The Tournament Trilogy Read online

  As a Tournament courier, driving was his least favorite mode of transportation. Trapped in a car, the pressures of the day amplified, rebounding against the roof and windows like caged animals, only intensifying. He was easily annoyed sitting worthlessly at stoplight after stoplight and moving in and out of traffic, waiting to shoot ahead and gain a little time. It seemed like a big pointless pinball game.

  He preferred running. He loved the speed and the sweat. It felt clean. He loved plowing bodily into the air in front of him, and he shaved his legs so he could feel it more intensely. He started shaving for high school track meets years ago and continued when he ran long distance for the Fighting Illini at the University of Illinois. He liked to think that his lack of leg-hair had increased his overall lifetime streamlining.

  In high school, a rail thin, prepubescent Allen “Stocky Locky” Lockton, recently arrived on the track team, was often heckled for his running style. He ran with his head held high, his back stick straight, forearm and bicep at ninety degrees, knees popping high, back leg extended for maximum thrust. All of this, naturally, was the correct way to run, but his teammates, and all of the football players practicing on the same field, had none of it.

  “You run like a faggot, Stocky. It looks fucked up,” one said eventually, after several days of snickering.

  That night, running in place before his mirror, his stick thin legs and bony shoulders jutting and shifting all about and looking more like a crude, angular rendering of a boy than an actual boy, Allen acknowledged that he did look a bit funny. But it felt right; it felt like the logical way to run.

  When, two months later, he ran that very same “fucked up” style all the way to second place at State as a fifteen year old freshman, he wasn’t heckled anymore. Soon he saw a few teammates running the same way. He told his mother so and she clasped her hands proudly and ran to tell his father.

  “Oh honey,” she said to James, “Allen says people are copying the way he runs now!”

  “They should,” he heard his father say from his chair in the living room. “The boy’s no idiot.”

  At U of I he always ran early in the morning, to the amazement of his roommates. He tried to put in five miles before the sun broke on the Illini Union, and he always stayed up late to run in the cool dead of night as well, under the buzzing lights. He left very little room for anything else in his life, least of all schoolwork, and as a result he nearly failed out. His physical endurance was remarkable, but his aptitude for academia was another matter. He was still convinced that the only reason he did graduate was because of a few choice words spoken to a few choice people on his behalf by the track and field coaching staff.

  But while he certainly wasn’t an intellectual, he was no idiot either, a fact his father constantly impressed upon him. Whenever his son got discouraged about school, James Lockton would say, “The last thing the world needs in another literati,” pronouncing it lituratee, and, “You got it where it counts, son.”

  While books infuriated him, Allen Lockton had always shown a lightening quick propensity for logic. Most often this would manifest itself in his remarkable ability to find things.

  When the Lockton’s terrier ran off, as it was prone to do, and his sister sat blubbering, as she was prone to do, Allen went out after it, reasoning that since the dog always barked furiously at their neighbor’s pink Mary Kay Cadillac, the neighbor’s garage might be a good place to start. He found the dog either there or at a myriad of other locations he quickly deduced over the years, and he always brought it back home.

  Seeing the dog safely squirming about in his arms, his mother would clasp her hands in pride and run off to tell his father, who would look up from his paper, shrug, and proclaim, “The boy’s no idiot.”

  After all his schooling was done and he had no more years of NCAA eligibility left, he felt lost. Struggling through the gap year between college graduation and whatever lay beyond, unemployed and dispirited, Allen was meandering around Chicago looking for a job when he came across a flyer stapled to a pocked wooden post in Grant Park:

  Bike Couriers Wanted

  Pay Variable

  Trinity Bank Building

  21 South Dearborn

  The bottom of the paper was cut like a row of teeth, each sporting the number to call. Allen tore one off and two days later he walked into the Trinity Bank Building for an interview.

  “Now you know we can’t be held responsible for whatever happens to you out there,”

  The head of courier services for the Trinity Bank Building, a middle-aged, military looking fellow dressed in a shortsleeve shirt and tie, looked at him over thick glasses. He gestured outside at the honking, chugging traffic snaking around the building like water through a series of sluices. Allen looked out of the glass doors of the lobby along with him. He saw the vendors, the sun glaring off the cars, he saw the billowing effects of the hot wind surging down the crosshatched streets of South Dearborn and West Madison, peeling around the corners and kicking up debris. It looked like Chicago to him, the Chicago he knew.

  “But that said,” the man continued, “we pay you by the job. So, ah, you know, the more you deliver, the more money you make.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “You got a bike?”

  “I do.”

  “And you know Chicago?”

  “I’ve lived here all my life, aside from college.”

