Chapter 4 Marek
The team lunch pasta is a hostage situation. Somebody boiled it until it confessed. I eat it anyway, because tomorrow is a round of sixteen and calories are calories.
“The pasta is eleven minutes past saving,” I tell Tomá?, who did not ask. “Somebody in that kitchen looked at a timer and chose violence.” I push it around the plate. “A real ragù takes three hours on a low flame. There is a kitchen—“
I stop.
That sentence had a destination. I heard it leaving and I know where it was going, and it was not going anywhere in the Czech Republic.
“Where?” Tomá? says.
“In general. There are kitchens.” I fill my mouth with hostage pasta so nothing else can leave.
Tomá? moves on, because Tomá? takes people at face value, which is one of the great mercies of my life.
“Mexico’s striker,” Tomá? says, coming back to me. “The tall one. Trouble?”
“Only if we let him get bored. A bored striker starts inventing runs. Keep him busy and he keeps himself offside.”
“You make defending sound like babysitting.”
“It’s mostly babysitting. Occasionally a knife fight.”
Film that afternoon is the Round of 16 opponent, Mexico. Their left side is slow to recover after losing the ball, their striker drifts offside when he gets bored, their set pieces are a real threat and the analysts say so four times. I take notes. I’m good at film. One screen, one task.
Afterward, the analyst packs up his cables and nods at the screen. “Quarterfinal folder’s already on the drive. Conditional. Don’t open it, it makes the boss superstitious. Mexico first.”
“Mexico first,” I say, like a man agreeing.
At eleven that night I’m on the hotel gym bike with my tablet open to a folder labeled ITA (COND).
This is preparation. Nobody prepares this early.
I’m aware that nobody prepares this early.
I watch Italy’s last match, anyway. I tell myself I’m watching their fullbacks, and for eleven minutes I genuinely am.
Then their left winger picks the ball up near the touchline, and shows the defender the outside, and takes the inside, and I stop watching fullbacks.
I know that move the way I know my own signature.
I’ve defended it twelve times. Maybe thirteen.
I have it cataloged from every angle, in league footage and cup footage, and one memory with no footage at all.
A training pitch outside Naples at dusk where he tried it on me for fun, laughing, sandals, holding a local peach in one hand the entire time.
Nothing about that is tactical.
I close the tablet. The bike says I have been pedaling faster for four minutes. The bike is keeping records too.
?íma is in the doorway with a towel over his shoulder. ?íma is always somewhere with a towel over his shoulder. It’s his surveillance uniform.
“Eleven at night,” he says.
“The gym is open at eleven.”
“You were asleep by nine every night in Qatar. We used to check watches against you.”
“Tournaments change.”
“What are you watching?”
“Fullbacks.”
“Whose?”
“The gym is open, ?íma. I’m using it.”
He looks at the dead tablet, then at me, and does the thing he does, which is nothing, loudly. “Big match,” he says, on his way out.
“They’re all big.” I watch as he turns.
“Sure,” he calls back over his shoulder. “Some are just louder.”
In the mornings, I walk. Everybody has a ritual, and mine is legs, streets, coffee, in that order. The hotel espresso tastes like a machine crying, so I found a place a few blocks east on the second day, a narrow bar with one grinder and a barista who doesn’t want to talk. My kind of establishment.
I’m two people from the counter when I hear the order ahead of me.
Double, short, no sugar, and a glass of still water on the side, said in English wearing an Italian accent.
I don’t need to look up. My body has already filed the report.
Two years of that voice ordering that exact thing across dozens of evenings that officially never happened, and it turns out the recording is intact and the playback is instant.
Enzo turns from the counter with his cup and sees me. For one second I get the daylight version without warning: dark hair loose around his face, blue eyes still sleep-sharp, olive skin warm from the walk. A man ordering coffee should not look like a room I left badly.
“Ková?,” he says.
“Enzo.”
His name comes out on its own. In front of witnesses.
There’s a barista and a man with a laptop and a woman with a dog.
None of them know it is the first time I have said it out loud in a year.
