The bells in the Old Cathedral down by the riverside were tolling twelve times when the armored car slowed down. Its wheels bumped again, this time as if the Piranha was crawling over a curb, then the vehicle ground to a halt. There was a double-rap against the wall in front of the driver’s compartment. Mullens stood up, grasped one of my arms, and pulled me out of my seat.
“End of the line, buddy,” he said as Hefler unlatched the rear hatches and pushed them open. “Time for you to go see the colonel.”
“Yeah,” said Hefler as he stepped out of the vehicle. “And when he’s through, maybe you can go for another ride with us. Would you like that, huh?”
I kept silent as Mullens hauled me out of the LAV. The vehicle had come to a stop in the middle of the wide plaza in front of the stadium’s Walnut Street entrance. Concrete barricades topped with coiled razor wire had been erected around the elm-lined plaza, surrounding the Piranhas parked in front of the closed-down ticket booths and dismantled turnstiles. ERA troopers were goldbricking against the statue of Stan Musial, stubbing out their cigarette butts against his bronze feet. Stan the Man was probably rolling in his grave.
The walkways winding around the curved outside walls of the stadium were vacant of baseball fans; the World Series pennants suspended from the ceiling of the ground-floor concourse hung limp and ignored, relics of a more innocent age. It had been a long time since anyone in this place had heard the crack of a bat or smelled a jumbo hot dog. That was one thing we had learned from all those two-bit dictatorships in Latin America: how to turn a good sports arena into a hellhole.
Bob and Bob escorted me across the plaza to a pair of boarded-up double doors beneath a tattered blue canvas awning. The doors led into a narrow lobby where two more soldiers were standing guard duty in front of a pair of elevator doors. One of the grunts reached out to press the Up button on the wall beneath a black plaque reading MEMBERS ONLY.
“Hey, wait a minute, guys,” I said as the left elevator opened. “We can’t go up there … we’re not members.”
Hefler actually seemed to hesitate for a moment, confirming my suspicion that he was too stupid even to have held down a job as a busboy when the club had been open. “Shut up, asshole,” Mullens growled as he shoved me into the elevator.
I stifled a grin. Some people have no sense of humor.
We rode the elevator up to the loge level and the Stadium Club. I had been here a couple of times before with Uncle Arnie, who was well heeled enough to afford a gold membership card. In its time, the Stadium Club had been one of the ritzier places in the city: good food, good drink, a great view of the diamond from an enclosed eyrie overlooking left field.
When the elevator doors opened again, my first impression was that the place hadn’t changed since I had last seen it. The oak reception desk was still there, facing a wall lined with photos of players and pennant teams. The barroom still looked much the same; the Budweiser and Michelob beer taps were still in place behind the horseshoe-shaped bar, as was the enormous framed photo of Ozzie Smith, the legendary shortstop’s arms raised in victory as he walked toward the dugout during the final game of the ’82 Series.
Then Bob and Bob led me farther into the long, concave room, and I came to see that the club wasn’t what it used to be. The round tables and leather chairs were now stacked on top of each other at the far ends of the room; the buffet tables had been brought down to the club’s lower deck so that they were now pushed up against the tall glass windows overlooking the field, and instead of rich, happy baseball fans there were now uniformed men and women seated before the windows, their faces illuminated by the blue glow of computer terminals and TV monitors. The voices of KMOX baseball announcers giving play-by-play coverage didn’t come from the ceiling speakers; all that could be heard in the darkened room was the low monologue of flight controllers, droning a police-state jargon of ten-codes into their headset mikes.
The Stadium Club had always been a bit snobbish for my taste, but given a choice between a maître d’ refusing to seat me for wearing blue jeans and watching a bunch of ERA androids manning a communications center, I would have taken a pompous headwaiter anytime. Still, the real obscenity wasn’t here but beyond the windows, out on the playing field beyond the deserted seat rows.
The diamond was gone, its canvas bases long since removed, even the pitcher’s mound taken away to another place. Beneath the harsh glare of the stadium lights, a dozen or more helicopters were parked on the field, their rotors and fuselages held down by guy lines while ground crews tinkered beneath their engine cowlings or dragged fat cables to their fuel ports. The giant electronic screens above the center field bleachers, which had once displayed the game score, player stats, and instant replays, were now showing cryptic alphanumeric codes designating flight assignments and mission departure times.
An Apache was lifting off from the first-base zone, rising straight up until it cleared the high walls of the stadium. A couple of jumpsuited pilots were emerging from the home-team dugout behind home plate. Several ground crewmen were sitting on top of the dugout, swilling soft drinks as they rested their butts on the red-painted pennants from World Series games. In the days before ERA had taken over the city, it was unspoken heresy even to step on top of any of those emblems, and only the gods themselves were permitted in the Cardinals’ locker room.
Now anyone could get an invitation to the dugouts. Closer to the Stadium Club windows, an Osprey’s twin rotors were still in motion as a small group of handcuffed civilian prisoners were led down its ramp by gun-toting guards and marched single file toward the visiting team dugout and whatever brand of hell awaited them in the holding pens beneath the stadium.
Blasphemy.
Busch Stadium had always been the pride of St. Louis, one of the city’s sacred places. Generations of baseball fans had watched the Cards win and lose in this ballpark, and even when the team had disastrous seasons, there had always been a certain sense of camaraderie. Now the stadium had been desecrated; even if ERA vacated the place tomorrow, its innocence would be forever lost.
The look on my face must have been obvious. Mullens, the funnyman of the Bob and Bob team, began to sing just above his breath as he stood behind me: “Let’s go out to the ball game … buy me hot dogs and beer … we’ll go up to the bleachers … get drunk as shit and beat up some queers …”
“Wrong town, jerkwad,” I murmured. “You must be thinking about New York.”
He grabbed my handcuffs and yanked them upward, threatening to dislocate my shoulders. My luck he would happen to be a Mets fan. I yelped in pain and pitched forward, nearly falling against the flight controller seated in front of me.
“Keep it up, pogey bait,” Mullens growled in my ear, “and we’ll be taking that ride sooner than you-”
“Corporal, is this the man we want to see?”
The new voice was calm and authoritative, its tone as casual as if the speaker had been asking about the time of day. Mullens suddenly relaxed his grip on the cuffs.
“That’s him, Colonel,” I heard a high-pitched voice say as I straightened up. “How’ya doing, Gerry?”
I looked around to see Paul Huygens standing beside me.
Great. Like I didn’t have enough problems already.
“Not too bad, Paul,” I replied. “Funny though … seems like every time I turn around, you’re here.”
Huygens’s grin became a thin smile. “I’ve been thinking much the same thing myself.”
I was about to ask exactly what he was doing in the Stadium Club in the middle of the night when Colonel George Barris stepped forward.
I had no trouble recognizing Barris. Everyone in the city had become acquainted with the commander of ERA forces in St. Louis, through newspaper photos and TV interviews: a middle-aged gentleman with thin gray hair and a mustache, so average looking that it was easier to imagine him pushing a lawnmower around a suburban backyard than wearing a khaki uniform with gold stars pinned to the epaulets.