by Otto Penzler
But she wasn’t going to lose the semis. She took the first set in a tiebreaker and sensed victory. She pounded shots into that backhand corner, feeling that her racquet connected with Michael’s head each time she clobbered the ball.
At the start of the second set she spotted him in the stands. She lost a break because of that—her nerves getting the better of her. He had the audacity to offer a small wave—catching her looking. But then she broke right back love–40, a humiliating service for her opponent, and what proved to be the final straw. It was the first of three more breaks. A trouncing. She hurried off the court, denying the television commentator an interview, a breach of contract that would cost her ten thousand dollars. She refused an interview in the studio as well, another ten thousand. Michael would be pleased by the victory, of course, and it angered her that she couldn’t score any points against him. Not yet, anyway.
• • •
Jessie watched the night game of the other women’s semi from her hotel room. She wore bags of hotel ice taped to both ankles and both knees—a trick she’d practiced for some time now. The ice kept any possible swelling down. After two decades on every kind of tennis court surface, she had the joints of a fifty-year-old. She swallowed two Advils, adjusted her pillows and turned the sound up so she could cover that other sound. It had begun about ten minutes earlier: the familiar swoosh and slap of a tennis volley. The problem was that no one was out there playing on the hotel courts at this hour.
She didn’t really care whom she faced in the finals, though she slightly favored the number-two-ranked player, the Czech, Sylvia Brazinski, with the big backhand, little legs and average serve. She could tire out Brazinski if she played a good, solid net game, and maybe win a break off that serve, although as a leftie Brazinski proved difficult to return. They had rarely met on the court, and Jessie felt confident of her chances.
The knock on the door to her suite caught her by surprise, and a trill of adrenaline spiked her system as if she’d been slapped from behind. “Busy!” she called out, not wanting to deal with the carefully rigged bags of ice on her joints.
She couldn’t make out any of the words of the voice on the other side of the door, through the suite’s living room, but its rich Scandinavian timbre gave away Khol, and she felt moved to greet him. She hobbled toward the door, checked the peep hole and threw the locks, admitting him. In a camisole, bikini underwear and taped up with lopsided bags of ice, she imagined herself quite the sight.
His arm was slinged and in a cast. He looked much paler than she’d ever seen him. She wondered how a court tan could fade so quickly. She locked the door behind him, and began crying before she turned around. She hated herself for this show of weakness.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he comforted her. “I’m glad it wasn’t you. They could have raped you. Killed us. They must have planned to kidnap us, don’t you think?” She loved the lilt to his voice, but it made him sound all the more naive as he assessed their assault incorrectly.
“We have to talk.”
“I came to watch Brazinski with you,” he said, drying her eyes of the tears. “Thought you could use the company.”
“We’ll watch in a minute.” She led him into the suite’s living room, and Khol must have known something was up: Jessie was far too great a competitor not to watch every last second of this semifinal match.
“Jess?”
“I have something to tell you. I hope you won’t hate me. But even if you do, I’ve got to tell you.”
“Who is he?” Khol said suspiciously, unwilling to be seated.
She burst out laughing, in a nervous volley of release. “I wish!” she said. “Sit,” she instructed again, and this time Khol sat down. Jessie turned one of the overstuffed chairs to face him.
“What the hell’s going on?”
She said, “I threw the Open. Four years ago. That loss to Crispin?”
“You what?”
“I owed some people a lot of money. Khol, I’m in big trouble.”
• • •
The most difficult part of their plan was acquiring twenty thousand dollars in cash in less than three hours. Khol turned to his sports agent in Chicago, a man named Stan Feingold, who was instructed come hell or high water he was to deliver the amount in cash to Khol before the end of the second set, as no one could predict if Jessie’s match against Brazinski would go the distance and reach a third set.
This part of the plan was never mentioned to the FBI handlers who jumped in on the case following Jessie’s call late the night before. They might have thrown her and Khol in jail for even thinking about it, but as it was, the federal agents’ full focus remained on obtaining warrants for cellular phone surveillance and establishing perimeter security in the face of four thousand adoring fans, any one of whom could be a mob-hired hit man. Hit woman, for that matter.
