“Come here and look at a foot that has been frozen at –40 degrees, for what?” He nodded toward the soldier guarding the freezer, “Six hours?”
The soldier nodded.
Quita held back.
Dr. Noir forced her to peer into the freezer. He reached in and, seizing something, flicked his arm and wrist in a deft movement. Quita screamed. Dr. Noir held up a toe for her inspection. The insentient man on the ground did not react. Quita fainted. She awoke where she had fallen. It was difficult to guess how much time had passed. She felt weak. She had bruised her face when she fell; her left eye was badly swollen.
“Now that you’ve toured our medical facilities, Miss Garza,” Dr. Noir began as soon as he saw she was conscious, “I assume you would prefer not to be involved in any of the situations you’ve encountered. Therefore, while you were indisposed I had some papers drawn up.”
He helped Quita to her feet.
“The confession is straightforward. You admit to an act of terrorism at the Hall of Baseball Immortals, as well as membership in an organization with plans to overthrow my government. I will personally recommend leniency: life in prison rather than death, and your beautiful body left intact.” He paused.
“Well, not entirely intact.”
As Quita shrank away he placed his hand on her slightly distended belly.
“I will take care of that little problem myself. As soon as you’ve signed the papers.”
“Never,” said Quita, her voice stronger than either of them would have thought possible.
“You are very brave now,” Dr. Noir said, stretching her cuffed hands above her head. “I’m afraid you have no choice but to co-operate.”
He fastened her handcuffs over a peg in a round wooden pole. Her toes just touched the floor. At his signal a soldier approached carrying a stout black leather belt, which gleamed from recently being oiled.
“I would prefer not to do this, Miss Garza. However, in a few hours when I ask what you will do to have the whipping stop, you will reply, ‘Anything.’ I know this from experience. In such a confrontation as this, the whip always wins.”
Dr. Noir’s cheeks bulged on each side of his mask.
“Never,” whispered Quita.
“Just a small reminder,” said Dr. Noir, as he prepared to leave. He reached down, and forcing Quita to balance on one foot, raised her other one waist high. He balanced her sepia foot on the pink palm of his ebony hand. With one deft movement he dislocated her little toe.
Quita screamed.
He dislocated the toe next to it. Quita screamed louder.
Pointing to the soldier with the whip he said, “I’m sorry not to be able to participate fully myself, but such exercise aggravates my asthma. I’m sure you’ll understand, but I have speakers in my office, and in my bedroom. I find the sounds of suffering very soothing. I’ll check in frequently to listen to your screams.”
HOURS LATER, DR. NOIR’S HEAVY BOOTS clattered on the floor of the wound factory. Quita was still suspended naked. Her body bore evidence of mayhem. She stared at him with wide, horror-filled eyes.
“Now, Miss Garza, assuming that a few hours of education has changed your perspective, let me ask you the same question I asked last night. What will you do in order for me to stop your punishments?”
“Anything! Anything!” gasped Quita.
“Much better. We’ll repair to my private operating room and take care of your little problem.”
“No,” cried Quita.
“Really?” said Dr. Noir. “I thought you had grasped the situation, Miss Garza. What I desire will eventually happen. But we never conduct a procedure without the patient’s consent. One more chance. Your answer is still negative?”
“Never,” said Quita.
Dr. Noir motioned to one of his lieutenants, who then spoke into a squawky two-way radio. Almost immediately a squad of palace guards marched into the wound Factory, eight heavyset young men in blazing white uniforms and pith helmets.
Turning to the squad Dr. Noir said, “You gentlemen are on limited furlough, but will of course be on call. Please accompany Miss Garza to the guest suite. I’m sure you will find everything there quite comfortable. I’ve taken the liberty of having a keg of coconut wine set up for your enjoyment. You will of course take care of all Miss Garza’s needs, and she yours.” He turned to his lieutenant. “When these gentlemen are quite exhausted, you may send in the second squad of guards, and then the third. I will monitor their progress from my quarters.”
THREE DAYS PASSED, then a week.
