Well, perhaps he would have to work on shortening that headline.

In the end, it was surprisingly easy. Tommy hung around in the rear of the room, in the shadows, watching as the celebration wound down without really ending as the players showered, dressed, and left the locker room still clearly high on emotion and crazed energy. It took awhile, but the locker room emptied of players and reporters and finally the only ones left in the clubhouse were those who also usually arrived first at the ballpark. Tommy found them in the manager’s office, sipping beer and smoking thick, fragrant Cuban cigars.

“I know who the secret ace is,” Tommy said in a dramatic, almost accusatory voice.

Reiser, lounging behind his desk with his feet up and a cigar in his mouth, groaned and sat up straight. “You, again? Jesus, kid, there ain’t no secret ace. I’ve been over it in my head, I’ve watched everyone. There just ain’t no secret ace.”

“Really?” Tommy said archly as he came into the room. “How do you account for all the strange things that happened during the Series? The spectacular catches, the bad throws and Oriole errors, the unexpected home runs, the shoe polish incident?”

Reiser shrugged. “It’s baseball, kid. It’s the nature of the game. Strange things happen. Sometimes players rise to the occasion. Sometimes occasions rise to the players. You can’t explain it. No one can.”

“Then how do you explain the way he smells?” Tommy asked dramatically, pointing at Fidel Castro, who was sitting across the desk from Reiser, cigar in one hand, champagne bottle in the other.

“The way he smells?” Reiser asked.

Shit, Tommy thought, I blew it. “I mean-” He realized there was no sense in lying now. It was better to stick to the truth. “Yeah. I should have told you before. I can smell people who are affected by the wild card-”

“That’s ridiculous-” Reiser began, but Castro interrupted him. “No. He’s right.”

Reiser turned to his old friend. “What?”

“I am a wild carder.”

Tommy couldn’t restrain himself from saying, “See? I told you, I told you!” He could barely restrain himself from doing a little dance of joy. Visions of headlines ran in his head. Screw The Weekly Gospel. He’d take this to The Daily News. And he was only in the ninth grade! Visions of future Pulitzers danced in his head.

“But I am not an ace.”

“What?” Tommy’s face fell. “I don’t believe you.”

Castro shrugged. “It’s true. I never knew I’d been infected with the virus until last winter. I went to see the doctors about my arm. They did tests and discovered I had the wild card. They discovered my ‘power’ when examining my arm.”

“What is it?” Reiser asked.

Castro shrugged again. “My tendons and ligaments are maybe twice as flexible as an ordinary man’s.” He illustrated by bending back the fingers in his right hand. They bent back pretty far. “But, more flexible or not, they were finished in my pitching arm. My arm was dead, useless for pitching. So, I retired.”

“Flexible fingers?” Tommy asked weakly. “That’s your power?”

“My elbow, too,” Castro said, taking a reflective puff of his cigar.

“Hmmm. That’s not much of a story,” Reiser said.

“Still…” Tommy said, but hope was fading even as he tried to grasp it.

Reiser looked at him thoughtfully. “Look, maybe we can, uh, make this up to you if you keep it our own little secret.”

“How?” Tommy asked.

Reiser shrugged. “I don’t know. How about a season’s ticket for next year?”

“Well…” Tommy wasn’t much of a baseball fan, but his father was. And other people were. With the Dodgers being world champs, tickets would be tough to come by next year. They’d be hot items. People might be willing to tell him things, to do things for him, if he had tickets for important games. “How about two season tickets?”

Reiser shrugged. “All right.”

“Okay,” Tommy nodded, absorbing the notion that he could just as easily be paid for not revealing something, as for revealing it. “I guess I should go write my story now.”

“Your story with no secret aces,” Reiser said.

“My story with no secret aces,” Tommy agreed. Flexible tendons weren’t a footnote, let alone a whole story. Also, he suddenly realized, he’d have had to reveal how he discovered Castro was a wilder carder-by smelling him. Maybe he shouldn’t tell the whole wide world about his talent.

Tommy smiled to himself. As it turns out, he thought, there is a secret ace in the story after all. Me.

He left the two men in the manager’s office, celebrating their victory. He had his story to write, his own victory to celebrate. Maybe it wasn’t as glorious as he’d hoped it would be. There’d be no blazing headlines, no by-line in a real newspaper, but Dodgers World Champs wasn’t exactly chopped liver, and it was a more manageable headline.

It’s so cool, Tommy Downs thought, being a reporter.

He strolled down the corridors of Ebbets Field, dreaming of the thousands of stories to come.

WALKING THE FLOOR OVER YOU by Walton Simons

The club was crowded, but a little less boisterous than usual. Audience members whispered to each other or played with their drinks, but they weren’t giving the girl at the microphone the kind of attention she needed.

A lot of the customers were smoking, but Carlotta’s routine was doing the opposite. It wasn’t the material, and her delivery was spot on. Well, as good as it ever was, anyway.

She was gorgeous, though. Carlotta had creamy skin, delicate features, and a body that, as the joke went “would make a bishop kick out a stained-glass window.” Her honey-blonde hair was cut in a Louise Brooks pageboy, framing her face to ideal effect. Bob leaned back into the polished bar rail and sighed. If he didn’t have a personal interest in her, it would be easy enough to fire her. Not much chance of that, though

In every crowd there was somebody who looked like they didn’t belong. Tonight it was a pair of guys sitting together to the left of the stage, just away from the light’s edge. They were young and looked like FBI agents dressed in particularly loud disco garb. One had a face with a hound-like quality and his companion was taller and thinner. Mentally, Bob dubbed them Mutt and Jeff. Neither man was laughing or even smiling at Carlotta’s material, although they were certainly keeping their eyes on her. Bob decided to pay them a visit.

He navigated the floor over to their table. “Enjoying the show, gentleman?”

The tall thin man looked up at him, expressionless. “Great,” he said.

Bob cleared his throat. “It’s traditional to laugh at the jokes.”

“My friend has a medical condition that keeps him from laughing.” The thin man smiled. It wasn’t pleasant. “So I don’t either, just to keep him from feeling bad.”

“That explains why you’re patronizing a comedy club.” Bob wasn’t sure what he wanted from these two, but knew he wasn’t going to get it if they had their way. “Pay attention.” He gestured to Carlotta. “You might just enjoy yourselves.”

“I’m sure most of you can tell I’m not from around here.” Carlotta looked down ashamedly from her mike. “The truth is, I’m from America ’s heartland, the great state of Iowa.”

“That would explain why you smell like pigs.” A deep male voice, slightly slurred, came from the back of the audience. Bob walked in the general direction of the heckler. He’d done this plenty of times and would have the creep pinpointed quickly.

Carlotta tried to work the interruption to her advantage. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned since being in the Big Apple, it’s that no one can survive very long with a well developed sense of smell.” Small laugh. “Getting back to Iowa. This is the truth, I swear to god. They held a contest in my home state for a new tourism slogan and asked Iowans to help them out.”