Ray finished his beer. The others waited for him to continue.
“Cops have a different story,” Ray said. “According to them, Frank went back in the motel room, tried to wake them up, got angry, pulled out his dick, and took a whiz on one of them.
“Oh, Christ,” Gordie said.
Ray said, “Turns out Frank pissed on the wrong goddamned girl. Her dad was a Belchertown cop. He raised holy hell. Frank’s father had to hire F. Lee Bailey to get him out of the jam. Ended up dropping a wad of dough on the girl’s family to settle. Believe me, Frank is a nasty son of a bitch.”
Ray turned to stare up at the scoreboard, squinting and shading his eyes. After a moment, he glanced over at Lou.
“Tonight,” Ray said.
Lou nodded. “Tonight.”
SCENE 64: FRONT-END, PART IV {Draft 3}:
INT. FRATERNITY BASEMENT BAR - NIGHT
Ray, Lou, and Buzz are on barstools, each with a beer.
BUZZ
Dudes, you’re on your own tomorrow night.
LOU
How so?
BUZZ
This was my last night.
RAY
Who’s front-end tomorrow?
BUZZ
Draw straws, you poor bastards.
CUT TO:
INT. BARRETT COLLEGE DINING HALL - THE NEXT NIGHT
There’s a line of bussing carts near the front of the dining hall waiting to unload. Busboys hang around, growing impatient. One of them peers through the pass-through window and shakes his head in disgust.
INT. DISHWASHER AREA—VIEW THROUGH THE PASS-THROUGH WINDOW
Total chaos. Ray is on front-end. Dirty dishes and glasses and pails of garbage are piled everywhere. Broken plates and stray pieces of silverware are scattered on the ground.
ANGLE ON LOU
at the back-end, waiting. He pushes aside the canvas flaps to peer inside to see if anything is coming. Nothing.
ANGLE ON RAY
as he attempts to stack a set of dirty dishes in a rack. Two dishes slip out of his hands and CRASH to the ground.
RAY
Shit!
ANGLE ON LOU
Steam is coming out of the back-end. Lou raises his eyebrows in surprise. A loaded rack is actually coming out of the dishwasher. As soon as the edge of the rack pushes against the flaps, Lou grabs it and pulls it out. Hot water sloshes all over the place.
LOU
What the—? Jesus, Ray—
CLOSE ON THE RACK
Ray has sent a pail of garbage through the dishwasher.
RAY turns to look. He’s overwhelmed, on the verge of panic.
LOU smiles. RAY gives him a quizzical look. LOU starts to laugh.
RAY
(starting to grin)
I sent garbage?
LOU
You know what they say? Garbage in—
RAY
—garbage out.
LOU
(in a bad Mexican accent)
Garbage? We don’t need no stinking garbage.
The two of them collapse in laughter.
INT. DINING HALL
The line of busboys is still out there waiting. Several of them frown at the HOOTS and HOWLS of laughter from the dishwasher area.
Chapter Twenty-five
Evanston, Illinois.
Six hours later.
They were squeezed around the kitchen table in Bronco Billy’s brick bungalow.
Billy turned toward Lou. “Really? Tonight?”
Lou nodded.
Billy looked at Gordie, and then at Ray.
“Yep,” Ray said.
Billy’s eyes blinked rapidly behind his wire-rim glasses. “Why so fast?”
“No other option,” Ray said. “Reggie and Frank are sniffing around like dogs in heat. Others might be, too. I’m feeling—feeling—”
He turned to Gordie. “What’s that Yiddish word of yours?”
“Shpilkes.”
“That’s me. Shpilkes out the wazoo.”
“But how are you going to get in there?” Billy asked.
“We, Kemosabe.” Ray grinned.
“Okay.” Billy forced a smile. “We. How?”
Ray shrugged. “We may not have the key to the front door, but we got the next best thing.”
“What’s that?” Billy asked.
“Heavy-duty bolt-cutters.”
Billy looked at Lou.
Lou nodded. “Ray and I went by Home Depot after the game.”
