Deuces Down

  He wanted to join in the celebration openly, but the other reporters were at least trying to keep themselves somewhat aloof from the partisan festivities. They were wandering around the room (most surreptitiously swigging beers) asking what Tommy thought were mostly inane questions of the players. Slug’s shoe polish theory was confirmed, but Tommy heard nothing else of importance.

  Tommy was determined to keep the surprise to himself, not to let anyone else in on his secret. He wanted to confront Reiser with his certain knowledge, and get the manager’s reaction. Then, The Weekly Gospel would get their exclusive, and what an exclusive it would be: Miracle Dodger Victory Engineered by Secret Ace!

  Well, perhaps he would have to work on shortening that headline.

  In the end, it was surprisingly easy. Tommy hung around in the rear of the room, in the shadows, watching as the celebration wound down without really ending as the players showered, dressed, and left the locker room still clearly high on emotion and crazed energy. It took awhile, but the locker room emptied of players and reporters and finally the only ones left in the clubhouse were those who also usually arrived first at the ballpark. Tommy found them in the manager’s office, sipping beer and smoking thick, fragrant Cuban cigars.

  “I know who the secret ace is,” Tommy said in a dramatic, almost accusatory voice.

  Reiser, lounging behind his desk with his feet up and a cigar in his mouth, groaned and sat up straight. “You, again? Jesus, kid, there ain’t no secret ace. I’ve been over it in my head, I’ve watched everyone. There just ain’t no secret ace.”

  “Really?” Tommy said archly as he came into the room. “How do you account for all the strange things that happened during the Series? The spectacular catches, the bad throws and Oriole errors, the unexpected home runs, the shoe polish incident?”

  Reiser shrugged. “It’s baseball, kid. It’s the nature of the game. Strange things happen. Sometimes players rise to the occasion. Sometimes occasions rise to the players. You can’t explain it. No one can.”

  “Then how do you explain the way he smells?” Tommy asked dramatically, pointing at Fidel Castro, who was sitting across the desk from Reiser, cigar in one hand, champagne bottle in the other.

  “The way he smells?” Reiser asked.

  Shit, Tommy thought, I blew it. “I mean—” He realized there was no sense in lying now. It was better to stick to the truth. “Yeah. I should have told you before. I can smell people who are affected by the wild card—”

  “That’s ridiculous—” Reiser began, but Castro interrupted him. “No. He’s right.”

  Reiser turned to his old friend. “What?”

  “I am a wild carder.”

  Tommy couldn’t restrain himself from saying, “See? I told you, I told you!” He could barely restrain himself from doing a little dance of joy. Visions of headlines ran in his head. Screw The Weekly Gospel. He’d take this to The Daily News. And he was only in the ninth grade! Visions of future Pulitzers danced in his head.

  “But I am not an ace.”

  “What?” Tommy’s face fell. “I don’t believe you.”

  Castro shrugged. “It’s true. I never knew I’d been infected with the virus until last winter. I went to see the doctors about my arm. They did tests and discovered I had the wild card. They discovered my ‘power’ when examining my arm.”

  “What is it?” Reiser asked.

  Castro shrugged again. “My tendons and ligaments are maybe twice as flexible as an ordinary man’s.” He illustrated by bending back the fingers in his right hand. They bent back pretty far. “But, more flexible or not, they were finished in my pitching arm. My arm was dead, useless for pitching. So, I retired.”

  “Flexible fingers?” Tommy asked weakly. “That’s your power?”

  “My elbow, too,” Castro said, taking a reflective puff of his cigar.

  “Hmmm. That’s not much of a story,” Reiser said.

  “Still . . .” Tommy said, but hope was fading even as he tried to grasp it.

  Reiser looked at him thoughtfully. “Look, maybe we can, uh, make this up to you if you keep it our own little secret.”

  “How?” Tommy asked.

  Reiser shrugged. “I don’t know. How about a season’s ticket for next year?”

  “Well . . .” Tommy wasn’t much of a baseball fan, but his father was. And other people were. With the Dodgers being world champs, tickets would be tough to come by next year. They’d be hot items. People might be willing to tell him things, to do things for him, if he had tickets for important games. “How about two season tickets?”

