I said something in a little spray of crumbs.
“Swallow what you’ve got,” Roxanne suggested, “and try again.”
I washed it down with a big glug of creamy English milk. “I’m still mad,” I said.
“At whom?” she asked, then ruined it by adding, “Not meem, I hope.”
I wasn’t being bitter, just stating facts, when I said. “No. Practically everybody but youm, as a matter of fact. At the world. At Fate.”
“We were talking about Fate yesterday.”
“I know. Mostly, though, I’m mad at myself. For going down to TVStrato in the first place. For getting sucked into this mess. But mostly for being so damned bad at it.”
One of the things that makes Rox tops in the girlfriend department is that she’s always ready to spring to my defense, even when I’m the one attacking me.
“What do you mean, bad?”
“Aliou got murdered in front of my eyes.”
“Your back was turned, and you couldn’t help it. And you were the only one who saw the real killer at all.”
“Who I failed to catch. Whom.”
“Because you were tackled by that policeman.”
“Who caught me from behind. Then I get a bright idea and a break, and I flush a figure who knows something about the mess, and before I can call the cops not only does he beat the snot out of me, he then proceeds to get conveniently killed so nobody can ask him any questions.”
“Who might even be the killer, for all you know.”
“Exactly. For all I know. For all anyone will ever know. If this all goes on too long without an answer, you know Bristow will just chalk it up to Weiskopf—I won’t blame him, he’ll have to do it—but that’ll leave the real killer out there, laughing.
“And talk about laughing. In consecutive days, I let myself be made a fool of by two of the biggest twits imaginable. That idiot Stephen actually thinks I’m having it off with Phoebe, and he’s grateful for the favor, so he can tryst the night away with his muse.”
“But they’re really kind of pathetic, aren’t they?” Rox asked.
“What do you mean?” I countered. “I’ve been talking about how pathetic I am.”
“Oh, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself. You’ll get over that soon, I know that by now.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Where was I?”
“Phoebe and Steve. Pathetic.”
“Right. It is pathetic. He’s got to see himself as a great artist, and she, apparently has to play these games as a femme fatale, and all the while they’re playing these Noel Coward-oh-so-sophisticated open-marriage games.” I rubbed my chin. “You have a point, maybe. The thing is, as far as I can tell, Stephen has all the attributes of a great artist. Except talent. He’s passionately devoted to poetry, knows a lot about it, works hard at it, and doesn’t really care about anything else, including his marriage. Then he sits down and sweats and pours out his heart and writes is this a head?”
“Phoebe’s probably pretty successful attracting other guys,” Rox said. “A lot of men are attracted to that fragile, seemingly helpless type. Women like that help them assuage their macho bruises in the wake of feminism.”
“Is this how you talk to your professors?”
“Sort of,” she said. “I have to make what I’m saying more obscure. You’re not having any trouble following me, I trust?”
“Lead on.”
She smiled. “Good. Attend, then. First I want to say that I love you for scorning Phoebe. Second, I want to get back to the point. The real pathetic thing about the whole business is that while the two of them are out there pretending, posing, and being the biggest pseuds imaginable, they sit inches from all the real power, influence, and importance anybody could imagine. They don’t even have to ask for it—it’s all there waiting in trust for Stephen. All he’s got to do is take it.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Idle chat during tea. My Network stock is set up the same way. I get the dough from it, but I don’t vote it until I tell the lawyers I want to.”
“So that’s what Lady Arking was talking about on Monday night, saying Stephen might want to fire her.”
“Exactly. And of course, Stephen wants no part of it. You can fail running a business.”
“Whereas,” I said, “you can’t really fail as a poet, because nobody reads it anyway.”
I reached for another scone, doctored it up, and took a bite. I corralled a little blob of cream with my tongue, and said, “You can, however, fail as a detective, and that I have been doing on this case.”
“You’re under no obligation—” she began.
“I know, I know. But it bothers me. I used to be good at this. I didn’t like doing it especially, but I was good at it.”
Roxanne said, “Mmmmm. So what are you going to do now, my love?”
“I,” I said, “am going to follow Cobb’s Principle. Not much else I can do.”
“Cobb’s Principle? What’s that?”
“Surely I must have enunciated it for you at some time or other.”
She batted her eyelashes at me. “You’ve enunciated so many.”
I thought she was going to add, “and don’t call me Shirley,” but she skipped it. She has a lot of self-control, that woman.
“Cobb’s Principle,” I enunciated, “states that when it is impossible to think of something intelligent to do, one should do something stupid.”
“Oh,” she said. “That one.”
“Yeah, that one. What’s the matter?”
“How come with you ‘stupid’ always has to mean ‘dangerous’?”
Depends what you mean by dangerous, I suppose. I went walking the streets of a ghetto bouncing a basketball. It was the way I spent most of my teenage years. I wanted to be the best; Harlem was where the best games were. I had to go there to find them.
One of the greatest compliments of my life was delivered by Sonny Boy Jeffries, who probably described himself on his income-tax forms as a “freelance pharmaceuticals distributor.”
