by Paul Bishop
"Right reasons?" I was as jumpy as a cat trapped in a kennel's dog run.
The finger on my face moved across my lips and then traced the line of my jaw. The fingers of her other hand traced the loose waistband of my jeans. "Yes. You were not curious. You weren't a freak collector—a man who has a fetish about women who are deformed or handicapped ..."
"Oh, come on," I broke in.
She moved her finger back to silence my lips. "No, it's true. There are men who live to put freak notches in their bedposts. I should know, I've been pursued by several of them. They think you should be grateful to have someone take a sexual interest in you. But I hated them; hated their motives; knew instantly what they were all about—no feelings, no emotion, only perverted lust. They are mental freaks looking to take advantage of physical ones."
"You are not a freak, Nina." I tried to imagine what life was like for Nina Brisbane. It was a futile effort. My own physical problems appeared to pale by comparison. An ugly, scarred man can be said to have character, but an ugly woman is simply written off as ugly. We are a shallow people, who rarely look beyond appearances.
"You were different, though," Nina said, as if she had not heard my last comment. She had moved both hands to my face now, and I had the impression she was trying to see me with her fingers, like a blind person.
It was a type of intimacy that is very hard to describe. I stood still and let her touch me. I felt more exposed than if I had been naked in the hotel lobby.
"When you lifted my veil, it was a gesture of compassion. I didn't know what I was feeling inside. You confused me. I responded by making snide remarks, but you absorbed them without anger."
"I remember," I said. And I did remember the scene in her office all too well.
' 'Do you also remember that I asked if you could make love to this face?" One of her hands briefly touched her veil before moving back to my face. "And you told me you made love to women not faces?"
We were entering very dangerous ground.
"I also remember asking you if you were making an offer, and you told me not to think I'd get the chance."
"Well, I'm giving you the chance. I want you to make love to me." I could feel her trembling against me. "Nobody has ever made love to me. Even before my face exploded, I was saving myself for the right man. I think you are the right man." Her voice caught in her throat, her emotions laid bare. "Will you make love to me with the lights on?" The desperation in her voice was like fingernails dragged across a chalkboard. She had driven herself to this seduction. She had worked herself up for it, planned it, and somewhere inside she had found the nerve to act it out.
My heart was hammering around in my chest. I wanted to swallow but couldn't. Nine had molded herself to me and her body felt like it was on fire. Millions of tiny neurons exploded in my brain and raced instant images through my mind.
I thought of Bekka, of making love to her and what that had meant to me.
I thought about how short a time I had known Bekka. What did I owe her? What did I want her to feel toward me?
I thought of my unspoken commitment to one woman.
And I considered what my declining of this simple, beautiful request would do to the woman next to me, who had already known so much pain in her life.
"Nina." I took both her hands in mine. "I can't."
She tore away from my grip.
"No," I said imploringly. "Not for the reasons you think."
"Shut up!" she screamed.
I grabbed her hands again, but she fought against me. "Please, listen to me. I want to make love to you with every fiber of my physical being, but I can't because I am committed to somebody else."
"Who? That Ducatte bitch?" She pulled away from me again, her voice rising to a squeal. "I asked you to screw me. I didn't ask you for any kind of commitment."
"Don't ruin what you asked of me by making it cheap."
"This is the nineties. Everyone screws everybody else. Commitment has nothing to do with lust."
"Nina. Stop it!" I took a step toward her, but she slapped me across the face and backed away from me.
"Stay away, you bastard!"
Her fingerprints felt hot on my face. "You didn't ask me to screw you. You asked me to make love to you. This might be the nineties, but I don't just screw for the sake of screwing. I never have. And making love carries commitment with it, whether you want to admit that or not. I don't know where the relationship between Bekka and me will lead," I said, impossibly trying reason against emotion, “but if I made love to you the relationship would eventually wither.”
"Why? Would you tell her you screwed the team's owner? Would you laugh about it in the?"