  Reiser shrugged. “All right.”

  “Okay,” Tommy nodded, absorbing the notion that he could just as easily be paid for not revealing something, as for revealing it. “I guess I should go write my story now.”

  “Your story with no secret aces,” Reiser said.

  “My story with no secret aces,” Tommy agreed. Flexible tendons weren’t a footnote, let alone a whole story. Also, he suddenly realized, he’d have had to reveal how he discovered Castro was a wilder carder—by smelling him. Maybe he shouldn’t tell the whole wide world about his talent.

  Tommy smiled to himself. As it turns out, he thought, there is a secret ace in the story after all. Me.

  He left the two men in the manager’s office, celebrating their victory. He had his story to write, his own victory to celebrate. Maybe it wasn’t as glorious as he’d hoped it would be. There’d be no blazing headlines, no by-line in a real newspaper, but Dodgers World Champs wasn’t exactly chopped liver, and it was a more manageable headline.

  It’s so cool, Tommy Downs thought, being a reporter.

  He strolled down the corridors of Ebbets Field, dreaming of the thousands of stories to come.

  WALKING THE FLOOR OVER YOU

  By Walton Simons

  The club was crowded, but a little less boisterous than usual. Audience members whispered to each other or played with their drinks, but they weren’t giving the girl at the microphone the kind of attention she needed.

  A lot of the customers were smoking, but Carlotta’s routine was doing the opposite. It wasn’t the material, and her delivery was spot on. Well, as good as it ever was, anyway.

  She was gorgeous, though. Carlotta had creamy skin, delicate features, and a body that, as the joke went “would make a bishop kick out a stained-glass window.” Her honey-blonde hair was cut in a Louise Brooks pageboy, framing her face to ideal effect. Bob leaned back into the polished bar rail and sighed. If he didn’t have a personal interest in her, it would be easy enough to fire her. Not much chance of that, though

  In every crowd there was somebody who looked like they didn’t belong. Tonight it was a pair of guys sitting together to the left of the stage, just away from the light’s edge. They were young and looked like FBI agents dressed in particularly loud disco garb. One had a face with a hound-like quality and his companion was taller and thinner. Mentally, Bob dubbed them Mutt and Jeff. Neither man was laughing or even smiling at Carlotta’s material, although they were certainly keeping their eyes on her. Bob decided to pay them a visit.

  He navigated the floor over to their table. “Enjoying the show, gentleman?”

  The tall thin man looked up at him, expressionless. “Great,” he said.

  Bob cleared his throat. “It’s traditional to laugh at the jokes.”

  “My friend has a medical condition that keeps him from laughing.” The thin man smiled. It wasn’t pleasant. “So I don’t either, just to keep him from feeling bad.”

  “That explains why you’re patronizing a comedy club.” Bob wasn’t sure what he wanted from these two, but knew he wasn’t going to get it if they had their way. “Pay attention.” He gestured to Carlotta. “You might just enjoy yourselves.”

  “I’m sure most of you can tell I’m not from around here.” Carlotta looked down ashamedly from her mike. “The truth is, I’m from America’s heartland, the great state of Iowa.”

  “Tha
t would explain why you smell like pigs.” A deep male voice, slightly slurred, came from the back of the audience. Bob walked in the general direction of the heckler. He’d done this plenty of times and would have the creep pinpointed quickly.

  Carlotta tried to work the interruption to her advantage. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned since being in the Big Apple, it’s that no one can survive very long with a well developed sense of smell.” Small laugh. “Getting back to Iowa. This is the truth, I swear to god. They held a contest in my home state for a new tourism slogan and asked Iowans to help them out.”

  “You suck, you corn-fed bitch.” The heckler was even louder this time around. Bob picked out a large sandy-haired man in a tank top and faux leather pants sitting by himself a couple of tables away on the left. Bob pulled a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and moved in.

  “Really,” Carlotta continued, ignoring him this time around, “you’d be amazed at the cruelty of responses from the folks in Iowa. These are people with a real sense of humor. One was ‘Iowa, gateway to Wisconsin.’” She sold the joke with a broad sweep of her arm, but didn’t get much for the effort.