“We stocked up,” Ray said. “Bolt-cutters, rope, tarp, duct tape, other shit. They’re all in the back of Lou’s van.”
“Whoa.” Gordie made a time-out signal with his hands. “Bolt-cutters? Are you seriously thinking about using them?”
“If we have to,” Ray said.
Gordie turned to Lou. “Counselor, am I correct to assume that breaking-and-entering is still against the law in the State of Illinois?”
“My heavens.” Ray put his hand over his heart in feigned shock. “Really?”
Gordie shook his head in exasperation. “I’m serious, Ray. We’re not in college anymore. We get caught, and we’re in deep shit, man.” He turned to Billy. “You think your principal would like that?”
Ray said, “Chill out, Gordie. If we have to actually use the damn bolt-cutters, you two Girl Scouts can sit on your thumbs in the van and wait.”
“Ssshhh,” Dorothy said as she entered the kitchen buttoning the top button of her peasant blouse. “You’ll wake up Santino. Anyone for more coffee?”
They told her no.
Lou said. “Dinner was great, Dorothy.”
She pulled up a chair and smiled. “My pleasure.”
Lou reflected again on the unlikelihood of her marriage to Billy—which was just part of the unlikelihood of Billy’s bizarre career in Nicaragua. The U.S. Embassy in Managua had been his first overseas posting. During those initial months he lived the life of an embassy functionary—sending cables to Washington during the day, donning a tuxedo for an evening cocktail party up at Tiscapa with Somoza’s Guardia Nacional henchmen.
But one day he failed to report for duty. And by that night he was huddled in back of a 1949 Ford truck with six other recruits bouncing along dirt roads to the outskirts of Matagalpa, where they began a three-day trek through the mountain jungles to the guerrilla training camp of Carlos Aguero Echeverria of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, known in the States as the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Carlos himself—in green fatigues and carrying an M-15—greeted the bewildered recruits. One year later, on July 20, 1979, Bronco Billy was among that crowd of 250,000 that jammed into the Playa de la Revolución in downtown Managua in celebration of the overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
Lou was the first to learn. He’d stayed in touch with Billy after college and knew about his Nicaragua posting with the State Department. Indeed, he’d called him in D.C. a few weeks before his departure to wish him good luck. But when he received the long letter from Billy describing his Sandinista conversion, Lou initially thought it was a spoof. But by page seven of the eighteen-page handwritten epistle, he realized his college roommate was telling him the truth.
Bronco Billy a Sandinista guerilla? Lou had been stunned.
He wrote back, though, and they stayed in touch. Billy joined the Literacy Crusade, a massive Sandinista operation in which seventy thousand volunteers (known as brigadistas) headed into the countryside to teach reading and writing in remote rural villages. Billy had led a group of thirty-two Managuan teenage brigadistas on a six-month tour of duty in a remote area of the Neuva Segovia province where they eventually brought literacy to hundreds of peasants.
As Lou could tell from the letters, it was a time of fierce passions and emotions,
exhilaration and anguish. Billy had been in the village the day Jaime Cordova, a coffee farmer who once couldn’t even recognize his own name in writing, proudly presented the brigadistas with a wood plaque on which he had carved the words of the revolutionary hero Augusto César Sandino, who’d been killed by Somoza’s father in 1934: Death is no more than a moment of annoyance, and it’s not worth taking seriously. But he was also there in May of 1980 when ex-National Guardsmen slipped across the border from Honduras and murdered his comrade and fellow teacher, Georgina Andrade.
Alas, things change. Especially revolutions. Six years ago, Billy returned to the States. That was when the catalyst of his mysterious life detour was revealed: Dorothy Becker. She’d been a University of Chicago graduate student in urban anthropology who’d dropped out of her doctoral program while on her field placement in Nicaragua. By the time she and Billy met at a fruit vendor’s stall in Managua, she was a paramedic in a ramshackle clinic in a Miskito barrio near the rancid waters of Lake Managua. Billy saw her across the aisle at the banana bin—a tall woman, twenty pounds overweight, dark curly hair, thick glasses, Earth-mother breasts. She looked up, and it was love at first sight. Literally. For both. Within a month, Billy’s unswerving internal gyroscope had jumped its base.