“I understand Miss Garza remains uncooperative even though she has not been allowed to sleep for several days, the small electrodes attached to sensitive areas see to that,” Dr. Noir said to his lieutenant. “Now, you will allow Miss Garza to sleep for three hours. When she wakes refreshed, shower her and bring her to my quarters. And bring with her a set of scalpels and an adequate selection of pliers.”
FIFTY-THREE
THE GRINGO JOURNALIST
There are many rumors about how Julio met his wives, most of them created by the tabloids. To my knowledge Julio has never been married. Oh, he would have married Quita Garza, but in that instance there were many obstacles.
Once at a hotel in Atlanta, deciding that he wanted to be alone, Julio stepped into the bubbling water of the hot tub beside the swimming pool, which smelled of sulphur. As he eased himself down into it, each part of his body that passed beneath the surface of the water disappeared, not just submerged, but disappeared.
A girl, whom he had met in the coffee shop of the hotel, and invited to join him in the hot tub, watched awestruck, not believing her eyes.
“How do you do that?” she finally croaked, when only Julio’s head remained above the water.
“It is something my tutor in Courteguay showed me.” She, being from Idaho, wherever that was, probably was not ready for the word wizard. Julio smiled his heavy-lidded smile. “Perhaps I will see you tomorrow at the ballpark?”
He ducked his head beneath the surface. All that was left was the odor of his hair tonic and the dumbfounded girl from Idaho.
FIFTY-FOUR
THE GRINGO JOURNALIST
The first complaints came from Moosey Battaglia, a bulbous-nosed Phillies first baseman, struggling, as he would through his long, sixteen-year career, just to stay on the club.
“There are times,” Moosey said to a reporter, after a particularly humiliating afternoon where he struck out four times, fouling only one pitch during the whole losing game, “when I don’t think that motherfucker throws the ball at all. Lots of times I think he just goes through all the motions but the catcher really has a ball hid in his mitt. The catcher makes the popping sound of ball hitting mitt with his mouth. I mean nobody’s that fast.”
The reporter paraphrased Moosey in the paper’s early edition, leaving out the word motherfucker and the twenty-eight other profanities Moosey had used during the short interview.
Other hitters were quick to jump on the bandwagon.
Charlie Bizarrovitch of the Sporting News did a feature story the following week. Moosey Battaglia, whose batting average had slipped to .219, took the story to the Phillies’ corporate offices.
“What if we was to set up movie cameras, secretly of course, and catch this guy with the goods, or without the goods would be even better.”
Moosey guffawed heartily until he saw the sober-faced executives across the table from him.
“Yeah, well, you know what I mean,” Moosey said with his usual gift for clarity.
The next time the only Major League Baseball Club in the True South visited Philadelphia, a portion of the press box was boarded up, supposedly under renovation. A second high-speed camera was hidden behind the center field wall, the lens dotting the i in the Strike of Lucky Strike. Both cameras filmed every move Julio and Esteban made all that muggy June afternoon.
Once, in the sixth inning, while Moosey was batting with the bases loaded and two outs, Esteban
called time and trotted to the mound. He and Julio talked until the umpire came and reprimanded them. Then Julio threw a pitch, the force of which almost knocked his crouching catcher brother onto his back. Moosey Battaglia swung halfheartedly, then spitting curses as if he had a mouthful of porcupine quills, retreated to the dugout.
The film took forty-eight hours to process, but in the meantime Phillie executives met several times with a jubilant Moosey Battaglia to gloat over what they were certain would appear on the film.
“We got him cold in the sixth,” said Moosey. “There was no ball. The catcher threw himself back as if he’d caught something, and made the popping sound with his mouth. There was no ball.”
Phillie executives were inclined to agree. There had been four clutch situations in the game and three had ended with strikeouts of a suspicious nature.
The film finally arrived. The executives and Moosey Battaglia gathered in the Phillie projection room. The film was grainy black-and-white.
“Look at the sixth inning first,” said Moosey and the others agreed.
They watched each pitch Julio delivered to Esteban, while Moosey was dug in at the plate. The ball, while not exactly visible, was discernible both in Julio’s hand as he delivered it, and as a comet-like blur traveling toward the plate.
