All-Star Pride

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “They said you were working for them. They said you gave them my name.”

  “Yes, I am working for them.” She raised her head and looked me directly in the eyes. “Yes, I gave them your name, but only because I have decided I can trust you.”

  “You always could. I told you that.”

  “Words mean nothing.”

  “Then how—”

  “Did I decide to trust you? After we spoke in St. Petersburg, Boris met with Chandler Harris. Boris took me along to translate. Boris told Chandler he intended to have you killed.”

  “What?”

  “Boris said you could not be trusted.”

  “What did Chandler say?” I could hardly believe people had calmly discussed whether I should die.

  “Chandler said you knew nothing of this. He said he only took you along because you were the strongest person he had ever met. He said you were the perfect bodyguard. Big and stupid.”

  I thought of how I had lifted Chandler from the airplane seat, trying to make him understand it was a mistake to mess with me. I remembered how he had suddenly become friendly after that and how I had let him lead me along. Chandler was right about one thing: I was stupid.

  Nadia’s hand was on my arm. “Goreela, I have seen your eyes and how you watch everything. I know you are not stupid.”

  I smiled so suddenly it almost cracked open my stitches.

  “And I know you are not part of this. So you are my only hope.”

  “Why not the government people? Didn’t they promise to help you if you helped them?”

  “I believe Ivan wishes to steal the art for himself.”

  “But he works for the police. And he’s got the U.S. Customs guy with him. Clint Bowes.”

  Nadia sighed. “Goreela, this is Moscow. Do you know what life is like here?”

  “Only what I see,” I said. Regardless of the subject, I wanted this and any conversation with her to last forever.

  “When Boris spoke about having you killed,” she said, “he knew it would cost only two hundred dollars. Such is the corruption here, and such is the value of American money. Before, we had the KGB, our secret police. Yes, the KGB did much evil, but it also prevented lawlessness. Now, even the police cannot be trusted. Ivan and his partner, Clint Bowes, can make millions. Is that not enough reason to steal from thieves like Boris?”

  “Can’t you report your fears to Ivan’s boss?”

  “His boss may be equally interested in stealing the art. Or Ivan may have me killed.”

  What chilled me most was the utter certainty on her face. What kind of situation have I gotten myself into? I wondered. How am I going to get out?

  “Just so I can be clear, let’s see if I understand all of this.” I took a breath. “Boris and Chandler are working together to bring money into Moscow and stolen art out. Boris thinks you’re working for him, but you’re secretly working for the Russian police. Except you think they’re equally interested in keeping the stolen art.”

  Her faint smile of agreement was like a hint of sunshine through rainy skies.

  I took another breath. This one deeper. “What is it you think I can do?”

  “While I know you are not working with Chandler and Boris, Ivan believes you are. He saw you the night Chandler delivered half the money. I have also informed Ivan you work with them.”

  “Why?”

  “This is important, Goreela. For us to steal the shipment from both thieves—Boris and Ivan—it should appear we are working for Boris, but secretly working for the Russian police. It is why I gave your name to Ivan and the American. Now they think you are a double agent, just like me.”

  My head felt like it was bouncing around in hurricane winds. We were going to steal the shipment? We were going to double-cross the double-crossers?

  I must have groaned out loud.

  She looked concerned. She reached up and lightly touched the bruises on my cheek. “Your face? Does it hurt?”

  I wished this was a normal conversation about movies and high school and hockey. Then I could have enjoyed the touch of her fingertips.

  But I couldn’t. Because other questions were forcing themselves into my mind. Pretty girls never go for guys like me. What if Nadia was using me in the same way Chandler had used me and in the same way Ivan and Clint were using me? What if Nadia intended to double-cross me?

  “My face is getting better each day,” I said in answer to her question. “I’m just glad I can play hockey again.”

  She gave me a full smile.

  All of this had happened because I had let money tempt me into areas I knew were dangerous.

  I watched her smile. I smiled back. I knew what I had to do to make things right again.

