The Great American Novel (52 page)

Roland was drawn from the horrible vision of a lifetime of paternal reprimand and unjust obscurity by the strange conversation coming from the clubhouse entryway. What the hell language was that anyway? It wasn't German, it wasn't Japanese—he knew what they sounded like from the war movies. What was that language then—and who was talking it anyway?

When he peered around the row of lockers he saw a stolid little man wearing a big padded blue suit conversing with the manager of the Ruppert Mundys. Gamesh had his eyes riveted to the foreigner's face, a face broader than it was long and heavily padded, like the suit. The stranger was holding a baseball bat at his side. He handed it to Gamesh,
Gamesh saluted,
and the man in the suit was gone.

That was all he heard and saw, but it left the center-fielder reeling.

Then Gamesh saw
him.

“You again? What are you sulking about now, Goldilocks? Who excused you from batting practice, Big Star?”

“That—that was Russian!” Agni cried.

“Get out on the field, Glamor Puss, and fast.”

“But you were talkin'
Russian
to that man!”

“That man, Agni, happened to be my uncle from Babylonia, and what we were talking was pure, unadulterated Babylonian. Now get your immortal ass out on the ball field.”

“If it was your uncle, why did you salute him?”

“Respect, Roland—ever hear of it? All Babylonians salute their uncles. Don't you know ancient history, don't you know anything except what a star you are?”

“But—but why did he give you a bat?”

“Jesus, what a question! Why shouldn't he? Don't Babylonians have kids? Don't Babylonian kids like autographs, too?”

“Well, sure, I guess so…”

“You guess so…” snorted Gamesh, that master of intimidation. “Here,” he said, handing Agni a pen to finish him off, “ink your famous monicker—be the first on your team. And then get out of here. You've got hitting to do. You've got
hating
to do. And loathing, God damn it! Oh, we'll make a Mundy out of you yet, Mr. All-American Boy!”

Thirty-two was the number chiseled into the wood at the butt end of the bat, but Roland Agni had only to lift it in his right hand to know that it did not weigh a gram over thirty-one ounces. An ounce of bat was missing.
Somewhere it was hollow.

He reeled again, but not so the Soviet terrorist and saboteur could see.

*   *   *

Even from deepest center, Agni followed the skipper's every movement down in the dugout: he watched him use it as a pointer to move his infield around, watched him hammer with it on the dugout floor to rattle the Kakoola hitters, watched between pitches when he rested his chin on the flat end, as though it were a bat and he were a manager like any other. For six full innings the center-fielder kept one eye on the game and the other on Gamesh—with that great pair of eyes, he could do it—and then at the top of the seventh, a Damur foul zinged back into the Mundy dugout, and when the players went scrambling, Agni landed like a blockbuster in the manager's lap.

“Hey! Give that here!” snarled Gamesh. “Hey—!”

But on the very next pitch, Nickname drew a walk; Terminus, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, moved up to the plate; and Roland, who according to the Isaac Ellis Rotation Plan (and with the reluctant permission of his father) batted first, leaped from the dugout to the on-deck circle, swinging round and round over his head the bat he had wrested from the Mundy manager with all the strength in his body, the bat that was missing an ounce.

Now rarely during that season did the Mundy manager step onto the field if he could help it; he had his reasons—and they were to prove to be good ones. To remove a pitcher from the game, he sent the Jewish genius out to the mound, and to talk to the batters he had the notorious Ockatur waddle on down from the third-base coaching box. Those two misfits gave a crowd plenty to holler about, without Gamesh (who was of course
the
Mundy they had turned out to see and to censure—though his popularity had plummeted, the charisma held) running the risk of liquidation.

But now the threatening notes that he had been receiving daily since opening day must have seemed to him as nothing beside the danger of discovery by the incomparable center-fielder, whose demoralization and incipient derangement (any inning now, Gamesh reported daily to his superiors) had fit precisely into his sinister timetable. So he called for time and came up out of the Mundy dugout as though to talk strategy with Terminus at home plate. What a Fourth of July treat for that crowd! At the sight of the cadaverous Mundy manager, wearing on his back the number he had made infamous a decade earlier, the Reaper fans roared as only they could.
There he was
at last, the hero who spoke to them of rage, ruination, and rebirth, a white Jack Johnson, a P. League Jesse James—the martyred intransigent, the enviable transgressor, and something too of the resurrected who had died for their sins and returned.

