Murder is My Racquet

by Otto Penzler

  “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”

  I have always been interested in how these things come to me, these decisions I make.

  “I’m thinking, I trusted you. I did, you know, I trusted you and you let me down. Now I got this feeling that I don’t want to see you anymore.” His voice had something new in it. A threat.

  “Listen,” I said, “this Rudi Bass was a bad actor. Real bad.”

  “I want you to go, I don’t want to see you again.” He sounded worried and that confused me.

  I saw him looking at my hands, at the fountain pen I was holding in my hand. “What are you going to do,” he said, “write me a note?”

  “No,” I said, “this was a gift to me, it’s a valuable pen, I treasure it.”

  “Let me have it.”

  I nodded. Exactly what I thought he’d say. I scare myself sometimes. I swear to God, I scare myself.

  I handed him the Mont Blanc, he put it in his pocket and took a drink, wiping his lips with the tips of his fingers. He had pretty hands, clean nails.

  NEEDLE MATCH

  PETER LOVESEY

  Murder was done on Court Eleven on the third day of Wimbledon, 1981. Fortunately for the All England Club, it wasn’t anything obvious like a strangling or a shooting, but the result was the same for the victim, except that he suffered longer. It took three days for him to die. I can tell you exactly how it happened, because I was one of the ball boys for the match.

  When I was thirteen I was taught to be invisible. But before you decide this isn’t your kind of story let me promise you it isn’t about magic. There’s nothing spooky about me. And there was nothing spooky about my instructor, Brigadier Romilly. He was flesh and blood all right, and so were the terrified kids who sat at his feet.

  “You’ll be invisible, every one of you, before I’ve finished with you,” he said in his parade-ground voice, and we believed him, we third-years from Merton Comprehensive.

  A purple scar like a saber cut stretched downward from the edge of the Brigadier’s left eye, over his mouth to the point of his chin. He’d grown a bristly ginger mustache over part of it, but we could easily see where the two ends joined. Rumor had it that his face had been slashed by a Mau Mau warrior’s machete in the Kenyan terrorist war of the fifties. We didn’t know anything about the Mau Mau, except that the terrorist must have been crazy to tangle with the Brigadier—who grabbed him by the throat and strangled him.

  “Don’t ever get the idea that you’re doing this to be seen. You’ll be there, on court with Mr. McEnroe and Mr. Borg—if I think you’re good enough—and no one will notice you, no one. When the game is in play you’ll be as still as the net post, and as uninteresting. For Rule Two of the Laws of tennis states that the court has certain permanent fixtures like the net and the net posts and the umpire’s chair. And the list of permanent fixtures includes you, the ball boys, in your respective places. So you can tell your mothers and fathers and your favorite aunties not to bother to watch. If you’re doing your job they won’t even notice you.”

  To think we’d volunteered for this. By a happy accident of geography ours was one of the schools chosen to provide the ball boys and ball girls for the Championships. “It’s a huge honor,” our headmaster had told us. “You do it for the prestige of the school. You’re on television. You meet the stars, hand them their towels, supply them with the balls, pour their drinks. You can be proud.”

  The Brigadier disabused us of all that. “If any of you are looking for glory, leave at once. Go back to your stuffy classrooms. I don’t want your sort in my squad. The people I want are functionaries, not glory seekers. Do you understand? You will do your job, brilliantly, the way I show you. It’s all about timing, self-control and, above all, being invisible.”

  • • •

  The victim was poisoned. Once the poison was in his system there was no antidote. Death was inevitable, and lingering.

  • • •

  So in the next three months we learned to be invisible. And it was damned hard work, I can tell you. I had no idea what it would lead to. You’re thinking we murdered the Brigadier? No, he’s a survivor. So far as I know, he’s still alive and terrifying the staff in a retirement home.

