“The point is this. For the first time, the Tournament is being used to quickly and decisively settle a matter of foreign policy between nations. Both the United States and Japan have agreed to adhere to this contract and to the result of this round between our two teams.”
Greer paused momentarily and imagined the various scenes on the receiving ends of the cameras. Were they shocked? Angry? Greer doubted it. It would be very hard to overestimate the collective power of those unseen eyes. No, these men and women were never shocked, and if they were angry it was because they lacked Greer’s foresight to use the Tournament in this way. Very soon they would all come to agree that the Tournament was born to be used in this way.
“This is the future of this organization, ladies and gentlemen, the natural progression! No one team would dare renege on a contract made public to ones such as us. No team would risk expulsion. It is one team against another, true, but as always, the weight of every team in this body lies behind each contract. The contract is final. Such accountability can be found nowhere else on earth. It’s time we took advantage. This, friends, is our future.”
Greer cleared his throat. “Let the games begin.”
Chapter Sixteen
Round One
AT THE DAWNING OF the second straight day in which Andy Billings had yet to see or hear anything of his neighbor Frank, Andy began to worry.
For as long as Frank had lived next door, Andy had seen him almost every morning. It was rare, in these times, for neighbors to look out for each other. It wasn’t like the old days, Andy thought, when a man’s neighbor was practically family. Now it seemed that everybody suspected everybody else. That’s why it was important to Andy that he kept up with Frank. The man lived alone, never had any callers that Andy had ever seen, worked all day and slept all night. He could use a good friend. And what with their proximity, Andy could hear the guy pee every morning for crying out loud. It would be downright indecent of them not to be regular acquaintances at least.
And what’s more, it was plain odd, him running out of the garage without even a word, especially given the nature of that wacko bullet he’d asked Andy to look at. The thing was still sitting on the Corbin where Andy had accidentally broken it and then dropped it when it shocked him. His thumb still smarted a bit from that damn thing.
Around nine in the morning Andy decided to go knocking and see just what was going on. Andy strode up to Frank’s door, taking the concrete steps two at a time. The house was dark. He saw four days’ worth of the Denver Post piled up against Frank’s front door. Andy paused for a moment, picked them up, and rang the doorbell. He then stepped back a stride and waited, both hands clasped on the newspapers in front of him.
There was no answer, so he rang again, and knocked on the door this time as well.
“Frank? Buddy you there? Frank, it’s Andy!”
No answer.
Now it fell upon Andy to make a difficult decision. Should he walk away, or should he try the doorknob? He stopped to think for a moment. First thing’s first. Just try the damn door and see if the sucker’s locked.
Andy slowly turned the knob and gently pushed on the door. It swung open a half an inch. Andy froze. It might be a little forward to just barge on in. Or would it? He had a responsibility for Frank—a neighbor’s responsibility. What if Frank had hurt himself? Tripped on the phone cord and gone down hard right onto the edge of the Formica island he had in his kitchen? Debbie did that once. Gashed her forehead up bad too. Andy knew Frank had that exact same damn island.
Andy pushed open the door and moved in, moustache first.
“Frank? Hey man, haven’t seen you in a while. Everythin’ okay?”
No answer. No turning back now. Andy gingerly stepped into the tiny foyer, leaving the door open behind him. He looked about. He wasn’t encouraged by what he saw.
Somebody had been in the house, all over it. Random sheets of paper were strewn about the foyer. In the living room too, on the stairs, and in the hallway leading to the kitchen off to Andy’s left. It looked as if someone had been going through a manuscript as they walked the house, tossing page after page as they read. Frank’s carpet was scuffed through the living room in front of where Andy stood. Andy peered into the kitchen: every cabinet was open and every drawer extended.
He bent to examine the footprints. They were big, larger than Frank’s foot for sure. Andy slowly walked forward into the living room, following the paper trail and calling out to Frank. Nobody. Now edgy, Andy trotted upstairs. Somebody, or some people, had been through everything. Frank’s bedroom in particular, where his meager study was, looked a mess. All of the books and binders Frank had, most of them with the Barringer logo on them, were splayed open on his bed. Certain sheets were torn out. Some lay strewn across the bed and floor. His mattress was off-kilter and his dresser drawers had been completely removed and stacked in the corner, their contents rifled through. No sign of Frank anywhere.
Back at his own home, Andy called the police to report a robbery. Nothing of any real value had been taken, as far as Andy could see, but what else could it be? Frank was a plain fellow with no enemies that Andy knew of. It had to be a robbery.
“911 emergency response.”
“Yes, I’d like to report a break-in at 15B South Plaza Circle, Colorado Springs.”
“All right, sir. Is the break-in in progress?”
“No. It’s maybe a few days old.”
Andy waited while the woman on the other end typed and he watched Frank’s house out of his window, dark and foreboding. It was the scene of a crime now, something cold and impersonal, no longer a home. Almost half of a minute passed without the dispatcher speaking.
“Ma’am?” Andy asked.
“South Plaza Circle?”