At home plate, Gamesh took Applejack Terminus aside to tell the fifty-two-year-old to remember to keep his eye on the ball, then headed back to the Mundy dugout by way of the on-deck circle, the crowd raving on all the while. With Gamesh looming over him, Roland remained down on one knee, the fingers of his right hand curled like a python around the handle of the Babylonian's bat.

“Okay, Champ,” said the manager, clapping him lightly on the back, “give it here and go back down and get your own.”

“Communist! Dirty Communist!”

“Tsk, tsk. What sort of language is that for a clean-cut lad from a big middlewestern state?”

“
True
language!” said the center-fielder, and opening his clenched left fist, showed Gamesh that he had the goods on him at last. “It's all clear now—you traitor!”

“What's clear, Roland? To me you sound confused, boy.”

“That you're a spy, a secret Soviet spy! Just like Mrs. Trust warned me about!”

“Now what on earth are you holding in your hand, Rollie?”

“Film! A tiny little roll of secret film!”

“Where'd you buy it, from some dirty old pervert downtown? Tsk, tsk, Roland Agni.”

“I got it out of this here bat! You know that! By unscrewin' the bottom of the bat! And out it dropped, right in my hand!”

“Play ball!” the umpire called. “You gave 'em their thrill, Gil—they've seen your frightenin' mug—now let's play the game!”

“Film?” said Gamesh. “Oh, sure. My uncle. He's the super-duper photographer in the family. Babylonians love pictures, you know—worth a thousand words, we say.”

“Your uncle's a Communist spy! You're one too!
That's
why you're teachin' them hate!”

“Play ball!”

Before the umpire could descend upon them, Gamesh started back to the dugout—but his parting words were chilling, their meaning as well as their tone: “Use your head, Hero. I can ruin your life, destroy your reputation forevermore.”

After working the count to 2 and 2, Terminus popped up foul on an Ellis hit-and-run and not all the abuse in the new Mundy lexicon could cause the Kakoola third-baseman to drop the fly ball, nor was he intimidated by Applejack's bat as it came careening toward his ankles. The put-out made, however, the third-baseman started after Ockatur (later, from his hospital bed, he claimed that the dwarf had spit in his eye as he crossed the coaching box in pursuit of the pop-up), whereupon the Mundys sprang from the bench and were kneeing (some said knifing) the fielder before he could lay hold of the misshapen coach. Scores of police charged on to the field from beneath the stands—on hand, as of old, when Gamesh came to town—and when finally spikes were plucked from flesh and fingers from eyeballs, Ockatur, Astarte, and Rama were ejected from the game, and the Kakoola third-baseman, as well as the shortstop—the sole Reaper who had dared to come to his defense—were carried unconscious from the diamond. How times do change! Who would have believed this of the Mundys only the season before?

The field clear at last of law-enforcement officers (and their horses), Gamesh came off the Mundy bench once again and started out to home plate, where Agni waited for the Reaper utility infielders to take a practice throw before stepping in for his turn at bat.

Making no effort to hide his disgust, the umpire said, “Now what, Gamesh? You gotta start in too? Ain't they crazy enough from Mazuma?” he asked, motioning out to the bleachers, where the irrepressible Kakoola owner, in an Uncle Sam beard and suit to celebrate the day, and with the assistance of daughter Dinero, was loading an iron ball into a mock cannon aimed in the direction of the Mundy bullpen.

“So what do you say, Rollie,” Gamesh whispered, “you don't want to go down in recorded history like Shoeless Joe, do you? You wouldn't want the world to know about those W-h-e-a-t-i-e-s, would you? Why not give over the fil-um then, okay? And then go get yourself a nice new bat, and we will forget we ever crossed swords today—what do you say, Roland?
Otherwise your name will be anathema for centuries to come. Like Caligula. Like Judas. Like Leopold and Loeb.
”

“What—what's anathema!” asked the young center-fielder, weakening under Gamesh's maniacal, threatening gaze.

“
Mud,
my boy,
mud.
You will be an outcast from decent society worse even than me. You who could be greater than Gofannon, greater than Cobb, greater than the great Joe D.”

“But—but you're out to destroy America!”

“America?” said Gamesh, smiling. “Roland, what's America to you? Or me, or those tens of thousands up in the stands? It's just a word they use to keep your nose to the grindstone and your toes to the line. America is the opiate of the people, Goldilocks—I wouldn't worry my pretty little reflexes about it, if I was a star like you.”