Sonny Boy had apparently once cherished NBA dreams before he found an even more lucrative field. He used to park his custom-built black-and-gold Cadillac near the playground. One time after a particularly tight game, he called me over.
I went. Even a white boy knew that when Sonny Boy Jeffries called you, you went. I went, but I didn’t like it. Sonny Boy was perfectly capable of telling me to get my white ass out of there and never be seen north of 110th again, or of wasting me on the spot.
Instead, he grinned big under the perpetual dark glasses, and said, “Boy, you done played yourself black as far as I’m concerned. Anybody give you any trouble about playin’ up here, you tell them to take it up with Sonny Boy.”
The amazing thing was, I never had to. Armored with that endorsement, I traveled with confidence, and was never hassled beyond anything I couldn’t handle personally.
Sonny Boy is doing life in Attica, at the moment, a fate I wish on all freelance pharmaceutical distributors without exception. But I do have a tiny soft spot for Sonny Boy for seeing past my skin to what I had inside. A lot of more respectable people just can’t do that.
I was walking through the black neighborhoods of South East London. The idea was to try to plug in with the neighbors, acquaintances, and friends, if any, of the late, and so far as I know, unlamented, Winston Blake.
Why? Got me. I guess I had some sort of feeling that Winston was too much a cipher—insert juvie delink hitman here—and like Aliou and Weiskopf as well, who were dead before I ever got to know them.
I’d read everything Bristow had found out about Winston, which wasn’t much. But there was one thing—he’d apparently been a bit of a basketball player. Not that you could blame the guy. Once you spoke to his mother (“He was a good boy, at heart, I don’t know what went wrong,” unquote) and a few of the guys he’d been arrested with in his abbreviated day (“I don’t know nuffink, Copper”), and sen
t a few detectives to talk to snitches and the neighborhood in general (nobody knew nuffink), what do you do?
You go to a sporting goods store, buy a rubber playground basketball, get into your sweats, and walk around Winston’s turf doing some fancy dribbles along the sidewalk, trying to take the newness off it.
I ran into another, unexpected problem. Another part of the difficulties I had with playing this game, so to speak, on the road.
I couldn’t find a basketball court.
I’d never expected the place to be like New York, where every paved lot that isn’t being built on at the moment has hoops at either end (some of the few things about New York’s outdoor physical plant that are almost never vandalized, by the way). Nor did I expect Suburbia, USA, with a garage behind every house, and a hoop over every garage.
I did, however, expect something, if only because you couldn’t go past ten billboards in London that fall without seeing Charles Barkley selling sneakers, or Shaquille O’Neal selling tickets for an NBA exhibition game at Wembley Arena.
My mistake. After about two hours of wandering, I’d drawn some curious looks but no place to play. The only outdoor basketball court I knew of in London was still the one back in Hammersmith, just on the north side of the bridge, just a couple of blocks from TVStrato headquarters, a place I regretted ever setting foot inside.
I finally found one, on a mostly deserted block, locked in behind a cyclone fence. There was one encouraging sign—the corner of the gate had been bent back, making a triangle of space big enough for somebody determined to fit through, even if he was six foot two and weighed a hundred ninety-five pounds. By basketball standards, I’m stocky.
So now, here I was, on a b-ball court at last. There was a discouraging sign, too. It was possible that the fence had been vandalized not to gain access to the court to play on it, but to vandalize it too. The left-hand basket had been bent way down out of the horizontal.
The other one was okay, though. You could even, faintly, see the paint lines on the concrete for the foul line and the strange conical foul lane they used for the International Basketball rules that they played in the Olympics and all the European leagues.
And I was alone.
A voice seemed to come to me. If you bounce it, it said, they will come.
Besides, I’d known it was a stupid idea to start with. It was about one o’clock. In this northern latitude—much farther north than New York—I had about three more hours of operational daylight. At least I could shoot some hoops. It had been a long time.
So I started. I dribbled and shot, dribbled, spun, and shot. I didn’t get to do the thing in basketball I did absolutely the best, which was pass, for obvious reasons.
I also didn’t get to do any rebounds, for the simple reason that I just couldn’t miss. I was in the zone. Me, the ball, and that basket were a closed system, and all of them responded to my will in equal measure. It happens, once in a while, to anyone who devotes a certain amount of effort to a particular game. The great ones spend their careers there.
The rest of us, of course, would love to save it for the Masters, or the Super Bowl, or the NBA finals, but believe me, it’s a thrill whenever it happens.
I was so into myself, to the drum solo of my dribbling on the tarmac, to the slap of my sneakers and the thunk of the ball through the netless metal hoop as they combined for a little unrepeatable jazz solo of my very own, it probably took me ten minutes to know I had an audience.
Six kids, various shades, togged out in what looked suspiciously like American sports kit, were gazing at me with wide eyes and serious faces pressed against the fence.
The oldest was about thirteen. They were a little younger than the crowd I had hoped to attract, but, as I was getting tired of reminding myself, this was not New York.
What the hell, I thought, you go with what you’ve got.
