Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [45]
Indian Thugees smoked hashish to buttress their courage before embarking on strangling raids. The drug will give you brassballs, which is probably why I had the audacity to yank the nightstick from the cop’s hands. Did that get his eyes bulging! He started backpedaling at sprinter’s speed across the parking lot. His performance riveted the twins until they collapsed in a fit of giggles. “Omigod, look,” one of the Sergeis said, “he is moonwalking! Just like Michael Jackson!”
Lord knows what the cop’s partner was doing all this time but when he came out of the van, all laughter ceased. This officer was a six-footer, wide as a hunk of rock from Stonehenge and built so hard you could ice-skate on him without leaving a mark. Anyone with that much size gets your attention right away. He made even more of an impression with his jacket. Probably because when he parted the front of it, we saw the butt of a pistol peeking over his waistband.
He motioned for me to return his partner’s nightstick and asked to see my papers. I handed them over with none of my usual smartass commentary. There is something about the presence of a .44 Magnum that dampens my wisecracking skills.
“So you are an American,” the officer said in a metallic Terminator monotone. “We do not want to make this an incident. I suggest you go back to your hotel and stay there till morning.”
I do not know what happened after that. The hash and vodka had combined with sheer exhaustion to sledgehammer my brain. Everything turned black. Someone must have driven me to the Olympic Village. The next thing I remember is stumbling into my room on rag doll legs, tripping over my feet, and collapsing into bed.
I awoke an hour later with my head banging. No, that was the door. Someone yelling too. Terwillinger. “We’ve got a big problem,” he blurted soon as I let him in, “It’s the kid. You have to get to his room or we might not see him again.”
Jay led me to an apartment down the hall. Inside, I found Jim Nelson, our young buck catcher, shivering in a corner. He was red-eyed and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of pants he had obviously just thrown on; his belt was missing and his zipper was undone. No shoes or socks. On his bed sat an eighteen-year-old Russian woman, a porcelain-skinned brunette dressed in a sheet and god-knows-what under it. She was pretty but had that sunken-eyed, not-fed-enough look we had seen in many young women around Moscow.
Two KGB agents stood at attention in the middle of the room. I signaled the one who guarded the lobby to join me in the hallway.
“You were told before you came here,” he reminded me, “no bringing women up to the rooms for sex.”
“How do you know he brought her up here for that? It probably started innocently.”
“So your friend claims. I am supposed to believe she came up here to play Scrabble?”
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t speak English.”
“Good point. That would make the game a tad one-sided. Look, you know things like this are going to happen. Haven’t you noticed that when American men visit a Communist country they walk around with perpetual erections? They confuse spreading capitalism with spreading their seed. You have two kids here, practically teenagers. What else are they going to do in this town on a Saturday night? They are not going to spend the night drinking your cognac, I can tell you that.”
“We have to take him in, unless . . .”
Oh, sure. About eight hundred rubles’ worth of unless and they let off Superstud with a reprimand.
We left the next day, which was fortunate since the team had run out of Russian money. As we checked through customs, officials rummaged through my bags looking for any merchandise I might be trying to sneak