When the bang sounded, all faces turned—grinning—toward the open center-field bleachers, where the bearded, top-hatted Mazuma, and daughter Dinero, clad for a summer day in a strip of red, a cup of white, and a cup of blue, were still wrestling with the cannonball (and one another). The fans whooped and barked with delight. Then came the second report, and with it the realization that it wasn't Mazuma setting off firecrackers, and it wasn't a joke.

Spectators turned up afterwards (publicity hounds, one and all) who claimed to have heard as many as six and seven shots ring out, thus giving rise to the “keystone combo” conspiracy theory of assassination bandied about for months and months in the letters column of the Kakoola papers; however, the investigation conducted by General Oakhart's office in cooperation with the Kakoola Police Department concluded “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that only two bullets had been fired, the one that shattered Gil Gamesh's left shoulder before ricocheting into Roland's throat, and the bullet that penetrated Agni's head directly between his baby-blue eyes, at the very instant, it would seem, that he was either to betray his country so as to save his name, or sacrifice his name so as to save his country.

From the stands it was at first assumed that the bodies lying atop one another across home plate were both dead; but though Gamesh's famed left arm lay stretched in the dust, lifeless as a length of cable, the right edged slowly down Roland's bloody shirtfront, and while pandemonium reigned in the stadium, Gamesh reached into Roland's pants and fished the microfilm out from where the innocent youngster had (predictably) secreted it.

The assassin was dead within minutes. Kakoola mounted police, low in their saddles, charged the scoreboard, placing as many as twenty bullets into each of the apertures from which the shots appeared to have come. As a result, they got not just the assassin, but also the scorekeeper—a father of four, two of whom, being boys, were assured within the week of admission to West Point when they should come of age. At a memorial service at Kakoola City Hall, a service academy spokesman standing in full-dress uniform beside the two small boys, Mayor Efghi, Frank Mazuma, and a veiled, voluptuous Dinero, would call the appointments “a tribute to the brave father of these two proud young Americans, who had perished,” as he put it, “in the line of duty” (perished along with Mike the Mouth Masterson, who was, as the reader will already have surmised, the murderer).

The coroner's inquest revealed that of the two hundred and fifty-six slugs fired by the Kakoola police, one had grazed Mike's ear; however, the long night he had spent with his high-powered rifle in a remote corner of the scoreboard, sucking chicken bones and drinking soda pop and dreaming his dreams of vengeance, followed by the excitement of the assassination itself, apparently had been enough to cause him to keel over, at eighty-one, a victim of heart failure.

T
HE
E
NEMY
W
ITHIN

Two days after Agni's death, from the studios of TAWT, Angela Whittling Trust's Tri-City radio station, General Oakhart revealed to the American people the magnitude of the plot to destroy the Patriot League, Organized Baseball, the free enterprise system, democracy, and the republic. Seated to either side of the microphone from which the General read his statement were Gil Gamesh, Angela Trust, and Mr. and Mrs. Roland Agni, Senior, parents of the slain center-fielder, who, it was now revealed, had not been the accidental victim of a vengeful madman, “a loner” acting on his own, but had been murdered deliberately for refusing to play ball with America's enemies.

“My fellow Americans, and ladies and gentlemen of the press,” General Oakhart began. “I have here in my hand the names of thirteen members of the Ruppert Mundy baseball team who have been named as dues-paying, card-carrying members of the Communist Party, secret agents of a Communist espionage and sabotage ring, and Communist sympathizers.”

He proceeded then to outline the scheme hatched over a decade ago in the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, and that had erupted in violence two days earlier with the tragic murder of the 1943 Patriot League batting champ, and the attempt upon the life of Gil Gamesh. “I am shortly going to ask the Mundy manager to tell you his own remarkable story in his own words. It is a story of defeat and dejection, of error and of betrayal; it is a story of the horror of treason and the circle of loneliness and misery in which the traitor moves. I know that some of you will ask, How can you have any respect for the integrity of a man who now admits to such a heinous past, who admits to us now that he did not tell anything like the whole truth about himself the first time he appeared before the nation only a few brief months ago? My answer is not one of justification but of extenuation. My fellow Americans, is it not better to tell the whole truth in the end than to refuse to tell the truth at all? Is it not better to be one who has been a Communist than one who may still be one? I think one need only contrast the searing frankness and the soul-searching courage of Gil Gamesh with the deviousness and treachery of the Mundy Thirteen—twelve of whom still staunchly refuse to admit to the crime of treason—to conclude that Gil Gamesh is indeed an American who deserves not only our respect, but our undying gratitude for this warning he has given us of the conspiracy we face and the battle that lies ahead.”