Champion of the World (25 page)

“This is ridiculous,” Stettler said. “They did right to lock him up the first time. You think we want another Jack Johnson on our hands?”

O'Shea ignored him. “It seems like a lot of trouble for one guy on a long-shot comeback,” he said. “A long way to travel, even if it is your home state.”

Mundt had worked a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and now he grimaced around it. “Taft's wife is white,” he said, and everybody around the table momentarily lost control of their eyebrows. “I'm not sure his stint in prison taught him any manners. He struts around like he's still above the rules. At the moment I've got him in a rooming house in the second ward, but even there he's made trouble.”

“I see,” O'Shea said. “And you think he'll do better somewhere more isolated, is that it?” Eddy wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Was he sympathizing with Mundt, who was now nodding in such extravagant agreement that Eddy was worried his head might topple off his shoulders?

“I need to get him out of the city,” Mundt said. “Someplace out of the way where we can work on getting him ready to return to the ring without distractions.”

Stettler shook his head, one strand of black hair falling out of place across his forehead. He smoothed it back with his palm and said, “Lesko will never wrestle a Negro. Even if I wanted him to—which of course I do not—I couldn't convince him. He knows as well as any of us the public would never accept the idea of a black champion.”

“You underestimate yourself, Billy,” O'Shea said. Then, to Mundt: “You've piqued my curiosity, Mr. Mundt. Let's say such a place exists. What's in it for you?”

Mundt set his shoulders back. He needed an initial investment, he said. He needed a cash loan sizable enough to buy a good place and to keep a wrestling camp up and running for a few months. After that, he'd take care of the rest. His contacts in Canada would have no trouble supplying them, but they'd need to be paid, of course. Mundt would want his fair share of the profits from any resulting wrestling match, the mention of which still made Stettler frown. When it came time to sell off the liquor, Mundt would want a forty
percent stake. That seemed reasonable, he said, a hopeful tone in his voice, like he was still trying to convince himself.

The furthest O'Shea was willing to go at that first meeting was to say he'd think about it. They all shook hands, with Stettler still furious, and he stormed out of the office after a short, hushed exchange with O'Shea. Mundt thanked Eddy for the legwork, and he spent the next five minutes working himself over with a dry handkerchief before he felt halfway clean again. The wrestler left aglow, having accomplished more than even he could realistically have anticipated.

When the two of them were finally alone, Eddy approached O'Shea at the sideboard and poured them both stiff drinks. “You can't be serious,” Eddy said. “Even if you believe Mundt is on the level, it's totally impractical. A complete fantasy.”

“Probably I'm not,” O'Shea said in a lighthearted way that made Eddy think he was considering it. “But it's an interesting flight of fancy.”

“What about Stettler?” Eddy asked. “Isn't the point of a wrestling camp to—”

“Jimmy,” O'Shea cut him off. “Let me deal with Billy Stettler. You just keep your head down and keep plugging along. You're doing great work out there.”

As he left the office, Eddy's last image of O'Shea was his friend leaning back against the sideboard, his nose hovering above the rim of his glass, one hand tugging on an ear.

Now, as he put his boots back on and crept between the shards of the broken glass paperweight, Eddy knew his fate had been sealed after that first meeting. Maybe even before that. Maybe O'Shea had always been looking for a way to get rid of him, and Fritz Mundt had merely given him an excuse. Picking up the pieces of glass with the tips of his fingers, he set them carefully in the bottom of the
wastepaper basket. Mundt, he thought. O'Shea. This place. It felt like he had been through a lot for it to end here, in the middle of nowhere, chaperoning the idiot Canadians and trying to keep a man like Garfield Taft from killing himself.

Pulling open the bottom drawer of his desk, he stood for a long time looking down at the kitchen pot containing the papers he'd taken from Howard Livermore. There was another life in there, he thought. A different man living in a different place. He wanted to take the forms out and hold them. He wanted to burn the figures into his memory, parsing through the small pamphlet Livermore had given him with measurements and schematics, but he didn't dare open the lid. He didn't dare touch.

Instead, he got out his stationery and his pen and started writing a letter to John Torrio.

S
he slept in fits and when she woke he was still there, sitting in a chair with his forearms resting on the tiny table. Seeing him in the purple light of morning, the sheer bulk of him making the cabin seem full to bursting, Moira knew neither of them had been thinking quite straight the night before. Her ears had still been ringing from the gunfire, her mind buzzing from the encounter in the road when Taft followed her into the cabin and locked the door behind them. She hadn't expected him to do that, but she also couldn't very well send him back out into the night with those men. Instead, she had just gone to the table and lit a cigarette while Taft stood in the doorway looking at the meager clutter of their quarters. She could tell it amused him they were living this way while he and Carol Jean had their own room in the lodge.

