Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Rook
When I left a note, I always wrote a second line: gone to the rink or picking up takeout. Varga read those the way other people read tea leaves, looking for the meaning underneath. I told myself leaving it off would give him less to worry about.
So I capped the marker, set the coffeemaker to keep the pot warm for him, and placed the BACK BY LUNCH note near it.
I’d texted Kovac at four that morning, lying on my back in the dark with Varga breathing slow beside me.
Rook: Are you in the city this week? I’d rather do this part in person.
He’d answered inside four minutes.
Kovac: this morning if you can swing it, whenever suits you
He named a coffee shop in the West Loop, and I said nine. That left me with five hours to fill.
For two hours, I tried to sleep. It didn’t work. By the time I climbed out of bed, Varga sprawled nearly spreadeagle, taking up most of the space.
I left the house and drove. I took the Edens and then the exit toward the river, the same as any practice morning. It was an off day at the rink, which meant I’d be able to skate in relative quiet.
I geared up alone in a room built for twenty, hearing the scrape of my skate guards loud against the concrete. I stepped onto a fresh sheet of ice nobody had touched since the last Zamboni sweep.
I took the first lap slow, and built up speed on the second. By the third, my legs were into it—inside edge, outside edge, and the slight corrections your feet make without thought. I worked the blue line. I did pivots and edge work, hard stops that threw snow first one way and then the other.
I didn’t have a puck. It wasn’t necessary. I wanted the cold in my lungs, the burn in my thighs, and a mind clear of distractions.
It worked for about ten minutes. Then I thought about the phone.
Last night, on the couch, Varga had held it up to me with that open, pleased look—somebody wants to write about you and they came to me—and I’d looked at the screen and seen Kovac’s name on a message that wasn’t sent to me.
He’d gone around me. He texted Varga directly.
I timed my next stop wrong. The edge caught, and I had to put a hand down to stay on my feet. I stayed there a second, bent over my knees, breathing harder than the skating explained.
After one more slow lap, I got off the ice and showered. I barely felt the hot water and dressed on autopilot. Looking at my phone, I saw it was 8:30. My meeting was at nine, and the drive west would take twenty minutes if the Loop was in a good mood.
I left to meet the Daniel Kovac I’d feared for six years.
He was already in a booth when I arrived. A half-empty coffee cup sat in front of him, beside a closed notebook. When he saw me, he stood.
I shook his hand. The place was loud in a good way. People stood four deep in a line at the counter, explaining their orders to the barista. A table of women in workout clothes laughed as they shared stories. Nobody looked at Daniel and me.
“Mattias. Thanks for meeting me. Truly.” He sat back down. “Can I get you something? I’m buying.”
“I’ll get my own.”
The line moved quickly, and I ordered my coffee black. Kovac had aged six years since Toronto, but he had the same eyes.
“You drove in,” he said. “I’d have done it by phone. You didn’t have to—“
“What do you want, Daniel?”
I didn’t want to waste time, but my words were sharper than I intended. He took it without flinching.
“Fair.” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table.
“The piece. I told you, and I told Mark, and it’s true, so I’ll just say it again.
I’m interested in long careers, the guys who kept playing.
When you play fifteen years in one league, most of it in one place, it’s easy for those later years to get lost. I want to know what it costs to stick around.
That’s the piece. You’re the cleanest example I’ve got. ”
“That’s a flattering way to say I’m old.”
“It’s an accurate way to say you’re an anchor of the team.” He offered a small smile. “Anchor is Cross’s word for you, by the way. Not mine. He gave me twenty minutes, and eleven of them were about you, which I’m told is the most he’s said about anyone since his wedding.”
I didn’t smile back. I wanted to, but I couldn’t show Kovac that he’d gotten to me.
“I’ve been talking to people,” he said. “People who knew you early. I want the arc to be real, not the press-kit version. I looked up your old coach at Maine. I also found a guy named Coombs from your first team. He said you used to stay after every practice, and he thought you were going to skate yourself into the boards.” Kovac watched me.
