The Sirena Quest (11 page)
Authors: Michael A. Kahn
They were in a Barnes & Noble underneath the El tracks on Wabash Street. Lou headed back to the sports section, skimmed the titles quickly, and found a hardbound book on the history of the Chicago Cubs. He checked the index at the back and then flipped to page eighty-three.
“Here we go,” he said.
“What?”
“Nineteen-thirty-two World Series. Yankees and Cubs. Game three. In Chicago. At Wrigley Field.”
Lou scanned the text. “Game tied four-to-four in the fifth. Ruth comes to the plate. Charlie Root is pitching for the Cubs. First pitch, called strike. Next two are balls. Then another called strike. Two and two. The Chicago crowd is going wild.”
Lou looked up with a smile.
“Okay,” Ray said. “What happened?”
Lou looked around to make sure no one was near or listening. He handed the open book to Ray and pointed at the text.
“Read that,” he said. “To yourself.”
The text quoted the wire story filed by a reporter covering the Series for the
New York World-Telegram
. Lou peered over his shoulder and read along silently:
Ruth stepped out of the batter's box. The stadium shook and rattled with the boos and jeers of the Chicago faithful. While forty thousand spectators hurled verbal assaults at him, the Sultan of Swat merely grinned, held his bat high, and pointed it toward the scoreboard in dead center field. This dramatic gesture only further infuriated the partisan throng.
Ruth stepped back into the batter's box and dug in, wagging his bat over his shoulder. Root threw a change-up curve, low and away. Ruth swung, and punched a screaming liner over the head of Johnny Moore in center field. Moore could only turn and watch as the leather spheroid caromed high off the scoreboard.
Ray looked up. “The scoreboard? The one at Wrigley Field?”
Lou nodded.
Ray frowned. “You think?”
Lou said, “He's the only sultan we have. And the only one that pointed anywhere.”
Ray looked down at the page and then back at Lou. “You're a fucking genius, Solomon.”
Lou took the book from Ray and turned to the next page. “It gets better. Look at the box score. Check the date.”
Ray studied the page and looked up.
“Holy shit.”
Lou nodded. “October first, 1932.”
When they were back out on the street, Ray said, “Let's figure this out. If that's where she is, if Marshall really stashed her there back in 1959, that's, what, thirty-five years ago?”
“A long time,” Lou said.
“No shit.”
“You think she could still be there?”
Ray gave him a wink. “We're gonna find out. Wait here a sec.”
He walked over to the corner newsstand and came back with a copy of the
Sun-Times
.
“Where're we supposed to meet Gordie?” he asked Lou.
“In front of that Nike store on Michigan Avenue.”
He flipped to the sports section that began on the last page of the tabloid.
“When?” he asked.
Lou checked his watch. “In about a half-hour.”
An El train rumbled by overhead.
Ray was scanning the sports page. “And we're supposed to be at the Bronco Billy's for dinner at six, right?”
“Right.”
Ray closed the paper and tossed it into the trash can. “Perfect.”
“Perfect?”
Ray nodded. “Cubs are in town today. Game starts at one. Let's get Gordie and head up to the ballpark. Time for a little recon.”
SCENE 64: FRONT-END, PART III {Draft 3}:
CUT TO:
INT. BARRETT COLLEGE DINING HALL - THE NEXT NIGHT
5:15 p.m. Dinner service starts in 15 minutes. The dining hall is empty except for the two dozen students working dinner shift as servers and busboys and runners. All wear white coats. They're eating in groups of two or three scattered throughout the dining hall.
ANGLE ON LOU AND RAY
seated at a table finishing their meal. The graycoat comes over. He is the supervisor of the dinner shiftâan officious upperclassman wearing a white shirt and tie under his gray cotton jacket.
GRAYCOAT
I'll give you boys a tryout on back-end tonight.
RAY
(grinning)
Cool.
GRAYCOAT
Buzz says he'll train you. If you're any good, he'll teach you front-end, too. He's pre-med, you know, and he's got organic chemistry next semester. He's quitting front-end before Christmas.