It was Dorothy who introduced Billy to Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the courtly editor of La Pensa and a leading opposition figure. It was Dorothy who showed her naïve embassy boyfriend the canned food in the supermarket bearing the Red Cross stamp—the same food that had been donated by international relief organizations in the aftermath of the 1972 earthquake and then intercepted by Somoza’s accomplices to sell in supermarkets Somoza owned. And it was Dorothy who took Billy to visit the three stark white buildings in the center of Managua, officially named Centro Plasmaferesis but unofficially were known as La Casa de Vampiros—or the House of Vampires. It was there that the poor of Managua, at the rate of 1,500 a day, came to sell their blood plasma for five dollars a pint, which was then marked up three hundred percent and sold on the U.S. market for millions of dollars in profits a year. Who owned La Casa de Vampiros? The ultimate vampire, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, bleeding his people to death. Chamorro’s newspaper first exposed Somoza’s involvement in the House of Vampires, and Chamorro’s assassination in early 1978 was the catalyst that caused Billy to make his first, tentative contacts with the Sandinistas.
Dorothy was, Lou believed, a good soul, albeit in her own tie-dyed, vegan, unshaved-underarm, hippie-commune-matriarch sort of way. Passionate about causes for which Lou could either muster no passion—such as the importance of breast feeding beyond the child’s second birthday—or for which he mustered guilt over not sharing her passion—such as the need to improve mental health care for prisoners. A serious person, and, as far as Lou could tell, without an ounce of frivolity in her. The world needed more people like Dorothy. Just so long as he didn’t have to marry one.
Dorothy poured herself a cup of herbal tea. “Are you still talking about that statue?”
Billy said, “Ray wants to go for it tonight.”
She glanced her watch and gave her husband a puzzled look. “They’ll let you in to look for it at this hour?”
“Well, not exactly,” Billy said. “We’d have to, uh, sneak in.”
She studied Billy.
The rest of them waited.
“I do not understand,” she finally said. “Why would you do that?”
Billy pursed his lips but said nothing.
Ray leaned forward and put his arm around Billy.
“That statue is an important part of our school’s heritage, Dorothy,” Ray said. “It vanished thirty-five years. No one’s seen it since. If we can find it and bring it back, the school gets twenty-three million dollars, and we get famous and divide up three million dollars. Not exactly chump change.”
Dorothy took off her steel-rimmed glasses and wiped them on a cloth napkin. She held them up to the light, squinting at the lenses, and then put them back on.
She gave Ray a severe look. “Breaking in? Doesn’t that seem—well—irresponsible?”
Ray smiled. “What if it was Michelangelo’s David? What if it had been missing for decades? Would it seem irresponsible if we were going in there to recover Michelangelo’s David?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“And why not?” Ray asked.
Dorothy gave him a tolerant smile. “Because Michelangelo’s David is a great work of art.”
“And you’ve concluded that Sirena is not?”
“Raymond, Michelangelo’s David is one of the most significant works of art in the world.”
“Says who?” Ray was grinning. “A bunch of snooty art critics? Who says they’re right? What if Michelangelo’s David is just Renaissance kitsch? Just the sixteenth-century equivalent of one of those Norman Rockwell figurines they hawk in the back of Parade magazine?”
Dorothy sighed. “I am not going to let you bait me, Raymond. You know that your statue is not a significant piece of art.”
“Actually,” Ray said, “I don’t know that. All I know for sure is that it’s a pretty significant piece of art to graduates of Barrett College. It’s part of the college’s history.”
“But in the grand scheme of things, Raymond, that statue is not significant.”
“All a matter of perspective, Dorothy,” Ray said. “To some guy in Tunisia, the Magna Carta is an insignificant scrap of paper. But if the original document, signed by old King John himself, had been stolen and hidden inside that scoreboard, well, you’d think it was pretty noble for Billy to go up there and rescue it.”