  I’m going to tell it as it happened, and we start on the November afternoon in 1980 when my best friend Eddie Pringle and I were on an hour’s detention for writing something obscene on Blind Pugh’s blackboard. Mr. Pugh, poor soul, was our chemistry master. He wasn’t really blind, but his sight wasn’t the best. He wore thick glasses with prism lenses, and we little monsters took full advantage. Sometimes Nemesis arrived, in the shape of our headmaster, Mr. Neames, breezing into the lab, supposedly for a word with Blind Pugh, but in reality to catch us red-handed playing poker behind bits of apparatus or rolling mercury along the bench tops. Those who escaped with a detention were the lucky ones.

  “I’ve had enough of this crap,” Eddie told me in the detention room. “I’m up for a job as ball boy.”

  “What do you mean—Wimbledon?” I said. “That’s not till next June.”

  “They train you. It’s every afternoon off school for six months—and legal. No more detentions. All you do is trot around the court picking up balls and chucking them to the players and you get to meet McEnroe and Connors and all those guys. Want to join me?”

  It seemed the ideal escape plan, but of course we had to get permission from Nemesis to do it. Eddie and I turned ourselves into model pupils for the rest of term. No messing about. No detentions. Every homework task completed.

  “In view of this improvement,” Nemesis informed us, “I have decided to let you go on the training course.”

  But when we met the Brigadier we found we’d tunneled out of one prison into another. He terrified us. The regime was pitiless, the orders unrelenting.

  “First you must learn how to be a permanent fixture. Stand straight, chest out, shoulders back, thumbs linked behind your back. Now hold it for five minutes. If anyone moves, I put the stopwatch back to zero again.”

  Suddenly he threw a ball hard at Eddie and of course he ducked.

  “Right,” the Brigadier announced, “Pringle moved. The hand goes back to zero. You have to learn to be still, Pringle. Last year one of my boys was hit on the ear by a serve from Roscoe Tanner, over a hundred miles per hour, and he didn’t flinch.”

  We had a full week learning to be permanent fixtures, first standing at the rear of the court and then crouching like petrified sprinters at the sideline, easy targets for the Brigadier to shy at. A couple of the kids dropped out. We all had bruises.

  “This is worse than school,” I told Eddie. “We’ve got no freedom at all.”

  “Right, he’s a tyrant. Don’t let him grind you down,” Eddie said.

  In the second and third weeks we practiced retrieving the balls, scampering back to the sidelines and rolling them along the ground to our colleagues or throwing them with one bounce to the Brigadier.

  • • •

  This was to be one of the great years of Wimbledon, with Borg, Connors and McEnroe at the peaks of their careers, challenging for the title. The rivalry would produce one match, a semifinal, that will be remembered for as long as tennis is played. And on an outside court, another, fiercer rivalry would be played out, with a fatal result. The players were not well known, but their backgrounds ensured a clash of ideologies. Jozsef Stanski, from Poland, was to meet Igor Voronin, a Soviet Russian, on Court Eleven, on the third day of the Championships.

  Being an ignorant schoolboy at the time, I didn’t appreciate how volatile it was, this match between two players from Eastern Europe. In the previous summer, 1980, the strike in the Gdansk shipyard, followed by widespread strikes throughout Poland, had forced the Communist government to allow independent trade unions. Solidarity—the trade union movement led by Lech Walesa—became a powerful, vocal organization getting massive international attention. The Polish tennis star, Jozsef Stanski, was an outspoken supporter of
Solidarity who criticized the state regime whenever he was interviewed.

  The luck of the draw, as they say, had matched Stanski with Voronin, a diehard Soviet Communist, almost certainly a KGB agent. Later, it was alleged that Voronin was a state assassin.

  • • •

  Before all this, the training of the ball boys went on, a totalitarian regime of its own, always efficient, performed to numbers and timed on the stopwatch. There was usually a slogan to sum up whichever phase of ball boy lore we were mastering. “Show before you throw, Richards, show before you throw, lad.”

  No one dared to defy the Brigadier.