RAY
Which one of us?
GRAYCOAT
What?
RAY
Which one of us is going to work back-end tonight?
GRAYCOAT
Which one? Three of you would be lucky to keep up with Buzz.
The graycoat departs.
RAY
This'll be great!
INT. DISHWASHER ROOM - LATER
CLOSE ON BUZZ as he leans back against the counter, arms crossed, facing the back-end area, slowly shaking his head.
ANGLE ON BACK-END
Lou and Ray have long since lost the battle. Total chaos. One rack of plates after another emerges, steam billowing up. Filled racks of clean dishes and glasses are piled everywhere. A plate slips out of Lou's hand and falls with a CRASH. Ray drops an entire silverware rack, the contents CLANGING to the ground as the knives and forks and spoons scatter all around.
And still the racks keep coming. Relentless. One after another.
[Note to director: This scene should be reminiscent of the “Sorcerer's Apprentice” episode from the movie
Fantasia
. Same music should play as Ray and Lou struggle to stem the rising tide.]
INT. BARRETT COLLEGE DINING HALL - LATER THAT NIGHT
The dining hall is empty. Chairs are stacked on the table tops. Most of the lights are off. There are only two people in the room: Lou and Ray. They're slumped forward on a pair of chairsâdisheveled, soaked, exhausted. They stare numbly at each other, dazed.
RAY
Toward the end there I was starting to think we were getting the hang of it.
LOU
Toward the end there I was starting to think about hanging you.
Lou scanned Wrigley Field, shading his eyes with his hand. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the outfield grass was bright green, and real ivy covered the red brick walls.
“Is this heaven?” he said. They were in the center field bleachers.
Gordie cracked a peanut shell in his hand and popped the nuts into his mouth. “Definitely.”
Ray was up getting beer and doing some scoreboard reconnoitering.
“When I was a kid,” Gordie said, “I used to come here two, three times a week in the summer. They were all day games back then. We'd ride down on the Skokie Swiftâme and a couple buds. Always sat in the bleachers. Usually over there.” He pointed toward the left-field bleachers. “That's where most of the homers landed, and that's where we could cheer Billy Williams.”
“Billy Williams.” Lou smiled. “What a ballplayer.”
“Greatest line-drive hitter of all time. Used to bounce singles off the ivy.”
Gordie leaned back on the bleacher bench. “Good times back then. We'd get a Coke and a hot dog and a bag of peanuts, watch the game, hop back on the El, and be home in time to play some ball before dinner.”
He smiled at the memory. “No better place in the world to be a kid than Wrigley Field in 1964.”
“Actually,” Lou said, “Busch Stadium wasn't too shabby that year. We beat the Yankees in the World Series. My dad took me to the seventh game. Bob Gibson was the winning pitcher. Talk about a memory.”
Ray returned with a cardboard tray holding three large cups of Old Style. “Got the brews.”
He took the aisle seat. Gordie was to his left, and Lou to Gordie's left. Ray handed them each a beer.
Lou took a sip of his beer and leaned toward Ray. “So?”
Ray glanced around and edged closer. “There's a ladder. Leads up to a trap door. Door's open now. Presumably 'cause they got guys inside operating it. Hanging from the door latch is what looks like an ordinary combination lock.”
Lou and Gordie both turned to glance back.
The rows of bleachers in center field ended just beneath the dark green scoreboard, which towered over the ballpark. The upper half of the scoreboard showed the status of other games around both leagues. On the left side, under the word NATIONAL, there were rows of metal slots for the inning-by-inning scores of the National League games; the right sideâAMERICANâhad slots for the American League games. The only game underway in either league that weekday afternoon was the one they were at.
In the scoreboard's middle panel were the sections where the balls, strikes, and outs were flashed, along with the number of the player at bat. Atop the scoreboard was a clock, and above it a T-shaped flagpole with team flags fluttering in the breeze.