Dorothy sighed again. “Raymond, Sirena is not the Magna Carta, and it is not Michelangelo’s David, and it is not the Mona Lisa. And it certainly is not worth the risk of getting arrested over.”
The other watched the back and forth, captivated.
“Not worth the risk?” Ray rubbed his chin. “Who has the right to decide that? Let me ask you this. Was Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean worth the risk? Did he save anybody, or cure any disease, or make the world safer for democracy by flying across the ocean? Same with Neil Armstrong. And Sir Edmund Hillary. And Hank Aaron. And all the crazy bozos that run the Boston Marathon each year. What’s the point of training six months to run twenty-six miles in three hours when you can drive the same goddamned distance in thirty minutes? But you know what? My opinion doesn’t count. I got no speaking privileges. You wanna run the fucking Marathon or climb Mount Everest or explore the Titanic or seek the goddamned Fountain of Youth or play golf on the fucking moon, I say go for it. It’s your quest, not mine.”
He glanced at Lou and winked. “Same with a bunch of dudes from the Middle Ages who decided to devote their lives to the search for the wine cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Talk about irresponsible.” He shook his head, grinning. “Shit.”
“Raymond,” Dorothy said, smiling despite herself, “that last one is just a story.”
“Hey, maybe someone will write our story some day.” Ray was grinning. “Sirena may not be the Holy Grail, Dorothy, but she’s the closest the four of us will ever get.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked around the kitchen table, his eyes suddenly widening.
“Check out the shape of this table, Dorothy. Milady, we’re your knights of the round table.”
Lou was grinning. Ray had done it. He’d charmed Dorothy and, in the process, he’d charmed the rest of them, too. A few moments ago they were four guys in their early forties scrunched around a little table in a cramped room in a brick bungalow on the outskirts of Chicago. Now they were a band of brothers in a magic circle.
Ray stood, gestured toward the others around the table, and gave her a sweeping bow. “How do we look, Lady Guinevere?”
She bowed toward him. “Most noble, Sir Lancelot.”
Ray turned to Billy. “Hear
that, Sir Bronco? Get your skinny ass upstairs and pack an overnight bag.” Ray checked his watch. “We’re departing Camelot at zero one-hundred hours.”
Chapter Twenty-six
At 1:40 a.m., Lou pulled the van to a stop directly beneath the El tracks at West Addison Street. The CTA station was to their right—brightly lit and empty except for the transit authority employee in the ticket booth.
Ray was riding shotgun. Gordie and Bronco Billy were in back.
Lou eased the van up to the corner of Addison and Sheffield. The four of them stared up at the curving gray façade looming in front of them. Above the dark row of ticket windows the unlit sign welcomed them to Wrigley Field, Home of the Chicago Cubs.
Ray rubbed his chin as he looked through the windshield. “The scoreboard is above the center field bleachers, which means—”
He turned toward the backseat.
“That way.” Gordie was pointing north up Sheffield. “The bleachers’ entrance is at the end of the block.”
Lou turned right onto Sheffield and drove slowly along the street. To their left, running the length of the block, was the east wall of Wrigley Field. Lou slowed to a stop at the corner of Sheffield and Waveland Avenue. To their right was a bar called Murphy’s Bleachers. They could hear music and laughter from inside. To their left were the entrance gates to the Wrigley Field bleachers.
Lou turned left onto Waveland and parked the van halfway down the block alongside the back wall of the ballpark. He turned off the engine, reached into the glove compartment, took out two flashlights, and handed one to Ray.
Ray looked back at Billy and Gordie. “Ready?”
They nodded.
The four of them got out. Lou had the rope, Ray had the bolt-cutters, Billy had the duct tape, and Gordie had the rolled-up tarpaulin.
Lou gazed upward. The sky was clear, the stars were bright. Towering above the ballpark was the scoreboard—three stories tall, with a T-shaped flagpole on top. From his angle on the sidewalk, Lou had a side view of the scoreboard. The front of it—the “wall” facing the playing field—was flat. The back, however, bulged in a convex curve. At its broadest point—front to back—the scoreboard was about twenty feet deep.
The Sirena Quest Page 13