“I HURT ABOUT YOUR hankle,” Mr. Molikoff said in a crusty Eastern European accent, sitting in the wingback chair in Harvey’s hotel room on Friday morning. He was a gaunt man with a small, mottled face and a blizzard of white hair that formed a high drift on one side of his head. He was wearing a brown suit that probably was not the best one he owned, and there was room for another neck in his yellowing shirt collar. Mr. Molikoff had phoned an hour earlier from the offices of a Yiddish daily newspaper in New York to ask for an interview. Now he held an incongruous reporter’s notebook in his large hands, ribbed with veins. “I hope it’s not in too bat shape,” he said.

Harvey was reclining on the bed with a hotel heating pad wrapped around his ankle. “With heat on it,” he answered, “I should be back in the lineup in a day or two.”

“That’s goot,” Molikoff said, finding an empty pipe and sucking airily on it. “I thought I might ask you about the relationship between baseball and a Jew.”

Harvey had other things on his mind, but he had agreed to the interview, and he forced himself to pay attention. At least it did not promise to be an ordinary clubhouse give-and-take. “I guess I don’t think about it much,” he said, stuffing another pillow behind him. “You know, there’re only three of us in the majors now, and I don’t think anybody notices anymore, except a reporter now and then. It’s not the most obvious career for a Jew, but”—he unclasped his hands behind his head and held them out—“here I am.”

“There is no, let us say, anti-Semitism?” Molikoff was writing with birdlike movements as he talked.

“I remember when I was with Boston, once one of my black teammates said to me in the clubhouse, ‘Your people are the ones who own all the slums in the ghetto, aren’t they?’ And I told him, ‘Yeah, that’s right. And your people are the ones who’re shiftless and eat watermelons all the time.’ After that, we became fast friends.”

Molikoff removed his pipe in order to smile appreciatively. “Let me tell you, bink a Jew in baseball used to be sometink,” he said, suddenly shaking a fist proudly at Harvey. “I’ve studied this. In nineteen forty-one, the New York Giants opened the season with four Jews. Let us see, Harry Feldman was pitchink, Harry Dannink was catchink, and in the outfield, you hat Sid Gordon and Morrie Arnovich. Hah! You remember Wally Moses? When the managers found out he wasn’t Jewish, they kept him out of the majors for many years!” He tilted his head back and regarded Harvey professorially. “Now I will tell you sometink else you don’t know. There was a player named Moses Solomon. He only played a few games for the Giants in nineteen twenty-tree. For his whole career, he was only tree hits in eight at-bats, and he did not hit any home runs. No home runs, but you know what they called him? They called him the Rabbi of Swat! The goyim hat their Sultan of Swat, and we hat our Rabbi!”

Harvey was smiling at this unlikely fount of baseball lore. “You were here during those years?”

“No. After the war. The second one. But I like baseball. A peaceful game. Maybe not so peaceful now. That was certainly terrible what happened to that pitcher on your team.” He shook his fragile head. “How does this happen?”

“I wish I knew,” Harvey said. “He was my roommate, you know.”

“No one knows? It is somebody’s responsibility to know what happened.”

“They’ll find out who killed him. Eventually.”

“They? Who’s they?” Molikoff was on the edge of his chair, pointing at Harvey. “Let me tell you an old Hasidic story. Do you mind? There was going to be a big weddink celebration in a small village, and all the guests were to brink a bottle of vodka to pour into a big barrel for everyone to drink. So there was one man who had the thought—with all this vodka, who will know if I put water in my bottle? So the weddink came, and hundreds of people came and poured their bottles into the barrel, and then the first man drew a glass. He brought it to his lips and he drank it. It was water. The whole barrel was water.”

Harvey found himself nodding. “I know,” he said. “Somebody has to bring the vodka. Speaking of which, can I order up something to drink for you?”

Molikoff clucked his tongue. “No, no, I am fine.” He took off his suit jacket and turned over a new page in his notebook. “So,” he said, “what about your family? They are baseball fans?”

Molikoff was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and Harvey saw the pale blue numbers tattooed on his forearm.

“This?” Molikoff said, raising his forearm.

“You know,” Harvey said, “when I look at that, it makes me feel slightly ridiculous being a baseball player.”

Molikoff regarded his tattoo impassively. “Not to worry. My bat luck. But you see”—it was his turn to spread his hands and shrug—“my luck was not so bat. Here I am.”

On Friday night, the Yankees beat the Jewels and Bobby Wagner 7-2, dropping his record to 8 and 17. On Saturday, Harvey’s ankle was strong enough for Felix to insert him in the lineup as the designated hitter while Dan Van Auken scattered nine New York singles for a 5-3 victory, the Jewels’ second in their last nine games. On Sunday, Andy Potter-Lawn was cruising along with a four-hitter for six innings before three Providence errors in the seventh cost him his composure and the lead. New York won 6-4. Harvey went 4-for-9 in the four-game series and was batting .304.

