"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?"
"You should train an eye on the mark on this Gorbachev's head, to see if it changes shape."
"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."
"Yes."
"They come and they don't want to leave. The phone rings, it's the family-where is he? This is the fraternity of missing men."
"I understand."
"What's your name?"
"Brian Classic."
"Nice to meet you," Marvin said.
Brian asked about a way back to Manhattan that did not include the George Washington Bridge. There was a tunnel here and a tunnel there and Marvin gave both sets of directions with a number of choices attached to each. Brian the fool narrowed his eyes and nodded yes although he knew he would retain none of this once he was in the car.
He drove along turnpikes and skyways, seeing Manhattan come and go in a valium sunset, smoky and golden. The car wobbled in the sound booms of highballing trucks, drivers perched in tall cabs with food, drink, dope and pornography, and the rigs seemed to draw the little car down the pike in their sheering wind. He drove past enormous tank farms, squat white cylinders arrayed across the swampland, and he saw white dome tanks in smaller groupings and long lines of tank cars rolling down the tracks. He went past power pylons with their spindly arms akimbo. He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays-all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality, and of course he thought of Marvin.