  The early weeks were on indoor courts. In April, we got outside. We learned everything a ball boy could possibly need to know, how to hold three balls at once, collect a towel, offer a cold drink and dispose of the cup afterward, stand in front of a player between games without making eye contact. The training didn’t miss a trick. At the end of the month we “stood” for a club tournament at Queen’s. It went well, I thought, until the Brigadier debriefed us. Debriefed? He tore strips off us for over an hour. We’d learned nothing, he said. The Championships would be a disaster if we got within a mile of them. We were slow, we fumbled, stumbled and forgot to show before the throw. Worse, he saw a couple of us (Eddie and me, to be honest) exchange some words as we crouched either side of the net.

  “If any ball boy under my direction so much as moves his lips ever again in the course of a match, I will come onto the court and seal his revolting mouth with packing tape.”

  We believed him.

  And we persevered. Miraculously the months went by and June arrived, and with it the Championships.

  The Brigadier addressed us on the eve of the first day’s play and to my amazement, he didn’t put the fear of God into me. By his standards, it was a vote of confidence. “You boys and girls have given me problems enough this year, but you’re as ready as you ever will be, and I want you to know I have total confidence in you. When this great tournament is over and the best of you line up on Centre Court to be presented to Her Royal Highness before she meets the champion, my pulse will beat faster and my heart will swell with pride, as will each of yours. And one of you, of course, will get a special award as best ball boy—or girl. That’s the Championship that counts, you know. Never mind Mr. Borg and Miss Navratilova. The real winner will be one of you. The decision will be mine, and you all start tomorrow as equals. In the second week I will draw up a short list. The pick of you, my elite squad, will stand in the finals. I will nominate the winner only when the tournament is over.”

  I suppose it had been the severity of the buildup; to me those words were as thrilling and inspiring as King Henry’s before the Battle of Agincourt. I wanted to be on Centre Court on that final day I was fated to be best ball boy. I could see that all the others felt like me, and had the same gleam in their eyes.

  I’ve never felt so nervous as I did at noon that first day, approaching the tall, creeper-covered walls of the All England Club, and passing inside and finding it was already busy with people on the terraces and promenades chatting loudly in accents that would have got you past any security guard in the world. Wimbledon twenty years ago was part of the social season, a blazer and tie occasion, entirely alien to a kid like me from a working-class family.

  My first match was on an outside court, thanks be to the Brigadier. Men’s singles, between a tall Californian and a wiry Frenchman. I marched on court with the other five ball boys and mysteriously my nerves ended the moment the umpire called “Play.” We were so well-drilled that the training took over. My concentration was absolute. I knew precisely what I had to do. I was a small, invisible part of a well-oiled, perfectly tuned machine, the Rolls Royce of tennis tournaments. Six-three, 6–3, 6–3 to the Californian, and we lined up and marched off again.

  I stood in two more matches that first day, and they were equally straightforward in spite of some racquet abuse by one unhappy player whose service wouldn’t go in. A ball boy is above all that. At home, exhausted, I slept better than I had for a week.

  Day Two was Ladies’ Day, when most of the women’s first-round matches were played. At the end of my second match I lined up for an ice cream and heard a familiar voice, “Got overheated in that last one, Richards?”

  I turned to face the Brigadier, expecting a rollicking. I wasn’t sure if ball boys in uniform were allowed to consume ice cream.

  But the scar twitched into a grin. “I watched you at work. You’re doing a decent job, lad. Not invisible yet, but getting there. Keep it up and you might make Centre Court.”

  • • •

  I can tell you exactly what happened in the Stanski-Voronin match because I was one of the ball boys and my buddy Eddie Pringle was another, and has recently reminded me of it. Neither player was seeded. Stanski had won a five-setter in the first round against a little-known Englishman, and Voronin had been lucky enough to get a bye.

  Court Eleven is hardly one of the show courts, and these two weren’t well-known players, but we still had plenty of swiveling heads following the action.

  I’m sure some of the crowd understood that the players were at opposite extremes politically, but I doubt if anyone foresaw the terrible outcome of this clash. They may have noticed the coolness between the players, but that’s one of the conventions of sport, particularly in a Grand Slam tournament. You shake hands at the end, but you psych yourself up to beat hell out of your rival first.