“Now!” said Moosey as the critical moment approached.
“Slow it down,” said a Phillie executive.
The film showed Julio Pimental in full wind-up, his left leg kicking toward the center of the sky, his arm swished forward and.…
They replayed the sequences, from both cameras, perhaps forty times, and what they saw each time was the same: Julio striding forward and firing the ball. But it was not a ball, but a pale, delicate flower, almost certainly a camellia. The flower bloomed from Julio’s fingers, glided toward the taut batter, slowly and softly as its perfume. Moosey Battaglia swung so hard the men in the room all thought they could hear his vertebrae cracking, though there was no sound with the movie.
“A flower?” said Moosey.
“Somebody’s screwed with the film,” said the Phillies President.
They watched a replay of Moosey’s bat swinging through the camellia, watched as the umpire raised his right hand to indicate the strikeout, replayed again and again the few petals that floated in the air like disturbed feathers, observed Esteban roll a ball back toward the mound.
Their conference lasted deep into the night.
FIFTY-FIVE
THE GRINGO JOURNALIST
By June 1st, many days after it happened, the news of the revolution in Courteguay reached the United States, Julio was 8-1, with 2.12 ERA, and leading the National League in strikeouts.
The UPI dispatch read in part:
SAN BARNABAS, COURTEGUAY — In an apparently bloodless coup in the early morning hours Tuesday, Dr. Lucius Noir, head of the Courteguayan Secret Police, seized power, ousting the aged dictator of Courteguay, El Presidente. Dr. Noir installed himself in the Presidential Palace and immediately issued a proclamation concerning the retirement of El Presidente. It is rumored that Dr. Noir, a native Haitian who once lived in America as a student while attending a chiropractic college in Davenport, Iowa, will ban baseball and name soccer as Courteguay’s national game.
Knowing of Dr. Noir’s hatred of baseball and guessing that Quita would not be safe under the new regime, Julio caught the first available flight to the Dominican Republic, not even notifying Esteban of his plans, never mind team management. He sneaked across the border into Courteguay in the dead of night and dressed like everyone else, in a cotton shirt and black slacks, made his way surreptitiously to his mother’s mansion, where he discovered his premonition had been correct, but worse than he feared. Quita had been in Dr. Noir’s power for nearly two weeks, since a few days after Dr. Noir had seized power again.
Julio dreamed all that night of herons, long, white, sleek as spears, the sky dappled with them. The flapping of wings gentle, but true, like his mother shaking a tablecloth outside her home in San Cristobel.
In the dream he and Esteban were walking on a beach; the herons filled the sky like clouds, the optical illusion became complete when he discerned that he could see black herons flying against a white backdrop, the backdrop too, being heron-shaped. Then they were in the water too, reflected on the sun-dazzled water; herons blue as Wedgwood, gray as fog.
In the morning Julio set out for San Barnabas.
As he was leaving Fernandella clung to his sleeve. “Don’t go,” she pleaded. “You don’t understand what Courteguay has become. A police state. You will be stopped at a checkpoint. You will disappear.”
“Courteguay has always been a police state. I am no more afraid of Dr. Noir and his thugs than I was of his predecessor.”
“Courage has nothing to do with anything. Hundreds of courageous young men and women are dead. They are the baseball martyrs,” she said.
“The what?”
“The baseball martyrs. Baseball is Courteguay. You, if anyone, should know that. After Dr. Noir’s edict that banned baseball, young people all over the country defied his wishes. It was instinct, I tell you. The Wizard tells a story, supposedly true, though one never knows with the Wizard, of monkeys in some country who were taught to swim by humans. Soon monkeys hundreds of miles away took up swimming. Who knows why? But young people all over Courteguay defied Dr. Noir by playing baseball.
