The Tournament Trilogy

by B. B. Griffith

  “What is she saying? Does she remember anyone in particular? Or anyone at all from then? From the house?”

  “No,” Claudia said.

  “No?”

  “She says no.”

  “That’s a long no,” said Frank. “Is she still saying no?”

  “She says many things, but no.”

  “Like what?”

  “She says how business was good then, too. But then it was bad, and now it’s good again. She is talking and talking.”

  “Why was business good?”

  The woman kept talking, sometimes interspersing her words with a short, soft laugh that ended in a sigh. The cigarette burned down near her knuckles but she did not notice. Claudia translated on the fly.

  “She says before it was just her bakery, and it was a famous bakery, and people who worked in the big house would come by every day at lunch. When it was abandoned she had to take up with the meat seller to pay rent and other things. Now business is good again, she is wishing that she had her own bakery again.”

  “Can she remember anyone specifically who came by back then and still comes by today? Ask her who her oldest customers are.”

  “She was just a girl then. She has had many customers.”

  “Ask again,” Lock insisted, stepping forward a bit.

  “I did already.”

  “Do you want the money?” Frank asked sharply. Claudia paused, along with the woman. “She’s almost done with her cigarette. Ask her again.”

  Claudia narrowed her eyes at Frank, and even Lock seemed taken aback.

  “Please,” Frank added.

  Claudia squared her shoulders indignantly, but she turned to the woman and asked their question in pointed Russian. The woman paused. She tucked a few thin wisps of gray hair back up into her cap. She stubbed the cigarette out on the wall and set it gently in a bucket of sand brimming with old butts. Then she turned with quick recognition.

  “Harry,” the old woman said, and she smiled and let out another laughing sigh. Claudia watched her keenly, and Frank couldn’t tell if she darkened at the name, or if it was just her general gray demeanor, but he noticed.

  “Who’s Harry?” Lock asked, shooting looks between the two women. Claudia relayed his question in a flat tone, listened carefully, and then thought carefully about her phrasing.

  “She says he is an old man. Crazy. He buys from her for so long she forgot when he first came. But it was at that time, in the beginning.”

  “Harry!” Frank said. “That’s great! We can work with that.”

  The reopening of the memory energized the old woman. She continued talking, a smile still upon her thin lips.

  “What’s she saying?” Frank snapped.

  “He flirted with her. With everyone. He still does, sometimes, but he’s difficult to understand now that he has a ...” Claudia reached for the word, pointing at her face. “He has a stroke,” she said, nodding. “He gets his orders delivered.”

  “So you have his address?”

  Claudia asked and the woman hesitated. Frank pulled his wallet out and took a twenty dollar bill from it and handed it to her.

  “I thought you said you had five bucks.”

  “It’s my emergency money. Thank you very much.”

  The old woman smiled again and rattled off an address. Lock slapped Frank on the shoulder and grinned. “Claudia, we’ll need you to translate for us when we get there.”

  “No need,” Claudia said, looking at Frank with a subtle working of her jaw.

  “What do you mean?” asked Lock.

  “He’s American.”

  Chapter Seven

  CAPTAIN QUI WALKED THROUGH the long, pristine hallways of the Diayoutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, one of the Ten Great Buildings of modern China. His every other step ticked softly upon the white marble flooring just off the running carpet. One foot in, one foot out. Beside him walked Master Tien. He wore a black boxed cap and sported a long, delicate beard of pure white that swayed with his steps. He was much older than Qui, but his steps were sure and his hands steady in their gestures, as if he had passed through old age and into something more substantial. He carried a cane of dark stained cherry wood, but only, it seemed, for effect.

  “They insult our government,” said Qui, hands clasped behind his back as they walked. His Mandarin was soft but sharp, as of a field commander reporting in a library. “They insult our leaders. They insult our history. They will not acknowledge our strength. They are afraid.”

