He took another pull at his cigar, and chased it with some Scotch.
“Why in the world would I hire a dog in order to bark myself?” he went on. (So now I was a dog. Wonderful.) “And why should I then presume to tell him when to bark or what he should bark at? Should I not leave that to the dog? Is he not better qualified to make those decisions?”
“Woof,” I said.
Cramer gave me a look as if to remind me that he would handle the jokes around here, but it didn’t stay on his face for long. If I’d blinked, I’d have missed it.
I felt the limo come to a stop. A few seconds later, the driver—a stunning brunette in a Cramer-blue uniform, complete with matching hat, white shirt, and tie—opened my door and I squinted into the sudden brightness. Almost immediately, three skycaps and two airport cops appeared at her side. I didn’t think they were there for my benefit. I made to get out, but Cramer laid a hand on my arm, stopping me dead. I swung back to face him.
“Have a good trip, and keep your eyes open,” he said. “That’s all there is to it, my boy. Unless I’m mistaken—and there’s not a bookmaker in the world who would give you odds on that—you’ll come back with a story.” Then he handed me a card. Unlike the first one he gave me, this one had a telephone number on it. His voice deepened. “Call me if you need me, but take my advice: don’t need me.”
On that ominous note, I felt my body twitch myoclonically and my eyes flew open like a cartoon character’s. I was back in the press box. Somewhere in Russia, I seemed to recall. I lurched forward in my chair, grabbed at the table, knocked the mineral water to the floor, and generally made a spectacle of myself to whomever was still around to watch.
One such person was. He picked up the bottle and handed it to me.
“Are you all right?” he asked, in slightly accented English.
I nodded and tried to speak, but my mouth was unaccountably dry. I unscrewed the cap and finished off the last few ounces of the Narzan, then got to my feet and looked around. We had the press box to ourselves.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I think I must still have some jet lag, Mr.—”
He smiled and extended his hand.
“I am Jon Stefansson,” he said. I couldn’t place the accent. It sounded vaguely German, but it wasn’t. Probably something Scandinavian, if his name was anything to go by. Swedish, maybe?
“Paul Mallory,” I said. We shook hands and I sat back down.
Stefansson was an older man of middle height, late fifties-early sixties, with a trim physique and a full head of white hair. His face was square-jawed and clean-shaven. The eyes were blue and clear, and gave the impression that they missed nothing of importance. Like me, he wore a dark gray suit and white shirt; unlike me, his clothes looked as though he’d just taken them out of the closet and put them on.
“Forgive me for asking,” Stefansson said, “but you are American?”
“Guilty as charged,” I said. “I don’t suppose you see a lot of us at international handball tournaments.”
“That is so. May I ask, is handball your usual—what is the word—beat?”
I grinned.
“I’m not even sure I have a usual beat—and what I don’t know about handball would easily fill this arena. I covered sports for my last newspaper, but if my boss thinks that makes me the resident handball expert for the Cramer Press Syndicate, then he’s in big trouble.”
Stefansson raised an eyebrow at me.
“You are with the Cramer Press Syndicate?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised. “You’ve heard of it?”
“I know of its reputation, and also that of your employer.” He gestured at my press pass on the table. “Your modesty is becoming, but misplaced. With that name on your credentials, you by definition rank at or near the top of your profession. My congratulations.”
I felt myself flush with pleasure at the undeserved compliment.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Stefansson—”
“‘Jon’ is sufficient, Mr. Mallory. And also correct.”
“Correct?”
“Quite correct, in both formal and informal settings.” He pointed to a nearby chair. “May I?” As though I owned the place or something.
“Of course.”
He sat down.
“Iceland,” he continued, revealing his nationality, “employs a patronymic naming system. Except in a very few cases, there are no family names, per se. ‘Stefansson’ simply means ‘son of Stefan’—that my father’s name was Stefan. Likewise, my son and daughter are Fjalar Jonsson and Katrin Jonsdottir: ‘son of Jon’ and ‘daughter of Jon’, respectively. And so it goes.”
