The door opened. Richard and Rawdon entered. They were dressed in black clothes—uniform-like—and they blended into the night like shadows. They wore solemn expressions.
"What in God's name are you boys playing at?” Quayle asked.
"Whom are you working for?” Richard asked.
"Why have you come to Mallbright?” Rawdon asked.
"Why have you dragged me down into the cellar in the middle of the night?” Quayle shot back at them. He clambered to get up. He was groggy. His eyes could barely focus. When he was almost to his feet, a chain connecting from the wall to a manacle clamped around his ankle came abruptly to its full length. The jolt toppled him, bringing him crashing back to the ground again.
"Unlock this!” Quayle barked from the floor. “Let me out of this!"
The boys stared at him, unmoved.
"You two are in a lot of trouble,” Quayle growled. “I don't give a damn who you have for a father."
"You are compiling reports,” Richard said. He held up the inspector's notebook. “There are reports in this book on everyone in the house, about the house itself, our weapons, and the location of our ammunition."
"I'm a policeman,” Quayle said. “Those are notes. That is what you will find in a policeman's notebook."
"You acknowledge this book is yours,” Richard asked. “And written by your hand?"
"Of course it's mine and written by me,” Quayle answered him. “You know that very well. You've apparently stolen it from my room."
The two boys nodded to each other, then turned about and left.
"Come back here,” Quayle shouted after them.
They left the door open. He was indeed in the cellar. There was a dark corridor leading away from his cell.
Quayle tried to free his leg, but it wasn't possible. The manacle was iron and layered with rust. The chain was bolted to the wall.
"Hello?” Quayle shouted. “Can anyone hear me?"
Rawdon stepped into the doorway—the two boys were apparently just outside, just beyond the door. He shook his head. “You're too far away for any of them to hear you.” He stepped out of sight again.
Quayle could hear the boys’ voices, faint whispers and murmurs. A discussion went on for some time. There was debate. And then agreement.
A moment later, they returned.
Richard stepped up and addressed the prisoner. “Ian Edward Quayle, if that is indeed your true name, you have been found guilty of spying for the German enemy."
Quayle stared in disbelief. “Spying?"
Richard nodded. “And for this crime, you have been condemned to death."
Quayle roared in anger. “This game stops right here and right now!"
Richard turned about and left the room.
Rawdon remained. He stared thoughtfully at the inspector. “What you said tonight at your dinner was correct. The schoolmaster's passport was important."
Quayle tried to get to his feet, but could only manage to get to his knees.
Rawdon reached into his back pocket. He produced a German passport. He stepped forward and held it open in front of Quayle's face. “Read the name."
Quayle read it aloud: Peter Heinrich Schwarz.
"Schwarz is the German word for Black,” Rawdon explained. “The schoolmaster lied about his identity. He was German. He pretended to be English. He hid this passport, but we found it."
Quayle remembered the brother's dedication in the book in the schoolmaster's room: DES. Mrs. Chalmers had said she only knew of a brother called David. DES wasn't a name—it was the initials of a name.
"This is the schoolmaster's dirty secret?” Quayle asked.
The boy nodded.
Quayle shook his head wearily. “Hundreds of Germans living in this country have changed or hidden their names, so as to avoid persecution or internment. They have nothing to do with the fighting."
Rawdon closed the passport and returned it to his pocket.
"It's not a crime to have been born in Germany or to have had German ancestry."
"We are at war with Germany,” Rawdon replied. There was no emotion in his eyes.
"My God,” Quayle said. "This is what happened to the schoolmaster. You dragged him from his bed and brought him down here."
Richard returned. He held one of the rifles.
The enormity of what had happened, and what was now happening, burned inside the inspector's skull.
Rawdon brought a finger to his lips ... silence.
Richard aimed the rifle. Before he pulled the trigger, he said: “This is for our mother."
