They took their seats on the vast main floor of the arena, which could be flooded to make ice but was now covered with row upon row of wooden folding chairs linked in pairs for easy setting up and removal.
Goodie craned up at the ceiling. It was very high, arched and vaulted, pierced by glassed-over skylights and with a square frame of spotlights centered above the ring. Around three sides were balconies, their steep rows of permanent seating finally lost in the blue haze of tobacco smoke.
‘Evening, ma’am.’
The man who owned the breathy voice beside her was very fat and wore a heavy tan coat with an astrakhan collar. His shoe-button eyes had an unusual intensity which frightened Goodie. She turned quickly to Hammett.
‘Sam…’
But the fat man was leaning past her, not toward her.
‘Dash, I hear you tell the kid outside you take Boulanger in the fifth?’
‘Not picking a round, two-to-three he does it by the sixth.’
‘Thirty says you’re wrong.’
Hammett nodded. The fat man began talking with great animation to a dapper slick-haired individual with a slightly lopsided face and a carnation in his lapel.
Goodie whispered, ‘Sam, who is he?’
‘Another of those gamblers you’re so anxious to meet.’ The spotlights went on above the ring. ‘Freddy the Glut. I saw him lose a grand to Benny the Gent in Bones Remmer’s Menlo Club on Eddy Street one night, and walk away laughing. Fellow with him is Carnation Willie. Local lads, not in a class with Eddy Sahati or the Rothsteins.’
The announcer interrupted with the information that Al Flores was going to engage in ‘four rounds of boxing’ with Dancing Frankie Whitehead in the curtain-raiser.
‘Keep your eye on the Portagee,’ said Hammett.
But Dancing Frankie opened fast: Halfway into the round he put the Portuguese boy on the canvas for a six count with a roundhouse right that wasn’t fooling. Goodie was on her feet, shouting. She sat down shame-faced when Hammett tugged at her coat sleeve.
‘I’m sorry, Sam, I just got so excited-’
‘Heck, yell all you want, kid. I just think you ought to know you’re backing the wrong boy. Whitehead won’t last.’
‘I’ll bet you supper he wins,’ said Goodie recklessly.
In the second round, Flores put the badly winded Dancing Frankie down with a flurry of punches that kept him down.
‘That takes care of supper,’ said Hammett.
‘Quit smirking!’ exclaimed Goodie furiously.
The second prelim was a slam-bang affair between KO Eddie Roberts and a colored lad named Battling Barnes, who took the decision. In the third preliminary bout, Roundhouse Revani TKO’d his Filipino opponent after flooring him in the second, closing his eye in the third, and using his gut as a workout bag in the fourth. Freddy the Glut spoke around Goodie again.
‘I’ve got twenty at four-to-seven that says the semi-final is a draw.’
Goodie was sure he was offering Hammett a bet of some kind, and was excited. ‘Go ahead, Sam,’ she urged. ‘Take him up on it.’
‘You’re faded,’ said Hammett to the gambler.
He spent the six-round roommate act that followed explaining to Goodie the difference between a jab, an uppercut, and a cross; why working on an opponent’s gut to take away his legs and wind was better than head- hunting; and how a fighter could win by opening an opponent’s eyebrow with his glove-laces if the ref was lax.
‘Of course nothing like that’s going on here,’ he said. ‘This is just a dancing lesson.’
The referee called it a draw. Hammett returned to the obese gambler.
‘Freddy, want to double your dough on the Pride of Glen Park?’
Freddy raised an eloquent shoulder under the rich coat. He had it draped around his shoulders like a cape.
Hammett grinned at Goodie. ‘See what you got me into?’
‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this.’
‘We had a twenty-buck bet, two-to-three odds. Twenty to me if I won, thirty to him if I lost. Now that’s doubled. If I lose I owe him forty — and I don’t have forty. Plus, I already owe him thirty-five from the last fight.’
‘I’m sorry, Sam.’ Her voice was contrite. ‘I thought-’
He chuckled. ‘Don’t worry, kiddo. I don’t have the thirty-five, either.’
By the end of the first round, it was apparent that Campbell was outclassed. By the end of the second, Goodie had become aware of stamping feet and a growing chorus of boos, shouts, and catcalls.
‘Hey, Frenchie, why don’t you kiss ’im?’
‘Me an’ my old lady tangle more than that!’
Hammett, watching Boulanger left-jab Campbell across the ring with light stinging blows without real beef behind them, had a calculating expression on his face.
‘He’s keeping Campbell awake, trying to choose his round. He must have some money down himself. It’ll work for Red Harvest, right enough.’
Goodie looked at him curiously, but he ignored her. Boulanger, dark, lean, intense, a good fighter, trying desperately to keep Campbell from tripping over his own shoelaces and KOing himself on a ring-post. And Campbell, blond, slow, stupid in the ring, throwing roundhouses at whatever got between him and the light. Good.
Only in the novel, the Boulanger character wouldn’t be trying to pick his round — he’d be trying to throw the fight. And… sure, the Op wouldn’t let him. Why? Some criminal charge from back east that the Op had found out about, and…
Boulanger was boring in. The catcalls had died under the thud of leather on flesh. Sweat flew as the Canadian pummeled away.
‘He’ll put him away in the next round,’ said Hammett.
The fifth started with Boulanger going around the bewildered local fighter, jabbing him at will like a cooper nailing up a barrel. Whenever Campbell would clinch, Boulanger would go inside, working on his belly with solid blows and on his jaw with sizzling uppercuts. The ref stopped it after the round’s fourth knockdown.
The lights came up. The ref raised the Canadian’s right hand above his head in the victory signal. And just here, Hammett thought, would come the flash of silver as a black-handled knife would be thrown from one of the balconies to kill the fighter in his moment of victory.
Freddy the Glut handed Hammett a twenty and a five. ‘I think our local boy should find some other line of work.’
‘Unless he wants to end up in Napa cutting out paper dolls.’
The lean writer and the petite blonde inched their way toward the Post Street exit. Tonight’s stint at the typewriter would just about wrap up Red Harvest.
‘What was that about cutting out paper dolls in Napa, Sam?’
‘A few more beatings like that, and Campbell will be ready for a room in the state hospital for the insane at Napa. Let’s go down to Fillmore Street and take on a stack of wheats and bacon.’
‘Oh, yes! I’m famished!’
‘On you. Remember?’
Goodie pouted her way out of the amphitheater.
The very big man wearing the checked lumberjack was bent over to smear out his cigar butt against the sole of one new elk-hide workshoe as they passed him. He came erect against the frame of a deep-set double door to Post Street through which the last of the fight fans were exiting. The bare low-wattage bulb caged in the archway over his head cast harsh shadows down across his features.
Atkinson unwrapped a fresh cigar, spat the end in the gutter, and lit up. He seemed to be watching for someone. Overhead, the wet-laden ocean wind creaked the ornamental iron fire escape held in place by pulley and counterweight.
His eyes gleamed. The boy who had sold Hammett the Knockout had emerged from the entrance. Atkinson