"You would never have asked me to make love to you if you believed I would act that way."
"She would never have to know." Nina's voice had taken on a pleading tone, one last appeal.
"But I would know," I said quietly, my head down.
Nina wrapped the fur coat around her, closing herself off from me physically. "You are either a fool or a prime bastard," she said. "You're just like all the rest."
She stepped forward, confronting me in her pent-up anger, and snatched the veil from her head. The horror of her face was screwed up even further with spitting hatred.
"Take a good look at me," she screamed. "Look at what my father and those IRA bastards did to me on the outside."
I was silent, maintaining a one-eyed locked stare with Nina's single askew orb.
"That's right. It's a nightmare what they did to me on the outside, but it's nothing compared to what you just did to me on the inside."
"I'm sorry. ..." Again, I was saying stupid things, but what else was there to say?
"You will be sorry," Nina hissed at me. "You'll all be sorry. My father, you, that bitch you're sleeping with, and others." Her lips twitched. I think it was a wicked smile. "Oh, yes, there'll be others.'
I kept her gaze for a beat longer, and then she pulled back.
"Get out of my way," she said.
I stepped aside and she stormed past me. At the door to the bedroom, she turned back. "Everything will be on your head, Chapel. You had the one chance."
She left the room and a second later I heard the locks on the front door being turned, the door opening, and then the finality of the slam.
I didn't know that Nina was talking about in the end, but I did know she was wrong about one thing. Her interior scars had been there for a long time before I came into the picture. Maybe I had ripped them open again, for which I was incredibly sorry, but I had not created them. That had been done at the point of a shotgun and through a father who thought the shotgun was justified.
I wondered if Bekka would think I'd done the right thing. I sure didn't know.
I went into the bathroom and vomited up every one of the orange juice drinks I had consumed with Sir Adam.
The next two days passed in a flurry of preparation for Sunday's final against New York. Nina Brisbane was noticeable only by her absence. I would have thought she'd been kidnapped, as I had been, except Sticks was in contact with her and was acting as a conduit for her wishes.
Neither Nick nor Stavoros Kronos had made a reappearance. Terranee Brisbane had passed through once to talk in an almost clandestine manner with Miles Norton, the equipment manager.
Sticks made no comment about any activity other than the coming game. He was like a man possessed. I'd never known him to have ambitions to lead a team. Goalkeeping and goalkeepers had always been his passion, but now he was like a whirlwind of intensity—a man who had discovered a consuming passion late in life and was racing to catch up with something that had almost passed him by.
Bekka and I worked out together, not talking about the possibility of her starting in goal instead of me. There was no doubt in my mind that Sticks would start me, but the papers and the crowd wanted to see Bekka in action again, and who knew what Nina Brisbane would demand? She could override Sticks as easily as she overrode Stavoros.
Outside of training, my relationship with Bekka continued to blossom. As I had told Nina Brisbane, I had no idea where the relationship was leading, but if I had my way, I wanted a long future for it.
I hadn't told Bekka about the scene with Nina. I hadn't told anybody about it. I felt I owed Nina that discretion. But did Nina know that, or was she staying away out of fear of laughter behind her back? I wanted to contact her, to tell her she had nothing to fear from me, but I couldn't think of any way to break through and convince her. I felt helpless, so I let the situation lie.
On Saturday morning Sir Adam had caught up with me at breakfast in the Marriott dining room.
"Your thought paid off, but I don't know what it means," he said, sitting down and pouring himself a cup of coffee from the plastic hot pot on the table.
"I had a thought?"
"Yes. You remember, don't you? Surely it's not that rare an occurrence in your life."
"Har, har, har." I spoke deliberate laughter notes. "To which particular thought on my part are you referring?"
"The one about Pat Devlin."
"Ahh. Okay. I'm with you now. What have you found out about the darling of the Ravens and the league's soon-to-be-honored most valuable player?"
"You do go on," Sir Adam said.