“That’s right.”
“15B?”
“Yes.”
“The police have already been there.”
“What’s that?”
“We have a first responder’s report on file already, sir.”
Andy narrowed his eyes at the house. Could the police have really already come? He hadn’t seen anything. No lights, no sirens, no police tape, nothing.
“Maybe there’s some sort of mistake...” Andy began.
“No mistake, sir.”
“Who called the police?”
“I can’t give that information out, sir.”
“Well then I’d like to file a missing person report.”
“What is the name?”
“Frank Youngsmith. He’s my neighbor.”
“There is already a department bulletin out for any information regarding his whereabouts.”
Andy shook his head. “What’s that supposed to mean? That sounds bad. Like he’s wanted or something.”
“No, it just means that the police are already looking for him, sir. If you have any information, I can patch you through to the Colorado Springs Police Department.”
“I don’t have any information.”
“All right then sir. Will that be all?”
“I suppose so.”
“Thank you for calling.”
Andy hung up and put his hands on his hips. He called upstairs to where his wife was reading in bed. She would worry if he told her everything. She was terrified of intruders; they were her number one fear. She would be hysterical. Andy was the gun connoisseur of the family, but it was Debbie who insisted upon keeping two loaded revolvers under the bed, one for each of them.
“Hey Deb?”
“What honey?” she yelled back.
“Anybody come to the door today? Or yesterday?”
“Not that I can remember,” she said, her tone already wary. “Why?”
“Nothing, I was just expecting Frank to drop by, that’s all.”
“Well, not when I was here anyway.”
Andy walked outside into the cooling night, across his driveway and the thin, knee high hedge that separated his property from Frank’s. He stopped on Frank’s identical
driveway and stared at the house. In its emptiness and violation it had taken on a haunted air. Nothing about it looked as though the police had been there.
Andy feared the worst kind of worst.
Chapter Seventeen
FIVE YEARS AGO, WHEN a consortium of powerful Mexicans decided that they needed a Tournament team, they sent recruiters far and wide looking for a worthy captain. They would have to go north before they finally found him. Far north. Across the border and all of the way to Bay City, Texas, in Matagorda County. They tracked him to the sprawling vacation homes of a wealthy, gated community called Foxwood Estates. He was mowing lawns there, working for his family company.
It was mid-summer and already steaming hot at eight in the morning. Diego, his first cousin Adrian, and two of his distant cousins, Luis and young Gabriel, made up the June to August crew of Vega Lawn Service, and they were already on their second job of the morning. The Vega family lived in Mexico City almost exclusively from the profits the two rotating lawn crews made throughout the growing season. Every year each man in the family filed for and received a temporary work visa from the United States, and for three months, each man made the trek up to Bay City. While they lived in Texas they did nothing but work. To cut costs they ate communally, usually cabbage rich stews, rice, and beans. All four of them lived in a small flat off of I-35. Their only vehicles were two old Chevy trucks they used to haul their four stand-and-ride mowers, two industrial trimmers, and one hedger. The mowers alone cost the equivalent of a small fortune in Mexico. Diego purchased them with money his sister gave him, the lion’s share of her wedding dowry. Diego refused the money for two weeks but was convinced when his sister announced her pregnancy. The family was growing. They would need to turn money into more money, and Diego was their best hope.
Diego and his brother Miguel agreed at the outset that one or the other needed to be with each crew to lead them and keep them in line. When Diego was gone Miguel stayed with the family in Mexico, and vice versa.
On the morning that they found him, Diego was mowing his least favorite house in Foxwood Estates. He dreaded the house not because of the size of its lawns—the standing mowers could mow nearly any size of lawn in short order—but because this house neighbored a home owned by a woman every Vega man had been warned about.
If anyone mowed anywhere near her house before noon, this woman—none of them knew her name even after two years of mowing her neighborhood—unfailingly stormed out of her door, waddled as fast as she could down her winding walkway in a silk robe and house slippers, and screamed for ten straight minutes. Either Diego or Miguel, whoever happened to be the lead man, always volunteered to mow the area nearest her house and take the brunt of the yelling, mostly because they weren’t confident that the other men in the crew would keep their cool.
As he rounded the sprawling Red Oak adjacent to her walkway she popped open her front door and huffed down the sidewalk as if on cue, her face reddening with righteous indignation. Diego sighed, choked the mower engine, and stepped off of the platform on to the grass. He took off his weather beaten, wide brimmed cowboy hat, wiped his brow, and awaited her arrival.
He wasn’t tall; even with his grass-stained cowboy boots he barely matched her height, but of the two of them he looked by far the more respectable even after an hour’s worth of mowing in the gathering heat. He was dressed as always in an impeccably clean, white t-shirt, and faded blue jeans. He was trim and stood straight, his lean, dark arms resting harmlessly at his sides. His face was kind, shaved clean save for a thin, down-turned moustache he’d had since he had been able to grow it. His face was deeply tanned, even beyond his normally dark complexion, and lined outward around his dark eyes where he squinted off the sun every day. He looked older than his twenty-six years and was often mistaken for being in his mid-thirties. Years of outdoor work will go a long ways towards blotting out anyone’s youth, but his wide smile shaved a good ten years off of his face, and he smiled often, exposing a bright gold cap on his left incisor.