  “Nadia,” I said, “tell me what you need from me and, if it’s legal, I will do my best to help.”

  chapter seventeen

  We jumped to an early one-goal lead in game six. It almost didn’t matter to me. Pumped and ready to play, I still couldn’t shake thoughts of Nadia and millions of dollars of stolen art.

  I tried and tried to get my concentration back. The Russian crowd was screaming and hollering. The Russian players were skating hard, checking us hard. Our own guys were yelling, grunting, sweating.

  I couldn’t feel like I was part of it.

  My shifts on the ice were mechanical. My body was working on its own, my legs going through the motions, but I had no zing.

  From the players’ box, I would scan the crowd for Nadia instead of watching the game and cheering for our guys. On the ice before face-offs, I would scan the crowd. Skating onto and off the ice, I would scan the crowd. I didn’t see Nadia anywhere, which made it more difficult for me to concentrate.

  Double-crossing the double-crossers. I wasn’t sure I had the skills to play that game. In hockey, at least, I could depend on size and anger. And in hockey, if you lost, it didn’t cost you your freedom or your life.

  We went up 2–0 on a power-play goal. The first period should have ended that way, except with less than a minute to go in the period, Chandler Harris made a poor cross-ice pass, which their center intercepted at full speed. He cut between our surprised defensemen, made a couple of moves on our goalie and flipped the puck into the top corner.

  The second period started almost the same way. Chandler was daydreaming instead of guarding his man. A pass out from behind the net, a flick of the Russian’s stick, the bulging of the net behind our goalie and just like that it was a tie game.

  I wasn’t doing much better than Chandler. I missed my hits, bobbled passes and generally performed like the average sick slug.

  The highlight of my unimpressive playing came with less than five minutes left in the second period. I was waiting at the top of the face-off circle in the Russians’ end. I didn’t really expect to get the puck. My talent is not in goal scoring. I wasn’t the only person on the team who knew that, so the guys only passed to me if they were desperate to find an open man.

  This was one of the few times. Nathan feathered me a soft pass, sliding the puck flat along the ice. I had lots of time but thought I had no time. Instead of stopping the puck, then firing it at the net, I went for a glorious one-time slap shot, hoping to redirect it at the net without stopping it.

  Nope.

  My balance and aim were so poor that I hit the ice well behind the puck. Worse, I hit the ice so hard my aluminum shaft snapped. The puck sailed past me, harmlessly reaching the far boards. I was forced to drop both pieces of the stick or face a penalty for playing with a broken stick. I left the two pieces at the top of the face-off circle and charged back to the players’ box for my spare aluminum stick.

  As I skated to the bench, I opened up the ice on my side of the boards. The Russians moved down the ice, tic-tac-toed another perfect passing combination and scored to make it 3–2 in their favor.

  As if that wasn’t enough torture for me, during the last shift of the third period, the puck popped loose in
front of the Russian net. We were still only down by a score of 3–2. No one was within miles of the puck, and I could score to tie the game. I raced toward the puck, cranking my stick back to take another magnificent boomer of a slap shot, one that would make up for my earlier mistake.

  Again, I timed it so badly that I hit the ice instead of the puck. This time my replacement shaft remained intact. But I broke the blade of my stick, which went flying much farther than the puck.

  The game ended thirty seconds later. As I skated off the ice—series tied at three games apiece—I shook my head in disgust.

  How was my stick breaking going to look on television? I could just hear the commentators chuckling about the big ox strong enough to break an aluminum shaft, but too much of a gronk to manage a shot with all that strength.

  In the dressing room I pulled out my blowtorch to heat up the aluminum shaft of my spare stick. I needed to loosen the broken blade. It gave me an excuse to keep my head down and avoid looking into the eyes of my teammates.

  Chandler Harris, however, threw me a brand-new aluminum stick with a brand-new blade, worth at least ninety bucks.

  I told him no thanks, I could get this old one ready for game seven.

