The Harder They Fall by Budd Schulberg

the offer to buy forty per cent of my share for thirty-five hundred dollars also. Only, if you will excuse me for saying, it is not exactly an offer. If I do not give him this forty, Meester Latka says to me, I might as well take my El Toro back to Argentina. It seems he has the power to keep me out of the Garden and any other place. So you see, Meester Lewis, for me the position is very difficult. For all my work I am left with only ten per cent. And from this I have promise to pay half to Lupe Morales. I did not come for money only, but to me this is a very great disappointment.’
    I ran through the stockholders in my mind, eighty per cent of the manager’s end to Latka, which meant 40-40 for him and Quinn, ten for McKeogh, ten for Vanneman, ten for me, five for Acosta, five for Morales, added up to 120 per cent. A little complicated. Not as complicated as some of Nick’s deals, but well beyond simple arithmetic. Not the kind of equation to figure in your head, unless you had Nick’s head, in which case you didn’t worry aboutsuch mathematical problems as how to cut a pie into five quarters. Either Nick’s head or Nick’s bookkeeper, Leo Hintz. Leo was a neat, serious, middle-aged man who looked like a small-city bank-teller. In fact that’s what he had been, in Schenectady, until his thirty bucks a week made him feel that a change was necessary. Unfortunately for Leo the change he decided to make was a slight alteration in some of his entries, a little matter of a digit here and there that added up to an extra zero on the end of Leo’s $1560 a year. Not long afterwards, however, Leo’s income was suddenly cut to fifty cents a day, which is what the State of New York pays the inhabitants of Sing Sing prison. Leo was a sort of mathematical genius with a natural talent for quiet larceny, the modern highwayman who has swapped his black mask for a green eyeshade.
    ‘Meester Lewis,’ Acosta continued, showing his small, white teeth in an anxious, mirthless smile, ‘since you are so
simpático
I will take the liberty to ask a very big favour. Meester Latka likes you very much, so I am thinking perhaps if you will be so kind to ask him please to make a little bigger my share of the …’
    ‘Look,
amigo
,’ I said. ‘Don’t give me that
simpático
crap. In Mexico every time somebody told me I was
simpático
I got taken. Nick likes me because he needs me. But he doesn’t need me that much. You’ve got your deal. If you want my opinion, you were lucky to come out with ten per cent. Maybe that’s his idea of the Good-Neighbour Policy.’
    Acosta crossed one short leg over the other, drawing up his pants carefully to protect the creases. He must have been a sharp little businessman in Mendoza. Here he wasjust another peddler. ‘But ten per cent, which I must share with Lupe Morales, is like the droppings of a fly. Especially when it is my idea, the big idea of putting boxing gloves on a giant, a conception that will make much money for Meester Latka. He will be grateful, yes?’
    ‘He will be grateful, no,’ I said. ‘Now
useful
he understands, but grateful, that’s too abstract.’
    Acosta shook his head in uneasy bewilderment. ‘You North Americans, you are so direct. You not only say what you mean but you say it immediately. In my country’ – he indicated a large circle in the air with his cigarette holder – ‘we say things like this, instead of – he bisected his imaginary circle with a sharp downward stroke – ‘like
that
.’ He closed his eyes, massaging the right lid with his thumb, the left with his forefinger, as if his head ached. Here he was, four thousand miles from Santa Maria, with only five per cent of a dream.

CHAPTER FIVE
    When you saw Toro Molina for the first time he was so big you had to focus on him in sections, the way a still camera photographs a skyscraper. The first shot took in no features at all, just an impression of tremendous bulk, like the view a man has of a mountain