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BEANBALL

Under the flickering light
of greasy rags, we finally found my phone and gun. They had landed in the sludge under one of the cables, a couple of yards away from the perimeter I’d been patting. It would have been a long night in here with the rats. I wiped the phone on the underside of my jacket. It seemed to still be alive, but showed only 29 percent battery. I put it in airplane mode so it would stop wasting energy looking for a signal; I wouldn’t use the flashlight unless I absolutely had to.

I tore a strip of fabric from my underpants—the cleanest garment I had on right now—so I could clean the gun barrel. Bernie wrung her hands, demanding that we get going, oh, why stand there playing with your weapon?

“I know, darling, I know, but if worse comes to worst and I have to shoot, I don’t want this gun jamming or blowing up on us.”

I gave her small tasks, things she had to concentrate on, working to bring her back from the edge of terror: Hold her torch over the gun barrel. Rewrap the rags around my torch. Tie her shoelaces. It’s amazing how much you can steady yourself by tying your shoelaces.

By the time I’d finished with the gun, Bernie was calm enough to tell me what she remembered of the night. She’d been imagining going to Wrigley for more than a week—my guess about her scouting trip to the ballpark, the night she’d said she was going out with friends from the peewee hockey league, had been correct.

“That time, I just wanted to see if I could do what Uncle Boom-Boom and you did, you know, see if I could climb up the bleachers. It looked like fun. Only then, when I saw the pictures, I
knew
this Annie, she must have left her diary here. I would have done that.”

Of course she would have. She was seventeen, with a high sense of adventure and a low sense of consequences.

Today, when Pierre took her to a camping store to get a few things for their mountain cabin, she’d bought a high-grade pocket flashlight—that made her feel confident she could navigate the stadium in the dark. Taking advantage of Pierre’s involvement with the game and with his old friends, she’d slipped out of the United Center and caught a cab.

“The driver, he asked me, am I sure I want to come here, since I am leaving a hockey game and there is no baseball game, and then when we got here—I saw how big this ballpark was in the dark, almost I called to him, wait!, but—” She broke off, shamefaced.

I skirted another pool of dank water dripping through the steel nets overhead. “But you didn’t want to admit you were no braver than I was,” I said matter-of-factly.

She nodded miserably. “He drove off. I felt very small and stupid. You said you and Uncle Boom-Boom used to climb over the back of the bleachers and I looked at them last week, but tonight—they looked so big—oh! Why did I think I needed to show off to you?”

Rats were skirmishing over something bleeding in a corner. I put an arm around Bernie to shield her from the sight.

She described her climb up the wall behind the bleachers—the same route I’d taken. A drunk had been watching her, which had scared her into swallowing her fears and scrambling over the wall.

“But when I was inside the park, I didn’t know where to look or what to do. I should have just gone back over the wall. Only the drunk man, it was dark, I didn’t know if he would attack me.”

“Let’s concentrate on being here now,” I said. “How did you find this tunnel?”

“I went inside the stadium, through the open aisle door. I thought, just one look, to prove I’m no coward, and then back outside, over the wall, and ride a cab to the hotel. I ran through the hallways, shining my flashlight around, not opening any doors. But then I came to the door to this tunnel. It was open, and I saw how she—it, the door, how it looked like the door in that photo. I stepped inside and the homeless man jumped me. He kept yelling at me, like he thought he knew me, or that I knew something I don’t know.”

“That’s typical of someone with a mental illness who’s been living on the streets,” I said. “Their reality is all they can process. Homelessness exacerbates the problem.”

“No! It wasn’t like that. He said that he was tired of tricks and people not believing him, that it was empty, there wasn’t anything here, but he wasn’t going to die for it. If anyone was going to die it would be me. And then he could be left alone.”

“That what was empty?” I started to ask, but I was interrupted by a loud clang, a sound vibrating along the iron pipes overhead, and then shouts, heavy footsteps.

“Is it Papa?” Bernie’s face was eager.

“I don’t know. I don’t like it.” Pierre would have been calling Bernie’s name.

I stuck our torches into holes in the concrete walls and pulled her back, away from the light.

“Stay here,” I murmured. “I want to see who’s here.”

I started up the tunnel, gun in hand.

“Don’t leave me,” Bernie cried. “I can’t be by myself in here, I don’t care if I’m a
lâche
myself, it’s too—”

The voices came through clearly.

“They’re further along, I can hear them.
Papa
!” Bernie called joyously.
“J’y suis, je t’attends!”

Footsteps pounding, slipping, men shouting. I tried holding Bernie: “Wait, wait until we know,” but she broke away from me and ran toward the voices, calling
“Papa, Papa
.
”

I lumbered after her, heard her scream, rounded a corner to see her struggling in the arms of a masked man. A second masked man loomed over him, gripping a third man, who wasn’t masked. Oily unwashed black hair hung over his forehead, almost joining with a week’s growth of beard. Jeans, a sweatshirt. I could just make out the Illinois Institute of Technology logo on its filthy front.

“Come one step closer and we shoot the girl,” the second masked man warned.

“Sebastian!” I shouted. “Sebastian Mesaline. Give it up. The police are on their way.”

“I told you,” Sebastian shrieked to the two goons. “I left the girl tied up in here, she’s the one you want, not me, she came in here, she stole the diary, she has the pages.”

“No,” I shouted. “We don’t have a diary. There is no diary.”

“Don’t lie to me, bitch,” the larger goon said. “I saw the cover to the diary. This worthless piece of shit”—he shook Sebastian—“says it was empty when he found it.”

