The Academy

by Ridley Pearson

  The mention of the suspicious shopping bag, and the doorman connecting it to a male youth entering the building, raised the hackles on the back of Cleveland’s hairy neck. He directed Howard Lightfoot to use security camera footage to identify the boy who had entered the hotel, and then “follow” him by moving from one camera to the next.

  The trouble with the plan was that it proved too time consuming. It took Lightfoot five minutes to find the images of the boy entering the hotel, and another two minutes to pick up sight of him in the lobby. Too long.

  “Keep working on it,” Cleveland said, thoughts grinding like gears in his tired head. He’d stayed up late the night before watching a DVD of 24, and all the coffee in the world couldn’t help him right now.

  “If I could make a suggestion,” Lightfoot said from his chair in front of the video control board. He was a big man with pitch-black hair and angular features.

  “Go ahead,” Cleveland said.

  “I can bring up all the hallway views on monitors two through six. Rotate through them in five-second intervals.” He did this as he spoke. Images of the hallways appeared. “If there are any kids—teenage boys—walking around, we’ll identify them.” He took a deep breath and waited for Cleveland to either explode or claim that this was his intention all along: both of which Cleveland was known to do. Cleveland only stroked his chin, which Lightfoot took as a good sign. “If we were then to post Kreutz in the lobby, and you were to take the arcade exit…” Another pause. “I don’t think anyone could leave the hotel without our knowledge. Not unless they used one of the service exits, loading docks, or the kitchen access. They’d have to know their stuff to use any of those.”

  “There are twelve ground-floor exits to the hotel,” Cleveland reminded him. “Sixteen fire escapes and five garage levels. We have only the three of us at the moment: you, me, and Kreutz.”

  Again he reached for his phone. But again he decided against calling the police. It would be too embarrassing if it proved to be for nothing.

  Lightfoot had forgotten about the garage levels. He wasn’t sure what to say.

  “What I would suggest,” Cleveland said, “is that you monitor the video. Assign Kreutz to the lobby. I’ll take the arcade entrance.” He made it sound like he’d just thought of this all by himself. “We’ll stop any teenage boy and make sure we connect him to a reservation and an adult.” He paused. “What do you think about that plan, Lightfoot?”

  Howard Lightfoot rolled his eyes. It was a good thing he was facing the bank of computer screens and not his boss.

  Cleveland puffed out his chest imperially and charged out of the small basement office like the military commander he wished he was.

  Johnny used the room-service key card to gain entrance to 1426. He didn’t knock. If it turned out someone was in the room, he would look confused and mumble something like, “How come the stupid key worked?” and then leave as quickly as he’d come. He had a real gift when it came to lying.

  No one was in the room: Taddler had done everything right.

  Johnny moved quickly to the other side of a handsome desk. There was a leather briefcase on the floor. He opened it and concentrated as he flipped through the contents, needing to remember the exact order he found things in. He used the notepad by the phone, writing down the sequence of what he discovered: a Time magazine, a printout of an Internet map page, two Netflix DVDs, and a manila folder.

  Inside the manila folder he found the letters Mrs. D. had mentioned. He jumped up and fed the letters one by one into the printer/fax/copier. Before he pressed the START button, he counted the number of blank sheets of paper in the feeder: seven.

  He counted eleven letters to copy.

  He slipped out an oversized mailer from where it was tucked into his back beneath his shirt, and counted out eleven sheets of blank paper and fed them into the feeder.

  He hit START.

  The copier was incredibly slow. Each sheet took five or ten seconds. It seemed an eternity.

  His radio clicked three times. Pause. Three more clicks.

  He was to talk if able.

  “Yeah?” he spoke into the radio.

  “I’m looking down from the mezzanine into the lobby. Looks like they maybe put a guy on the door.”

  “No way.” Johnny leaned over the printer/copier, wondering how it could take so long. There were still six letters to go.