“I hope you haven't gotten the wrong idea about me,” she had said.

“I'm sorry?” he said, taking two steps inside to stand with his hands on the back of a chair. “You think I came inside hoping to look after more than just your safety, is that it?”

When he smiled she could see the scar tissue shining in his brows and a little triangular dent in the middle of his nose. They had not known each other long—maybe they still didn't know each other at
all—but something seemed familiar about him. He was confident and easy in his manners, the kind of man who was used to getting what he wanted from women.

“Well,” she said, “I'm sure I didn't mean to imply anything untoward.”

“What
did
you mean to imply?”

“Fine,” she said, “maybe I was being unpleasant. Maybe I think you resent it that my husband was hired to be your coach. Maybe I think you might like the idea of getting over on him by having it off with his wife.”

He laughed, a clapping sound so loud in all the quiet that they both glanced out the window toward the lodge to see if anyone had heard.

“In that case, it wasn't me who had the wrong idea,” he said. He pulled out the chair and sat. “I was out for my walk. It seemed like you were having trouble with those men, so I stopped to see about it. That's all.”

She stayed on her feet, leaning on the opposite wall just to put some distance between them. “Who is Dr. Paulson?” she said.

“Who?”

“Outside,” she said. “Mr. Eddy said you'd better shape up if you want him to continue covering for you with Dr. Paulson.”

“Oh,” Taft said. “Nobody. Just a doctor who's helping me with my comeback. It's not easy for a big fellow like me to try to get back into wrestling shape, you know. These old bones.”

“There'll be more hell than a little over it if you stay in here tonight,” she said.

“I should bid you good evening, then,” he said.

She should've let him go. She should've seen him back out into the night, locked the door and been done with it, but she wasn't ready to be alone. She told him so, but said if he remained there, he wasn't to move from the chair. “I want that to be perfectly clear,” she said.

He spread his hands. “Quiet as a church mouse,” he said.

Eventually she'd gotten into bed and some time long after that must have drifted off, though only sparingly. Each time she woke he was still at the table, his chest and shoulders moving up and down with the slow, deliberate breaths of sleep. Now, though, as her eyes adjusted to the early gloom, she realized that his eyes were open and that he was looking right at her. In a panic she hauled the sagging blanket to her chin, pushing herself away until her back touched the cold cabin wall. He didn't move. Finally, she said his name.

“Mr. Taft,” she said again when he didn't stir, louder this time, and still got no response.

From outside, somewhere up the hill, she heard the muffled sound of men's voices.

“Mr. Taft,” she hissed at him.

This time his head lolled up and the light returned to his eyes. He looked startled at first to find himself in a strange place, but then the memory of the night before dawned on his face. He went to the window and peered out from behind the flimsy curtain, pressing his lips together in a way that let her know the bootleggers were still out there. When he'd seen enough, he crossed the room and filled the woodstove with kindling, then searched through his pockets for a match. Moira was cold and it was taking him too long, so she secured the blanket tightly around her shoulders and got up to retrieve a matchbox from one of the cabinet drawers. She tossed it to him, collecting her cigarettes from the table as he stooped to light the fire.

“I thought they'd be gone by now,” he said, his voice casual, as if he found himself in these sorts of situations all the time.

He had his back to her, cupping his hands and blowing into the stove until the flames caught. Shaking the kettle to see if there was water, he set it on the stove to boil.

“I saw you watching me,” she said. “When I woke up.”

Now he turned. “I beg your pardon.”

“Anyway,” she said, feeling color rising in her face. “That's what it looked like.”

He set the matches back on the table and went to stand in the same spot by the window. “I haven't been sleeping soundly,” he said. “This morning it must've caught up with me. I dozed off in my chair, that's all.”

“With your eyes open?” she said.

“If you say so,” he said.

The light tone in his voice made her feel silly. Like this was all sort of a game to him. “Pretty lousy night watchman,” she said.

When the coffee was done he poured a cup for each of them and she found herself watching his hands. They were blunt and thick, with fingers that bowed around wide, flat knuckles but narrowed to dainty tips. There was a delicacy in the way they moved, darting back and forth as he added scoops of sugar and then held his cup, looking comically tiny compared to the rest of him, between his thumb and forefinger. It was strange to think of the things those hands did to other men.

“You're looking at my finger,” he said, splaying one hand in front of him like a woman trying on a wedding ring. “Leo Pardello broke it for me back in”—he thought a moment—“1915? Now it only bends this far.” He crooked it to ninety degrees and showed her, smiling as he did.

How odd he was, she thought. How big and black and strange.

“That was in Italy,” he said. “You ever been to Italy?”

