Eight Million Ways to Die

He said, "You remember Lou Rudenko? Louie the Hat, they call him," I said I did. "You hear about his mother?"



"What about her?"



"Nice old Ukrainian lady, still lived in the old neighborhood on East Ninth or Tenth, wherever it was. Been a widow for years. Must have been seventy, maybe closer to eighty. Lou's got to be what, fifty?"



"Maybe."



"Doesn't matter. Point is this nice little old lady has a gentleman friend, a widower the same age as she is. He's over there a couple nights a week and she cooks Ukrainian food for him and maybe they go to a movie if they can find one that doesn't have people fucking all over the screen. Anyway, he comes over one afternoon, he's all excited, he found a television set on the street. Somebody put it out for the garbage. He says people are crazy, they throw perfectly good things away, and he's handy at fixing things and her own set's on the fritz and this one's a color set and twice the size of hers and maybe he can fix it for her."



"And?"



"And he plugs it in and turns it on to see what happens, and what happens is it blows up. He loses an arm and an eye and Mrs. Rudenko, she's right in front of it when it goes, she's killed instantly."



"What was it, a bomb?"



"You got it. You saw the story in the paper?"



"I must have missed it."



"Well, it was five, six months ago. What they worked out was somebody rigged the set with a bomb and had it delivered to somebody else. Maybe it was a mob thing and maybe it wasn't, because all the old man knew was what block he picked the set up on, and what does that tell you? Thing is, whoever received the set was suspicious enough to put it right out with the garbage, and it wound up killing Mrs. Rudenko. I saw Lou and it was a funny thing because he didn't know who to get mad at. 'It's this fucking city,' he told me. 'It's this goddamn fucking city.' But what sense does that make? You live in the middle of Kansas and a tornado comes and picks your house up and spreads it over Nebraska. That's an act of God, right?"



"That's what they say."



"In Kansas God uses tornadoes. In New York he uses gaffed television sets. Whoever you are, God or anybody else, you work with the materials at hand. You want another Coke?"



"Not right now."



"What can I do for you?"



"I'm looking for a pimp."



"Diogenes was looking for an honest man. You have more of a field to choose from."



"I'm looking for a particular pimp."



"They're all particular. Some of them are downright finicky. Has he got a name?"



"Chance."



"Oh, sure," Danny Boy said. "I know Chance."



"You know how I can get in touch with him?"



He frowned, picked up his empty glass, put it down. "He doesn't hang out anywhere," he said.



"That's what I keep hearing."



"It's the truth. I think a man should have a home base. I'm always here or at Poogan's. You're at Jimmy Armstrong's, or at least you were the last I heard."



"I still am."



"See? I keep tabs on you even when I don't see you. Chance. Let me think. What's today, Thursday?"



"Right. Well, Friday morning."



"Don't get technical. What do you want with him, if you don't mind the question?"



"I want to talk to him."



"I don't know where he is now but I might know where he'll be eighteen or twenty hours from now. Let me make a call. If that girl shows up, order me another drink, will you? And whatever you're having."



I managed to catch the waitress's eye and told her to bring Danny Boy another glass of vodka. She said, "Right. And another Coke for you?"



I'd been getting little drink urges off and on ever since I sat down and now I got a strong one. My gorge rose at the thought of another Coke. I told her to make it ginger ale this time. Danny Boy was still on the phone when she brought the drinks. She put the ginger ale in front of me and the vodka on his side of the table. I sat there and tried not to look at it and my eyes couldn't find anywhere else to go. I wished he would get back to the table and drink the damn thing.



I breathed in and breathed out and sipped my ginger ale and kept my hands off his vodka and eventually he came back to the table. "I was right," he said. "He'll be at the Garden tomorrow night."



"Are the Knicks back? I thought they were still on the road."



"Not the main arena. Matter of fact I think there's some rock concert. Chance'll be at the Felt Forum for the Friday night fights."



"He always goes?"



"Not always, but there's a welterweight named Kid Bascomb at the top of the prelim card and Chance has an interest in the young man."



"He owns a piece of him?"



"Could be, or maybe it's just an intellectual interest. What are you smiling at?"



"The idea of a pimp with an intellectual interest in a welter-weight."



"You never met Chance."



"No."



"He's not the usual run."



"That's the impression I'm getting."



"Point is, Kid Bascomb's definitely fighting, which doesn't mean Chance'll definitely be there, but I'd call it odds on. You want to talk to him, you can do it for the price of a ticket."



"How will I know him?"



"You never met him? No, you just said you didn't. You wouldn't recognize him if you saw him?"



"Not in a fight crowd. Not when half the house is pimps and players."



He thought about it. "This conversation you're going to have with Chance," he said. "Is it going to upset him a lot?"



"I hope not."



"What I'm getting at, is he likely to have a powerful resentment against whoever points him out?"