  “We could try the entrance to the shops, but I gotta think we have problems.” Taddler was holding the radio like a cell phone, and he had the volume turned way down so that only he could hear, but he still felt as if he stuck out, being the only kid for a million miles. “I’m not sure what to do,” he admitted.

  Five letters to go. The machine was taking forever.

  “You there?” Taddler asked.

  “Yeah,” Johnny answered. “This thing is pathetically slow. I can’t believe it.”

  “I think you should abort.”

  “I’m so close.”

  “Yeah, but…I still think—”

  “Okay. I’m almost done,” Johnny replied, his transmission interrupting Taddler’s.

  In the basement security office, Howard Lightfoot caught something out of the corner of his eye. It was not easy watching four monitors that covered seventeen floors, each image changing in five-second intervals. He froze all the images and then reversed the playback on screen four.

  A kid entered the frame, walked to a room, and entered.

  Lightfoot counted the doors.

  “1425 or 26,” he spoke into the hotel radio. “A kid entered. A boy.”

  “I’m on my way,” Cleveland replied. “Stay with him, Howard. Monitor his every move.”

  “I’m on him,” Lightfoot answered. He kept the other screens on PAUSE, the one screen now the center of his attention.

  Taddler saw the man he believed to be a house detective move toward the bank of elevators, his finger pressed to his ear.

  Taddler hurried down the escalator and then controlled his urge to run, and instead moved calmly toward the revolving door while only yards from the house detective, whose face was presently turned away from him.

  It looked as if the guy had heard something over the radio, and had moved toward the elevators as a result.

  Taddler hoped that didn’t involve Johnny.

  “Hey!” he heard a voice from behind.

  The house detective.

  Taddler took off running.

  “Stop!” the man shouted.

  Taddler hit the revolving door and pushed hard, the big doors easing forward. Reaching the other side, he turned to see the man coming toward him at a full run.

  There was no way he was going to outrun this guy.

  He looked down. A big pink concrete urn held a small evergreen tree. He leaned his weight into it, raised it up on its edge, and was able to rotate it so that it wheeled toward the revolving door. He moved it into the path of the door by a good six inches, then turned and ran.

  He heard the collision as the detective hit the revolving door hard, and the door advanced, colliding with the urn. Refusing to move.

  It bought Taddler the time he needed. He ran to his left, then left again down an alley along the side of the hotel. Another block and he’d have his choice of a bus or the Red Line.

  He had the radio out and in hand. “Bail! Bail!” he shouted. “Mayday! They’re after us!”

  He hoped like mad that Johnny had heard.

  Johnny slipped the manila envelope containing the copied documents along the small of his back and covered it by tucking in his shirt.

  Taddler’s words, “They’re after us!” swirled in his head. To be caught would not only mean the police, but would also be an end to the Corinthians for him. It was unthinkable: the Corinthians was as close to a family as Johnny had—discounting those people in Minnesota.

  He returned the originals to the briefcase just as he’d found them, and hurried to the door. Cracking the door just a fraction of an inch, he
peered out.

  A man holding a radio was coming down the hall toward him.

  Johnny knew about hotel security. He knew he was outnumbered. For a moment he froze, unable to think what to do. It’s not as if there were lots of places to hide. He could make a run for it, but what chance did he have against such odds?

  He heard a knock on the door of the next room over: the house detective had picked the wrong room. Then he heard the door open.

  If he had any chance, it was now.

  He peered out of the fish-eye peephole: an exit sign over an unmarked door to his left. A stairway. He gently pushed down on the room door lever and opened it as quietly as possible. He didn’t dare shut it for the loud click it would make, but he pulled it nearly closed. Then he sprinted for the exit.

  As expected, he found himself in an echoey, concrete stairway.

  They would expect him to go down.

  He took off up the stairs. As he climbed, he looked for any sign of security cameras. There! He spotted a black plastic bubble in the far corner of the landing as he arrived.

  He heard the door below blow open and the furiously fast footfalls of the house detective descending in pursuit of him.

