Harry Frazee kept his face stone-still as he pushed the intercom button and said, “Doris, send Chappy out for a lemonade, would you?”

Kat waited until he’d released the intercom button and sat back.

“Oh, and an egg-and-onion.”

Harry Frazee leaned forward again. “Doris? Tell Chappy to pick up an egg-and-onion sandwich, too, please.” He looked over at Kat, but she’d gone back to her magazine. He waited another few seconds. He released the intercom button.

“So,” he said.

“So,” Johnny Igoe said.

Frazee spread his hands, waiting, one eyebrow arched into a question mark.

“Have you given any more thought to our offer?” Johnny said.

Frazee lifted Ruth’s contract off his desk and held it up. “This is something you’re both familiar with, I take it. Mr. Ruth, you are signed for seven thousand dollars this season. That’s it. A bond was forged. I expect you to hold up your end.”

Johnny Igoe said, “Given Gidge’s previous season, his pitching in the Series, and, may I mention, the explosion in cost of living since the war ended, we think it only fair to reconsider this arrangement. In other words, seven thousand’s a bit light.”

Frazee sighed and lay the contract back down. “I gave you a bonus at the end of the season, Mr. Ruth. I did not have to do that and yet I did. And it’s still not enough?”

Johnny Igoe began ticking points off on his fingers. “You sold Lewis and Shore to the Yanks. You unloaded Dutch Leonard on Cleveland. You let Whiteman go.”

Babe sat up straight. “Whiteman’s gone?”

Johnny nodded. “You’re flush, Mr. Frazee. Your shows are all hits, you—”

“And because of that, I’m to renegotiate a signed contract made in good faith by men? What kind of principle is that? What kind of ethic is that, Mr. Igoe? In case you haven’t been following the news, I am locked in a battle with Commissioner Johnson. I am fighting to have our World Series medals rightfully given to us. Those medals are being withheld because your boy there had to strike before game five.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Babe said. “I didn’t even know what was going on.”

Johnny quieted him with a hand to his knee.

Kat piped up from the couch. “Honey, could you ask Chappy to also get me a—”

“Hush,” Frazee said to her. “We’re talking business, bubblehead.” He turned back to Ruth as Kat lit a cigarette and blew the smoke hard through her thick lips. “You’ve got a contract for seven thousand. That makes you one of the highest-paid players in the game. And you want what now?” Frazee held his exasperated hands up to the window, the city beyond it, the bustle of Tremont Street and the Theater District.

“What I’m worth,” Babe said, refusing to back down to this slave driver, this supposed Big Noise, this theater man. Last Thursday in Seattle, thirty-five thousand ship workers had walked out on strike. Just as the city was trying to get its noggin around that, another twenty-five thousand workers walked off the job in a sympathy strike. Seattle stopped dead—no streetcars, no icemen or milkmen, no one to come pick up the garbage, no one cleaning the office buildings or running the elevators.