"Humor me."
Sir Adam sipped his coffee and took a sheaf of teletypes out from the inside pocket of his well-cut blazer. I knew the papers were only a prop, something for Sir Adam to do with his hands. Once he had read something, he could spit it back at you verbatim even years later.
"It seems our young friend has a very interesting and diverse background. He is illegitimate. Born to a Protestant woman but raised Catholic."
"What?" I'd never heard of such a thing in Ireland, where views on religion are cast in iron.
"I know. It's very odd, isn't it?"
"Do we know why his mother bucked the system?"
"Apparently, Devlin's father was a Catholic, and an IRA man to boot. His mother, the bonny Peggy Devlin, worshipped the ground her Catholic lover walked on. She couldn't give up her own beliefs, but she made sure that her son honored his father. She even christened him with his father's name, but Devlin later changed it to his mother's family name." Sir Adam rifled through his stack of papers and pulled out a faxed document. "It appears that Pat Devlin didn't care for his father's politics or activities."
"Did he know his father?"
"Only through the wire fence that separated them on visiting days. And that was only until his mother died. After that the lad never went back to the prison. By all accounts he blames his father for not being there to raise him or to take care of his mother when she became sick. And on top of it all he blames the IRA for turning his father into a murdering terrorist."
"I take it we know the identity of this paragon of fatherly virtue?"
"Aye, that we do."
Sir Adam shoved the fax copy of the document in his hands toward me. It was upside down and turned around, so it took me a few seconds to identify it as a copy of Pat Devlin's birth certificate. His mother, Peggy Devlin, was duly noted, and in the space for father's identity was the name Duncan Finlas.
I looked up sharply at Sir Adam. "I know that name."
"Aye."
"Let me think, let me think ..." I closed my eye and wrung my brain. I knew the name. It churned inside me with an excitement that let me know we were on the verge of something. And then I had it. "Duncan Finlas! He's the IRA hit man who destroyed Nina Brisbane's face!"
"I never said you weren't sharp," Sir Adam said.
"Sweet Mary," I said in a half whisper, as I considered the consequences of the information. "Does Devlin know his father was responsible for Nina's injuries? Hell, does she know she has the son of the man who disfigured her playing on her team?"
Sir Adam shrugged. "I'm quite sure Devlin knows. He has a scrapbook that he takes everywhere with him. It has the newspaper reports of the entire incident and the subsequent trial. Playing his heart out for Nina Brisbane, and taking the war to idiots like her father, are what Pat Devlin thinks of as ways to make up for his father's sins."
"How do you know that?"
' 'The same couple of tiptoe boys who went through Devlin's possessions and found his scrapbook also found his private journal. It made interesting reading."
"I'll bet, but aren't there laws against burglary in this country?"
"We didn't take anything."
"Just Devlin's privacy."
"Come on, Ian. Grow up, man."
I nodded. Sir Adam always believed there was one set of rules for some people and another set for others. I never could figure out how he defined the difference.
"How about Nina? Does she know."
"Hard to tell," Sir Adam said. "I can't find her to ask her."
"I thought she was in touch with Sticks."
"She is. She calls him. Nobody has any way to get in touch with her."
"Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice," I said.
"Are you related to Lewis Carroll, or do you just like to misquote him?"
I ignored the remark and moved on. "Any of this tie to Liam Donovan?"
"I'm having it worked on, but nothing yet. We're trying to backtrack Donovan's movements since he hooked up with the Sons of Erin."
We both sat and thought about that for a few minutes while we polished off the dregs of the coffeepot and I munched the last of my toast.
I didn't like the trails my thinking was leading me down. I didn't want to talk about what had happened between Nina and me the previous day, but all theories had to be aired.
"I think Nina Brisbane is fully aware of who Pat Devlin's father is. I also think she possibly has something planned that none of us are going to like. The damage from Duncan Finlas' shotgun blast might not be finished."
"Tell me all about it, son."