Jessie had been up until four in the morning; had gotten only four hours’ sleep as a result of the interviewing (interrogating was more like it) and the lawyering (her attorney in New York, Susan Steiger, had obtained representation for her here with a firm specializing in criminal defense). She realized she faced an uphill battle in the match against Brazinski—not that it actually mattered. Even when in top physical shape, Jessie found the southpaw no pushover. They’d met seven times. Jessie had won four. Three of the last five. She held a psychological edge, but the wear and tear of the previous late-night negotiations, while supporting the FBI plan, threatened her own.
The FBI plan called for her to lose a close match, preferably in three sets. Michael would believe she had capitulated to his demands following the violence done to Khol and would pay her off for services rendered. This payoff would be monitored and intercepted and recorded by authorities. At the very least, Michael, and perhaps his associates along with him, would do some serious time.
For agreeing to throw the match, to cooperate, the FBI had offered that her criminal wrongdoing at the Open four years before would be expunged from her interrogation transcripts in return for a fine equal to her tournament winnings and her payoff for throwing the Open, plus interest, plus a one-year hiatus from the sport. For this, she would serve no jail time and the ATA would be led to believe this tournament was the only attempt at extortion and that Jessie had come forward of her own free will following the harm done to Khol.
With each of the concerned parties scheduled to win something from the deal, all Jessie had to do was lose, and walk away from the sport for a year, possibly the best tennis she’d ever played—to throw away everything she had worked toward for her entire life. With a victory here, in a major, she would gain enough points to hold the number-one ranking in the world for at least two weeks—the date of the next scheduled major.
She walked out onto that court amid a roar of applause, captured by live television cameras, a mass of confusion, awaiting a sign from Khol that Stan Feingold and his twenty thousand in cash had reached the stadium. Waiting for a sign they could satisfy the FBI’s needs, while satisfying their own as well.
A person couldn’t always do the right thing.
• • •
Having only twenty-five minutes to warm up, and under the considerable pressure of not only a finals appearance in a major, but a match of such magnitude in terms of national ranking, Jessie approached the first game cautiously. Her return of serve revealed itself as her most obvious weakness and Brazinski capitalized, pummeling ninety-mile-an-hour SCUDS so close to the service tape that twice Jessie waited for Cyclops to chirp his out-of-bounds alert, only to realize the serve had been good. She hadn’t even seen the thing. Forty-love. Brazinski won not only the first game, but a piece of the crowd. As number two in the world, Brazinski had legions of adoring fans. Jessie, at a current ranking of number five wasn’t quite as well-loved. (It was only through the mathematics of computer-rated standings, enhanced by the number-one player having lost in the first round in her last two majors, that either Brazinski or Jessie had a shot at
the bullet. The number-three player had been ambushed by a random drug testing and had showed positive for a performance enhancer that everyone in the locker room knew she was taking—in point of fact, she’d probably been sandbagged by a player or a player’s agent in an effort to get her off the rankings, which seemed inevitable.) But Brazinski claimed the crowd early. She wore a very tight top, which would be soaked through in perspiration in a matter of minutes to the pleasure of all the men attending (she was famous for this wet T-shirt look, and had twice been censured by the ATA, but the networks weren’t complaining, given the ratings whenever she played), a white and blue pleated skirt so short that it rose off her cheeks every time she lifted to serve. It was the way of women’s tennis—part athletics, part soft porn. The real money came from endorsements, millions a year to the number-one-ranked player who had a body worthy of national television and billboard ads. The butt-faces didn’t get nearly the offers that the glamour queens did. In this day and age it wasn’t enough to be coached on your backhand, your media coach meant the difference between winning and stardom, and stardom paid for the fractional ownership of a private jet, stretch limos, presidential suites, private masseuses, personal chefs and the rest of the entourage. Jessie didn’t appreciate losing the crowd so early in the match. Now, instead of having Brazinski to beat, she could add seven thousand others to the list.