(c)2008 by Stephen Ross
[Back to Table of Contents]
Fiction: DIAMOND RUBY by Joseph Wallace
Art by Mark Evan Walker
* * * *
Professional nonfiction writer Joseph Wallace's books include The Autobiography of Baseball, which was nominated for the Seymour medal for best baseball book of 1998. He began writing short stories recently and has appeared in the anthologies Hardboiled Brooklyn, Baltimore Noir, and Bronx Noir. For his EQMM debut he employs his knowledge of baseball in a most inventive way.
You've got no choice,” the man said.
He leaned back against the splintery bench, his head outlined against the steel-gray sky and sea, and smiled down at the girl sitting beside him. His teeth were white behind his thin lips, and his eyes were silvery as they scanned her face.
The two of them sitting there like father and daughter on a visit to Coney Island. But no family in its right mind would linger on the Boardwalk today, with the wind chasing curtains of sand and ragged waves grinding against the beach. The only other people in sight were hurrying past, heads down, hats pulled low over their eyes.
"No choice,” the man said again.
The girl, a fair-skinned teenager with an oval face and dark eyes, huddled deeper into her cloth coat and didn't speak.
"You listening to me?"
Finally she lifted her head to look at him. “I'm listening,” she said in a whispery voice. “The answer's still no."
He shook his head, and for an instant seemed almost sorry for her. “You have no idea what I'm talking about,” he said. “You don't get it."
No longer smiling, he got to his feet.
"But you will,” he said.
* * * *
The big man stood at home plate, waving that ridiculously heavy bat over his head and grinning out at the mound. He wasn't young anymore, and all those hot dogs and cigars and late nights had begun to take their toll. For a few years already he'd had a bit of a shelf above his thin waist and banjo legs, but now he was running to fat, his belly pushing against his pinstriped jersey.
Same grin as always, though. Same moon face and crinkled-up eyes and pure joy in doing whatever he did. Those hadn't changed. You almost had to smile back when you saw him.
Unless you were standing just sixty feet and a hair away from him and those amazing arms that could whip the bat around and send the ball back at you twice as fast as you threw it in. Take your head off and you'd find yourself thinking, “How'd that happen?” out in centerfield somewhere while your body was still standing on the mound.
"You ready, kid?” he called out.
Rue Thomas nodded.
The big man took a vicious cut, his bat a blur. “Then let's go."
The crowd loving it. How many? Four thousand, at least. Maybe five. More than had ever packed little Mansfield Grounds before, that was for sure. Yelling and screaming and making the old wooden grandstands shake. Sending a fleet of gulls flapping away towards the ocean in panic.
Everybody who could buy or beg or steal a ticket was here. Here for an event big enough to shut down Coney Island, to hush the clatter of the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt. All of the attractions silent, because what would be the use of opening till the game ended? Who would come to Coney Island today and not want to see the Babe, the Bambino, the Big Bam, Jidge.
Babe Ruth, the most famous man on earth, facing off against Rue
Thomas, the seventeen-year-old Brooklyn girl with lightning in her left arm.
The Babe settled back into his coiled batting stance. He was still grinning, but Rue could see something different in those guileless eyes. They seemed to sharpen, and his face, his whole body, grew still, watchful, attentive. Focused.
On Rue, on her hand, on the ball itself.
This white sphere.
* * * *
Rue was nine when she first found out.
Before that, she wasn't much different from any other kid on East 21st Street, skinny and dirty-kneed, with a mass of dark ringlets that framed her face.
But though few noticed, her hands were different, bigger and stronger than most of the boys'. And her fingers were long and tapered, ideal for running up and down the keys of a piano, people told her, if her parents could have afforded one.
Still, she was just another neighborhood girl until the day Billy O'Reilly tried to steal her brother Nick's bicycle.
Billy O'Reilly and his gang from up on Nostrand Avenue, coming through like a thunderstorm. Four of them, pushing poor little Tim Trotta into the bushes, throwing Cliff Jamison's hat up onto a roof.
The usual. You just waited for it to pass, like you'd wait out the storm.