  “Go the fuck back where you came from,” yelled the heckler. Bob was standing directly behind him and briefly turned on the flashlight over the troublemaker’s head. Carlotta was looking in his direction and nodded.

  “My favorite slogan by far, though, was ‘Iowa, it makes you want Dubuque.’” This got a pretty good response from the audience but the heckler started to laugh uproariously. He knocked his drink over, spilling ice and alcohol onto the floor, and grabbed onto the edge of his table, laughing convulsively. He looked up at Bob, with something close to panic in his widening eyes. Bob grabbed the man under his sweaty armpits and hauled him into a standing position, then guided him toward the exit. The heckler got his legs under himself quickly and Bob was afraid he might try to resist being ushered out the door. Luckily the man seemed relieved as Bob pushed him outside into the heat.

  “I wouldn’t come back,” Bob said, as a parting shot, and gave the man a practiced stare for good measure. The heckler said nothing, but walked slowly away down the pavement.

  Carlotta was leaving the stage to scattered applause when Bob made it back to the interior of the club. Mutt and Jeff had disappeared, which was okay with Bob. “Thank you ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the audience. “She’s here Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Tell your friends.”

  Bob met her backstage with a half-smile. “Not your best, but not awful, given the circumstances.” He’d guessed Carlotta’s wild card ability and had bluffed the truth out of her a few weeks earlier. She couldn’t do any real harm with it; make a crowd giggle, a few people laugh out loud, or—if she focused it on one person—completely incapacitate them.

  “Right.” Carlotta wiped her forehead and combed back her damp hair. “Thanks for the help, but I had him spotted. Jerks seem to grow on trees in this burg.”

  “That’s a fact, my dear. After six months here, I’d think you’d come to expect it. New York’s reputation didn’t manifest itself out of thin air.”

  Carlotta headed for her tiny dressing room. Bob followed. “God help me if I ever get used to rude assholes,” she said without looking back at him. “The dirt, yes. The noise, yes. Even the lack of anything green outside of Central Park or the A&P. But jerk-off morons are always going to piss this girl off.” She turned around at the doorway of her tiny dressing room. “I haven’t got time to talk. I’m meeting someone.”

  “You’re certainly not a very traditional girl.” Bob fingered his watch and waited for a reply, but received only a roll of the eyes. “Most people suck up to their boss a bit, unless they’re very, very good at their job. You certainly don’t have more than one ‘very’ and possibly none at all.”

  “You’re not going to get rid of me just yet, Mr. Cortland,” she said, and closed the door with finality.

  Too true, Bob thought to himself. He wandered back over to the bar and poured himself a half-shot of scotch, wondering what it would be like to win a round with her. She certainly wasn’t smarter than he was. Well probably not. But he couldn’t match her obstinacy. “To good humor,” he said quietly. “Mine. And patience.”

  He saw her flash out the rear exit in a short blue dress and almost-matching heels, blonde hair bouncing, and decided, with the help of the scotch, to try another approach on her. He had until he caught up with her to figure out just what that might be.

  Once outside, the July heat swallowed him like a chip of ice in a cup of steaming coffee. Even in the early morning hours, the still, furnace-like air sucked the life out of everyone and everything. Carlotta was disappearing down the alleyway, but stopped short on the far side of a dumpster. Two men emerged from the darkness and stepped into her path. Bob couldn’t see them well and slipped into the shadows on the dark side of the alley, carefully removed a small revolver from his right jacket pocket. It felt bigger in his hand that it really was. He was hoping the same psychological phenomenon applied to the men he was going to try to stop.

  “You’re coming with us. Any trouble, I hurt you.” The taller of the two men grabbed Carlotta by the arm. She tried to wrench away, but was pinned by his grip.

  Bob moved out from behind the dumpster and trained his weapon on the man holding Carlotta, recognizing the pair as Mutt and Jeff. “Let her go,” he said, in as even a tone as he could manage. “I’ll shoot you both if I have to.”

  Mutt stared at him, unblinking. “Now why don’t I believe that?”