To true baseball fans, Lou mused, the Wrigley Field scoreboard was a comforting sightâas reassuring to fans as the Statue of Liberty was to immigrants. In a sport awash with retro-nostalgiaâYe Olde Ballparksâthe Wrigley Field scoreboard was the real thing, a genuine relic from an era when all scoreboards were operated by men moving around inside them. Indeed, it was THE scoreboard from every boy's childhoodâwhether the games you attended back then were at Forbes Field, Connie Mack, Tiger Stadium or, for Lou, the old Busch Stadium (aka Sportsmen's Park) along Grand Avenue across from the Carter Carburetor factory.
He could still remember his first Cardinals game, his first sight of the playing field. He was nine years old. As he stepped through the passageway holding his father's hand, there it was, spread out before himâthe magic carpet of bright green, the sparking white bases, the smooth brown infield, the pitching mound with the white rubber and the rosin bag, the bright yellow foul lines that seemed to shoot out from home plate and hit the outfield walls with such momentum that they leapt to the top of the foul poles.
In the second inning of that very first game, his hero Ken Boyer, number 14, smashed a two-run homer into the left field bleachers. As Boyer trotted into the dugout after circling the bases, Lou looked out toward the scoreboard in time to see the blank metal plate in the second inning slot removed and replaced with a yellow “2,” which in turn was replaced with a white “2” when the inning ended.
And now, as he gazed up at the Wrigley Field scoreboard, one of the keepers slid a green metal plate with a white zero into the visitors' slot for the fourth inning.
“How many people work inside that thing?” Gordie asked.
Ray said, “Guy working the beer concession said two guys for day games, three for nights.”
Lou shaded his eyes as he studied the scoreboard. “How big is it?”
Gordie squinted. “Three stories?”
Ray took a sip of beer as he appraised the structure with the savvy eyes of a real estate developer. “I'd say thirty feet from top to bottom. Double that from side to side.”
“Hard to believe she's in there,” Lou said.
“Is?” Gordie shook his head. “We don't even know about
was
. And even assuming she ever was, what are the odds she still is?”
“Pretty good,” Lou said.
“Come on, man,” Gordie said. “Thirty-five years is a lot of years.”
“I don't think that matters,” Lou said. “Assuming we're right about the sultan, that means that of all the possible hiding places in the worldâin the
whole
worldâhe selected this one. You can be sure he didn't pick it casually. Not for hiding something that important. He had to be convinced that it was a safe hiding place. Right?”
Gordie shrugged. “I guess.”
“Don't forget,” Lou said, “this scoreboard is private property. Back in 1959, the Wrigley family owned Wrigley Field. That's an important fact. Think of who Graham Marshall was: a well-connected Chicago lawyer in a well-connected Chicago law firm. Guy like Marshall would have known important people within that organization. I'd bet he knew a Wrigley. I bet he cleared the whole thing in advance and got a commitment from them before he stashed her in there.”
“Maybe,” Gordie said. “But the Wrigleys don't own the Cubs anymore. They sold them to the
Tribune
.”
“I know,” Lou said. “I thought about that. It's still okay. The dates are key. Marshall's will is dated in October of 1984. That was
after
the
Tribune
bought the Cubs. What's that tell you? He must have gotten assurances from someone at the
Tribune
. Otherwise, he would have moved the statue out of the scoreboard before the
Tribune
bought the Cubs and he would have changed his will.”
They were all silent, gazing up at the scoreboard.
“Makes sense,” Ray finally said.
“Let's hope so,” Gordie said.
The roar of the crowd turned them back to the playing field just in time to see a Cubs player round first base and dig for second. Everyone in the bleachers stood. Lou located the ball in the gap between center and right field. The Pirates' Andy Van Slyke grabbed it barehanded off the ivy and in one motion spun toward third base and threw. The ball reached the third baseman on one bounce and he slapped the tag on the sliding Cub. The umpire didn't hesitate.
“Out!”
The stadium erupted in boos and catcalls. The runner jumped up and started jawing with the umpire, who turned his back and walked away.