“A ball and a bat would mysteriously appear, smiles would crease a half dozen faces, someone would dig frantically in the backyard and a glove would appear, someone else would appear clutching a base to their chest like a baby. This whole group would make their way to a park, a baseball diamond, and the game would begin. Dr. Noir’s terrorists drove about the cities and towns in camouflaged trucks supplied by the United States. If someone was seen playing baseball they simply opened fire. If the players, who always had at least one lookout, saw the soldiers first, the players scattered wildly in all directions. Sometimes they would chase down one individual. Usually death was swift, the bullet-shattered body left behind as a reminder to those who escaped. But, occasionally the captured player was carried off to San Barnabas to the Presidential Palace where Dr. Noir would subject the player to days in the wound factory. What happened there is only rumor, but rumor too terrible to repeat.”
“And where is the Wizard when I need him?” said Julio. “How come he who claims to be in two places at the same time, is nowhere to be found? I’ll need some magic to find Quita.”
“Gone to the jungle,” said Fernandella. “It will be a while before it is safe for him to be in San Barnabas, even San Cristobel. The Wizard always tries to be on the side of both the Government and the Insurgents.”
“Don’t go!” Fernandella said again. “Go back to America. Stay there! I’m afraid there is nothing you can do for Quita now. She is one of the disappeared.”
But Julio could not wait to start his search for Quita. He shot out into the clear, blue morning as if he were stealing a base.
Instead of walking the oiled gravel that passed for a road he lurked through the jungle fern ever watchful for Dr. Noir’s soldiers. He decided he needed a weapon and stopped at the house of a boyhood friend, Ruiz Tata, where he hoped to borrow a machete.
The mother of Ruiz Tata answered the door. She was a large, smiling woman the color of toffee, but today she was not smiling.
“Julio, you don’t know?” she said, after he asked for Ruiz. “Dead,” she said, and hugged Julio to her. “One of the baseball martyrs. One of the first. A dozen boys were playing on the field where you got your start. The soldiers sneaked up on them, parked the truck a mile away, and crawled through the jungle. Are they traitors those boys, the soldiers I mean? They are sworn to do a job, but it must be hard for them, if they were not in the army they would be on the baseball fields defying the ban. But there are bonuses for each kill of a baseball player. Ruiz was shot dead in the outfield, it is said the outline of his body remains on the grass as a remi
nder of evil. Two others were killed while running away. But by that night a dozen more, including Ruiz’s girlfriend Melita Diaz, were there in the dust tossing the ball in memoriam to their friends and lovers.
“Ruiz died a hero. A martyr. But what of you? Because you are a baseball player Dr. Noir will have you killed.”
“I am not afraid of Dr. Noir. I came to borrow Ruiz’s machete. I am on my way to the capital to rescue Quita Garza.”
“You are very brave, so I will do what I can to aid you.” The woman disappeared into the tin-roofed hut and returned with a small, gleaming machete, which she handed to Julio.
Julio spent the day wandering the streets of San Barnabas. He circled the Presidential Palace a few times, counting the number of guards, estimating how high he would have to jump to clear the whitewashed wall. He wondered if he could bribe his way inside. He had more money in his pocket than all the guards made in a year. But he remembered something Esteban had said, to the effect that money meant nothing to zealots, that they derived their self-esteem and sexual pleasure from having a single purpose in life. In this case their purpose in life was serving Dr. Noir and fighting his enemies. As darkness fell Julio caught the bus back to San Cristobel.
FIFTY-SIX
THE WIZARD
It was Alonzo Encarnacion, the right fielder, who exhibited the properties of ice. How Encarnacion came to Courteguay is not known. He appeared one day near the steps of the capitol in San Barnabas, bearded, wearing a slouch hat, carrying a rifle, with cartridge belts forming an X across his chest.
He rested on the lush lawn of the capitol, ate from a package of white cheese and dark bread, which he pulled from inside his filthy tunic. After he ate he sprawled in the sun and slept for most of the afternoon, his hat on the grass beside him. When he woke it was early evening and the sounds that reached his ears were like familiar birdcalls outside a childhood window. He heard the sounds of baseball: a ball thwacking into a mitt, the bat and ball meeting, the thumping of feet on the friendly earth, the encouraging babble of the players, the occasional gasp from the fans. When he rose up from where he lay his image was burned into the grass of the capitol lawn.
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