Chapter 2 Marek
The eggs at this hotel are hiding something.
I’ve been eating them for two weeks and I still can’t name what it is. They’re yellow and warm, and they arrive in a tray the size of a door. And every morning they taste like a photograph of eggs. Technically correct. Emotionally absent.
“You’re doing the face,” ?íma says.
“There’s no face.”
“The egg face. Every morning. You look at the tray like it owes you money.”
“I’m chewing. This is my chewing face.” I point my fork at the tray. “Something happened to these eggs and nobody in this building will tell me what.”
Down the table, Novotny and Polá?ek are at war over chicken.
“Fried chicken is not a breakfast,” Polá?ek says.
“This country says it is. I’m a guest of this country.” Novotny has four pieces on his plate. “I eat what my hosts eat. It’s called respect.”
“It’s called cholesterol.”
“Novotny.” I wait until he looks at me. “Slow down. If you die at the buffet, they’ll name the omelet station after you.”
The table laughs. Novotny takes another piece to make a point, and I go back to the eggs, because somebody at this table should keep the investigation alive.
?íma leans over and counts my bananas. Two. He has been counting my bananas since 2019. He has never explained it, and I have never asked, because asking would only encourage him. The counting is the tax I pay for a decade of friendship. The rate is fair.
Tomá? arrives with his phone already talking. “It’s official. We win against Mexico, and after that it’s the winner of the Italy-Austria match.”
Somebody at the far end groans about the Italian midfield.
Somebody else says the bracket was drawn in Rome, which gets more agreement than it deserves.
Polá?ek says we should worry about Mexico first, which is the most sensible thing said at this table in two weeks, so naturally nobody responds to it.
“Ková?.” ?íma again. “If it’s Italy, you get Valenti. What’s the report?”
“Left winger. Fast in both directions.” I peel the first banana, focused on it as if it’s a lifeline, which it might be.
“Five ten, maybe, but that is the trick. Low balance. Lean through the middle. He sells you the outside and takes the inside. When you stop buying the outside, he takes the outside. Quick feet, quicker hips. Don’t read him early. Wait him out.”
“Is he as fast as television makes him?” Tomá? says.
“Faster. Television shows you the feet. The feet are advertising. The hips are the business.”
“So read the hips.”
“No. He knows when you’re reading them. Wait him out. He gets bored before I do.”
?íma looks at me for a moment. “Very calm.”
“It’s a quarterfinal that doesn’t exist yet. Ask me after the R16 match.”
“What’s the report for Mexico?”
“Win.”
He nods as if I’ve said something wise. I’ve said something obvious. Around here, the difference is mostly volume.
Training is training. We run the shape until the shape stops needing thought, and the staff film all of it from a little scaffold tower, as if the tower will protect them if the shape turns out to be wrong.
On the bus back, I sleep eleven minutes.
Quality minutes. Novotny claims I snored, which is rich, coming from a man whose sinuses hold their own training camp every night.
Back in the room, he opens the argument anyway, because Novotny without an argument is a man without a hobby.
“I don’t snore,” he says.
“The walls disagree.”
“That’s the air conditioning.”
“The air conditioning doesn’t apologize in its sleep. You apologized to somebody named Roman at three in the morning. Twice.”
“I don’t know anybody named Roman.”
“Then you owe a stranger two apologies.” I take my jacket. “Dinner. Damián found the place, so wear something you can concentrate in.”
Damián picks the restaurant because Tobík Hájek found it first and apparently Atlanta has handed him a map the rest of us haven’t earned.
A smokehouse a few blocks off the Beltline.
Brick walls and no menus on the tables. There’s a line out the door, and Damián walks us past it with one nod at the counter.
The nod privileges are Tobík’s, earned one brisket at a time.
Damián has apparently borrowed them for the evening.
“You don’t order here,” he says. “You accept what they are willing to put in front of you.”
I respect this restaurant already.
The trays come out loaded. Brisket, ribs, sausage, white bread nobody needs and everybody takes. I go quiet the way you go quiet in a church. Somebody kept a fire honest for fourteen hours to make this happen, and they don’t even put that on a sign. They just hand you the tray and let you find out.
Tomá? reaches for the sauce.
“Put that down.”
“It’s sauce. It’s on the table.”
“So are napkins. You don’t put napkins on the brisket.” I take his plate and build it properly. Slice, pickle, onion, bread underneath to catch what matters. “Sauce is for doubt. There is no doubt at this table. Now eat.”
He eats, and his eyes close.
“Ková?.”
“I know.”
Damián watches the ceremony with his arms crossed and the particular smile of a man being proven right in public. “Two weeks of hotel food,” he says. “I should have staged this rescue earlier.”
“The eggs are a cover-up. I’m still building the case.”
“Tobík found this place his first month over here. He says he’s tried many barbecue places but keeps coming back here.”