  Johnny lowered his head, keeping his face off the security cameras, and pulled open the door to floor Fifteen, realizing he might already have been spotted.

  Elevators to his left. He couldn’t take the stairs.

  By now the house detective would know that Johnny had headed up, not down. By now they probably knew he was on Fifteen.

  He could barely breathe.

  A maid’s cart to his right.

  A black plastic bubble on the edge of the hallway, nearly directly overhead.

  Maybe…

  He hurried to the cart and peered into a room. The maid was cleaning in the bathroom, the bathroom door nearly closed.

  He grabbed a can of window cleaner from the cart, raced back down the hall, and shot a spray of CleanVu up at the camera until it was speckled with a sudsy slime. The view from the camera would be like looking out a car windshield in a carwash. Placing the spray can back on the cart, he checked once again that the maid was in the bathroom. He heard her clanking around in there, gathered his courage, and slipped through the door and into the open closet. He sat down and carefully, quietly, shut the sliding door, leaving only a crack to peer through.

  He switched off his radio, not wanting any sounds to give him away.

  He held his breath when, a minute later, a beefy woman who reminded him of a shelter nurse mopped her way backward out of the bathroom. She put some stuff on her cart, removed the rubber wedge that held open the door—the top of her head coming within inches of Johnny’s eyes—and pulled the door shut behind her.

  Johnny threw his head back and released a long but nearly silent sigh.

  He would wait an hour and then make a mad dash down the stairwell. By then security would assume he was long gone.

  A chilly mist hovered above the soccer field like a veil of gauze, masking any view of the gymnasium and natatorium beyond. A murder of crows flew in and out of the smoky layers, their caws piercing the still, mud-scented morning air and echoing off the dormitory’s ivy-covered brick walls. As Steel crossed the adjacent field, the mist swirled around him, looking sometimes like long fingers attempting to grab him, or animal faces, or, at last, like a gray stone archway leading directly to the ga-ga pit and the silhouetted figure that awaited him there.

  Mr. Hinchman had a military demeanor: he carried his shoulders square, his back stiff and straight. His small mouth failed to reveal any emotion. Only his steely eyes gave hint of the man’s personality, which could scarcely be considered anything but severe and intense.

  “Are you ready, Mr. Trapp?”

  Steel nodded, though somewhat reluctantly.

  “Ga-ga is a game of reaction, agility, split-second timing, and most of all, deception. On the surface it is the picture of simplicity: don’t get hit by the ball. But nothing is as simple as it appears.” The glare of his eyes seemed to penetrate Steel; he was trying to convey much more than his words afforded.

  The pit itself was a space defined by ten-foot, waist-high, octagonal walls, the floor of which was hard-packed sand and dirt.

  “There are a few basic rules, as you may or may not know. The idea is to hit the other person with the ball, below the knees. This strike puts him out of the game. You must only slap the ball. If you catch it after it hits the ground or a wall, you’re out. If you scoop or ‘carry’ it”—he demonstrated palming the ball—“you are disqualified and ejected. You may not leave the pit or use the walls to jump. You may not touch the ball twice in a row, though you can use the walls to pass it to yourself—called dribbling.

  “As I explained, we typically play with two five-person teams. Players are eliminated in the ways I’ve just explained. Teammates may pass the ball. However, if the ball should strike a teammate at or below the knees, he too is out, regardless of who hit it.”

  “Sounds easy enough,” Steel said.

  Hinchman raised an eyebrow and scowled. “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” He waved Steel over the wall and into the pit to join him. “We play the game with a slightly undersized volleyball that we call the ‘spud.’ It is a very fast ball, the strikes often sting, and it can be dribbled and passed quickly due to its small size and firm inflation. It bounces out of control easily and therefore requires the striker to demonstrate the utmost precision.”

