Five O'Clock Lightning Read online

  On the three hundred eighty-seventh step, just before Patti Page could finish the verse, Garrett’s right leg gave out, and he fell hard on the concrete steps.

  “Son of a bitch!” he hissed. His legs were getting worse, not better. He wanted to cry. Next time he’d arrange it so he fell running down the stairs. Then he could just roll right through the railing and fall to his death in the lower deck.

  Garrett closed his eyes and took a slow, ragged breath. He hauled himself into a seat. It wasn’t difficult. Months on crutches had given him arms and shoulders almost as powerful as Mickey Mantle’s.

  With his hands, he literally lifted his legs and propped them against the rail. He looked at them in the sunlight, felt them as though they were being offered for sale by a dishonest butcher. His head felt hot enough to glow, but his legs were cool under his fingers. It was as though the bullet holes had let in the Korean winter, and nothing was ever going to get it out again.

  Well, too bad, he thought. He was suddenly very angry. He’d just have to find a better doctor or think of a better way to get these goddam legs in shape. He couldn’t put up with this kind of nonsense—he had to be ready to play ball next spring. Oh, not for the Big Club; of course not there—maybe back in K.C. or farther down in the minors, to get his timing back, and to prove he was as good as ever ...

  Garrett sighed and started groaning quietly to himself. He shook his head slowly from side to side and tried to figure out who the hell he thought he was kidding.

  2

  Russ Garrett did a lot of his best thinking in the shower. It was a habit he’d gotten into in the minor leagues; what with living in a rooming house or in a cheap hotel with at least one roommate, traveling on crowded buses, playing ball or practicing, the shower was the only place he could count on a little privacy.

  So Garrett stood under the hot water and thought.

  One thing was becoming obvious—his training program wasn’t getting him anything but tired. And he was starting to look foolish. He had his B.A.; he could apply to law school back at Columbia or NYU or maybe Fordham. He’d saved a lot of his army salary; hadn’t had much chance to spend it while he was in the hospital. He had all his GI benefits coming, too.

  It was costing him practically nothing to live, for the time being. He’d moved back in with his parents when he left the hospital, and it was only after a loud and bitter argument that he’d gotten them to accept even token money for room and board.

  He even had a job of sorts—adviser to the Commissioner of Baseball for Veterans’ Affairs (minor-league division). Mostly that meant answering letters from guys whose lives and careers had been jerked out from under them by the war. He’d qualified for the job by having been a ball player, by being able to write an effective letter and sound as if he knew what he was talking about on the telephone, and by having nothing better to do. He was his own first successful project.

  He’d been able to fix a few men up with jobs or arrange some tryouts with new teams, but Garrett’s job was mostly make-work, and he knew it. He didn’t like the idea. There were altogether too many people supporting him. He might as well have been a Communist. He laughed at that. A knee buckled; he lost his balance for a second and dropped the soap.

  Christ, he thought, I’d better get out of baseball fast.

  He’d give it, he decided, one more day. If tomorrow’s workout left him as depressed and as beat as today’s, he’d have to let it go. Maybe he could tape himself differently, or take a shorter flight of stairs, or a shallower one ...

  Garrett told himself to shut up. He reached for his towel and stepped out of the shower.

  No one could do enough for a veteran, especially a wounded one. That was why he had his job, and that was why the Yankees let him use their stadium and the home-team locker room when he worked out—the coaches’ room, actually. Still, Garrett tried to be out of the way before any of the real ball players showed up. When they were around, Garrett felt like an impostor, a gate-crasher. Collins, McDougald, Raschi, Reynolds, Rizzuto—these guys had proven themselves. Garrett might never get the chance to do the same. Besides, he was no longer the same self he had started out to prove.

  The first thing he had to do was to stop feeling sorry for himself. He did that by walking past Yogi Berra’s locker. There you go, kid, he told himself. That’s an even bigger handicap than cold legs. Yogi is the best damned catcher in the game, and he’s likely to play forever. Why knock yourself out for the chance to spend your career on the bench or playing in the American Association or down in Mexico?

  He’d keep the dream one more day. It was hard to let go of a dream on a sunny Saturday with a ball game coming up.

  Garrett finished buttoning his shirt, then tied his tie—his second favorite one, dark gray, with a discreet red stripe. His first favorite tie happened to be navy and white; the commissioner had cautioned him not to wear it around any baseball-related activity. Navy and white were the Yankees’ colors, and Garrett was to do nothing to indicate that the adviser to the Commissioner for Veterans’ Affairs (minor-league division) might be partial to the team he still hoped to play for.

  There had been a time Garrett had been able to attend baseball games in sport shirts, but no more. That was another reason to quit—if he couldn’t be a player, at least he could be an honest fan.

  Garrett laughed and shook his head. Who are you kidding, you hopeless bullshit artist? You’d watch a game in a suit of armor lined with excelsior. He made sure his tie was straight, put on his jacket (though that wouldn’t last long in this heat), and went back out into the stadium to watch batting practice. He wanted to have a few words with Mickey before the game began.