"I don't see why he should."



"Then what it's going to cost you, Matt, is the price of not one but two tickets. Be grateful it's an off-night at the Forum and not a title bout at the Main Garden. Ringside shouldn't be more than ten or twelve dollars, say fifteen at the outside. Thirty dollars at the most for our tickets."



"You're coming with me?"



"Why not? Thirty dollars for tickets and fifty for my time. I trust your budget can carry the weight?"



"It can if it has to."



"I'm sorry I have to ask you for money. If it were a track meet I wouldn't charge you a cent. But I've never cared for boxing. If it's any consolation, I'd want at least a hundred dollars to attend a hockey game."



"I guess that's something. You want to meet me there?"



"Out in front. At nine- that should give us plenty of leeway. How does that sound?"



"Fine."



"I'll see if I can't wear something distinctive," he said, "so that you'll have no trouble recognizing me."



Chapter 4



He wasn't hard to recognize. His suit was a dove gray flannel and with it he wore a bright red vest over a black knit tie and another white dress shirt. He had sunglasses on, dark lenses in metal frames. Danny Boy contrived to sleep when the sun was out- neither his eyes nor his skin could take it- and wore dark glasses even at night unless he was in a dimly lit place like Poogan's or the Top Knot. Years ago he'd told me that he wished the world had a dimmer switch and you could just turn the whole thing down a notch or two. I remember thinking at the time that that was what whiskey did. It dimmed the lights and lowered the volume and rounded the corners.



I admired his outfit. He said, "You like the vest? I haven't worn it in ages. I wanted to be visible."



I already had our tickets. The ringside price was $15. I'd bought a pair of $4.50 seats that would have put us closer to God than to the ring. They got us through the gate, and I showed them to an usher down front and slipped a folded bill into his hand. He put us in a pair of seats in the third row.



"Now I might have to move you gentlemen," he said, "but probably not, and I guarantee you ringside."



After he'd moved off Danny Boy said, "There's always a way, isn't there? What did you give him?"



"Five dollars."



"So the seats set you back fourteen dollars instead of thirty. What do you figure he makes in a night?"



"Not much on a night like this. When the Knicks or Rangers play he might make five times his salary in tips. Of course he might have to pay somebody off."



"Everybody's got an angle," he said.



"It looks that way."



"I mean everybody. Even me."



That was my cue. I gave him two twenties and a ten. He put the money away, then took his first real look around the auditorium. "Well, I don't see him," he said, "but he'll probably just show for the Bascomb fight. Let me take a little walk."



"Sure."



He left his seat and moved around the room. I did some looking around myself, not trying to spot Chance but getting a sense of the crowd. There were a lot of men who might have been in the Harlem bars the previous night, pimps and dealers and gamblers and other uptown racket types, most of them accompanied by women. There were some white mob types; they were wearing leisure suits and gold jewelry and they hadn't brought dates. In the less expensive seats the crowd was the sort of mixed bag that turns up for any sporting event, black and white and Hispanic, singles and couples and groups, eating hot dogs and drinking beer from paper cups and talking and joking and, occasionally, having a look at the action in the ring. Here and there I saw a face straight out of any OTB horse room, one of those knobby on-the-come Broadway faces that only gamblers get. But there weren't too many of those. Who bets prizefights anymore?



I turned around and looked at the ring. Two Hispanic kids, one light and one dark, were being very careful not to risk serious injury. They looked like lightweights to me, and the fair-skinned kid was rangy with a lot of reach. I started getting interested, and in the final round the darker of the two figured out how to get in under the other kid's jab. He was working the body pretty good when they rang the bell. He got the decision, and most of the booing came from one spot in the audience. The other boy's friends and family, I suppose.



Danny Boy had returned to his seat during the final round. A couple minutes after the decision, Kid Bascomb climbed over the ropes and did a little shadowboxing. Moments later his opponent entered the ring. Bascomb was very dark, very muscular, with sloping shoulders and a powerful chest. His body might have been oiled the way the light glinted on it. The boy he was fighting was an Italian kid from South Brooklyn named Vito Canelli. He was carrying some fat around the waist and he looked soft as bread dough, but I had seen him before and knew him for a smart fighter.



Danny Boy said, "Here he comes. Center aisle."



I turned and looked. The same usher who'd taken my five bucks was leading a man and woman to their seats. She was about five five, with shoulder-length auburn hair and skin like fine porcelain. He was six one or two, maybe 190 pounds. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, trim hips. His hair was natural, short rather than long, and his skin was a rich brown. He was wearing a camel's-hair blazer and brown flannel slacks. He looked like a professional athlete or a hot lawyer or an up-and-coming black businessman.



I said, "You're sure?"



Danny Boy laughed. "Not your usual pimp, is he? I'm sure. That's Chance. I hope your friend didn't put us in his seats."