I did. I told Sir Adam about the attempted seduction and the threats which it degenerated into.
His eyes took on a sorrowful cast. "The poor woman."
"I still don't know how I could have handled the situation any differently.
"You could have screwed her. We might have been better off all round. You've killed for your country, I would have figured this would have been far easier."
"It's unlike you to be crude, sir," I said coldly.
He flapped his hand. "I'm sorry, son. I wasn't thinking. It was crass of me. You did what you thought was right at the time. And who knows—if the woman is unbalanced, you could have even more problems on your hands. If you had made love to her, and she kept expecting more, any little rejection might have set her off."
I replayed Nina's threats through my head again. She said we'd all be sorry. Her father, me, Bekka (I didn't like that part at all), and the others. Who were the others? The Ravens? Pat Devlin? His father, Duncan Finlas? Or perhaps the whole bloody IRA—who knew?
The waitress came by and put the bill on the table. I signed it and added my room number.
"It's time to start tying up loose ends," I said, after wiping my mouth and putting my napkin down. I stood up. "The season finale is tomorrow. If we can't clean this up between now and then, we will have to wait for the beginning of next season to start at square one again."
"And during all that time, you're going to be waiting for Liam Donovan to drop the axe."
I shook my head. "No. I'm not going to wait. I'm going to find a way to crack this open one way or the other. And I think I'm going to start by cracking Archer and the Hard-birds."
"A good trick if you find them."
"I'm not going to find them. They're going to find me."
Saturday afternoon practice was light physically, but heavy on the mental exercises. Sticks played film after film of games featuring the New York Lights, and we all were mesmerized by the level of their play. They had been the champions of the league for the last three years running and were the odds-on favorites to repeat a fourth time. We weren't only a dark-horse team, we were pi
tch-black plow nags.
The Ravens had played the Lights three times during the regular season and lost all three games. The last game, a 6-7 squeaker, was the closest we had come to beating them. At least it had been an improvement over the first game, when they had beaten us 10-2. Pasqual Maddox had been in fine form that day. It showed in the films if you were looking. Goals that he should have saved went by him easily. Oh, he made it look like he was trying hard, but it was all flash and no substance.
When all was said and done for the day, I joined Kurt Wagstaff in the steam room. We were alone, everyone else having bugged out for an early evening.
I poured some more water on the stones and climbed up on the wooden slat benches mounted on the wall across the small room from Wagstaff. He opened his eyes and looked at me without saying anything. I stared back. There was communication that went beyond the verbal plane.
"It's funny," I said after a while. "I never thought I'd be able to sit across a room from you like this and not be consumed by a black hatred."
I saw Wagstaff nod his head through the steam. "Nor I you, England. Only my hatred was always red."
I felt shocked. "You hated me?"
"But of course."
"Why? What did I ever do to you?"
"That is part of why I hated you. You never knew what you did to me."
"I don't understand."
"You ruined me! Ruined my career! Even stole my family from me!" His voice had filled with repressed anger, but his body language was still relaxed, limp from the steam.
"What the hell are you talking about? You were the one who ruined me. My career. My eye!"
"Ah, yes. Your eye. You lay in hospital, and everybody rallied around you. Everybody gave you their support and love. You were the mighty hero struck down in your prime by the filthy Boche. I was the villain of the piece."
Wagstaff sat up on the wooden slats of the tier he was perched on and leaned toward me. "Ian ..." His voice trailed off, and then he tried again. It was the first time I'd ever known him to use my first name. "Ian. I don't care what you think. I don't care how inconclusive the films are. I did not kick you in the face on purpose."
I didn't say anything.
Wagstaff reached out a hand and grasped my arm. "I did not kick you in the face on purpose," he repeated. "I am a physical bastard of a player. Putting the ball in the goal is my only reason for existence, but I did not kick you in the face on purpose. The game is the most important thing in my life and kicking people in the face on purpose is not part of the game."