Underworld

'Feed the little jerk some capozella. It makes him ballsy.'

The butcher gestured at the whole lamb hanging in the window. Bronzini imagined the broiled head hot from the oven and sitting on a plate in front of Matty. Two cooked heads regarding each other. And Albert is telling the boy he has to eat the brain and eyes and principal ganglia. Or no more chess.

'It puts some lead in his pencil.'

The butcher stood at the corner of the window looking well-placed among the dangled animals, his arms crossed and feet spread. Bronzini saw an aptness and balance here. The butcher's burly grace, watch him trim a chop, see how he belongs to the cutting block, to the wallow of trembling muscle and mess-his aptitude and ease, the sense that he was born to the task restored a certain meaning to these eviscerated beasts.

Bronzini thought the butcher's own heart and lungs ought to hang outside his body, stationed like a saint's, to demonstrate his intimate link to the suffering world.

'Be good, Albert.'

'I'll be in tomorrow.'

'Give my best to the woman,' the butcher said.

Bronzini checked his watch again, then stopped at a candy store to buy a newspaper. He was trying to be late but knew he could not manage it. Some force compelled him to walk into the pastry shop not only on time but about two and a half minutes early, which translated to a wait of roughly twenty minutes for the priest. He took a table in the dim interior and unfolded the Times across the scarred enamel.

A girl brought coffee and a glass of water.

The front page astonished him, a pair of three-column headlines dominating. To his left the Giants capture the pennant, beating the Dodgers on a dramatic home run in the ninth inning. And to the right, symmetrically mated, same typeface, same-size type, same number of lines, the USSR explodes an atomic bomb- kaboom- details kept secret.

He didn't understand why the Times would take a ball game off the sports page and juxtapose it with news of such ominous consequence. He began to read the account of the Soviet test. He could not keep the image from entering his mind, the cloud that was not a cloud, the mushroom that was not a mushroom-the sense of reaching feebly for a language that might correspond to the visible mass in the air. Suddenly there the priest was, coming in a flurry, Andrew Paulus S.J., built low and cozy, his head poked forward and that glisten of spittle in his smile.

He had books and folders slipping down his hip but managed to extend a cluster of scrubbed fingers, which Albert gripped in both hands, pressing and shaking, half rising from his chair. It took a moment of clumsy ceremony with overlapping salutations and unheeded questions and a dropped book and a race to retrieve it before the two men were settled at the table and all the objects put away. The priest heaved, as they say, a sigh. He wore a roman collar fitted to a biblike cloth called a rabat and over this a dark jacket with pocket square and he could have been George the Waiter's tailored master in black and white.

'How late am I?'

'You're not late at all.'

'I'm doing a seminar on knowledge. Wonderful fun but I lose track.'

'No, you're early,' Bronzini said.

'How we know what we know.'

You had to look hard at Andrew Paulus to find a trace of aging. Unfurrowed and oddly aglow, with a faint baked glaze keeping his skin pink and fresh. Hair pale brown and fringed unevenly across the forehead in boyish bangs. Bronzini wondered if this is what happens to men who forswear a woman's tangling touch and love. They stay a child, preserved in clean and chilly light. But there were parish priests everywhere about, leaky-eyed and halting, their old monotones falling whispery from the pulpit. He decided this man was not youthful so much as ageless. He must be thirty years senior to Albert and not an eyelid ever trembles or a bristly whit of gray shows at the jawline.

'Did you see the paper, Father?'

'Please, we know each other too well. You're required to call me Andy now. Yes, I stole a long look at someone's Daily News. They're calling it the Shot Heard Round the World.'

'How did we detect evidence of the blast, I wonder. We must have aircraft flying near their borders with instruments that measure radiation. Or well-placed agents perhaps.'

'No no no no. We're speaking about the home run. Bobby Thomson's heroic shot. The tabloids have dubbed it for posterity.'

Bronzini had to pause to take this in.

'The Shot Heard Round the World? Is the rest of the world all that interested? This is baseball. I was barely aware. I myself barely knew that something was going on. Heard round the world? I almost missed it completely.'

'We may take it that the term applies to the suddenness of the struck blow and the corresponding speed at which news is transmitted these days. Our servicemen in Greenland and Japan surely heard the home-run call as it was made on Armed Forces Radio. You're right, of course. They're not talking about this in the coffeehouses of Budapest. Although in fact poor Ralph Branca happens to be half Hungarian. Sons of immigrants. Branca and Thomson both. Bobby himself born in Scotland, I believe. You see why our wins and losses tend to have impact well beyond our borders.'

'You follow baseball then.'

'Only in distant memory. But I did devour today's reports. It's all over the radio. Something propelled this event full force into the public imagination. All day a steady sort of ripple in the air.'

'I don't follow the game at all,' Bronzini said.

He fell into remorseful thought. The girl appeared again, sullen in a limp blouse and shuffling loafers. Only four tables, theirs the only one occupied. The plain decor, the time-locked thickness in the air, the trace of family smell, even the daughter discontented-all argued a theme, a nonpicturesqueness that Albert thought the priest might note and approve.

'But baseball isn't the game we're here to discuss,' Paulus said.

In other shops the priest had made an appreciative show of selecting a pastry from the display case, with moans and exclamations, but was subdued today, gesturing toward the almond biscotti and asking the girl to bring some coffee. Then he squared in his chair and set his elbows firmly on the table, a little visual joke, and framed his head with cupped hands-the player taut above his board.

'I've been taking him to chess clubs,' Bronzini said, 'as we discussed last time. He needs this to develop properly. Stronger opponents in an organized setting. But he hasn't done as well as I'd expected. He's been stung a number of times.'

'And when he's not playing?'

'We spend time studying, practicing.'

'How much time?'

'Three days a week usually. A couple of hours each visit.'

'This is completely ridiculous. Go on.'

'I don't want to force-feed the boy.'

'Go on,' Paulus said.

'I'm just a neighbor after all. I can push only so hard. There's no deep tradition here. He just appeared one day. Shazam. A boy from another planet, you know?'

'He wasn't born knowing the moves, was he?'

'His father taught him the game. A bookmaker. Evidently kept all the figures in his head. The bets, the odds, the teams, the horses. He could memorize a scratch sheet. This is the story people told. He could look at a racing form with the day's entries, the morning line, the jockeys and so on. And he could memorize the data of numerous races in a matter of minutes.'

'And he disappeared.'

'Disappeared. About five years ago.'

'And the boy is eleven, which means daddy barely got him started.'

'Adequate or not, on and off, I have been the mentor ever since.'

The priest made a gesture of appeasement, a raised hand that precluded any need for further explanation.