All of them could have heard it. The old system would have said Valenti in a room like this. The old system had rules.
He looks at me with no indication of what he’s thinking. “You’re drinking coffee?”
“I’m walking. The coffee is making its own choices.”
Something moves behind his eyes and doesn’t reach his mouth. Before, that would have been a laugh. I built entire drives around getting that laugh.
“The hotel eggs are still hiding something,” I say, because it almost worked on him the other day. Because it would have gotten the real smile, the sudden one, the one that lights his face before that night a year ago.
Instead, it gets a nod. A nod is what he’d give a linesman.
“Have a good day,” he says, and he steps around me, and the door does its little bell, and he’s gone, cup in hand, and into the street.
The barista looks at me. “What can I get you?”
“Double, short, no sugar.” I hear it as it leaves. “And the water.”
I didn’t decide that. I’d like the record to show that nobody in this body consulted me.
“Name for the cup?”
“Ková?.”
He writes something with a K and three wrong letters, and I don’t correct him because whoever that is can carry this one.
I walk back the long way with a drink I didn’t choose.
The drawer that holds everything in Naples stands open the whole four blocks, and I finally look into it long enough to see the shape of it.
That first night three years ago, then a few dozen nights across two years.
The nights getting more frequent, but the leaving never changing.
Always before the sun broke over the horizon.
Always a quiet escape back to Rome. Rare messages in between.
Then, that last night a year ago. The moment wasn’t the stairwell.
The stairwell came after. Before the stairwell, there was me at the door with one shoe on, seeing his kitchen.
There was a plate on the counter. Mine. He’d left it there, not washed yet, like the night wasn’t over, like mornings could exist for us.
And I stood there with one shoe on for the length of an entire espresso, and a man who times his exits does not lose track of time.
That was the emergency. Not the neighbor, not the dog, not almost being seen. The dog was just the excuse arriving when I needed it. I ran because staying had started to feel like the reasonable option, and the whole system is built on staying never being an option at all.
The lie I have told best is that I was afraid of being caught. I was afraid of not wanting to leave even after the danger passed. Caught would have been survivable. Staying would have required an entirely different man.
So I went silent. No call, no message, no goodbye. I filed it under kindness, and the file held. This morning that man wished me luck, like the left winger I’d be marking soon. Polite, professional, and already sharpening the knife.
Back at the hotel, Damián appears in the doorway of our room while Novotny is in the shower, singing something off-key. Damián’s in team-issue everything. A recovery shake in one hand. He leans on the frame as if the corridor is also his living room now.
“Film this afternoon,” he says. “Tomá? says Tobík watched the last time we played Mexico and called your right side a wall. I’m quoting.”
“Tell him the wall says thank you.”
“Ready?” he asks, and lets it sit there.
“Yes, I’m ready.”
A pause arrives with something folded inside it. Damián went to the same school of pauses as ?íma, he just graduated kinder. “You good?”
“I’m fine, Mare?.”
“Okay.” Easy. No push. His phone buzzes, and he reads it. “Tomá? says brisket either way. If we lose, nobody is allowed to discuss football for twenty minutes.”
“Either way it goes,” I say. He pushes off the frame and goes. I look at the empty doorway for a moment.
I lie on my bed and run the checks twice.
Twice there is a drawer in the middle of the cabinet that was shut for months and is now ajar, no matter how hard I try to close it.
It’s a condition I don’t recognize, because in this system, a thing is either closed or it’s a crisis.
Doors are allowed to be ajar. Drawers are not.
A drawer that won’t close means the thing inside has changed size, and things that change size while filed away are the exact things the system exists to prevent.
I said his name in front of a barista. I ordered his coffee with my own mouth. The tape last night was eleven minutes of fullbacks and one minute of him repeated over and over, and the ratio is going the wrong way.
The air conditioning hums. Four blocks east, the grinder is off and the chairs are up. Somewhere west of that, a kitchen I have never seen has peaches on the sill. I know it the way you know a thing you have no right to know.