He even retained the smallest trace of his smile when confronted with this hysterical, fat peacock of a woman. Not a full smile—that would insult her, but Diego had found that when dealing with such people the barest upturning of the mouth, a small dimpling of his cheeks, gave the impression that he was a harmless simpleton. Just a Mexican farmer in the big city. Diego spoke very little English, so with the exception of the occasional que? or lo siento, he remained silent throughout her diatribe.
“Listen to me. Do you speak English?” Her voice was nasally and her jowly face turned upward to gain that extra inch. Diego shook his head slowly but she barreled ahead anyway.
“I speak to one or another of you Mexicans every time. Every time! You must wait until the afternoon to mow here. Do you understand me? I cannot have this noise! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” She spoke slowly and heavily, as if to a small child or a dog. Diego shook his head.
Luis, fluent in English and mowing nearby, stopped working when he saw her frump out of the door. He called out to his cousin in very polite Spanish, disguised as a harmless question.
“Diego, you need me to come help with this bitch?”
Diego calmly waved him away.
“I’ll tell her it’s almost nine o’clock and she has to get her fat ass up sometime.”
Diego never broke his bovine gaze just below the woman’s wide nose as he slowly shook his head. He knew you couldn’t reason with these types of people; it was much better to let them run their course.
“What is he saying? Does he speak English? Hey! YOU! DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME? THIS. IS. A. COVENANT. CONTROLLED. COMMUNITY. WE. HAVE. NOISE. RESTRICTIONS. DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT A NOISE RESTRICTION IS?”
Luis looked at Diego and Diego warned him with a sudden flash of his eyes. Luis looked at the woman and back at Diego and gritted his teeth into a stupid smile. He gave an exaggerated shrug and spoke in Spanish.
“Sorry pig, but I’m not supposed to understand you. Seventy-two lawns we mow and you are the only one that ever complains. You make me sick. Can you understand that? You understand me? I want to vomit whenever I see you.”
She looked blankly from Luis back to Diego, who smiled and shook his head slowly once more.
“If you Mexicans want to come and live here, you learn to speak English. Can you do that for me?”
“Unbelievable. She really has nothing better to do,” Luis said, as the two men watched her grumble all of the way back to her door and inside her house. They sat in silence until they saw her round face glare at them one last time through the window and then disappear behind the flick of a curtain. Diego turned to his cousin and cocked one eyebrow at him accusingly.
“One day someone is going to understand your Spanish. Then we’re both in deep shit,” said Diego, his voice rolling easily over each word.
“These people? Understand me? Please. Half of them can’t even speak their own language correctly. If that cow spoke even one full sentence of Spanish I’d eat my mower,” said Luis, laughing as he stepped back on his machine and pressed the starter. Despite his best efforts at maintaining a reproachful, fatherly air, Diego couldn’t help but laugh himself.
Fifteen minutes later, having mown the entire lawn down to a final patch in the corner, Diego prepared for his last pass when he noticed another potential complaint walking towards him: a man, dressed in a starched and pressed white button up shirt, jet black slacks, and shimmering black cowboy boots. Diego sighed, stepped off of his mower onto the bleeding grass, and took off his cowboy hat once again. Then he noticed that another man, dressed similarly to the first but shorter and wearing fat, reflective aviator glasses, was leaning gently on an old Cadillac parked nearby, quietly watching.
Luis choked his mower once more. Diego glanced at him and saw him eye both men nervously. All of his snap seemed to have deserted him.
“Police,” he said in a whisper. “What do they want?”
The police terrified Luis, mostly because men like Luis
and Diego, honest, hard-working Mexicans, had the most to lose in a causal encounter with any one of them. Men like Diego, who worked tirelessly to distance themselves from those few migrant workers who took a different, more violent path, could lose all that they had built up over years of saving and toil in one careless swipe of a the long, overworked arm of the South Texas law. All too often the police went looking for the type of men who gave Luis and Diego a bad name, but instead found Luis and Diego. It had happened to almost all of the Vega men; their nationality sometimes inspired instant mistrust. They all worked constantly to rise above it, but the battle was so sharply uphill that every one of them had at one point pondered another way. Perhaps the single greatest measure of the true character of the Vega family was the fact that despite their extensive knowledge of the English language, the border routes, the visa procedures, and even the crime circuit of the Texas borderlands, not a single member of their large, extended family had even once succumbed to that temptation.
Diego thought that the woman had finally called the police on them and was already preparing a rational argument for them so that, through Luis, he could explain that the woman was unhinged. The man in the white collared shirt reached where Diego stood and for a very long moment simply looked Diego over, scanning him up and down. Then, most unnervingly, the man smiled and stood in silence.
The Tournament Trilogy Page 14