Brush Back

I struck a flame and saw a jumble of partially eaten food, cups of beer, stadium seat cushions, a filthy blanket with the Cubs logo still showing faintly blue against the dirt.

The match went out. I lit another. In its brief life I saw a row of makeshift torches, rags wrapped around wooden spindles. I gave one to Bernie to hold and lit it with another match, lit a second for myself.

Bernie was trembling and weeping, but she obediently followed me into the body of the tu

“Your homeless man locked us in and barricaded the door,” I said, “but I’m betting there’s a way out at the other end. I sent a message to your dad and to the police, that you’d been seen climbing into the stadium, so I’m hoping they’ll be here looking for you. But you and I are not going to wait around for someone else to rescue us.”

BEANBALL

Under the flickering light of greasy rags, we finally found my phone and gun. They had landed in the sludge under one of the cables, a couple of yards away from the perimeter I’d been patting. It would have been a long night in here with the rats. I wiped the phone on the underside of my jacket. It seemed to still be alive, but showed only 29 percent battery. I put it in airplane mode so it would stop wasting energy looking for a signal; I wouldn’t use the flashlight unless I absolutely had to.

I tore a strip of fabric from my underpants—the cleanest garment I had on right now—so I could clean the gun barrel. Bernie wrung her hands, demanding that we get going, oh, why stand there playing with your weapon?

“I know, darling, I know, but if worse comes to worst and I have to shoot, I don’t want this gun jamming or blowing up on us.”

I gave her small tasks, things she had to concentrate on, working to bring her back from the edge of terror: Hold her torch over the gun barrel. Rewrap the rags around my torch. Tie her shoelaces. It’s amazing how much you can steady yourself by tying your shoelaces.

By the time I’d finished with the gun, Bernie was calm enough to tell me what she remembered of the night. She’d been imagining going to Wrigley for more than a week—my guess about her scouting trip to the ballpark, the night she’d said she was going out with friends from the peewee hockey league, had been correct.

“That time, I just wanted to see if I could do what Uncle Boom-Boom and you did, you know, see if I could climb up the bleachers. It looked like fun. Only then, when I saw the pictures, I knew this A

Of course she would have. She was seventeen, with a high sense of adventure and a low sense of consequences.

Today, when Pierre took her to a camping store to get a few things for their mountain cabin, she’d bought a high-grade pocket flashlight—that made her feel confident she could navigate the stadium in the dark. Taking advantage of Pierre’s involvement with the game and with his old friends, she’d slipped out of the United Center and caught a cab.

“The driver, he asked me, am I sure I want to come here, since I am leaving a hockey game and there is no baseball game, and then when we got here—I saw how big this ballpark was in the dark, almost I called to him, wait!, but—” She broke off, shamefaced.

I skirted another pool of dank water dripping through the steel nets overhead. “But you didn’t want to admit you were no braver than I was,” I said matter-of-factly.

She nodded miserably. “He drove off. I felt very small and stupid. You said you and Uncle Boom-Boom used to climb over the back of the bleachers and I looked at them last week, but tonight—they looked so big—oh! Why did I think I needed to show off to you?”

Rats were skirmishing over something bleeding in a corner. I put an arm around Bernie to shield her from the sight.

She described her climb up the wall behind the bleachers—the same route I’d taken. A drunk had been watching her, which had scared her into swallowing her fears and scrambling over the wall.

“But when I was inside the park, I didn’t know where to look or what to do. I should have just gone back over the wall. Only the drunk man, it was dark, I didn’t know if he would attack me.”

“Let’s concentrate on being here now,” I said. “How did you find this tu

“I went inside the stadium, through the open aisle door. I thought, just one look, to prove I’m no coward, and then back outside, over the wall, and ride a cab to the hotel. I ran through the hallways, shining my flashlight around, not opening any doors. But then I came to the door to this tu

“That’s typical of someone with a mental illness who’s been living on the streets,” I said. “Their reality is all they can process. Homelessness exacerbates the problem.”

“No! It wasn’t like that. He said that he was tired of tricks and people not believing him, that it was empty, there wasn’t anything here, but he wasn’t going to die for it. If anyone was going to die it would be me. And then he could be left alone.”

“That what was empty?” I started to ask, but I was interrupted by a loud clang, a sound vibrating along the iron pipes overhead, and then shouts, heavy footsteps.

“Is it Papa?” Bernie’s face was eager.

“I don’t know. I don’t like it.” Pierre would have been calling Bernie’s name.

I stuck our torches into holes in the concrete walls and pulled her back, away from the light.

“Stay here,” I murmured. “I want to see who’s here.”

I started up the tu

“Don’t leave me,” Bernie cried. “I can’t be by myself in here, I don’t care if I’m a lâche myself, it’s too—”

The voices came through clearly.

“They’re further along, I can hear them. Papa!” Bernie called joyously. “J’y suis, je t’attends!”

Footsteps pounding, slipping, men shouting. I tried holding Bernie: “Wait, wait until we know,” but she broke away from me and ran toward the voices, calling “Papa, Papa.”

I lumbered after her, heard her scream, rounded a corner to see her struggling in the arms of a masked man. A second masked man loomed over him, gripping a third man, who wasn’t masked. Oily unwashed black hair hung over his forehead, almost joining with a week’s growth of beard. Jeans, a sweatshirt. I could just make out the Illinois Institute of Technology logo on its filthy front.

“Come one step closer and we shoot the girl,” the second masked man warned.

“Sebastian!” I shouted. “Sebastian Mesaline. Give it up. The police are on their way.”

“I told you,” Sebastian shrieked to the two goons. “I left the girl tied up in here, she’s the one you want, not me, she came in here, she stole the diary, she has the pages.”

“No,” I shouted. “We don’t have a diary. There is no diary.”

“Don’t lie to me, bitch,” the larger goon said. “I saw the cover to the diary. This worthless piece of shit”—he shook Sebastian—“says it was empty when he found it.”

“You found a book in here?” I stupidly asked.

“Yeah, Fugher, he fucking double-crossed us. He said this pansy of a nephew here did. Or you did. Which is it?”

I couldn’t recognize the voice. Not the heavy accent of Nabiyev. Not Bagby’s lilting baritone.

“Stella doesn’t have it?” I asked.

“Oh, the Guzzo broad—she’s so crazy she sees double whatever she’s looking at. No, what she has isn’t what we’re looking for. Which one of you is telling the truth—the boy or you?”

“I am,” Sebastian wailed. “I told you, I told you last week, when I gave it to Uncle Jerry the pages were already gone. Someone else was in here ahead of me. It had to be her.”