Books & Rough Business

XI

54 Books and Rough Business XI Camerlingo’s little subterfuge before that final round against ‘O Castellone was hardly the only one I encountered, during my years with him and his boxers. On the contrary, many a fighter worked in the economic underground , using one form of “irregular activity” or another to make ends meet. The most flamboyant may have been a certain Salvatore. Or that had been his name at baptism. In the Olimpia Salvatore became Toritore, Bull-tore—Bull Tower, you might say. He was the lone true heavyweight among us, weighing 225, 230 American pounds. A giant by the standards of Southern Italy, he’d had the same solid training as the rest of us, but by the time I joined the gym he’d let his skills erode. This wasn’t entirely his fault. Our BullTower had his failings, a fondness for women especially, but at local matches the man often went unopposed. And when he did find an opponent, Toritore knew better than to put up a real fight. He’d learned that the real money in this game was to be made otherwise. The most striking demonstration of the Bull Tower’s pragmatism came during a match against the Americans. We would box the boys from States every now and again, in some “rec area” or other, down in the bowels of their warships. Our mayor Achille Lauro, as I mentioned earlier, had worked out a lucrative arrangement with the Sixth Fleet, allowing them to take over most of the downtown docks (and forcing much of the city’s shipping business down the coast to Salerno). For myself, and for the others on Camerlingo’s squad, the American presence offshore meant that, every time we went up against them, we needed a heavyweight. So there came a day when our coach asked me 55 Tullio Pironti hustle around town and scare up our massiveTore. Camerlingo figured that as the youngest on the team, I had the legs for the job. But I had to admit I wouldn’t know where to begin. At that the trainer sighed and called over one of the older fighters, a medal-winner named Gigino Favo. “You really don’t know?” this man asked me. We needed to look for the Bull-Tower in the case chiuse, the “private houses”—whorehouses. Tore had two favorites, Favo explained, as we left the Olimpia. The first was a posh place here in La Chiaia, one of the most exclusive in town. A heavyweight with a heavy wallet, Tore had become friendly with many of the girls. Yet his second preference had no girls, in the usual sense. This was a specialty house over in the Spanish Quarter, not far off in terms of distance but a world away nonetheless. A warren of pinched streets and squat palazzi, the Quarter was rundown even for bomb-scarred lower Naples, and considered a slum. There you found the house of the vecchierelle, the “old ladies.” The name alone was enough for me, but my colleague Favo explained anyway, grinning. In the Bull-Tower’s second choice, the youngest woman available was past fifty. The oldest of the vecchierelle, still busy with clients every day, had to be seventy, easy. At least I was spared an eyeful of that establishment. Toritore turned up at the first stop, the brothel in La Chiaia. Favo knew what to say at the street door, and didn’t appear fazed by the parlor upstairs. I suppose the décor was ordinary enough for such a business, the armchairs and curtains of heavy red velvet. But at the time I’d never seen anything like it.The crowd alone came as a shock to me.The mix suggested rush hour at the Piazza Dante trolley: young men and old, Americans and locals, in military uniforms and in the coats and ties of bureaucrats, men of obvious high pedigree and drawling half-shaven types who’d somehow gotten lucky. Here and there the men stood shoulder to shoulder, actually , and yet this never interfered with their flirting. How could it? The women who threaded through the crowd were such pretty young things, and none of them were covered by more than a fluttering veil. At the room’s center—it took me a while to notice—sat the traffic cop for this crossroads.The madam had arms and shoulders as thick as some of the boxers I’d gone up against...