  3

  David Laird handed in his ticket and entered Yankee Stadium. There were ushers to direct him to his seat, in Section 21, upper deck, first-base side, but Laird knew the way. It was stadium policy to let people in several hours early, because a real die-hard fan liked to sit in the sun and settle gradually into baseball’s artificial universe. It took time to reduce the world to a wedge of grass and dirt surrounded by uncomfortable seats, where every event, no matter how bizarre, could be recorded with a few arcane symbols and reduced to statistics.

  Then, too, the real baseball fan liked to watch the players warm up, to see if Noren was stinging the ball, to find out how Reynolds’s injured shoulder was doing.

  The real fan could watch a player run and judge the condition of the field. If the visiting team depended on their base-running speed, the grounds keepers would water down the infield, softening it and slowing the runners down. If the visitors liked to bunt, the groundhogs would bank the foul lines just enough so that a bunt that might otherwise work would roll harmlessly foul.

  The real fan noticed things like that, appreciated them, liked to see them.

  David Laird was not a real fan.

  He’d never really cared much for baseball. Rowing was more to his taste, or had been. It was true that Laird had attended almost all the Yankee home games over the last five weeks or so, but that had been a matter of planning and logistics, not enthusiasm.

  Laird had picked Section 21 for several reasons, none of which had to do with his view of the playing field. For one thing, it was relatively deserted during the hours before a game. When he’d originally taken his seat, he’d had only a few loud-mouthed beer drinkers and some fool torturing himself by running up and down stairs to keep him company.

  Another reason for choosing Section 21 was that it got a good portion of the afternoon shade. No one had seen David Laird’s face in quite a while, any more than he had himself, but there had been a time when that face was well known. Not as famous as Secretary of State Dulles’s face, say, or Desi Arnaz’s, but David Laird had been recognized on the street more than once. He wanted to be recognized today, but only by one person, and only when he chose the time. Until then he’d keep to the shadows. He’d gotten to be quite good at that.

  A third item in Section 21’s favor was
the excellent view it commanded of the lower-deck box seats, the high-priced accommodations, three dollars each. The seats he’d reserved for the congressman and his party were easily visible. He’d be able to see how well the congressman was following his instructions.

  But the fourth reason was the most important. If it weren’t for the young vendor, Section 21 could have been paradise itself, but it still would have been useless for his plan.

  David Laird looked at his watch. Ten before one. He’d be face to face with his fourth reason in less than a quarter hour.

  4

  Any time he happened to find himself in New York City (something he tried to avoid as much as possible), Congressman Rex Harwood Simmons (R-Missouri) stayed at a small hotel on East Thirty-ninth Street. He could have stayed in a plush, or more prestigious place—hell, he was on an expense account, wasn’t he?—but he didn’t give a good goddam about plushness or prestige.

  If you asked him, Rex Simmons would inform you that he brought his own prestige with him. As he liked to tell reporters, he bought his suits off the rack, his shoes from J. C. Penney, and his ties from his brother Tad.

  No, the Bentley was just a good, solid, American place (something damnation hard to find in New York), and that suited the congressman just fine—he was nothing if he wasn’t a good, solid one-hundred-percent genu-wine American.

  Simmons also preferred the Bentley because it was the only decently clean big-city hotel (outside of Kansas City, of course) that would take his breakfast order the night before, then wake him next morning with the knock on the door that said it had arrived.

  Oh, the Plaza, the Statler, and the rest would do it all right, but Rex H. Simmons could tell when some stuck-up frog or spiggoty of a bellboy thought he was being put upon.

  Here at the Bentley, though, there was no problem at all. They spoke his language here. They knew that the hunger of Rex Harwood Simmons was nothing to trifle with.

  What the congressman didn’t know (and was never given the opportunity to find out) was that the hotel’s night manager, head cashier, and chef had all belonged to the Communist Party back in the early thirties, when being a Communist had been fashionable. They’d outgrown it years ago, but they were all scared witless that if anything happened to displease the Honorable Gentleman from Missouri, he’d check up on them and have them up before his subcommittee, and they’d soon be unemployed, or worse.

  Simmons was dreaming sweet dreams of the consternation the very mention of his name caused at the Kremlin and how he had that bunch of Commie bastards quivering in their fur-lined boots. He liked that dream; dreamed it often.

  The knock on the door woke him. Simmons sprang out of bed and stood in his A-shirt and boxer shorts, looking for his pants. He finally found them on the back of a chair, under his jacket. Cheryl must have picked them up and draped them there before she let herself out last night. Simmons grinned. A tiger-woman in the sack, and neat, too. What a doll. He was lucky to have her.

  Simmons went to answer the door.

  “Here you are, Congressman,” the bellhop said. “Hope you like it.”

  “Sure. Here.” He handed over a dime.

  The bellhop’s face was stone. “Thank you, sir,” he said and left. The hell with him, Simmons thought. Am I supposed to make him rich on the taxpayers’ money? Besides, the bellhop was never going to be voting in Missouri.

  The congressman shed his pants, sat, wolfed down his bacon, eggs, and home fries (crappy ones, if you asked him), then started his morning exercises. Someone had once tried to tell him that so-called “experts” said you should do the exercises before you ate. That was the trouble with experts—common sense was too easy for them. If you did the exercises before you put some fuel in your tank, where the hell did you get the strength to finish? Rex Simmons stopped listening to “experts” years ago—half of them, at a charitable estimate, were pink around the edges, anyway.