I thought about it for a moment.
“That must make it tough on your genealogists,” I said. “Not to mention the guy who puts out the phone book.”
He smiled.
“The telephone directories are arranged alphabetically by first names, with the person’s occupation also provided to resolve any possible ambiguity. As to the genealogy, there is no great difficulty. Because there is little immigration to speak of, and because meticulous records have been kept over the centuries, it is a comparatively easy matter to reconstruct one’s lineage. I have no great interest in the matter, but I can definitively trace my own ‘roots’—is that the American term?—back to a certain Eric Thorvaldsson, who emigrated from Norway in the middle of the tenth century—apparently one step ahead of the Norwegian police.” He smiled and shrugged. “Something about a charge of murder, I am given to understand.”
I laughed. “I won’t hold that against you. So let me see if I have this straight. Eric’s father would have been Thorvald? And his sons would have the surname Ericsson?”
“Exactly! You see? It is not so difficult after all. But neither is it particularly interesting. This is your first handball tournament?”
“That’s right. I did a fair bit of studying on the airplane, and Cramer gave me a stack of videos that I’ve been watching around the clock since I got here. I must have absorbed them somehow, because the game is actually beginning to make sense to me.”
Stefansson nodded. “As with most games, handball is easy to comprehend, once one has a grasp of the basics.” His eyes held mine briefly, then he turned away to look out and down at the court below for a moment before giving his attention back to me.
“May I ask you a question, Mr. Mallory?”
“Only if you call me Paul,” I said. “Fair’s fair.”
He smiled again. It was an infectious smile. His teeth were white, even, and his original set. “Very well then, Paul. That you are an observant man goes without saying. Tell me this. What did you think of the last goal in the game we just saw?”
I thought back, then glanced down at my scoresheet.
“The Croatian girl, Horvat? Phenomenal stuff, but for my money, it was the number 16, Babic, who made it possible by catching that impossible pass from the corner.”
“Agreed,” Jon said. “But I was referring to the last goal, from Greece just as time expired. What do you recall about that one?”
I replayed the last few seconds in my head.
“Nothing unusual,” I said after a moment. “It was only a penalty throw, and it came in garbage time anyway, so I didn’t pay too much attention. Did I miss something?”
“What is garbage time?”
“Time near the end of a game when the outcome is no longer in doubt; when nothing of significance is likely to happen. Usually the second-and third-string players come in at that point to ‘clean up’ the rest of the clock—hence the phrase.”
“An apt expression,” Stefansson said. “I must remember it.”
But he hadn’t answered my last question. For that matter, I couldn’t recall the last time anybody had directly answered any of my questions. I was one hell of a reporter, that much was clear. No wonder Cramer hired me.
“Did I miss something?” I repeated.
He smiled.
“Perhaps not,” he said, standing
up. “In any event, it is not worth keeping us from our respective beds any longer.”
The way I felt, nothing short of an assassination would have been worth that. But I didn’t say so.
“You go ahead, Jon,” I said, gesturing at the table. “I’m gonna be a few minutes putting all this crap away.”
“Can I be of assistance?”
“No, thanks, it’s okay. I’ve got it.”
I stood up and we shook hands again.
“Come early tomorrow, Paul,” Stefansson said. “I’ll keep a seat available for you.”
“It’s a deal,” I said, raising my empty bottle of Narzan to him. “I’ll even spring for the free mineral water.”
By the time I powered down the laptop and got everything packed up, Stefansson was gone and I had the place to myself. It was a little spooky up there. Newly built to accommodate the huge influx of international media, the press box actually jutted out some thirty feet over the upper rows of seats on the east side of the arena, supported there by four huge triangular beams. It made for a great vantage point, if you didn’t mind feeling like you were watching the games in a zero-gravity skybox. All in all, I supposed, it was a hell of a lot better sitting in the press box than it must have been sitting under the thing. I tossed my empty bottle into a nearby trash can and got out of there.