  Taking a deep breath, Bob pointed the end of the revolver slightly to one side of the man and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked uncomfortably in his sweaty hand and the bullet ricocheted off the brick alley wall and into a pile of crates, spraying chips of wood. “Because you’re stupid,” he suggested.

  The pair turned and bolted toward the street. Bob aimed the gun toward the Mutt’s receding back, realized he wasn’t up to that, put the safety back on, and slipped the weapon back into his pocket.

  Carlotta still stood unmoving, fists clenched. Bob quickly put his arm around her and got her moving back toward the club door. “You never have any shortage of admirers. Ever seen them before?”

  She let out a deep breath. “No. Not until tonight. Show business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Carlotta looked into his eyes for a second, then turned her head. “Thanks.”

  “You want to tell me anything?” Bob tried to make eye contact with her, but she looked away and walked slowly back into the club. “Somehow, I didn’t think so.”

  He was in his favorite seat at the club, lazily rubbing his thumb over a cigarette burn on the table’s hard wood finish. Bob was tired and it was only late afternoon. The excitement of the previous night had kept him from sleeping. Not that insomnia was unusual for him. It even helped if you ran a late-night business. Even though he’d put on fresh clothes, he felt rumpled.

  Carlotta had seemed more scared than he would have expected if Mutt and Jeff were just muggers, and she didn’t spook easily as far as he could see. Not to mention the fact that comedy clubs like his didn’t really pay very well and any thief with half a brain would know that. Something was up, he was sure of that, but he didn’t have a clue what it might be. Maybe Carlotta just made him stupid. He took a sip of lukewarm coffee. It was his fourth cup of the day. If he had to be tired, at least he would be alert.

  Wes the bartender walked over with a half-empty pot of coffee and gave Bob a warmup, then headed back to his work cleaning glasses behind the bar. A native New Yorker, Wes was physically large, but not particularly good-looking, loved to laugh, and only poured heavy for regulars and attractive women. He was the first person Bob had hired when he opened the Village Idiot and the only original employee the place still had.

  “Wes, am I an idiot?” Bob asked, without looking for inspiration in the steam swirling in his cup.

  “No, boss. No one who has the good sense to hire me could possibly be an idiot.” r />
  Bob knew Wes could have made a comment about Carlotta. The bartender had a good pair of eyes and a quick mind. “Thanks, Wes.”

  “How about a raise?”

  “Don’t hurt me, Wes. You know how things are.”

  Bob heard a key turn in the front door and Carlotta stepped in. Even in the dim light, he could see she was paler than usual. She was wearing a royal blue halter-top that was sweat-soaked to the skin and her hair was plastered to the sides of her face.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Bob asked. “You look like, well, like last night.”

  “Funny about that.” Carlotta clutched a chair back and took a deep breath. “Because that’s how I feel.”

  “Okay. Sit down and tell me about it.” He motioned to Wes. “You want anything to drink?”

  “A shot of brandy would be nice.”

  “Coming up.” Wes grabbed a glass and a bottle. “Anything for you, Mr. Cortland?”

  “Not just yet, Wes.” He put a finger under Carlotta’s chin and raised her head. “Let’s hear it.”

  Carlotta took the glass of brandy Wes had hurried over and had a sip. “Okay. I’m shopping on Eighth Street. Checking out some clothes and whatnot, and I wind up in a bookstore. This guy comes up to me and starts talking. Gorgeous guy. Tall. Blonde. You’d hate him.”

  “I do,” Bob said. “I’ll take that brandy after all, Wes.”

  “Right. Well we really hit it off and he asks if I want to get a cup of coffee. I figure he’s looking to get laid, which isn’t exactly objectionable in my mind, so I’ll just entertain the possibility and see how it goes.”

  “Playing hard to get again.”

  “Forget that, okay.” Carlotta shot him an agitated glance. “I don’t need you to ride me right now. In any case, we’re having coffee and it turns out he likes the same things as me. Russian composers, and Monet, and Woody Allen, and iced coffee.” She ticked off the coincidences on her fingers as she named them. “And I realized that this was beyond Kismet and into something really creepy. This guy came after me, same as those goons last night. Only he was using sugar instead of trying to strong-arm me.” She paused and took a deep breath, then another swallow of brandy.