“You found a book in here?” I stupidly asked.

“Yeah, Fugher, he fucking double-crossed us. He said this pansy of a nephew here did. Or you did. Which is it?”

I couldn’t recognize the voice. Not the heavy accent of Nabiyev. Not Bagby’s lilting baritone.

“Stella doesn’t have it?” I asked.

“Oh, the Guzzo broad—she’s so crazy she sees double whatever she’s looking at. No, what she has isn’t what we’re looking for. Which one of you is telling the truth—the boy or you?”

“I am,” Sebastian wailed. “I told you, I told you last week, when I gave it to Uncle Jerry the pages were already gone. Someone else was in here ahead of me. It had to be her.”

Sebastian wrenched himself free of the thug holding him and fled toward the exit. Big Goon turned and shot. I leapt over and smashed my gun stock into Small Goon’s jaw.

He roared in pain, loosed his grip on Bernie.

“Go, go, go!” I screamed.

She almost made it, bending her slight frame low, to slide under Small Goon’s arms, but she was too tired, too shell-shocked for the speed she needed. Big Goon grabbed her. Small Goon slugged me. I kicked his shins, hard, and he jumped back. Small Goon fired at me, missed.

I felt the heat as the bullet zinged past. I ducked down, scooted under a pipe, shot back, high, over Bernie’s head. The sound was unbearable, echoing, reechoing. Smoke filled the air, the stink of sulfur. Big Goon fired again.

“Don’t fucking kill her until we know where the goddam pages are!” the smaller creep yelled.

“We’ll get little missy here to tell us where she lives and search her place. I’m tired of fucking bitches thinking they own the universe.” Big Goon shot again.

Eyes watering, coughing, ears ringing, find a target that wasn’t Bernie. Edge forward. A sharp shock, and I was plummeting over a cliff, bouncing down rocks into the tar pits.

WILD PITCH

Tar was in my nose,
my lungs. It sucked me under, I couldn’t move my arms. Someone had been sick in front of me and the smell mixed with the tar was so terrible it made me vomit. I wanted my mother but Stella Guzzo and my aunt Marie appeared.

The tar poured over me and I blacked out. I woke in the modern epoch, into darkness so awful that I thought for a moment I actually was buried in tar. I flung my arms wildly trying to swim to the surface. Hit my hand on metal, heard it clang. Not tar. Tunnel. The smell of sewage and vomit. I’d been sick.

I struggled to sit up. My head knocked into a pipe and the jolt made me throw up again, a trickle of bile that left me panting for water.

Test for concussion: Can you remember the day, the president, the geological epoch? What’s your name?
V. I. Warshawski.
What’s your occupation?
Idiot
.

Bernadine Fouchard, she’d been with me. And then—masked men. Sebastian Mesaline. We’d fought, I could still smell the acrid gun smoke through the stench in my nose. Don’t think about what you’ve inhaled, sit up, move, slowly, but move! Phone in pocket, still working, turn on the light.

I’d been in the dark too long, I’d become a mole, couldn’t handle the stabbing shapes, colors. My head ached, my left eye was tearing, but I forced myself to keep blinking, looking, hoping for Bernie.

I was alone except for the rats. They’d gathered where I’d been lying, insolent, unconcerned, eating my vomit. Good thing I’d been sick, they’d have gone for my nose and cheeks first without it. The hard hat I’d borrowed had rolled off. My gun, nearby, I wanted to shoot the rats, but I only had one magazine and I’d already fired twice.

I bent slowly, not wanting to challenge my head, picked up the Smith & Wesson and the hard hat. I must have fallen heavily: the hat had a dent in it. I started to put it on, then looked at the dent. I’d been shot. The hat saved my life. The impact had knocked me out, but the men must have thought I was dead.

Move, V.I. Don’t be feeble, get out of here. I moved up the tunnel, got to the entrance. Locked in, no time for finesse. I shot out the lock, put my shoulder to the door. Damned mops were holding it shut. I backed up, shot at a hinge. The bullet ricocheted, but before I could find a cleverer strategy I heard shouting from the other side.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” Noises, mops scraping back, the door opened. I stood in the shadows, put away my gun when I saw who was on the other side. Five in the morning, game day. The grounds crew was there, getting the field ready for play.

I left through the doors in the outfield wall while the grounds crew were waiting for the cops to pick me up. The crew hadn’t been able to follow my story, or at least they didn’t believe my story—how could someone have been living inside the ballpark without the security detail noticing? They didn’t want to go into the tunnel to see the squalid nest Sebastian had built behind the steel panel, they didn’t have time for this kind of BS. No, the best thing was to have me picked up for trespassing and shooting a weapon inside the park.

I didn’t try to argue, just said I needed to use the washroom. While they stood guard at the entrance they’d unlocked, I picked the lock at the far end and slipped out, back hugging the wall, until I’d rounded a bend in the stadium wall. I went out through the first open aisle door, staggered down the seats and shuffled along the perimeter of the field to the exit. At least it was still so dark that they didn’t see me until I actually opened the door beneath the ivy. I heard them shout, but I hobbled over to Clark without stopping to look.

I didn’t contact Conrad until I was clear of the park, but as soon as I was sure I wasn’t being followed I texted a full report of my night.
Terrified,
I finished.
They have Bernie and I don’t know where they’re taking her. Check Sturlese Cement, check Virejas Tower and Bagby’s truck yard
.