “How about that joint that broad lived in on Park Avenue?” Penna said, on the drive back. “How would you like to shack up there?”

  “Stop dreaming,” Eddie said.

  “You ever been in a joint like that, Frank?”

  “Yes. Once.”

  “What was it like?” Penna said.r />
  Trying to get to sleep that night I lay there a long while, picturing those people who made that movie.

  5

  The first two days that Eddie was in camp he slept late and just took it easy. After he had his breakfast we would take a walk and we would take another after dinner at night. The rest of the time he would play gin rummy with Polo or the pinball machine with Penna or watch television or just lie on his bed and read paper-covered westerns or the newspapers or a magazine.

  “I found out it’s good,” he said the second afternoon, lying on the bed near the windows while I stood looking out at the lake. “The last couple of years I found out it’s better if I come out two, three days early and just get away from the wife and the kid and, you know, relax.”

  It is a sort of transition period, I was thinking, a sort of interval in which to prepare to prepare, and basically sound.

  “You know,” he said. “So I can just do what I want to do.”

  “I understand. It’s bound to be good for you.”

  “I never used to do it. First day in camp I’d start to work, but now I’m getting older, I like it this way.”

  He was twenty-nine.

  “After a couple of weeks, though,” he said, “I’m thinking about getting home again.”

  “Does your wife ever come out to camp?”

  “A couple of times she did. Some friends of ours drove her out and they ate and looked around and went back. She might come out, but I call her up, two, three times a week. If she isn’t home, I talk to her mother and find out how the kid is doing.”

  “How do she and Doc get along?”

  “They never see each other.”

  “Does she like Doc?”

  “Well, my wife is kind of different. I mean, she doesn’t like everybody, and she doesn’t understand this business.”

  “Few women do.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Eddie said.

  About four o’clock the next afternoon I saw a beaten black Plymouth in the parking space, and when I went down to the bar a few minutes later, Johnny Jay was there. He was a bald little man, with a flat nose and the upper helix of his left ear slightly cauliflowered, and, with his friendly officiousness, he always seemed to be a challenge to anyone’s capacity for collecting characters. He had been a featherweight, about forty years before, and Doc Carroll’s first fighter, and he had been with Doc ever since.