  “Good. Then you’re hired. But be careful flyin’ around out there. You know, there’s a lot of morons. There’s a reason we’re always hiring couriers, if you catch my drift.”

  The Trinity Bank Building shot up sixty stories into a tapered edge that cut a prominent spot on the Chicago skyline. It was made of granite and reflective black glass, and when the sun set it often took on the look of massive and bloodied obsidian arrowhead. Although named for the Trinity Bank, it housed an array of institutions, mostly financial firms, but also a variety of legal firms, a food court, and an organic supermarket. Allen Lockton would be delivering all manner of correspondence for any and all of them that wished it, all over downtown Chicago.

  Despite having what he thought was a working knowledge of the city, the other couriers beat him hands down at first, sometimes delivering two or three items to his one. He quickly found out that riding down the streets, even in and out of cars, was not always the quickest way. The best ways often meant he had to cut across corporate lawns, in and out of courtyards, up the sidewalls of stairs, and in and around loading docks and back alleys that he had never before noticed. Split second decisions often meant the difference between a twenty-five minute delivery and a fifteen minute delivery. By the end of his first week he was averaging twenty minutes a job.

  At home he would study overhead maps of the city, noting each place he delivered to and marking the clusters of buildings he trafficked most. He mapped out routes and marked out potential shortcuts. By the end of the first month he knew exactly how much passing room certain models of certain cars allowed and where their corresponding blind spots were. In that first month he fell twice: Once he took a rough tumble off the retaining wall of a concrete island near the Carbide and Carbon building and scraped a thin layer of skin off the back of his arm. The other was an incident in which a car door opened as he passed and he clipped his left handle on its side-view mirror, flipping himself head over end. The woman driving the car thought she’d killed him and shrieked, but the fall looked a lot worse than it was. He was able to ride away.

  After the first month he never fell, and although he did buzz a few pedestrians and garnered his share of loud curses, he never hit anything else.

  Soon he was averaging fifteen minutes a delivery and companies were requesting him by name for their most pressing documents. By the middle of his second month at work he was beating every other courier and was one of only three that had remained on from the time of his hiring. As with every task to which he applied himself, Allen had become a well-oiled machine. He formed blisters that split
and reformed as calluses on his palms and his legs grew strong and corded. He got a deep biker’s tan that made the rest of his covered body look onion white. By the end of his third month he could quote just about any delivery time to within one minute: City Hall or Daley City Center? Seven minutes. Prudential Plaza? Ten. Citicorp Center? That’s across the river, so it’ll take eleven minutes there, seven minutes back.

  One day, after he had been working as a courier for almost half of a year, Allen was asked to deliver to a place that he didn’t recognize. A company called BlueFox Financial, occupying half of the very top of the Trinity Bank Building, hired him for the delivery. He’d run for them a handful of times before, always tightly sealed packages and letters addressed to strange, nondescript locations; once he delivered a sealed letter from them to one of a series of warehouses on the east-side that he had always thought were abandoned. Another time they asked him to deliver a small package to someone’s car in the Cooper Residential area. He was given the keys, told to place the letter on the driver’s seat, and then lock the keys in the car. These were among the oddest of his deliveries, so when he reported to the top floor that day he was expecting another strange ride. He got something else entirely.

  The secretary for the office was an endearing elderly woman who had always given him his mail and directions in the past, but this time she told him to pass through the thick wooden doors himself. There, a tall, gaunt fellow in a dark suit gravely shook his hand and led him into a sparsely lit conference room.

  Unsure if he should remove his helmet, Allen sat awkwardly in a large leather chair that faced a table cluttered with maps of every sort. There were maps on the walls and maps on the floor. Some were rolled up and shoved halfway in various cubbyholes along the walls while others lay limply strewn about in the corners. One large map of the world, prominently placed on the wall to his left, was studded with hundreds of tacks of every color. He was surprised to see that of all the maps visible, only one was of Chicago, partly covered by others and hanging half off of the table.

  The man introduced himself as Henry as he sat heavily opposite Allen. Henry rested his head back and sighed audibly. Then he closed his eyes for a moment and didn’t move at all, as if struck by a sudden fit of narcolepsy. Henry’s hair was unkempt and stuck out a bit over either ear the way a child’s bowl-cut might. Under his eyes were deep, purplish bags so prominent that they looked painted. Allen glanced at one of the five clocks in the room, the one that read CHICAGO, and was about to say something about keeping to his schedule when Henry suddenly spoke, his eyes still closed.

  “Allen, I need help here. This has all gotten to be... more than I can handle.”

  “What do you need?”

  “If I ask you to deliver to a place for me, without knowing anything beyond the few details that I give you, could you find it? Find him?”