The only people left on the floor of the Sports Palace were the cleaning crew. It consisted of a few teenaged kids dressed in red and white who were sweeping the court, folding seats, and picking up trash under the direction of a young, averagely-built man with dark hair. The giant overhead scoreboard still showed the final of the Croatia-Greece game: 27-22. I remembered Stefansson’s question about the last Greek goal and tried again to recall the details. They came down the floor quickly, there was contact, the referee whistled a foul, and the Greeks converted from the seven-meter line. Nothing unusual in that. I shrugged, then left the press box and trudged down the stairs to floor level. As I stepped around the scorer’s table and onto the court, I heard a crash off to my left. I flinched, then looked up into the stands where it seemed that one of the cleaning crew had dropped and broken a glass.
“Pick that up, you damned clumsy fool!” the supervisor shouted in Russian. It sounded unnaturally loud in the empty arena and, to my ear, unduly harsh on the poor kid.
But it was none of my business and I was far too tired to care anyway. I watched for a second or two and then, as I turned to head out of the arena, a small blonde woman ran into my arms.
Chapter Eight
That was all I knew about her, because all I could see was the top of her head. She caught me on the wrong foot, and if she had been any bigger, she’d have brought me down like a linebacker. A sort of whoosh came out of her as we crashed together. I grabbed her instinctively, and for a few seconds we staggered around the court like one of the last three couples at a six-day dance marathon. She had probably been distracted by the crash of the glass shattering, same as I had.
I got my feet back under me and we broke cleanly. The woman doubled over, hands on knees, and I got to look at the top of her head some more. Probably had the wind knocked out of her. It’s happened to me before. If you’re not expecting it, it can make for a terrifying few seconds, and there’s not much you can do about it except wait for the feeling to pass.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She didn’t look up, but her head bobbed and she raised a “give me a minute” index finger in my direction. When she finally straightened up and saw me, her pale face went almost instantly red with embarrassment.
“Entschuldigen Sie bitte,” she half-gasped, half-croaked at me. [I didn’t know that at the time, of course; I looked it up later.] That she could speak at all, I found impressive: to speak what I thought was German, with all its jaw-breaking constructions, one ought at least to bring a full complement of breath to the table. I didn’t know the language, but I guessed that the gist of what she said was meant to convey something along the lines of “I’m sorry.”
After a few more seconds, she painfully straightened up. I wasn’t sorry. If we hadn’t collided, I might have missed seeing her altogether, and that would have been a shame.
She wasn’t as small as I first thought—five feet six or seven, maybe, and possessed of a slight but athletic build. I put her age at something close to my own, maybe a few years younger, twenty-eight to thirty. She was dressed in a simple white blouse, a gray skirt that wasn’t quite a mini but close enough for government work, and sensible, low-heeled black dress shoes with sheer stockings. She wore no jewelry, and her unpolished fingernails were cut short. Her wide-set gray eyes matched her skirt, and the blonde hair, cut in a sort of rumpled pageboy style, was still damp and smelled of apple-scented shampoo. There was something oddly familiar about her, too. I don’t often forget a face—and never an attractive female face—but I couldn’t figure out when or where I’d seen this one before.
Then I realized I was staring at her.
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s my fault for not watching where I was going. Are you all right?”
“Thank you, yes,” she answered in a heavily accented though competent English. “I am quite all right, but it is I who should apologize. I was for a moment inattentive.”
“Me too. Let’s call it a draw, shall we? However it happened, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Paul Mallory.” I held out my hand.
She glanced down at it—in Europe, one was supposed to wait for the woman to make the first move—but then she let me off the hook. Her grip was firm and brief, but it was accompanied by a smile that took some of the edge off its formality.
“I am Lorelei Schachter,” she said.
