“There’s the big fella I want!” said Sandy.
“Shut up and let me enjoy the show, or you won’t be the little fella I want!” said his girlfriend.
Sandy sat impatiently through the rest of the bill and was actually glad Mabel had a date that evening with her ukulele teacher.
Harry Soule, stage-manager at the Palace, was a hot fight fan and Sandy had often given him tickets to Arena shows. So it was easy to get backstage and arrange a meeting with Prentiss’s big aid.
“But what do you want of the big bum?” asked the curious Soule. “Are you thinking of making a fighter out of him?”
“No, no,” replied Sandy with a mendacious laugh. “I’m trying to locate his brother, who used to work for us.”
“The big bum,” Henry Goetz by name, was shy at first. He was not accustomed to being wanted by anybody and it seemed unlikely that the little visitor boded well. However, Sandy managed to coax him to a thinly disguised saloon and there to warm him into a less diffident mood.
It developed that he was twenty-four years old, that he had been born in Pennsylvania, that his father’s ancestors were German and that his mother’s people, way back, had lived in Russia. Prentiss was paying him thirty dollars a week, but his engagement was for one week only, as the Master found it possible and economical to break in a new silent sentry at each stand. He had graduated from school at the age of nine and since then had sold newspapers, washed cars, painted barns, worked in a mine and enjoyed vacations lasting anywhere from one to four years. He was six feet two, weighed 208 pounds and had not been in a fight since he was old enough to apologize.
“I don’t suppose you’d mind making a lot of money,” said Sandy.
“How?”
“Boxing. A fella with your build and stren’th is a sucker not to go in the fight game. Especially when they look as much like a fighter as you do. When I seen you on the stage this afternoon, I thought you must be a champion fighter from somewheres in Europe, just doing this thing for fun.”
“Who would I have to fight?”
“Nobody you can’t lick. That is, at first. You’d be matched with a couple of pushovers and you’d make twenty or thirty thousand dollars. And then you’d be in line for the big cleanup, seventy-five or a hundred thousand at least.”
“What cleanup?”
“A match with Jack Ryan.”
“Jack Ryan! Say, my parents is both dead and I ain’t got no other heirs.”
“Don’t be silly! It’s very seldom a man is killed boxing.”
“Just once would be more than enough.”
“Listen: You’ve got a great chance to make a barrel of money with very little work. If you do as I say, in less than a year from now you’ll be fixed so as you won’t never have to think of another job. And I’ll guarantee that Ryan won’t do anything to you that you can’t get over in two days’ time. You look like a pretty bright fella, but if you’re even half-witted, you can’t turn down a proposition like this.”
Well, influenced by Mr. King’s eloquence, the speakeasy’s thirty-proof Scotch and probably by a desire to prove himself half-witted, Henry Goetz finally said yes and promised to put his immediate future in Sandy’s small hands, his salary to be fifty dollars a week until the heavy money began to roll in.
Inasmuch as Sandy’s own pay was only a hundred and it took every cent of it to buy his clothes, lodging and food, and entertainment for Miss Ives, he realized he could not swing his undertaking without help. And next afternoon found him closeted with Willie Troy, a boxing impresario with a bankroll, a real ability to develop “prospects” and a boyish delight in pranks.
Troy was interested and became more so when introduced to Goetz. The latter was certainly big enough and, in spite of his Pennsylvania nativity, looked as alien and homicidal as a taxi driver.
“Have you got any friends?” Troy asked him.
“No,” said the erstwhile trouper.
“I didn’t think so,” said Troy. “But if you had, I was going to warn you to keep away from them and not let them know where you’re at or what you’re doing. From now on you’re a Russian, your name is Ivan Ivanovitch and your nickname is ‘The Venomous Viper of the Volga.’ ”
“You no spika de English,” put in Sandy.
“No,” agreed Troy. “You don’t talk at all. Whatever remarks are addressed to you, you shake your head and act dumb. I don’t believe that will take many rehearsals.”
The Viper became an inmate of the Troy home in the Bronx, which boasted gymnasium space and paraphernalia necessary to a primary education in the manly art. And Sandy King wrote himself a long letter from a mythical friend in Berlin, describing a recent bout between Franz Reum, leading Teutonic heavyweight, and Ivan Ivanovitch, young champion of all the Russias, wherein the German had been knocked cold in Round Two and had remained unconscious for an hour and twelve minutes. Enclosed were snapshots of the new Slav fistic marvel, posed in the almost altogether and displaying a muscular development that reminded one of Monty Munn and the elder Zbyszko.
“Funny they ain’t been nothing in the papers about this guy,” said Luke Lewis when he had read the letter and studied the pictures.
“There will be,” said Sandy. “I hear he’s coming to this country the first of the year.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“From Willie Troy. Willie has known about him quite a w’ile. And he’s been in correspondence with his manager in regards to the