But then Billy grabbed Nick's bike and took off. Nick had worked for a year delivering milk with Mr. Stephanides to buy that bike. Now, even if they saw it again, it would be wrecked. No one could bust something up like Billy could.
Nick and a couple of the others went running down the street, chasing, but it was hopeless. The littler kids just stood and watched, except for Rue.
Rue, standing in her front yard, looked down at the stone resting in her left hand. She'd picked it up without even realizing, and now she hefted it, enjoying its weight and cool smoothness against her palm.
Then she let fly, and an instant later Billy lay moaning on the street. The newly riderless bike made a gentle right turn and fell on its side.
There was a moment of dead silence as everyone stared at her. Then, shouting and cursing, Billy's friends came running back.
Rue bent down and picked up another stone. “Watch,” she said in her wispy little-girl's voice, a voice that was usually easy to ignore. But not now, not when the second stone whanged off a street sign, leaving a big dent. Not when she found a third one and raised her eyes to look at them again.
As his friends hoisted Billy up and half-carried him away, everyone else clustered around her. “Where'd you learn to do that?” Nick said. He was holding his bike like it was a gift from heaven.
Rue shrugged. A million hours spent throwing a ragged stitched-up ball against a white square painted on the garage wall, and no one had ever noticed.
Till now. The very next Saturday Nick brought her down to Marine Park, and an hour later she was pitching for the neighborhood baseball team.
Some people said the diamond was no place for a girl, especially a little one like Rue Thomas. But the minute they saw her fastball and drop curve and fadeaway, they shut right up.
Because they played for money, every Sunday morning in Marine Park. Money and neighborhood pride. And if it would help you win, no rule book said a chimpanzee, an alligator, a sewer rat, or a girl couldn't play.
* * * *
He showed up for the first time midway through Rue's rookie season with the Comets, just a week after her sixteenth birthday. He was waiting outside the players’ door at Mansfield Grounds after a game, leaning against a scrawny locust tree like he had all the time in the world.
Thin, well-dressed, with a quick, toothy grin and silvery eyes. Smiling at her as she walked past, heading towards the El.
He fell into step beside her. “Buy you a soda?"
His voice gentler than she'd expected. But confident, like he was used to people doing what he wanted.
She kept walking.
"Or a—whaddaya call it? An egg cream?"
From out of town. She'd guessed from his look, and from his voice, too, though she hadn't done enough traveling yet to figure out where. She stopped and looked him up and down, in his gray suit and well-brushed hat.
Forty years old, maybe more. And far from the first to try this. “Sorry,” she said. “Not interested."
He laughed, showing those white teeth. “What you're thinking, I'm not interested either,” he said. “I'm talking about business. Baseball business."
Rue hesitated. It was 1931, and times were hard. Her parents had already moved twice, from the house on East 21st to an apartment over on Ocean Avenue, and then to another one in a worse neighborhood on Quentin Road. Sometimes they didn't have enough to eat.
If someone wanted to talk business, you listened.
"I'll buy you a burger,” the man said. “To go along with that soda."
* * * *
His name was Chase. He said he was from Chicago.
All she had to do, he told her, was lose every once in a while.
They sat in a booth way in the back of Benny's, a place a few blocks towards the bad side of Coney Island. She'd never been there before, but the food tasted just fine.
She let him describe what he wanted, although she'd understood where he was headed in the first ten seconds. She knew how it worked, with ballplayers being paid to make an error here, strike out there, throw just a few bad pitches at important moments.
That kind of thing had been around as long as baseball. It'd gotten so bad that a whole World Series had been lost on purpose, Rue knew, back in 1919, when she was only four. After that they'd brought in this old man, a judge, to make sure baseball stayed on the up and up. The first thing he'd done was kick eight of the guilty players out of baseball forever.
Rue had pitched against one of them, Joe Jackson, a tired, hollow-eyed old guy, when a barnstorming team had stopped in Brooklyn the previous fall. He hadn't been able to get around on her fastball.
She listened to Chase. Waited till she was nearly done with her Coke and hamburger before saying, “Sorry."
