Go for the Body

It was my first day in Paris but the feeling was still with me: like I was getting ready to explode, as if my guts were a lit fuse racing up to my brain.

Being cooped up gets me that way, although I was camped in a big room in this swank hotel. Twelve bucks a night and it was the best hotel room I'd ever been in. I'd docked at Le Havre the afternoon before, came straight to this fancy joint from Gare St. Lazare, like they told me to. I had a swell suit of clothes, an expensive big suitcase, and looked like ready money—except I had exactly forty-seven bucks on me.

All I had to do was wait for a call, yet I was jumpy. I'd promoted a deal with one of the biggest guys in the American fight racket, and I was in Paris to put the cap on it—the deal I'd been sucking around on for over a half year. And when you got to butter up a goon like Slats, your nose is scraping the bottom of a dirty barrel.