“Said you were the most serious twenty-one-year-old he’d ever met. ”
I exhaled. He hadn’t said the name I was afraid of. He’d said Coombs, who was kind, forgettable, and probably coaching a winter rec league somewhere now. There was someone else on that first NHL team, and Kovac cracked the door open enough for me to remember what I’d tried to forget.
I made that roster by a whisker. I was a late-round, longshot kid from Maine who knew every day that I was one terrible month from a bus to the minors.
Alan Easton was a veteran on that team. He was eleven years in and near the end of his career.
He told the room that I deserved to be there.
Those words from a man like that could make the difference between sticking around and getting sent down for good.
And then something about Easton got out. I never knew the specifics. What spread around was that he’d been seen with a man. I never knew more than that, and I’m not sure there was more than that to know. It didn’t matter whether it was true. It moved through the room in three days.
By February, Easton was a healthy scratch. By the deadline he was gone, sent somewhere that sent him somewhere else, and inside two years he was out of hockey entirely. I never heard his name again.
I said nothing against him, but I didn’t defend him either.
I just stopped sitting in the stall next to his.
The most decent man in the room was quietly erased for being seen, and I didn’t try to stop it.
I decided nobody was ever going to see the same thing in me.
It worked. I got to stay, and he didn’t.
”—Mattias?”
“I’m here,” I said. “Coombs. Sure. He was a good guy.”
“There’s another source.” Kovac said it evenly. “I won’t name them. I want to be straight with you about the fact that they exist, and straight with you that I won’t say who.”
The back of my neck prickled. I’d spent five years building a life with all potential leaks managed. Now Kovac had an unnamed source, a leak I didn’t know.
“That’s a lot of digging for a piece about a defensive system,” I said.
“It’s not a piece about a defensive system. I told you that part already.” He looked into my eyes. “I’d rather have you in it than write around you, Mattias. I mean that. Writing around a man always shows.”
I said nothing.
He looked down at his unopened notebook and spoke without looking at me.
“I remember the night we met in Toronto.” He turned the cup again.
“I want you to know that I’ve always been careful with that conversation.
That’s all. I’m not—“ He stopped, and for the first time, he looked like a man who didn’t entirely like his own job.
“I’m not bringing it to the table, but I didn’t want to sit across from you and pretend I’d forgotten it. ”
“What are you writing?” I said. “About me, specifically.”
“Nothing about your personal life.” He spoke plainly, letting me decide whether to believe him.
I didn’t. He saw that on my face.
“Mattias.” He set both hands flat on the table. “Nobody gave me evidence. Nobody came to me with a story. There’s no photo or document with your name on it. That is not what’s happening here. You need to hear that, because I can see you doing the math, and the math you’re doing is wrong.”
I exhaled.
Then he said: “But you’ve been with him five years.”
I tensed again.
“And I have to ask you something, not as a reporter. If you think I’m out of line, you can tell me to go to hell.” He paused. “Do you really think nobody can see it?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I had nothing to say.
He let a few seconds of silence pass between us. Then he reached into his jacket and took out a card, sliding it to the middle of the table.
“I’ve already said more than I came to say.
We should leave it there,” he said. “But if you want to talk about the real piece, the one about what it costs to stick around, call me. If you don’t, throw the card out, and I’ll write the honest version of the parts you and the others have already given me and nothing else.
” He stood, picked up his cup, and put two bills under the saltshaker.
“It was good to see you, Mattias, even like this.”
I watched him go out into the West Loop morning with his hands in his pockets. I sat in the booth.
The card was in the middle of the table, where he’d left it. My coffee had gone cold without me drinking any of it.
Everything I’d built, I’d built on one belief—being seen put us in danger. If I could stop others from seeing, I could keep us from being erased the way Easton got erased. Kovac thought some could already see us.
I picked up the card and put it in my jacket pocket. It was a short walk to my truck. I got in, shut the door, and I put both hands on the wheel.
Next, I would start the truck, drive home, and make lunch. It was a simple plan, but something was wrong with my breathing. It had gone shallow and high up in my chest.
My heart was racing like it did in the third period of a one-goal game. I put my forehead down on the backs of my hands on the wheel and breathed slow, on purpose, but it kept coming short. My hands shook.