He looked at her. “At least listen to what we're offering."
She shook her head.
Chase seemed unruffled. “Not every game, of course. Only every once in a while. Wouldn't want to ruin your reputation.” He paused for a second. “Though it might be better for you in the long run, you weren't quite so good."
At the time, Rue was 9-1, with an earned-run average of under 2.00.
"You're hot stuff,” he went on. “Some think it's a joke, a setup. Others think you're for real. Either way, there's a ton of action whenever you pitch, all over the country."
Rue thought about that.
He leaned closer to her, and she could smell his cigarette breath. “Five hundred every time you do what we ask. Like every three or four starts. Nobody will ever know."
Rue did the math. She probably had fifteen more starts left in the season, so he was talking about two thousand bucks, maybe more. A lot of money.
But lose on purpose? How could she do that? “No,” she said, draining the last of her drink and getting to her feet. “Still no."
Her wide eyes, her quiet voice, making him disbelieve her. “You'll come around,” he said. “You'll change your mind."
She turned away.
"Your problem is, you think you've got a choice,” he called after her. “But you don't."
The first time she heard that from him, but not the last.
* * * *
Diamond Ruby. Belle of the Ball. Queen of Diamonds. The “Out” Girl.
The Angel of Brooklyn.
Silent Rue, sometimes, because of her fragile voice.
Even just plain Rue every once in a while. It made for a good headline joke: “Opponents Rue the Day Captain Mansfield Signed Girl Phenom."
She'd been just fifteen when the old Army officer who owned the Coney Island Comets came to watch her pitch in Marine Park. By then she'd gotten some local attention, not that it mattered much to her. All she wanted to do was pitch, win, and collect the money she was owed
to help her family scrape along.
Captain Mansfield, bluff, loud, friendly, looking at his team like it was a toy, had other ideas. “Sign with me,” he'd said, “and we'll make a fortune."
Underneath all his jollity he was a smart businessman. Because he certainly made himself a pretty penny from all the fans who came to the ballpark to watch Diamond Ruby, the freak of nature straight out of a Coney Island sideshow, pitch. To see this little girl with the unhittable fastball and knee-buckling curve mow down men who were heading to the majors, or who'd already been there and were heading down.
But very few of those pretty pennies ever made it into Diamond Ruby's pockets.
* * * *
Rue's first pitch to the Babe bounced two feet in front of the plate, skipped past Jimmy Connelly, the Comets’ catcher, and rolled all the way to the backstop.
The crowd howled. Some of them were Comets fans—she could see a scattering of familiar faces—but most were here for the show, the spectacle, the Babe. If the girl pitcher made a fool of herself, that was okay with them.
But Rue had never bounced a pitch by mistake in her life. No, that wasn't true, sure she had, once or twice. On rainy days, or freezing ones, when the ball felt like a chunk of ice in her hand.
It was warm and sunny today, though.
* * * *
She met Babe Ruth a week after Captain Mansfield and the Yankees’ owner, Colonel Rupert, old war buddies, arranged the big exhibition game. The Comets, with Rue starting, would face a team of minor-leaguers and local stars ... plus the Babe, the only one who really mattered. The two owners knowing that even in the depths of the Great Depression, people would hand over their hard-earned dollars for a chance to see, as one of the tabloids put it, “Big Bam vs. Great Gams."
The Bambino was game for it. He was game for anything. Hospitals, orphanages, boxing rings, football fields, rodeos—just promise him some diversion and he'd be there.
They gathered for lunch at Lundy's Clam Shack, a little place built on wooden stilts over Sheepshead Bay. Rue and the Babe and his business manager, a silent man in an expensive suit who sipped coffee and kept a close eye on both of them throughout the meal, and dapper Colonel Ruppert and Captain Mansfield, who kept grinning like kids on Christmas morning. All the other tables in the shack were empty, and Rue knew that this single lunch was probably costing more than she earned all year.
EQMM, September-October 2008 Page 32