  Tien laughed coldly and paused to admire a porcelain vase from the Qing Dynasty, perched upon a pedestal and set behind velvet ropes, one of several such pieces depicting an angular dragon in sharp white and crisp blue colors, on loan from the National Museum. It was a lesser work, but stunning nonetheless for the paradox it expressed: grand in its austerity.

  “I doubt that seriously,” Tien responded. “The Russians are many things, but they are not afraid. So you failed, then. I should have gone myself.

  Qui bowed in deference to Tien, then turned to admire the vase himself.

  “Please do, Master Tien. But with all due respect, you will fare no better. This Mazaryk is obsessed with the original eight teams. He thinks all others have insulted him. He says we spurned him, somehow. He is half mad.”

  Tien bent further at the waist to inspect the porcelain working at the base of the vase.

  “There was an offer. Years ago. In the beginning,” he said, straightening. Qui watched him but said nothing. When Tien turned to move on, Qui followed. “It was a foolish offer, and I stand by my refusal. Back then they would have had us exchange the simmering might of the Chinese army for three men. Insanity. Now things have changed. Now we can pull three men from the army and keep the army.”

  Qui thought on this and sensed that Tien awaited further questions along this line, but in truth Qui cared little for the past or what colored it. He cared only that he was shut out of the present, and derelict in his duty to his country. “So much trouble for a simple serum.”

  “Not so simple, it would seem. He granted you audience only to show that you were still unworthy in his eyes. I see that now,” said Tien. He came to a stop and turned to Qui, hooking his cane over one arm. “The time for diplomacy is over,” he said, his beard bobbing with each word. “We asked the Russians out of respect. Respect that they do not deserve. We will move on.”

  “Yes, but how? Using the diodes without the serum would be shameful, it is a half-measure, and the bettors won’t accept us at any rate.”

  Tien nodded. “We are not a team of half-measures. We are not a people of half-measures.” He turned to the next vase on display, another depiction of the dragon, but with Jade filigree on the tendrils of its maw, and a sapphire on the tip of its tongue. He nodded again, this time in approval.

  “What do you know about a man named Baxter Walcott?” Tien asked.

  ————

  Sarah Walcott was getting attention at school. Not the kind of attention she wanted, either. This year was supposed to be her collegiate zenith. She was supposed to coast through her senior year, ride the wave, get the last hurrah out of every weekend and do very little work. She was supposed to get looks for being a glowing, smiling, gradually tanning, perpetually buzzed twenty-one year old. That was the kind of attention she craved. She got something else entirely.

  When the media got hold of Frank Youngsmith’s story of the Tournament, what started as a simple write-up of a life insurance claim for Barringer Insurance quickly grew into the best single reference for the shadow organization that anyone had. Sarah thought that the “Dr. Walcott” the cable news channels were referring to was some other man. Some other Walcott with the same first name and job as her father, who happened to feature prominently in Youngsmith’s report. There was simply no way that her father could have anything to do with the Tournament. He wore black socks with running shoes. He was legally blind without his decades-old eyeglasses. He had gray nose hairs that poked out ever
y now and then. You might as well try to convince her he had a supermodel mistress as well, or moonlighted as a secret agent. Even when odd, outdated pictures from past company photographs of him started to appear on television, she refused to believe. Youngsmith’s report was sloppy, after all, hastily thrown together while he was on the run. It was more like a teenager’s scrapbook of notable articles and strange sketches and wild presumptions.

  When she finally came home, a copy of the report printed and in her hand, she held it out to her father to put the bad joke to rest. She smiled. “Dad, you’re not gonna believe this, but there’s this guy...”

  But Baxter Walcott wasn’t smiling. And then Sarah wasn’t smiling, either.

  “I couldn’t tell you or your mother,” he said, and Sarah heard him as if he were speaking through a poorly tuned radio. “I was forbidden, for one. But mostly because I wanted to keep you safe. Now everything is spinning out of control, and I wanted to catch you to tell you first, but I didn’t know how.”

