Dutch Blue Error (26 page)

“I see.” I groped on the bedside table for a pack of Winstons, shook one loose, and plucked it from the pack with my mouth. Then I lit a match one-handed, a trick I learned in college. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there in an hour or so.”

“Appreciate it, friend.”

“By the time I get there E.J.’ll be back.”

“I’m not so sure, Brady. Jan’s right. This isn’t like the boy. Not at all like him.”

I sighed. “Call the police. I’ll be there in an hour.”

Sylvie was sitting on one of the aluminum patio chairs on my balcony when I wandered out of my bedroom. I stood in the kitchen to look at her. She had slipped her arms through the sleeves of one of my dress shirts. She wore nothing else. She had her feet up on the railing and was scanning the Boston harbor, which lay spread out beneath us from my sixth-floor oceanfront apartment. She trained my binoculars on the horizon, where a big LNG tanker was inching its way to port. Beneath us dozens of tiny sailboats skittered across the water like white bugs. The summer breeze that riffled the surface of the Atlantic had brushed my shirt off Sylvie’s body, baring her breasts and all the golden rest of her.

I checked the coffee pot. Sylvie had already loaded it and plugged it in. It was chugging and belching on the counter. I went back into my bedroom, pulled on a pair of Levis and a white polo shirt, and then shuffled into the bathroom to run the electric razor over my face. When I went back into the kitchen the coffee pot had fallen silent. I poured two mugs full and took them out onto the balcony.

“Your coffee, Madame,” I said, setting her mug on the table beside her. I remained standing, leaning back against the sliding glass doors.

“Zank you,” said Sylvie, still peering through the glasses.

“Sylvie, will you please for Christ’s sake stop talking like a Hungarian refugee.”

“But, Bradee, Sylvie
is
a Hungarian refugee.”

“Can you see the people on the boats clearly with those glasses?”

“Oh, yes. I can see their faces. Very good glasses, these.”

“Did it occur to you that the people on the boats may have binoculars, too, Sylvie, and they might like to look at the people on the balconies?”

She giggled. “Zay might like to look at Sylvie, no?”

“They might like to look at Sylvie, yes. Why don’t you at least button the shirt, if that’s all you’re going to wear?”

Sylvie took the glasses from her eyes and pouted at me. “Bradee is an old poop,” she said. She tied the tails of my shirt together across her flat stomach, which did little to cover her up.

“Sylvie, you’re an exhibitionist.”

“Zis is not foreplay, Sylvie knows that.”

“Sylvie is right.”

“The lady on the phone, she seemed distraught.”

“Yes. She is distraught.”

“She is angry because Sylvie answered your telephone?”

“No. That’s not it.”

“Brady is angry, though.”

“No, I’m not angry.”

“Because Sylvie wouldn’t want to spoil Brady’s love life.”

I bent to kiss her forehead. “Sylvie
is
Brady’s love life,” I said.

“Bool-sheet,” said Sylvie, her green eyes smiling.

“We’re going to have to cancel our picnic,” I told her.

“Brady got a better offer, eh?”

“No. The lady was a client. She has a problem.”

Sylvie must have read something in the tone of my voice, because she frowned, held my hand against her bare breast, and said, “Is it something serious?”

All traces of her accent had disappeared.

“I don’t know. It sounds like it. Eddie Donagan’s little boy didn’t get back from his paper route when he usually does.”

“The parents must be very worried.”

“The mother is. The father doesn’t live with them.”

Sylvie still held my hand, absentmindedly massaging herself with it. “So you must go to the mother, then?”

“Yes. Jesus, Sylvie, don’t do that.”

She grinned up at me, then lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed my palm. She used her tongue and her teeth. It made me shiver. I repossessed my hand. It took enormous strength of character. My hand seemed to have acquired a will of its own.

“Who is this Eddie Donkey, anyway? Has Sylvie heard of him?” Her accent was beginning to creep back.

“It’s Donagan. Eddie Donagan. You would have heard of him if you had been following the Red Sox back twelve years ago or so instead of wasting your time on those boys in tights and codpieces. Eddie Donagan, for a couple of years, was the best right-handed pitcher I ever saw. He was as stylish as Marichal, he was as mean as Drysdale, he had more stuff than Bob Gibson, and he was more colorful than Dizzy Dean.”

“Sylvie doesn’t know those men.”