  • • •

  Back to the tennis. The first set went narrowly to Voronin, 7–5. I was so absorbed in my ball boy duties that the score almost passed me by. I retrieved the balls and passed them to the players when they needed them. Between games, I helped them to drinks and waited on them, just as we were programmed to do. I rather liked Stanski. His English wasn’t up to much, but he made up for it with the occasional nod and even a hint of a smile.

  Stanski won the next two sets, 6–4, 6–3.

  Half the time I was at Voronin’s end. Being strictly neutral, I treated him with the same courtesy I gave his opponent, but I can’t say he was as appreciative. You can tell a lot about players from the way they grab the towel from you or discard a ball they don’t fancy serving. The Russian was a hard man, with vicious thoughts in his head. He secured the next set in a tiebreak and took the match to a fifth. The crowd was growing. People from other courts had heard something special was happening. Several long, exciting rallies drew gasps and shrieks.

  Voronin had extraordinary eyes like wet pebbles, the irises as black as the pupils. I was drilled to look at him each time I offered him a ball, and his expression never changed. Once or twice when Stanski had some luck with a ball that bounced on the net, Voronin eyeballed him. Terrifying.

  The final set exceeded everyone’s expectations. Voronin broke Stanski’s service in the first game with some amazing passing shots and then held his own in game two. In the third, Stanski served three double faults and missed a simple volley.

  “Game to Voronin. Voronin leads by three games to love. Final set.”

  When I offered Stanski the water he poured it over his head and covered his face with the towel.

  Voronin started game four with an ace. Stanski blocked the next serve and it nicked the cord and just dropped over. He was treated to another eyeballing for that piece of impertinence. Voronin walked slowly back to the line, turned, glared and fired a big serve that was called out. The second was softer and Stanski risked a blinder, a mighty forehand, and succeeded—the first winner he’d made in the set. Fifteen-thirty. Voronin nodded toward my friend Eddie for balls, scowled at one and chucked it aside. Eddie gave him another. He served long. Then foot-faulted. This time the line judge received the eyeballing. Fifteen-forty.

  Stanski jigged on his toes. He would never have a better opportunity of breaking back.

  The serve from Voronin was cautious. The spin deceived Stanski and the ball flew high. Voronin stood under, waiting to pick it out of the sun and
kill it. He connected, but heroically Stanski got the racquet in place at the far end and almost fell into the crowd doing it. The return looked a sitter for the Russian and he steered it crosscourt with nonchalance. Somehow Stanski dashed to the right place again. The crowd roared its appreciation.

  Voronin chipped the return with a dinky shot that barely cleared the net and brought Stanski sprinting from the back to launch himself into a dive. The ball had bounced and risen through another arc and was inches from the turf when Stanski’s racquet slid under it. Miraculously he found enough lift to sneak it over at a near-impossible angle. Voronin netted. Game to Stanski.

  Now there was an anxious moment. Stanski’s dive had taken him sliding out of court and heavily into the net post, just a yard from where I was crouching in my set position. He was rubbing his right forearm, green from the skid across the grass, and everyone feared he’d broken a bone. After a delay of a few seconds the umpire asked if he needed medical attention. He shook his head.

  Play resumed at three games to one, and it felt as if they’d played a full set already. The fascination of the game of tennis is that a single shot can turn a match. That diving winner of Stanski’s was a prime example. He won the next game to love, serving brilliantly, though clearly anxious about his sore arm, which he massaged at every opportunity. Between games the umpire again asked if he needed assistance, but he shook his head.

  Voronin was still a break up, and when play resumed after the change of ends he was first on court. He beckoned to me aggressively with his right hand, white with resin. I let him see he wouldn’t intimidate me. I was a credit to the Brigadier, showing and throwing with the single bounce, straight to the player.

  Stanski marched to the receiving end, twirling his racquet. Voronin hit the first serve too deep. The second spun in, shaved the line and was allowed. Fifteen-love. Stanski took the next two points with fine, looping returns. Then Voronin met a return of serve with a volley that failed to clear the net. Fifteen-forty. The mind-game was being won by Stanski. A feeble serve from the Russian allowed him to close the game. Three all.