Don DeLillo - Underworld

A woman came down the stairs carrying coffee and cheesecake on a tray. She seemed to issue from Marvin's story, a recollected figure taking material form. Marvin shut the trunk so she could place the tray on top. She was his daughter, Clarice, determined to tend to dad whatever his objections.

"I didn't hear you come in. She comes in like she's Chinese, with muffled feet."

"You were talking. I could be an armed robbery in progress, you wouldn't hear a thing."

She was in her late twenties, blondish and gym-fit. She told Brian she lived ten minutes away by car and worked as a court stenographer. He thought he could easily fall in love with the sitcom tilt in her voice and the swerve of her thigh lines under the linen skirt.

"We're almost finished here, Clarice."

"In a hundred grueling hours. Your guest may have other things he needs to do."

"What could he have?"

"It'll be dark soon."

"Dark, light. These are words."

The baseball box was on its side among scattered photographs on the floor and the ball had dribbled out, still crinkled in tissue. Clarice pulled up a chair and she and Marvin finished the story, more or less, through mouthfuls of cheesecake.

"For how many years, Clarice, I'm looking for a man named Jackson orjudson?"

"Get to the point," she said.

"Because there were roundabout hints that pointed to him as someone I should be interested in. And the ball has a history by this time that I've been inching along, where different things match and join. But I can't locate the man or even-what?"

"Ascertain," Brian said.

"His correct name. By this time, forget the footage-I'm using rumors and dreams. There's an ESP of baseball, an underground what, a consciousness, and I'm hearing it in my sleep."

"Faster, daddy, faster."

"Meanwhile there's this woman. I'm trying to find Judson Jackson Johnson and there's this woman who got my 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?"

" 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?"