“No, I suppose Sylvie doesn’t. That’s her loss.”

I
MET EDDIE DONAGAN
for the first time one soft May afternoon on a baseball diamond at Fitchburg State College. The year was 1970.

It began with a phone call to my office from Sam Farina.

“What’s up, Sam?” I said.

“Little business trip. I want to take you to a ball game.”

“Business, huh?”

“Trust me, Brady.”

I laughed. “No one trusts you, Sam.”

“Aw, come on. Have I ever lied to you?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“Okay, then. I’m taking you to a ball game, and it’s business. You’re my attorney, right? I pay you a ridiculous retainer, right? Our definition of business is when I say it’s business, right?”

“Right, right, and, yeah, I guess so.”

“Pick me up in an hour.”

“Is this an offer I can’t refuse, Big Sam?”

“That Godfather shit ain’t funny, Coyne.”

“I’ll be right over.”

Sam Farina lived in a twelve-room showplace in Winchester, near the Lexington line, with his wife, Josie, and his daughter, Jan, who was then finishing up her junior year at Mount Holyoke College. Sam owned a chain of liquor stores and four racehorses and a half-interest in a casino in St. Maarten. He kept several law firms busy defining the cutting edge of legality for him in his businesses, while I handled his personal affairs. Mostly I gave him advice and directed him to specialists when he needed real legal expertise. He enjoyed my company and trusted my discretion, and if he sometimes treated me as if he owned me, I didn’t mind. I liked him, and he never asked me to do anything that violated my conception of the spirit of the law.

I drive a BMW now, but back in May of 1970 it was a Chevy wagon, as befitted a young attorney with a young family. Sam was swinging a five-iron on his front lawn when I pulled into the circular drive. His thick forearms were sticking out of a short sleeved white shirt and a cigar stuck out of his mouth. Sam was built like a refrigerator, and somehow managed to look more like a well-conditioned offensive tackle than a pasta-fed businessman.

He climbed into the front seat beside me with the five-iron propped between his legs.

“I thought the Sox were in Detroit,” I said to him.

“They are. They’re facing Denny McLain tonight and Mickey Lolich tomorrow.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Get onto Route 2 west.”

About an hour later we took the Fitchburg exit and Sam directed me to a ball field. I parked the wagon behind some bleachers and looked at Sam. “Now are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

Sam hooded his eyes and turned his face away from me so that he could stare down at me along the lumpy slope of his big nose. He’d done that to me before when I asked him questions about some income he wanted to invest, or a line on a tax form, or the losses he was declaring on his horses. It was Sam’s way of saying, “Just don’t ask, and then I won’t have to tell you.”

We climbed up into the bleachers. The game had already started, and the stands were sparsely populated with college age kids smoking marijuana and wearing shoulder-length hair and tee shirts and blue jeans cut off high on the thigh. Both the boys and the girls. You could tell the boys because they wore their hair a little longer.

It was a big game. Fitchburg State against North Adams State. I supposed it was a great rivalry. “What the hell, Sam?” I complained.

“Watch the game. Shut up. Trust me,” said Sam.

Sam slouched back into the bleachers and propped his elbows up on the bench behind him. He rolled his dead cigar butt around in his mouth and gazed placidly out onto the field. I clearly had no choice but to follow his example.

The May sunshine warmed my face, and the perfect geometry of the game commanded my attention. I knew none of the players. I had no interest in learning whether North Adams or Fitchburg might win. Sometimes baseball is a better game that way. Once in a while I’ll pull over beside the road to watch a bunch of Little Leaguers or a men’s softball game, always amazed at the symmetry of it, no matter how well or poorly it was being played.

Baseball is a game of absolutely flat planes, perfect right angles, precise distances, measured velocities, and beautiful parabolas. Euclid would have loved baseball. The field is a grid laid out in white lines against emerald green. It contains dozens of little contests of inches and feet-per-second, all so equalized that a millimeter’s alteration would destroy the entire balance of the game. Baseball demonstrates repeatedly all the physical laws of motion. It could have served as Newton’s laboratory. The fact that it’s played by flawed and unpredictable human beings creates a classically dramatic tension between the physical and the emotional, the fixed and the random. A single game of baseball is a whole repertoire of one-act morality plays. The good guys win about half the time, which seems to me to reflect the ways of the world.

