Free The Dark Side by Anthony O'Neill

his head and opens the second parcel. And finds the Stars and Stripes, neatly folded in a velvet-lined case. But still he doesn’t know what to make of it all. So he repackages everything and puts it aside,intending to return it to sender, or maybe give it all to one of his kids. Then he gets a phone call.
    â€œDid you get my presents?”
    â€œWho’s speaking, please?”
    â€œIt’s Fletcher Brass.” From the calypso music in the background he seems to be calling from somewhere tropical.
    â€œFletcher Brass.” The bureaucrat suppresses his annoyance. “What can I do for you, Mr. Brass?”
    â€œYou can thank me, for a start.”
    â€œThank you?”
    â€œFor those gifts you just received. You can’t say I didn’t put in some effort.”
    â€œWell, we already have enough flags here, thank you.”
    â€œOh really? Do you have a flag as valuable as that?”
    â€œA flag is a flag.”
    Brass kind of chuckles. “And the golf balls?”
    â€œI don’t play golf, sorry.”
    â€œYou don’t need to play golf to admire those balls. They might be the most valuable balls in the entire solar system.”
    â€œYes, well . . .”
    â€œYou just think about it,” Brass says. “And call me when you’re ready. But in the meantime, it might be advisable to get some insurance—and quickly .”
    So the bureaucrat returns to his paperwork, trying to banish the whole thing from his mind. But then the most ridiculous possibility occurs to him—so ridiculous that he’s able to dismiss it almost immediately. Only it won’t go away, and keeps buzzing around, to the point that he can’t concentrate anymore. So he makes some phone calls, verifies a few things, consults some data—and then, trembling, barely able to speak, he makes a return call to Fletcher Brass.
    â€œ How—how did you get them? ”
    Brass, in the middle of drinking something, chuckles. “I’m not at liberty to disclose that,” he says. “But more importantly, do I get the contract?”
    â€œYes,” breathes the bureaucrat, “you get the contract.”
    Well, that was the story, anyway. When a later expedition found Alan Shepard’s golf balls still in the Sea of Tranquility, exactly where the astronaut had belted them in 1971, Brass was able to claim that he’d simply “deposited them back in the scrub by the fairway, as any ethical golfer would do.” And when a television crew ventured to the Apollo 11 landing site and discovered a Stars and Stripes that was not quite the pristine specimen Brass had supposedly sent in the velvet-lined case—the fabric was discolored by decades of cosmic rays, thermal cycling, and levitating dust—well, he shrugged that off with another semi-plausible explanation: that the flag had been in such lamentable condition when he’d found it that he’d taken the liberty of giving it a “cosmetic cleanup” before sending it on to Washington. And naturally it had “gotten a little dirty again” since he put it back in place.
    Justus himself doesn’t give the story much credence. He knows that interesting anecdotes are one of the most corruptible currencies in the world. So Justus has seen the flag-and-golf-ball story, in all its dubious glory, in Brass’s autobiographies Shining Brass and The Brass Age , in the authorized biographies Polished Brass and Gleaming Brass , and even in the billion-dollar biopic Brass —the four-hour feature film shot on Purgatory soundstages and starring, in the title role, the wife-murdering Welsh thespian Lionel Haynes (happy to undergo extensive cosmetic surgery to more closely resemble the man who was offering him refuge).
    Needless to say, the anecdote does not appear in the unauthorized biographies—all those muckraking testimonies writtenby bitter journalists, ex-wives, and disaffected