Lorelei Schachter. Jackpot. Now I had a familiar name to go with the face. Those days I spent memorizing the tournament’s press guide had paid off.
“Now I recognize you,” I said. “You were one of the referees in the last match,” I said. “You and Karin…Fessler, was it?”
Her eyes opened wide.
“That is correct,” she said, “but how did you know this?”
I showed her my press pass.
“Oh, a journalist?”
I admitted it. “I don’t know much about handball, but I know experts when I see them. I thought you and Karin worked very well together.”
“You are most kind. We have been together as a team for almost four years and more than two hundred matches.”
“It shows. You seemed to be almost telepathically linked at times. Except for the hair, the two of you even look alike.”
She shook her head.
“Thank you again, but Karin is a much more experienced Scheidsrichter—pardon, referee. Also, when she was at Gymnasium, she received formal instruction as an actress. Such training can be most useful for this sort of work.”
“Selling the call,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“If the decision is a close one, you signal much more emphatically, to demonstrate—or ‘sell’—to the players and spectators that you are certain of your decision.”
Lori raised both eyebrows and a wide smile broke out on her face. It looked good on her.
“You know of such things?”
“I was a baseball umpire at one time,” I told her. “Even used to work some high school basketball back in the day. The mechanics of basketball officiating are very close to those of handball.”
She cocked her head at me. Prettily.
“Back in the day?”
“Many years ago,” I translated.
Then I had an idea. An interview with one of the tournament referees didn’t exactly rank up there with the Lindbergh kidnapping as a news story, but at least it was slightly off the beaten path, and would have been a damned sight more to give Cramer than I had now. What the hell; the worst she could do was say no.
So I asked. Lori demurred at first, but I was able to swing the conversation back around to her job. I made a few more well-informed observations about her cra
ft, asked an intelligent question or two (just to see how it felt), and eventually, she relented.
“Very well, Herr Mallory—Mr. Mallory.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. “You’ll be doing me a great favor. And the name is Paul.”
“Paul, then.” She smiled again. “And you may call me Lori, if you wish. I must say that you are most persistent and persuasive.”
“Just your typical gauche American.”
She looked at me for a few long seconds.
“Typical? I suspect not.”
I wondered what she meant by that, but I didn’t follow it up. I would rather have had her suspect I wasn’t gauche.
“What time and place would be convenient for you?”
She thought for a moment. “Our first free day in the tournament is on Sunday,” she said. “We are staying at the Three Crowns Hotel—are you familiar with it?”
“No, but I can find it easily enough,” I said. “Shall I meet you in the lobby at, say, ten o’clock Sunday morning?”
She thought for a moment. “That is agreeable,” she said.
“What about your partner, Karin? I’d love to have her come along as well.” I didn’t—three’s a crowd, no matter what—but I had to ask.
Lori shook her head. “I do not think so. She is dedicated to her work and, I think, would consider it eine Ablenkung—a, how to say, distraction.”
“I would too, in her shoes. Are you sure it won’t be a distraction for you?”
“I am sure. I do not mind being…distracted in a good cause.”
I was beginning to like Lori Schachter. Under different circumstances, she’d have made a pretty good distraction herself. We shook hands again—again, the same quick, formal shake.
“Until Sunday, then,” I said.
“Until Sunday. Good night, Paul.”
“Good night, Lori. And thank you.”
She smiled at me once more, then turned and walked briskly away, down past the north goal, through the exit, and up into the tunnel. I watched her all the way—it was no hardship, she had a great walk—and as I turned to leave, I saw that the supervisor of the cleanup crew had been watching her, too. Any man would have. Nothing odd about that, but as our eyes met, his expression turned into a hard cold stare. I wondered why. If it was meant to intimidate me, he wasn’t close to achieving his goal. Had he yelled at me the way he did at that kid who dropped the glass, I’d have broken him into more pieces than Humpty Dumpty. Until about ten minutes ago, I was just in the mood to do it.
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