For several innings I allowed my mind to ponder the abstractions of the game. But after the players had taken a few turns in the field, I began to pay closer attention to the pitcher for the Fitchburg team. He habitually hunched his shoulders and compressed his neck into them as he received the sign from the catcher, much like a turtle beginning to retreat into his shell. Then he’d bend, dangling his arms for a moment before bringing them over his head to initiate his windup. He kicked high, his right arm reaching behind him nearly to the ground, before arching his body like a bow and zinging the ball quick as a dart toward the plate. The North Adams kids, I realized, were completely overmatched. One of them dumped a blooper in back of first base trying to hold back his swing. An inning later another beat out a topped roller down the third-base line. And that was it.

Not only did he get batters out with effortless grace, but the Fitchburg pitcher had what actors call “presence,” and what, in a politician, would be termed “charisma.” He was always in motion. He sprinted to the mound to begin each inning. He got down on his knees to pat and pack the dirt around the rubber. He yelled and gestured to his fielders. When he struck out a batter he thrust his right fist into the air and yelled, “Yeah!” loud enough for me to hear from the stands. Once the first baseman scooped up a low throw from the shortstop, and the pitcher ran over to him and patted him on the ass. Between pitches he sometimes turned his back on the batter and held the baseball up in front of his face. It looked as if he were talking to it.

I reached over and poked Sam on the arm. “That kid out there—that pitcher. He’s good. You notice him?”

“Shut up. Enjoy the game,” he growled.

In the middle of the eighth inning a stocky, deeply suntanned guy wearing a blue knit shirt and a Red Sox baseball cap climbed up into the bleachers and settled beside Sam, imitating his slouch. Neither of them spoke until the inning ended. Then Sam said to him, “He’s doin’ okay, huh?”

“Sixteen K’s, one inning still to go. Two goddam bleeders. No walks. Okay, I guess,” said the man. He appeared to be in his late forties. His face was crosshatched with deep creases that could have been smile lines or old knife wounds. His hands were square and powerful. His teeth were astonishingly white and he showed them often.

“This is Brady Coyne,” said Sam, jerking his head in my direction. “Brady, meet Stump Kelly.”

I reached across Sam to take Kelly’s hand. He squeezed hard and showed me his teeth.

“My friend Stump here is a scout for the Red Sox,” continued Sam.

“You’re interested in that pitcher, I’ll bet,” I said.

“Betcher ass,” said Kelly. “Thanks to Big Sam.”

I frowned my confusion.

“Sam put me onto the Donagan kid,” explained Kelly. “I been birddoggin’ him all spring. The kid’s got it, no question.”

“He’s in the wrong league, I’d say.”

“Betcher ass,” said Stump Kelly. “Good head, great arm. Throws BBs. For strikes. Got a curve’d put a stripper to shame. He could be in Triple A right now, still mow ’em down.”

In the top of the ninth the Donagan boy, rolling his shoulders, wheeling his arms, lecturing the baseball, and grooming the pitcher’s mound, struck out the three batters who faced him. He made the game look unfair.

After he had swatted palms with his teammates and absorbed their slaps to his backside, Donagan took off his cap and wiped his face with his forearm. He looked around momentarily, saw us in the bleachers, and trotted in our direction.

He wore his reddish hair fashionably long, over his ears and collar. His nose was short and sunburned. His grin was broad and ingenuous.

Sam waved at him, and he climbed up into the bleachers. “Hey, Mr. Farina,” he said.

“Nice game, Eddie,” said Sam. “You know Stump Kelly.”

“Sure,” nodded the boy. “Hiya, Mr. Kelly.”

“And this is Mr. Coyne, who I was telling you about.”

Eddie Donagan reached over and engulfed my hand in his big mitt. “Thanks for coming, man.”

I frowned, but just nodded. “My pleasure. You pitched very well.”

“Yeah, I had the good gas today, man. And, let’s face it, North Adams ain’t exactly the Red Sox. A salad team.” He glanced at Sam and Stump Kelly and grinned. “A little cheese for the kitchen, a yakker for the kudo, and it’s sayonara North Adams. Know what I mean?”

I smiled at him. “I’m not sure.”

“Kid’s gonna make a million bucks some day, right Stump?” said Sam.

“Yup. Million bucks. Betcherass.”

Sam turned to me. “The boy needs some counsel, Brady. Already things are complicated.”