She shook her head. “We were going to tour Ireland once, Pepper and I. When he was champion. We made it to Dublin and stayed in a hotel that was the converted manor of some lord. It was just about the grandest place I ever saw. But someone set off a bomb outside the arena downtown and they put us right back on the boat. He didn't even get to wrestle.”

“Italy was my favorite,” Taft said. “The food and the people? The
women? It all seemed like a storybook to me. I even learned some of the language.”

“You do speak very well,” she said. “I mean, not like when they write about blacks in the papers.”

“You means like this?” he said, bobbing his head and putting on a gibberish accent. “I thinks, Miss Moira, that you's a-cain't truss ev'rting you reads in dem papers.”

She smiled and accepted a cup when he offered.

“My folks were schoolteachers,” he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling when he thought about it. “My mother worked in the school library. The only black school in Cincinnati. My father taught science and arithmetic.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “You must think I'm a terrible bigot.”

“No,” he said, “you seem better than most.”

He was enjoying himself, so she decided to push a bit. “I've been talking with your wife,” she said. “She insists you were sent to prison as an innocent man.”

“You don't believe it?”

“I believe she loves you,” Moira said. “That she'd say anything for you. I don't think you can do any wrong in her eyes.”

His mouth was full of big, straight teeth. “Oh, I did plenty wrong,” he said. “But as far as the law was concerned? I was just the big black demon who was going to take the title off Joe Stecher. Maybe I owned a house in the wrong neighborhood. Maybe I had the wrong color friends.”

“And just for that they put you away for three years?” she said. “I can't imagine that's the whole story.”

It took him a long moment to say anything else. “No,” he said. “You can't imagine.”

“She tells me you're different now, ever since.”

He reset his shoulders, muscles moving underneath his soiled shirt. “It stays with you,” he said. “That's a fact.”

She was trying to think what to say next when they were interrupted by some fresh commotion up the hill, the sound of car doors opening. They got up and went to the window, Moira still wrapped in the blanket. She recognized the young, good-looking man and his dog-faced companion as they came out of the lodge with James Eddy walking between them. The two bootleggers had their collars turned up against the wind and shotguns draped over their arms. They looked like bird hunters, she thought, as they pulled themselves up into the cab of the truck. The other men piled into the sedan, their engines fired and then they all tottered up the road toward the crest of the hill.

Eddy stood there watching them go, hands in pockets, every now and then rocking back on his heels as if blowing in the breeze. There was sadness in him, Moira thought, and sadness always turned to rage in men like Eddy. She remembered the look that had come into his eye the night before as he glanced up the hill toward the horse barn. It was the same look a poker player gave his hole cards when he didn't want you to know he had a pair of aces hidden there. Whatever he was plotting, it was bigger than his business arrangement with Fritz Mundt and the bootleggers.

“How much liquor you think was on that truck?” she said.

“Hell if I know,” Taft said. “Figure eighty to a hundred cases, that's—”

“Five thousand dollars,” she finished for him.

“And a lot more than that sitting up there in that barn,” he said.

She turned to him, but his gaze didn't register her presence. He was looking past, staring at something out the window.

“Shit,” he said.

She followed his eyes, expecting to see the bootleggers coming back for something they'd forgotten, but instead it was Carol Jean cutting across the lawn in her nightgown.

“Shit,” Taft said again.

He left her standing there, slamming the door hard behind him. Moira watched through the glass as he marched across the grass to meet his wife, big body moving gracefully with long steps, his chest bent slightly forward with purpose. Carol Jean said something to him as he got close, but Moira couldn't hear it. She could only see Carol Jean's mouth wide, her cheeks flushed. Taft put his hands up to meet her, and Carol Jean slapped him hard across the face.

F
or an hour after he left, Moira sat at the small table playing five-card poker against herself. The scene she'd witnessed between Carol Jean and Taft made her feel like she needed something to do with her hands. She was worried Carol Jean might come down to the cabin and have it out with her, but as the stillness of the hunting camp settled around her she realized it wasn't going to happen. When she got bored of poker she performed a hundred practice shuffles and a hundred one-handed cuts, then did the few magic tricks she could manage. Simple, card-up-the-sleeve stuff that all dealers knew.

As she sat there, the smallness of the cabin started to weigh on her. She thought of going for a walk but didn't want Carol Jean to see her and didn't want to be out in the woods by herself. She worried the bootleggers might still be skulking around somewhere. Even if they weren't, who knew what else was out in the trees off the main road? Until Pepper got back, she was stuck. The feeling of cabin fever began to remind her of the riverboat, when sometimes she got so sick of their stateroom or wandering the deck that she had to resist the urge to toss herself overboard from sheer boredom.