The Harder They Fall by Budd Schulberg Read Free Book Online Page A

gonna do with you, wise guy. You’ll get your straight C every week and on top of that I’ll cut you in for five per cent of our end. If we do two hundred thousand the first year, you’ll make a little money.’
    ‘Two hundred thousand!’ One hundred thousand was a good year’s take for a name who packs the Garden. Anything over that was big-name heavyweights in outdoor shows. ‘Pass that opium pipe around and let’s all take off.’
    ‘Listen, Eddie,’ Nick said, and his voice had the self-satisfied tone it always took on when he took himself seriously, like a self-made Kiwanian explaining his success to his fraternal brothers. ‘I learnt one thing when I was a kid – to do big you got to think big. When we used to jimmy those penny machines, for instance, you know, peanuts, chewing gum, hell, we was always getting caught. Then I got the idea of mugging the collector who went from one machine to another every Friday, emptying out the coin boxes. It was safer to get him on his way back to the office at night, and hit the jackpot, than it was to work those machines over in broad daylight and pick up a few pennies. That’s what I mean. If you got to think, think big. What the hell, it don’t cost you nothing to think. So why think fifty grand when you can think a hundred and fifty grand? Now tomorrow I gotthis Molina and his spic manager, Acosta, coming out to the country. You better come too. Bring the broad along if you want. Take Acosta aside and get the story – you know, how the big guy was discovered and all that crap. Then we’ll sit down together and work out the angles. Wednesday morning I wanna hit the papers. The suckers open their papers and right away like this’ (he snapped his fingers) ‘there’s a new contender for the championship.’
    Nick stood up and put his hand on my arm. He was excited. He was thinking big. ‘Eddie,’ he said, ‘you gotta work like a son-of-a-bitch on this. You make with the words, I work the angles and if that big Argentine bastard gives us anything at all, we’ll all make a pisspot full of dough.’
    If I ever got five thousand dollars ahead, I was always thinking, I’d throw up my job, get a little cabin in the mountains somewhere, take a year off and write. Sometimes I was going to write a bright, crisp, wisecracking comedy, the George Abbott type, and make a hatful of dough. And sometimes I was going to pour out everything I had seen and learnt and felt about myself and America, a great gushing river of a play that would get me a Pulitzer prize. After the play opened, Beth and I would take a honeymoon cruise around the world, while I outlined my next …
    ‘How about a shot?’ Nick said. He rose, pressed a button in the wall near his desk and a panel rolled back, revealing a small, well-fitted bar, and brought out a bottle of Ballantine’s, the twenty year old.
    ‘To Señor Molina,’ I said.
    ‘And to us,’ Nick said.
    He filled the two pony glasses again. ‘That girl yougot, she’s a writer too, ain’t she?’ he said. The only serious reading Nick ever did was the
Morning Telegraph
and the
Racing Form
but he always got an earnest, respectful note in his voice when he spoke about writers. ‘A smart girl like that, she must make out pretty good,’ he said. ‘What does she make on
Life
, eighty, ninety a week?’
    ‘You’re high,’ I said. ‘Took her three years to get up to fifty.’
    ‘Fifty,’ Nick said. ‘Jesus, a preliminary boy in the Garden gets a hunerd’n fifty.’
    ‘Beth figures she’ll last longer,’ I said.
    ‘You oughta marry a dame like that,’ Nick said. Whenever Nick hit a mellow stretch he liked to concern himself with matrimony and legitimate genesis. ‘No kidding, you should get yourself hitched. Hell, I was in the saddle with a different tomato every night until I got hitched. You oughta settle down and start having some kids, Eddie. Them kids, that’s what makes you want to work like a bastard.’
    From his