Read The Harder They Fall for Free Online

sports suit.
    The reason he kept me on the payroll, I think, was because he thought I had it too. He had the self-made man’s confusion of respect and contempt toward anybody who had read a couple of books and knew when to use
me
and when to say
I
. But whenever he was with me I noticed he cut the profanity down to those words he just didn’t have any respectable synonym for. Even Quinn, who had worked himself up through a logical sequence from ward boss to high-level rackets, didn’t always get the velvet-glovetreatment. And when Nick was dealing with what he considered his inferiors, fighters, other managers, bookies, collectors, trainers, honest but intimidated merchants, the only way to describe his talk would be to compare it with the vicious way Fritzie Zivic used to fight, especially when he was sore, as in the return match with poor Bummy Davis after Bummy had got himself disqualified for conduct even less becoming a gentleman than Zivic’s.
    Probably the biggest mistake that Nick had ever made in picking class was very close to home. It was his wife Ruby. When Nick was in the liquor business back in Prohibition he had sat in the same seat for George White’s
Scandals
twenty-seven times because Ruby was in it. Where Ruby had it over the rest of the line was she was beautiful in an unusually quiet way, like a young matron who would look more at home in a Junior League musical than in a Broadway leg-show. On stage, so the boys tell me, even in the scantiest, she carried herself with an air of aloof respectability which had the actual effect of an intense aphrodisiac. The other girls could dance half naked in front of you and, if you thought about anything, you’d wonder how much it would cost. But seeing Ruby with her black lace stockings forming a sleek and silken path to her crotch was like opening the wrong bedroom door by mistake and catching your best friend’s sister.
    That’s the effect Ruby had on Nick. And the physiological accident that gave Ruby Latka an austere beauty was accompanied by a personality adjustment that developed a quiet, superior manner to go along with the face. The combination drove all other women out of Nick’s life. Until then he had been giving the Killer competition, but fromthe first time he had Ruby he lined up with that small, select group who believe in monogamy and that even more select group who practise it. In fact, the first three years of his marriage Nick had it so bad he hardly ever bothered to look at another woman’s legs. Even now, in an environment which, to put it euphemistically, smiled on adultery, Nick never cheated on Ruby unless it was something very special and he was a long way from home. But the ordinary stuff that was always there, the showgirls and the wives who float around the bars when their husbands are out of town, Nick never bothered with. The ones who simply wouldn’t have minded never got a play, and the ones who had already made up their minds almost always got the brush. Most of it was the way he felt about Ruby. But what made it easier was the way he worked. He was all the time working, in the clinches, between rounds, always moving in, throwing punches, heeling, butting, elbowing, like Harry Miniff, only it was done on the top floor of a great office building and it wasn’t for nickels but for very fancy folding money.
    There was a glutton’s hunger for money in him. Maybe it was the pinched childhood, the gutter struggle, the fearful itch of insecurity that drove Nick on to his first hundred thousand and his second. And now, without even letting him sit down to catch his breath and enjoy himself a minute, he was pushing toward his third. If it hadn’t been for Ruby, Nick would never have had that place in Jersey with the riding horses and the swimming pool and the terraced barbecue pit. Ruby, who had been a working girl all her life, found no trouble at all in double-clutching into a life of leisurely hedonism. Nick would enjoy a swim