  He insisted I take the new stick.

  I told him no thanks again and began to apply the flame of the blowtorch to the aluminum shaft of my hockey stick.

  Chandler came over and dropped the new stick in my lap and tried for the third time to get me to take it.

  That time I did. Mainly because I had a sudden thought that told me exactly where I might find a few million dollars’ worth of stolen art.

  chapter eighteen

  Nadia knocked on the hotel room door exactly on time: eleven o’clock that night. Four hours after our game had ended. Two and a half hours after our team had finished a quiet supper. Two hours after curfew.

  She knocked softly. Nathan was asleep and snoring, and I barely heard her although I’d been listening hard for her arrival. I was fully dressed beneath the covers. I slipped out of my bed and tiptoed to the door. Nathan’s nose-blaring trumpet imitation didn’t change as he continued to sleep in peace.

  “Thank you,” I whispered as I opened the door. “I could not do this without you.”

  “What is it?” she asked as I stepped into the dim hallway. She was in blue jeans, T-shirt and her leather jacket. She could have been anyone in my high school back home. A raven-haired, beautiful cheerleader. Not someone involved in double-crossing double-crossers out of millions of dollars of stolen art.

  “Take us to the basement,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her anything else. In case I was wrong about the stolen art. Or about her intentions.

  “The basement of this hotel?”

  I nodded. In my back pocket, the pressure of the rolled-up nylon strap I had taken from my equipment bag reminded me I needed my plan to work.

  “Why?”

  “Let’s go,” I told her. “You’ll see when we get there.”

  Normally, as a traveling team, we would leave our equipment at the ice arena, especially with a game scheduled there the next day. In Moscow, however, Coach Jorgensen did not trust the ancient padlocks of the dressingroom doors at the arena. He had also explained to us how valuable our new equipment was in a country where most players were thrilled if they could play in skates younger than themselves. So at the end of every game—despite the inconvenience—we lugged our equipment back to the bus and back into the hotel.

  We needed a place to air out the sweaty wet equipment, however. Our hotel rooms were cramped and had little ventilation. Coach Jorgensen had made arrangements to use a large storage room in the rear corner of the hotel basement. Earlier in the evening, when we’d unloaded our equipment and spread it out in the storage room, I’d looked for a way to break in.

  I thought I’d found it. Trouble was, I was too big to take advantage of it.

  That was why I needed Nadia.

  She was standing beside me, squinting at the door to the storage room. “Goreela?”

  Her voice, soft as it was, echoed. Here in the basement, the concrete floor did not even have the cheap thin carpet found on the upper levels. Dust-covered lightbulbs merely gleamed, barely bright enough to throw our shadows onto the unpainted walls of the hallway.

  I pointed upward. This was an old, old hotel, so old it had ventilation windows above the doors. This window was cracked, gray with filth.

  “Stand on my shoulders,” I said. “You need to crawl through.”

  “Goreela?”

  I’d studied the door earlier. It locked on the inside.

  “I’m going to wrap this around your ankles,” I whispered as I pulled the strap from my pocket. “I’ll push you up, and on your way down the other side it will save you from falling. Once you’re in, open the door for me.”

  She searched my face, then reluctantly nodded. I helped her stand on my shoulders. I steadied her legs as she reached for the window and wiggled it open. I grabbed her ankles and pushed upward as she started to pull herself up. I held my breath as she began to disappear. It would be difficult for her, crawling forward and then downward. If the other end of this strap in my hands slipped from her ankles, she would tumble down the other side face-first. And that was just the least of my worries.

  I eased the strap upward, slowly letting her down the other side. There was a light thump. The pressure on my strap disappeared. I let go, and she pulled it in. Seconds later the door handle clicked and she invited me inside.

  I shut the door behind us and locked it.

  Nadia was wrinkling her nose. I smiled and nodded and wrinkled mine in agreement. Months of sweat soaked into hockey equipment is not a pleasant odor, especially with an ancient, wheezy furnace pumping hot air into the stuffy storage room.