The two women traded service wins up to a first-set tiebreaker that Jessie understood represented the match. Brazinski no doubt knew this as well, but Jessie wasn’t allowing herself to think about Brazinski, nor the crowd, nor the fact that Khol had yet to show himself at the appointed place to signal the arrival of the cash, and therefore, the start of their plan. Instead, she took a series of deep breaths and pushed away the cheering and catcalling, knowing that she had regained a large part of the house with her aggressive play, while Brazinski, as steady as a workhorse, had disappointed the crowd by her cautious adoption of minimal net play. Jessie considered this a clinic—she was going to show Brazinski how to win both at the net and in the bleachers. She had always played well under pressure, and surely Brazinski knew this about her as well. Tiebreakers played to Jessie’s favor. Warmed up now, she muted the sound on the playback of the crowd and focused entirely on that yellow ball. There was nothing in this world but that yellow ball, and each time it tried to get past her, she smacked it, disciplining it and mandating it return to its corner. If it dared to come back at her, she smacked it again, actually talking to it in her head. “Oh, no you don’t.” “Back you go, little one.” “Not this time.” She clocked the damn thing. Smashed it into submission, turning its spherical shape oblong, raising fuzz dust off her racquet and cheers from the stands. Harder and harder she hit it, to where she knew she’d found the zone. That yellow ball was hers now. It wasn’t going to obey Brazinski. It didn’t dare. Jessie took the tiebreaker and a standing ovation, before an official time-out for a network ad and a court change.
In the third game of the second set, Brazinski broke, following Jessie’s identification of Khol at the mouth of exit 7, just below the huge TIMEX sign that posted their scores. Khol made an “E” by extending three fingers, and then flashed his hands to signal “34.” Jessie’s concentration slipped, she double-faulted due to a shitty overruled call on the part of the dykish umpire, and for four and a half minutes she lost focus. In those four and a half minutes she set herself up to lose the second set. Breaking back would not be easy—Brazinski had a feel now for her own reluctance on return of serve, and she exploited it with two aces in a row. The crowd, so very much in her camp at the end of the tiebreaker, began to slip back toward the more familiar competitor, cheering on those aces and turning up the volume with each convincing point.
Jessie buckled down and prepared for the battle of her career.
She glanced over, ensuring that Khol had reported correctly. There, just below the COPPERTONE ad, Michael sat in seat E-34. He, too, was cheering on the aces that suggested a Brazinski second-set victory.
• • •
Khol received the twenty thousand dollars in an aluminum briefcase. He couldn’t tell his agent what he was doing without risking the man’s career, and the agent didn’t want to know for this very same reason. A look passed between them that conveyed the agent’s concern, disappointment and regret at having participated in any of this. That look warned that he hoped Khol knew what he was doing.
That made two of them.
The tennis circuit, like all of pro sports, is filled with wannabes, groupies, hangers-on and the suckerfish that cling to one’s belly hoping to eat the scraps. The forbidden vice of gambling is rampant—players gamble all the time (seldom on their own games, which is highly illegal and frowned upon even by the most addicted gamblers), using bagmen to place their bets. Khol was not a gambler. He leaned toward the luxury of the groupies—knowing that he could have sex, any kind of sex at all, at nearly any time of day in any city with no responsibility toward maintaining a relationship. Like many of the men on the tour, he knew fine-looking, willing women in dozens of cities around the globe and kept his Palm Pilot brimming with current phone numbers. That he was now involved with Jessie put much of this into the past for him, but when he needed a bagman to place a bet, it required only a trip up to Todd Seaborn’s suite on the fifth floor and a passing of that briefcase, one hand to the next. Within minutes, a twenty-thousand-dollar bet was placed on the outcome of the finals match taking place on the court below and currently airing on a national television network. A fee of two thousand dollars was to be paid for special delivery, if the bet paid out. It was placed for Jessie to win the match in three sets. The odds were four to one in favor of Brazinski given a three-set final. As Khol walked out of that suite, that briefcase was suddenly either eighty thousand dollars fat, or dead empty. Only Jessie could control the outcome.