  Strangely, Sarah wasn’t mad or excited or curious. She was afraid. If her father could be this man from the report, was anything in the world what it seemed? What outlandish secret life was her mother leading? Was this actually her home? She’d lifted a box in her mind expecting it to be light and airy but found it to have great weight. She was staggered.

  “Now you know why I said you had to stay away from John Northern,” Walcott said. “Can you imagine if you’d gotten near him? After what happened? God knows what might have happened to you, too.”

  Sarah went cold. All she could do was turn around and feel for a place to sit. Her father mistook this for shock.

  “Honey, you can be mad at me if you want, but I’m not sorry for holding this from you. For keeping you away from this part of my life.”

  Sarah nodded absently, but her mind flipped over itself.

  John Northern. Johnnie Northern. He was the one people wanted to know about. Nobody knew his face then, or even his name. People only knew that someone very important involved with the Tournament had ended up very dead off of the Chula Vista docks. Sarah also knew that he was handsome, that he had a beautiful tattoo on his shoulder, and that he was good in bed. And there was a good chance she was one of the last people to have seen him alive.

  Her dad hadn’t kept her away from anything, or anyone. She’d dived right in. Deep.

  “Holy shit,” she muttered. Her dad paused at that, but said nothing given the circumstances.

  “Just let me tell your mother,” he said. For an entire day after Baxter's revelations, he and his wife, Sheila, spoke to each other in frantic, high-pitched voices, just short of yelling. Over the next week there was silence as Sheila parsed the truth in her mind, examining it from every angle. Sheila believed that love in marriage meant complete honesty, above all else. Baxter believed that he’d shown love by keeping them apart from this side of his life, which he still considered reckless and destructive, no matter the world’s newfound interest. He reminded her that he was a cardiologist first and a Tournament doctor after that. Before the Tournament ascended into the international spotlight he’d spent only a small portion of his life developing the diode system and tending to the players. He couldn't have known, back then, how much that slice of life would hang over him. Ultimately, although neither could accept the other's position on the matter, both he and Sheila knew that it was love that drove their arguments, and that was enough.

  Sarah concluded that she would never tell either of them anything about her and Northern. Their lives were shaken enough, and no good would come of it.

  In the months following Walcott’s revelation to his family, he took a sabbatical from UCSD Medical Hospital and shut himself in his study at home, rarely venturing outside. Sheila tried to attend to her daily schedule as if her husband wasn’t being frequently mentioned on the news. She visited her ailing parents on Thursdays, joined her bridge club on Sundays, worked in a boutique clothing store on Mondays and Wednesdays that she owned with her neighbor. She deflected questions as best as she could and claimed ignorance when she couldn’t.

  Sarah returned to school, vowing not to let the Tournament ruin her final year. She prepared to answer questions about her father, rehearsing scenarios and banking a series of tepid but forthright responses that she hoped would deter the curious. For a time, this worked. The first questions were simple. Did she know that her dad was mentioned in the Youngsmith Report? Yes, and she was as amazed as anyone. Did she know anything about her father’s work? No, he’d always kept it to himself. Did the names Northern, Haulden, or Hix sound familiar? No, she couldn’t say that they did.

  In early April a reporter stopped her on Gilman Drive, not far from the slab benches where she’d first laid eyes upon Northern what felt like a decade ago, but was in fact only a handful of months past. This one had a big glossy photograph with him. He came very close to her, closer than the others, and he pushed the photograph in her face and asked if she recognized the man. She stumbled back and shouted that she had no idea who was in the picture, and that if he didn’t leave her alone she’d call the police. Chagrined, the reporter shoved the paper in his coat and glared at her as he backed away. She jogged into the closest public place she could find, a sandwich shop just off the street. She sat down without ordering.