  “We’ll hurry,” I whispered. I moved to my equipment bag, dropped the strap inside and pulled out the small blowtorch. I lit it, wincing with fear that the hiss of the small blue flame was still too loud.

  “Goreela?”

  I smiled at her but gave no answer. With the blowtorch in my right hand, I grabbed my spare hockey stick from a pile of sticks in the corner of the room.

  She stood beside me and watched, her eyes squinting in puzzlement.

  I opened the dial and increased the flame. Then I ran the tip of the flame over the point where the stick blade was inserted into the hollow aluminum shaft. I warmed it for nearly a minute, and when I felt it was ready, I turned down the flame on the blowtorch and set it beside a support pillar in the center of the room. It hissed softly, unheard above the noise of the furnace fans.

  “Hold your breath,” I said.

  Left hand on the aluminum shaft, right hand on the stick blade, I pulled them apart.

  Nadia’s face lit with understanding. “It must be warmed for the metal to loosen!”

  “Exactly. But that’s not why I wanted you to hold your breath. I just hope we find what I think we will.”

  I needed something to muffle sound. From my equipment bag, I pulled out an old towel. I folded it and placed it on the floor.

  I held the aluminum shaft like a ski pole and jabbed it downward against the towel. Instead of a loud ringing of metal against concrete, there was only a slight thud. I jabbed the shaft down again, harder.

  “Goreela?”

  “Keep holding your breath,” I said. I was either a genius or an idiot. We’d soon find out which.

  Two more slamming jabs of stick shaft onto towel-covered concrete floor.

  I lifted the stick and peered into the hollow shaft. I was rewarded by the sight of thin rolled canvas.

  “You can stop holding your breath,” I told Nadia. “We’ve just found some of the art shipment.”

  I shook the shaft and the roll of canvas slid toward the bottom. Enough stuck out that I could gently pull it loose. I handed her the roll.

  With great reverence, Nadia pulled it open, as if she were reading a scroll. It consisted of four small canvases, each o
ne painted with daily scenes of Russian peasants.

  “This is it,” she said. “But how could you know?”

  I shrugged modestly. Why else would Chandler try to keep me from removing the blade from this old stick? It was the perfect place to hide rolled-up canvases. He couldn’t have known I’d break my other stick shaft and have to use this one.

  I shook the aluminum shaft again and felt movement inside. Altogether, we found a dozen unframed, well-rolled paintings.

  Chandler had played me for the idiot I was. The previous night—with me stuck in the other hotel room—he’d delivered the second payment of cash and received the paintings. He’d then planted them in my equipment. I would have carried them through customs. If I’d been caught, I’d have faced time in jail no matter how loudly I said I was innocent. If I’d made it through customs safely, he would simply have stolen my stick at the other end.

  Nadia cradled the canvases—millions of dollars worth of canvas and old paint.

  I steeled myself to get ready for my second gamble. The first, of course, had been the location of the canvases. The second? What she actually intended to do with the paintings.

  “We’ll go upstairs to the camera crew,” I said. I had thought this through as carefully as I could. If she refused, it meant she intended to double-cross me along with Boris and the government people. “They can film us as we turn the paintings in at the nearest police station.”

  “Goreela?”

  “The camera crew will love the chance for a great news story. And if it makes the news that these were recovered, nobody in the government will be able to make them disappear again. And nobody will be able to make us disappear.”

  Was she going to pass the test? Or was I going to have to take the canvases from her and deliver them to the camera crew myself?

  Her face broke into a smile. One to fool me into trusting her? Or one because my plan was good?

  I didn’t get the chance to find out.

  Boris—Mr. Eyepatch—kicked open the door and danced into the room, his knife held waist high. He was followed by our promoter, Matthew Martin Henley. Instead of his usual cigar, he waved an ugly black pistol in the pudgy fingers of his right hand.