As the bleacher crowd settled down, two hot blondes in tight jeans and halter tops sashayed up the aisle. Several guys whistled. The girls smiled and kept moving. The beer man came by, followed by the peanut man. Someone sailed a red Frisbee overhead.
Lou turned to Gordie. “I love this game.”
***
During a pitching change two innings later, Gordie said, “Did you know I started shaving in sixth grade?”
Said it just like that. Out of the blue.
Ray and Lou exchanged puzzled looks over his head.
“Shaving what?” Ray said.
“My face.”
Gordie had his arms crossed over his chest. He was staring at his half-empty beer cup on the ground in front of him. “I started shaving in sixth grade.”
The Pirates' pitcher walked off the mound, head down, to a polite round of applause.
“That's young,” Lou finally said, for want of anything better.
Gordie turned to him. “You're damn right.”
Gordie reached for his beer, finished it in one gulp, and crumpled the cup. “Sixth grade. Started shaving and stopped growing.”
“No shit,” Ray said. “What are you, five seven?”
“Five six.”
“You were five six back then?”
“Yeah.”
Ray nodded. “You were once a big motherfucker.”
“Sure was. I played center on the basketball team. Batted clean-up on the baseball team. I was the Jim Thorpe of sixth gradeâpicked first in every sport. When I used to come down here during junior high, I just assumedâand all my buddies just assumedâthat I'd be playing here myself one day.”
“I hear you on that,” Ray said, smiling. “I used to dream of driving in the Daytona 500.”
“No, Ray,” Gordie said, “you don't understand. I was a superstar back then. A real superstar. You have no idea what that's like. You get the girls. You even get an entourage. I had a seventh-grade entourage. But then one day you wake up and realize you aren't the biggest and strongest kid anymore. Even worse, you realize you aren't growing out of your clothes or your shoes anymore. By eighth grade, I was barely average. By tenth, I was cut from the basketball team. My senior year, one of the kids who used to idolize meâRonny Goldenbergâwas out there on the court playing varsity basketball while I was up in the stands sitting on my butt.”
He stared down at his hands. Lou and Ray exchanged glances.
Gordie shook his head. “How do you think that felt? To know in high school that your days of glory are already six years past.”
“Jesus, Gordie,” Ray said, “lighten the fuck up. Sounds like your mind got stuck in sixth grade, too.”
“Ray, you have no conception of what I'm talking about.”
“Bullshit, Gordie. I have a total conception of what you're bitching about. It's the same whiny bullshit I heard from you freshman year, man. Since when does being big and strong qualify you for anything more than pulling a fucking farm plow?”
“I'm not talking about plows,” Gordie said.
“Ah, you're talking about them?” Ray made a sweeping gesture toward the field. “That herd of cattle grazing down there in the pasture?”
“Yes, Ray,” Gordie said, his voice fierce. “Down there.”
“Come on, man, you think those bozos are somehow tuned into the music of the spheres? Give me a break. Talk about dumb luck. You're looking at guys one major league fastball from pumping unleaded at Bud's Amoco or stocking paint thinner at Sears.” Ray shook his head. “So you're not big enough to play down there. So what? Who says playing down there has anything to do with anything?”
“You're missing the point.”
“No, Gordie,” Ray said, “you're missing the whole goddamned boat. Size and speed don't mean shit in the real world. What counts is brains and savvy, baby. Moreover, you got no grounds to bitch. You had exactly what these ballplayers have now. You were once king of the hill, right? Now they are. So what if your turn came in sixth grade? Most people never get a turn. Most people aren't king of diddly. I was never picked first for any sport. I never batted fourth. I never played center. Shit, man, I can barely dribble a fucking basketball.”
Ray pointed to one of the outfielders. “Look at that bozo in left field. King of the hill? Not for long, dude, He'll be washed up by forty. You think it's tough reinventing yourself at fourteen? Wait 'til that yutz gets
his
wake-up call. Christ Almighty, Gordie, you're sitting here moaning aboutâ”
Ray stopped in mid-sentence.
“Well, well, well,” he said, craning back his head. “Look what the goddamned cat dragged in.”