Baltimore was next, and the Orioles were as hot as the wilting weather. On Tuesday night, Baltimore’s Henry Ludell held the Jewels to two runs and four hits, but twenty-two-year-old Eddie Storella, after vomiting twice in the clubhouse before the game, proved better, and Providence won 2-1. Stan Crop took the loss on Wednesday, 8-2, and Bobby Wagner could barely get anyone out in the first inning on Thursday on the Jewels’ way to a 5-1 defeat. The Toronto Blue Jays had somehow managed to win five of six in the past week, and Providence was only two games out of the Eastern Division cellar, with a record of 66 wins and 78 losses. They were 3-11 since the night Rudy was murdered; the team batting average had dropped from .256 to .246. Harvey kept his average afloat at .306. It was September 13, and there were seventeen days left in the season.

On his way down to the Baltimore Hilton coffee shop on the morning of the team’s last day in Baltimore, Harvey ran into Les Byers in the elevator. Byers was dressed in a purple acetate shirt and ivory pants, and he was complaining about a bad investment in a friend’s soybean curd dairy in upstate New York. “I underestimated the future of tofu, my man,” he said. “Join me for some eggs over easy?”

Les spotted Steve Wilton alone in a booth in the coffee shop and dragged Harvey over. Steve was absorbed in the Jumble word puzzle in the Baltimore Sun and mumbled an unintelligible greeting when they sat down. He was running the eraser of his pencil back and forth over his lip.

The menu was written on the placemats, and a waitress in a stiff red uniform, her lacquered hair set in swirls like the icing on a chocolate cake, took down their orders for two Number Threes and a Number Four. Steve pushed his newspaper under Harvey’s nose.

“I can’t unscramble this one,” he said. “Take a crack at it, will you, Professor? The letters spell ‘nigame.’”

“Enigma,” Harvey said.

“What?”

“I said ‘enigma.’ As in who killed Rudy.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Steve said.

Les jumped in. “Man, this club is bad news. I don’t know who killed him, but just about every mother on the team thinks some other mother on the team did it. So nobody want to bring it up with anybody ’cause they afraid they might be talking to the dude hisself.”

“You’re not afraid to bring it up,” Steve grumbled without raising his eyes from the newspaper.

“And, man, nobody want to bring it up ’cause they afraid the people’ll think they the murderer. You know, like just by talking about it the people’ll think they covering up.” Les took a few sugar packets out of the wire holder and began dealing them out on the table in front of him. “You’d think that if anyone of us the one,” he went on, “we be acting weird. At least he be screwing up on the field, and then the people’d know. Man, there no way you kill some dude and then go out and play good baseball. The problem is”—he shuffled some sugar packets—“everybody on the team be acting weird, so how do you know? Now, all I know, man, is that there no way it be somebody in the infield. See, infielders social. We all nice dudes in the infield, get along with everybody else. Infielders just don’t be the killing kind. But outfielders, they something else.” He panned from Harvey’s face to Steve’s. “You guys loners. You stand out there all alone having evil thoughts, man. Your basic antisocial type of dude. What you think of that, Steve?”

Steve looked up, then slid his newspaper under Harvey’s nose again. “I’m having trouble with this one, too, Professor.” He pointed to a scramble of letters that read “davip.” “Take a crack at it for me, will you?”

Compared with Baltimore, where the weather still thought it was summertime, Providence had autumn written all over it. The air was cool and thinned out, and the trees up on College Hill were blotchy with red, gold, and orange. The fall semesters at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design were a week old, and the sidewalks were filled with students in their baggy corduroys and knee socks. At the bottom of the hill, the sun struck the planes of the buildings at a sharp angle. On the north side of town, the white Georgian marble dome of the State House glistened like a varnished egg. The city almost looked like a place you would want to live.

The Jewels were glad to get to Providence, but so were the Toronto Blue Jays. Before two more healthy Rankle Park crowds, the Blue Jays embarrassed the Jewels 4-0 on Friday evening and 7-5 on Saturday afternoon. The two teams were now tied for the honor of last place in the American League East. A winning percentage of .452 was among the highest in years for a last-place team this late in the season, but it was little consolation for the Jewels, who only two and a half weeks before had been on speaking terms with .500.

Harvey was having bad dreams. On Saturday night, he dreamed he came up to bat at Rankle Park and the scoreboard flashed his average as .044. Rudy Furth was pitching to him, and he was throwing the ball underhand.