“It would be hard to go anywhere else,” I say. “And now you get to come here whenever you want.”
“I know,” he says, happier than the sentence deserves.
He looks good. Not the face, the posture. He sits the way you sit when a city has started asking you a question and you are pretending you have not already heard it. Something about that tilts the room a few degrees. I put it level again. Different life. Different math. Not my situation.
His phone buzzes against the table. He looks at it, and his whole face goes unguarded before he catches it. He types back with his thumb while his other hand keeps eating. “Tobík says get the sausage too. And if there are burnt ends left, I should consider it a test of character.”
“He can want them. The burnt ends are spoken for.”
“Tell him yourself next time.”
Nobody at the table blinks. Damián answers a text at dinner, in front of the whole squad, from Tobík, and nothing happens. No pause. No inventory of who saw. He leaves the phone face up next to his plate, as if even an unfinished thing is allowed to exist in the room.
My phone stays in my jacket. It’s a good phone. It behaves.
It behaves because I trained it to. No names lighting up in front of teammates. No proof left where a hand could accidentally turn it over. A private life is manageable as long as it never asks a room full of people to make space for it.
A year ago, I stood in a stairwell at four in the morning with my shoes in my hand, listening to a door open one floor down.
A neighbor with a dog. Sixty seconds flat against a wall that smelled like summer and old cigarettes, watching the stair light time itself out and click back on, listening to a dog decide whether I was worth mentioning, doing the math on how many steps to the street and what I would say if the light found me, which was nothing.
Because there was nothing to say and nobody I was allowed to say it to.
The dog knew I was there but the neighbor never looked up.
I drove home with my shoes still off, and I didn’t go back, and I have called that an act of kindness for months.
It even sounds like kindness if you say it fast enough.
“Ková?. The sausage.” Tomá? holds a piece up like evidence. “Why is this better than at home? Tell me the truth. I can take it.”
“Different animal, different smoke, different country.” I turn a piece over on the tray. “The casing is the test. A serious casing snaps. It doesn’t bend, and it doesn’t chew like a wallet. When you bite this one, listen. It’ll sound like a small decision being made.”
He bites. He listens. He looks at me as if I’ve shown him a card trick.
“Ková?,” Tomá? says. “If it’s Italy, the winger, can you hold him?”
“That’s talk for after we win this match.”
“But can you?”
“I’ve done it before.” I stack the rib bones on the tray’s edge. “It costs ninety minutes of never being wrong.”
“Never being wrong for ninety minutes.” He whistles. “Against a man like that?”
“Ninety-four. He plays the added time like it’s his birthday.”
Tomá? laughs. “What’s he like off the pitch? Five years in the same league. You must have crossed paths.”
I’m assembling the answer. The safe one, the one that fits in one word.
The door of the restaurant opens before I can say anything.
It brings the street in with it, and then a noise I know arrives ahead of its owners. I’ve heard that noise for five years playing in Serie A. Italian. A lot of it, all at once, the whole language coming through the door sideways.
Rossetti first, pointing at the counter like a man with his own nod privileges.
Behind him, half a squad’s worth of Italy in training casuals.
Gallo. Ricci. Two more I know from Serie A.
And in the middle of them, hands already going, telling a story that has the whole group leaning in before any table has been found, Enzo.
His hair is longer than it was last year, dark brown and pushed back badly, already trying to fall into his eyes.
Atlanta has put more color in his olive skin.
I don’t need the distance closed to know the eyes.
Deep blue, darker than television gets them.
I’ve spent five years being professionally unaffected by them, and I have the disciplinary record to prove it.
He hasn’t seen me. He’s in the middle of a story. The story has hands, and an ending everybody is already waiting in line for, because with him the laugh is a place you stand, not a thing you decide. The volume is exactly the same.
Something in my chest stands up. I tell it to sit down. It doesn’t sit down.
“Off the pitch,” Tomá? says. “You were saying.”
“Professional,” I say. The word comes out in the right way. It costs more than a word should.
?íma is looking at me. One second. Maybe a second and a half, which from ?íma is a paragraph. Then Novotny announces that the brisket portions are a scandal in our favor, and the table tilts toward the argument, and ?íma goes with it.
The Italians settle two tables away, loud and easy, pulling chairs as if they own chairs everywhere.
Rossetti spots Damián and points at him across the room, some football thing between them already, and Damián points back, and the two tables are suddenly one room with a seam down the middle.
He still hasn’t looked over. Or he has, at some point I missed, and decided the room was big enough for both of us.
I’m not going to think about which of those is worse.
I file him where he goes. Serie A. Left winger. That’s all he is, all he needs to be.
I put the fork down and pick up my water and drink it slowly, like a professional, like a man whose only problem in this city is the hotel eggs. The counter calls out a number and somebody’s tray goes by loaded. Two tables away, a story lands and takes the whole corner of the room with it.
The glass is empty. I keep holding it.