name from the memorabilia market and she's been calling me long-distance collect day and night. She says she used to own the thing I'm looking for. Mysteriously missing for years, she says, from the little locked box where she used to keep it.'
'Genevieve Rauch.'
'Whose name I can never.'
'Genevieve Rauch,' his daughter said. 'And the two of them try to establish the basic, you know.'
'Indicators,' Brian said.
'That would make her baseball at least a remote possibility.'
'The marks and scratches,' Marvin said. 'The trademark if it's correct. The signature of the league president who was in office at the time. Her memory is iffy. I make some leeway, then she talks about something else. This is a woman she has an extra chromosome for changing the subject. A thousand times I'm tempted to hang up the phone.'
'Then it happens,' Clarice said.
'A man in his car.'
'A man's driving along in his car, someone shoots him dead. Turns out the victim is the long-lost former husband of Genevieve Rauch. Turns out further his name is Juddy Rauch, Judson Rauch. So the two rivers meet. Took a homicide to reveal the connection.'
Marvin lowered his head to the trunk top to sip his coffee and Brian stared into the weave of his woeful toupee.
'When I had my stomach I used to eat this cheesecake unconscious.'
Clarice explained how he went to Deaf Smith County, Texas, where he hired a local lawyer on behalf of Genevieve Rauch and finally located the baseball sealed in a baggie and vouchered and numbered and stored in the property clerk's office. Impounded by the police along with the body, the car, all the things in the car, of which this was one, crammed in a cardboard box filled with junky odds and ends.
Marvin puffed on his stogie.
'I go all the way to the Bronx to buy this cheesecake. A kosher bakery that you couldn't find it if I gave you a road map, a guidebook and whatever he's called that speaks five languages.'
'An interpreter.'
'An interpreter,' Marvin said.
The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.
'And so finally,' Brian said, 'you bought the baseball.'
'And I traced it all the way back to October fourth, the day after the game, nineteen hundred and fifty- one.'
'And how did you finance this operation for so many years? The travel, the technical end, all of it.'
'I had a local chain of stores, dry cleaning, which I sold after my wife passed away because I didn't need it anymore, the aggravation.'
'Marvin the Clothes King,' his daughter said with a little affection, a little regret, some irony, a certain pride, a touch of rueful humor and soon.
She talked to her father about a doctor's appointment he had in the morning and he listened the way you listen to the TV news, staring indifferently into India. She took the tray and headed up the stairs. Brian imagined following her in his car and pulling alongside and catching her eye and then accelerating loudly and leading her to a wayside inn where they get a room and undress each other with their teeth and tongues and never say a word.
He listened to the music drifting through the house, the keyboard lament, and he finally identified the lurking presence in the story of Marvin's search, the strange secondhandedness of all that exacting work, the retouching, the enhancements-it was an eerie replay of the investigations into the political murders of the 1960s. The attempt to reassemble a crucial moment in time out of patches and adumbrations-Marvin in his darkroom borrowing a powerful theme and using it to locate a small white innocent object bouncing around a ballpark.
Brian said, 'So we know the lineage of the thing in the later stages. Rauch to Rauch to Lundy. But how did it all begin?'
'You asked so I'll tell you. With a man named Charles, let me think, Wainwright. An advertising executive. I have the complete sequence back to him. The line of ownership.'
'But not back to the game itself.'
'I don't have the last link that I can connect backwards from the Wainwright ball to the ball making contact with Bobby Thomson's bat.' He looked sourly at the Scoreboard clock. 'I have a certain number of missing hours I still have to find. And when you're dealing with something so many years back, you have to face the mortality rate. Wainwright passed away and his son Charles Jr. is forty-two years old now and stuck with the name Chuckie and I've been trying to talk to him for a long time. He was last seen working as an engineer on a freighter that plied- you like that word?'
'Plied.'
'The Baltic Sea,' Marvin said. 'Speaking of which.'
'Yes?'
'
'Changes shape? It's always been there.'
'You know this?'
'What, you think it recently appeared?'
'You know this? It's always been there?'
'It's a birthmark,' Brian said.
'Excuse me but that's the official biography. I'll tell you what I think. I think if I had a sensitive government job I would be photographing Gorbachev from outer space every minute of the day that he's not wearing a hat to check the shape of the birthmark if it's changing. Because it's Latvia right now. But it could be Siberia in the morning, where they're emptying out their jails.'
He looked at his cigar.
'Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots.'
Then he got to his feet with a certain effort.
'And when the cold war goes out of business, you won't be able to look at some woman in the street and have a what-do-you-call-it kind of fantasy the way you do today.'
'Erotic. But what's the connection?'
'You don't know the connection? You don't know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?'
'That's an amazing thing to say.'
'And you don't know that once this threat begins to fade?'
'What?'
'You're the lost man of history.'
It seemed the visit was done. But first the host led his guest to a shelved alcove near the stairway. This is where he kept his collection of taped ball games, radio and TV, hundreds of slotted cassettes going back to the earliest broadcasts.
'People who save these bats and balls and preserve the old stories through the spoken word and know the nicknames of a thousand players, we're here in our basements with tremendous history on our walls. And I'll tell you something, you'll see I'm right. There's men in the coming years they'll pay fortunes for these objects. They'll pay unbelievable. Because this is desperation speaking.'
Brian wished the man could be lighter and sweeter. He looked at the Scoreboard one last time. He thought finally it was an impressive thing but maybe a little funereal. It had that compact quality of preservation and exact proportion and respectful history that can produce a mood of mausoleum gloom.
They went up the stairs and walked through the shadowed rooms to the front door. Marvin stood there with his dead cigar.
'Men come here to see my collection.'