The front of the bent-down rim was about five inches below where it should have been, or about nine feet, seven inches from the pavement.
That ought to be enough.
I took one last jumper at the good hoop, pulled it down as it went through as if it were a rebound, and headed off down the court. Just past the foul line, I pulled the ball up and jigged it a little to the left as if I were going to pass it off, which in real life I had done probably seventeen thousand times.
Since there was nobody to pass to, however, I kept it and jumped for the hoop, a white Julius Erving.
And I did it. I threw that ball down the hole like the winner of the slam-dunk competition, something I was never quite able to do with a legitimate basket.
It felt good, even if it was cheating.
That brought some applause from the peanut gallery.
That was what I’d been hoping for. I stood facing them, with the ball against my hip, catching my breath and smiling. I waved to them.
“Come on in,” I said.
As soon as they believed I meant it (and as if I had any right to be inviting people in or keeping them out in the first place), they came on in through the fence and joined me on the court.
Any group of kids like this tends to throw up a spokesman. In this case, it wasn’t the biggest kid, or the oldest kid—it was a suspicious-eyed youngster of about eleven.
“You’re from America, then,” he told me.
“Yeah,” I said. “You knew that from just three words?”
“Words? No, nothing like words.”
I looked down at myself. My whole outfit had been purchased in England. Roxanne and I had left New York in such a rush that I packed in the unconscious assumption that I still had a job. I brought a wardrobe with me that could handle any business demand, but which was painfully deficient when it came to dressing for leisure time, which I now had nothing but.
So he didn’t tell I was an American by the clothes I was wearing.
“The way you done that last shot. The way you play in general, ain’t it?” The kid explained. “Nobody around here can do that sort of thing. That’s NBA-level stuff, that is.”
“Not quite,” I said.
“Who are you?” the kid demanded.
I switched hands with the basketball and stowed it on my left hip to be free to shake hands.
“Matt Cobb,” I said. “Who are you?”
I collected a bunch of names and handshakes. The spokesman’s name was Philip.
“Don’t mean that,” Philip informed me. “What team are you with? What are you doing here? This is one of those charity fings, innit?”
“I thought he was Michael Jordan,” came another voice.
“Don’t be daft,” said the biggest kid. “Michael Jordan is black.”
“And about a thousand times better,” I said.
“Look pretty good to us,” Philip said.
“Thanks. I played in university.”
The big kid’s name was Thomas. He wore a Chicago Bulls jacket. Bulls gear was pretty common around London, probably because it looks tough and flashy in black and red, and the bull logo is neat.
But Thomas seemed to wear the thing as if he meant it, as if he’d a glimpse of something he might really like and wanted a way to get more.
“Show us some more stuff, then,” he said.
I shook my head. The boys looked disappointed but resigned, as though life had accustomed them to disappointment.
“I’m not in show business,” I said. “I just want to play some hoops. You up for that?”
“I’m on your side,” Philip said.
I laughed. “I think I’d better coach and ref,” I said.
The afternoon turned into a clinic. Basic skills, dribbling, passing, free throws. And shooting baskets, of course. Until you get a very sophisticated view of the game, scoring is where all the joy of it comes from.
They were all rank beginners, of course. Until recently, if you can believe this, the view in England of basketball was of a boring game for wimps—the way Americans feel about soccer. Maybe the way most of them have seen it pla
yed, it is.
Still, Thomas showed some definite promise. He was the first to catch on that you had to trust the laws of physics to bring the ball back up to your hand when you dribbled it, because if you looked at the ball, you weren’t watching your teammates, the basket, or the enemy.
He had a pretty good eye for the hoop, too.
After a while, I let the other kids play some chaotic two-on-two under the one good basket and took Thomas aside.
“You’ve played this game before, haven’t you?”
He took it, as intended, for praise, and grinned. “Couple of times. They used to have a program at the yoof center, but they got their budget cut before I was really old enough to be in it. Me mum doesn’t like me out after dark.”
“Smart mum,” I said. “Listen,” I went on, “did you ever hear of a guy named Winston Blake? I understand he played a little basketball in the neighborhood.”
“What, Winston? Yeah, older guy. Spent a couple years in Canada, picked up the game there, he said. Seen him play a couple of times. Best around here. Not a shade on you, though.”
“Seen him around lately?”
“Seen who?”
It was Philip, the brains of the outfit, who. with some street-kid radar had worked out what was going on. The streets, for better or worse, always have a code, and there’s always somebody like Philip around to make sure it gets enforced.
This was going to be a little harder than I’d hoped. Nothing to do for it but to meet the challenge head on.
“Winston Blake,” I said. “Light-skinned black, early twenties, a little shorter than me.”
Thomas said, “He’s dead,” at the same time Philip said, “We don’t know nothing.”
“I know he’s dead. I want to know what he was up to just before.”
“You a copper?”
“I’m an American, for God’s sake.”
Philip wasn’t being fobbed off with that. “There’s American coppers,” he said.
I dropped my voice real low and terse. “All right. You’re a smart lad. You’ve figured it out that far, let’s see if you can take it the rest of the way.”
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