  Fifty push-ups, a hundred straddle hops, and a hundred sit-ups later, the congressman felt great. His muscles bulged under his freckled skin, pumped up with blood from the strenuous work he’d put them to. Sweat gleamed on him; drops of it slid across his scalp and down his neck, unaffected by the bristles of his trademark red-brown crew cut.

  Simmons opened the bathroom door and looked in the full-length mirror behind it. He shed his underwear and let it fall wetly to the floor. He stood and admired himself.

  He would always be squat and a little bowlegged, but he was still powerful. He grinned and slapped his taut stomach. An American had a duty to keep himself in shape. It was a disgrace the way some of his colleagues on the Hill had let themselves go to seed. America—and especially those who were to lead America during the struggles ahead—couldn’t afford to get soft, mentally or physically. A man who was too out of shape to fight the Reds with fists would be the most likely to flinch during a duel of ideas.

  Rex Simmons would never flinch. “I’d like to see the son of a bitch who could make me, too,” he said aloud as he stepped into the shower.

  He was the avenging sword of the American people. He’d visited their wrath on entertainers, and writers, and educators, and government officials. No target was too big. Ask Wilma Bascombe, the actress. Ask David Laird, that pinko college professor. Ask any of the fellow travelers he’d run out of the Interior Department for their communistic plans to deprive American businesses of their right to make use of forests in the Northwest.

  Simmons turned around in the shower and let the hot water splash over his back.

  Of course, the congressman had to share credit for his previous triumphs. Joe McCarthy and others were working the same territory. But this was his very own.

  In a way, it was funny. When he’d first been elected to Congress, Simmons himself had no idea how pervasive Communist influence had become in this country. But the closer you looked, the easier it was to see the network—a web of friendships and family ties, and trips abroad at very suspiciously convenient times, and memberships in (cough, cough) liberal organizations. Obvious, devious, and ominous.

  They had infiltrated every part of American life—that became more apparent by the day—but they withered under purifying light of investigation.

  Already the pink tinge was beginning to fade from show business—things had been fixed so that the traitors and fellow travelers in that neck of the woods would find it hard to find work from now on.

  Simmons bent to wash his knees, scrubbing them until they hurt.

  But the Red Menace was like athlete’s foot—get rid of it one place, and it pops up somewhere else. Now the Reds had moved in on something that would allow them access to the cream of America’s young people. They were in sports.

  Fungus in sports. Exactly like athlete’s foot. Simmons liked that one. He smiled. He had to remember to use it in his next speech.

  But clever remarks wouldn’t make the danger go away. Kids worshipped athletes—what if they were worshipping traitors? What if the coaches, in the schools and the Little Leagues, started slipping some un-American poison into the middle of their pep talks? The kids, eager to learn how to be winners, would soak it right up. Simmons knew how influential a coach could be to a boy. Back when Pa had run off and Ma had started her drinking, it was Coach Steinmark at Central High who had single-handedly kept the young Rex in school. God only knew what might have become of this country if Rex Simmons hadn’t finished his education and gone on to the halls of Congress.

  The sports people were starting to wake up to the problem. Congressman Simmons had sent the owners of the Cincinnati baseball team a certificate of commendation when they’d changed the name of the club from the “Reds” to the “Redlegs.” It was a small thing, sure, but a symbol of a commitment to the bigger fight.

  The congressman had always been sports-minded. In ’51 he’d protected the reputations of all professional athletes in this country by making sure none of them had been able to duck his fair share of the fighting in Korea, and he’d stuck with that
job right up through the shameful surrender the White House had had the nerve to call a truce. Sure, a few had been able to come up with phoney injuries or diseases and fool a draft board or two, but for the most part Americans could rest easy that the athletes they loved weren’t going to get special privileges as long as Rex Simmons sat in the House.

  Then, last winter, the idea of the sports subcommittee hit him. As he did everything, Simmons had talked the idea over with Tad. Tad had been enthusiastic.

  Simmons grinned and shook his head, spraying the door of the shower with drops of water from his crew cut. Leave it to little brother, he thought. Tad had seen the possible political dividends of such an investigation, something that had never crossed Rex’s mind. A few words to the right folks on the Hill, and the subcommittee had been in business.

  The only trouble was they hadn’t been finding anything. Oh, sure, the staff had turned up a few half-assed sympathizers in some Ivy League programs, but finding Commies in the Ivy League was about as surprising as finding juice in an orange.

  Trouble was, most athletes were too naive to spot a pinko unless he came up and bit them. They were concentrating on the game, striving to excel—which was right, the American way and all that, but it made protecting them from un-American influences a lot more work.

  There was pressure to make some progress. Just before the first letter had come into his Kansas City office, Rex had had a conversation with Tad.

  “Rex,” his brother had said, “we’ve got to get moving on this sports thing or move on to something else. It’s beginning to be embarrassing.”

  Simmons hadn’t liked hearing that. “These things take time, Tad; you know that yourself.”