  Of course, she had recognized the man in the photo. It was a grainy picture, pixilated, but it was clearly Johnnie Northern. She would later learn, along with the entire world, that the picture was a still taken from a surveillance video of a Japanese train station. Once it was confirmed, hundreds of others surfaced from people who had seen some leg of the fight there and now knew it for what it was: a Tournament round. The world finally had a picture of Northern to go with the name, along with Nikkie Hix and Max Haulden. The dead team was made real. It was official. But it was an answer that only led to more questions.

  That was when people started asking her about herself.

  It started with her roommates, Annie and Jessica. Throughout college the three of them had been nearly inseparable. They were known to fall asleep in each other’s beds. They’d shared clothes and shampoo and laughter and hangovers over the past four years, but suddenly they were distant and skittish. One night Sarah heard the two of them speaking in hushed tones behind Annie’s closed bedroom door. Her bedroom door was never closed. The next day, while they were watching television, Jessica flipped to one of the Tournament channels.

  “C’mon, Jess. You know I can’t stand all this stuff. It’s never ending,” Sarah said, and after Jessica changed the channel, looking away, she spoke.

  “You told us about him,” she said, and Sarah went cold. “I kept thinking to myself, why would she tell me about him if he was supposed to be this big worldwide secret? So I think you didn’t know who he was then.”

  In the rush of the past months, Sarah had forgotten that she’d told her roommates that she’d met a cute guy named John. In fact she was fairly sure that they might have even seen the man himself one evening, while the three of them walked past the coffee shop on Gilman. She’d been so focused on running interference on the reporters that sat outside of her sphere that she’d forgotten about who still dwelled within it.

  “He seemed like a pretty cool guy,” Jessica said, looking at Sarah for the first time.

  “Jess, I’m sorry. I should have told you as soon as—”

  But as Sarah spoke Jessica stood and her eyes became like pennies under drops of water. She averted her gaze again. “—No,” she said. “I’m the one who should be sorry, Sarah.” She picked up her jacket and took her keys and walked to the door. Sarah called after her, but Jessica shook her head and the door closed behind her.

  Sarah thought about going after her, but she didn’t have the energy. Jessica’s odd departure settled evenly with the rest of the weight upon her. It was hardly the worst of it. What bothered her most now was what had been bothering her ever since she heard his name on television, and, if she was being honest
with herself, the same thing that had been bothering her since their night: From the way he dressed, to their dinner, to the drinks, and then to the sex, the entire night was a little fuzzy, and it embarrassed her.

  She didn’t feel exploited; she remembered feeling great about the date and she remembered thinking to herself that maybe she was drinking too much wine, and then things blurred. She did remember taking him up to her bedroom. Even now she rubbed broadly at her temples. She must have seemed like an eager puppy. And with him. With the global man of the hour.

  She remembered a general, hazy contentment as far as the sex went, too. And the tattoo. Then he’d left early in the morning and died that night. She didn’t even remember saying goodbye to him. She woke up at ten in the morning and his side of the bed was empty. She’d had a cup of instant coffee and a bagel with light cream cheese and then she’d thrown it all up. The hangover lingered until Monday afternoon.

  If she ever sat down with a reporter, what would she even say? Yes, I recognize him because we hooked up once? No, I can’t quite remember anything he said, or what we talked about? If they asked her what it was like to be with him she could say that it was really nice. It was nice. And that would be that, the last living memory of the last full night of a man’s life.

  After enough reporters started stalking the routes to her classes, UCSD security tried to keep the media off the campus. She learned the hard way that no such courtesy was extended to her apartment outside of the campus bubble. She was harassed steps from the outer door to her apartment complex by the same reporter who had shown her the picture. He was wearing a hat this time, as if that could fool her, and he stepped heavily to within two feet of her again.

  “Sarah Walcott?”

  “Leave me alone,” Sarah snipped, fumbling for her keys. “I don’t know anything about my dad’s job, I don’t know anything about Johnnie Northern, I just want to go to bed.”