  The way Hinchman spoke, he made ga-ga sound like it was a religious experience instead of a game. Briefly, Steel considered opting out, telling Hinchman he wasn’t up for this. But the man’s fiery look told him that to do so would condemn him in this man’s opinion and, if word got out, the opinions of many others. He’d been offered what would be considered an honor, and he knew he would be stupid to turn it down.

  Practice began. Steel stooped over and protected his legs with open palms to deflect the “spud.” Hinchman hit him with the ball time and time again, first with direct shots, and then, as Steel became more practiced, from ricochets angled off the walls.

  “You’re good at this,” Steel said, while they continued to play. In thirty minutes of practice, Steel had managed to hit Hinchman only once. He was learning that there was as much skill involved in dodging or avoiding a hit as there was in striking or deflecting the ball. It was part dodgeball, part billiards.

  “I was on the runner-up team my Fifth and Sixth Form years. I want you to focus on—”

  “The angles,” Steel interrupted.

  “Yes. Exactly. And patterns. Use your memory skills. Study my play. Learn to anticipate my next move.”

  Hinchman struck Steel three times in a row. He stopped the play and gave instruction.

  “Angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. Whatever critical angle the ball strikes the wall will be the same angle it will leave the wall, meaning its course is entirely predictable. You must learn to never take your eye off the ball, to mentally measure how it comes off a striker’s hand or wall. This gives you a split-second advantage over its trajectory, the chance to anticipate its destination, and therefore the opportunity to avoid being hit.”

  He hit a ball slowly off the wall at Steel.

  Steel suddenly saw things as if a transparency sheet had been overlaid with the mathematics drawn out in colored dashes and arrows. He jumped, and the ball passed beneath him. Hinchman found it in him to grin, though only slightly. He hit the spud again, and again Steel avoided a shot that earlier would have hit him.

  “Excellent!” Hinchman called out proudly. “You can see it now, can’t you?”

  “I can!”

  “Any patterns?” Hinchman asked.

  “When your right foot goes back, you’re about to strike. If you lift your head, it’s a wall shot. Chin down, it’s straight at me.”

  “Impressive!”

  The play continued. Steel nimbly avoided any hits, while quickly developing a shot that involved defle
cting a ball on the move rather than stopping the ball and striking it fresh.

  He hit Hinchman twice with the deflected strike. It was all a matter of measuring angles, something he found incredibly easy to do.

  “You have a unique shot, Mr. Trapp,” Hinchman said after the second strike landed. He had stopped the ball. He stood tall, breathing rapidly. “These are the skills we will build upon. With time and practice and patience, we will see how far your abilities will carry you.”

  “What’s this?” It was Kaileigh.

  Steel had no idea how long she’d been standing there, watching. He looked around: students were heading to breakfast in their uniforms. He checked the clock tower on the administration building. He was absurdly late; he’d be lucky to eat this morning.

  “Ga-ga,” Steel answered.

  “Isn’t that a sound a baby makes?”

  “It is anything but a child’s game, Miss Augustine,” Hinchman said. “You will be introduced to it in gym class. Perhaps you’ll find it interests you. We can always use skilled players.”

  Hinchman knew Kaileigh’s last name. Steel wondered if he knew all the students in such detail. And if not, why her?

  “Mr. Hinchman is the Spartans’ coach,” Steel said.

  This had the effect he’d hoped for: Kaileigh’s jaw dropped.

  “But you’re Third Form.”

  “It’s only a tryout, Miss Augustine,” Hinchman said. “Some coaching. We don’t want this getting around school just yet.”

  Steel wiggled his eyebrows at her.

  “A little late for that,” came a deep-throated voice. “Third Formers should know their place.”

  “Ah!” said Hinchman. “Mr. DesConte.”

  “Mr. Trapp, meet the reigning school champion, Victor DesConte.”

  “Dez,” said the deep voice, introducing himself.

  Steel turned, already extending his hand to greet the boy behind him.

  He stood face-to-face with the square-jawed boy he’d seen in the chapel the night before. The boy he’d overheard meeting secretly with a British-accented teacher.