• • •
She never recovered the break. Brazinski won the second set 6–4 to thunderous applause, and the match headed into the third set. To see the look on Michael’s face, one might have mistaken him for a cheerleader. He left his seat early in the third set. Jessie wondered if he was gone for good, or to the men’s room, or to check in with his bosses over the cell phone. If the last, the FBI was likely listening in at this very moment, and Michael was on his way to exposing his employers. Files would be created. Transcripts of the conversations would be generated. The U.S. attorney’s office would be on the way to building a case worth prosecuting.
Jessie returned to her earlier success, punishing the ball in regular strokes with a focus and concentration unmatched in any of the contests leading up to this final. Seeing Khol’s signal and knowing their plan was under way allowed her a freedom of thought, a peace of mind, overcoming her anxieties, and permitting her to dedicate herself to the task at hand—defeating Brazinski and upsetting the FBI’s sting. She met the ball with the full force of her body; nothing felt quite as good to her as a perfectly executed groundstroke, not even sex, if truth be known. Everything paled by comparison. That one perfect stroke, the ball launched a quarter-inch above the net, the fuzz practically peeled off, trained into the exact spot on the court that the mind intended as if she talked it down through a perfect landing. She sprang back into position, a light bounce to her step, not an ounce of fatigue in her joints or muscles, the racquet already preparing itself—a mind of its own—setting up for another devastating power shot that sprang from her strings like a bullet.
God, but she loved this game.
No one, nothing, was going to take it from her life. Especially Sylvia Brazinski.
• • •
The first “Ditti” (Digital Telephone Intercept) recorded by the FBI techs at the corporate headquarters of the Global Wireless Corporation intercepted a call from one Michael Raphael to an AT&T wireless owned by Sebastian Califoni, aka “Sid” Califoni, a known racketeer, bookie and gambler who was believed to be tied to the Umbrizi family, a Vegas-based coalition of mobbed-up accounting fir
ms that connected six of the biggest casinos. This call set into motion the possibility of raiding Sid Califoni’s residence, which in turn presented the hope that some connection to the Umbrizis might be found. If so, the house of cards would come tumbling down.
Anthony Meta, the St. Louis Field Office’s SAC, monitored events from the fairways of the Ladue Country Club by cell phone, wanting to be kept apprised of events but not daring to pass up an invitation to one of the area’s premiere courses. His next in command, Donna Fabiano, a woman he’d wanted to bone since she’d been assigned to him, but a woman he would never touch for fear of losing his coveted job, kept tabs on operation Close Shave and reported to her SAC at regular intervals. By the time Tony Meta was informed the chain of command might lead to the Umbrizis his golf game had gone to shit as his concentration waned, and he learned a painful lesson: It’s far better to opt out on a golf game at this level than duff through the back nine looking like a kid learning the game.
Donna Fabiano felt giddy with excitement. Sid Califoni. It made sense he’d be corrupting players to shave points and throw games in support of his gambling connections. No doubt a Brazinski win would put tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands into his pockets. She quickly notified the federal prosecutors to go after the necessary warrants for her to monitor all incoming and outgoing calls to Sid Califoni’s home, car and cell phone. The nice thing about the federal court system was that it could move quickly. She sat back, notifying her technicians to begin the necessary work to wiretap Califoni, absolutely convinced those warrants would be in place in a matter of minutes. Now, with a Brazinski win, all was set for the upset of the decade—and that upset had nothing to do with tennis. Thank God, she thought, that Jessie had come to them and was now going to throw the game. When Califoni’s winnings came in, they would have an airtight case against him.
Watching the television monitor installed into the Global Wireless Corporation’s tech center, one of Fabiano’s aides said, “She’s sure trying awfully hard for a person who’s supposed to lose.”