  “Yes,” said Allen, and then, “Him? A person?”

  Henry seemed not to have heard him and continued talking, eyes still closed.

  “It’s rather out of the way, and God knows you won’t get any help from the locals.”

  “Where is this? Up north? On Chicago Ave? If I just take Dearborn up I can usually get that far north in twenty minutes.”

  Henry opened his eyes and looked directly at Allen, who was already putting his helmet back on.

  “St. Petersburg.”

  Allen stopped, mid-strap.

  “St. Petersburg? Is that that suburb out by South Pond?”

  “It’s that city. In Russia.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  Henry’s tired eyes peered at him with such scrutiny that Allen wished he would close them again. Henry shook his head.

  “This is no joke, Allen. We would want you working full time for us. Something like a... a worldwide courier.”

  “Can’t you just use FedEx?”

  “The things we need delivered are special things. Things we can trust to very few people. Almost nobody.”

  “I don’t deliver drugs.”

  Henry laughed weakly and the stubble on his face lifted into something of a smile.

  “No, nothing like that. Mostly just letters. And we’ll also need you to find people... people we need to get signatures from, people we need to keep tabs on.”

  Allen looked at him, and then glanced about the room at the maps.

  “We would pay you very well. If, that is, you can find these people for us. Starting with one man in particular. In St. Petersburg.” Henry shook his head apologetically. “This one is a trial by fire if there ever was one.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Eddie Mazaryk, and he lives in St. Petersburg sometimes, and that’s all you get because that’s all we know. That, and this credit card, which will cover every expense you need, regardless of what it might be.”

  Henry slowly slid a black charge card across the desk.

  “No one else has ever contacted Eddie Mazaryk with any regularity whatsoever. We thought that perhaps you might be the right... type.”

  Allen took the card and looked at it. It was a black American Express card with Allen Murrow Lockton inscribed on it in raised black lettering.

  “Is this what I—”

  “If you can find him and deliver to him, we’ll take you on full time to deliver to all of our players worldwide. Then we’ll tell you everything you want to know. Or, you could walk out and forget I ever asked. Up to you.”

  Allen paused for a long moment in which only the ticking of the clocks could be heard.

  Finally, Allen stood up and took the card off the desk. Henry nodded, and Allen left the room. The elderly receptionist out front smiled kindly at him as he went out.

  In the ensuing months and years, Allen flew, ran, swam, climbed, slid, dropped, biked, and drove all across the world finding people and delivering things for the Tournament. He came to realize that this new job was simply an extension of his old job, really of the jobs he had been doing all of his life. Only now instead of looking under Mrs. Massey’s Pink Cadillac in her garage, he might have to jet across the Sahara to some casino in Sun City, or run down the Amalfi Coast to a fish shack off Via Quasimodo.

  Hardly anyone called him Allen anymore. He wasn’t even sure he would turn around if someone yelled his first name in a crowded room. Now people called him Lock, because he was a sure thing. He got the job done, no matter what.

  But he still hated driving. Without the open air around him he felt restricted and muddled, even while doing what likely was the freest job in the world.

  Lock eyed himself in his rearview mirror, as he often did, and ran his thumb down the rail-straight part in his brown hair, smoothing any errant flyaways. He would have to take each task as it came, as he always did. One at a time. But this whole issue with Bill Beauchamp and Frank Youngsmith was bothering him more than he allowed himself to show. It seemed a bad omen to open the fifth cycle on the tail-feathers of the death of one of their own. And the insurance agent, he was a rare kind of desperate. He was searching for something, even if he didn’t know it yet.

  Lock’s gut told him the Tournament hadn’t seen the last of Frank Youngsmith. And Lock’s gut was never wrong.

  Chapter Seven

  IN THE TWO AND a half hours it took Frank Youngsmith to drive from Glendale down south to San Diego and the UCSD Medical center, Lock notified Greer Nichols about the unfortunate inquiry Frank had brought to their doorstep, and about what Lock had done to get rid of him.

  “You sent him to Baxter?” Greer cried. “You know how that man feels about this organization!”

  “There was nothing else I could do!” Lock snipped back. “He was threatening to go to the Attorney General!”

  In his office, Greer rubbed at his head and glanced up at the dead cameras above him. He let out a big breath.

  “I don’t know, Lock. Baxter Walcott can be a pain in the ass. Might have been better off letting him toss the file to the Attorney General and leave the rest up to our l
egal people.”

  “All this Frank guy is going to do is get Dr. Walcott to sign a simple statement regarding his benefits. Then this whole issue gets shuffled off,” Lock said, but his high pitch betrayed his lack of confidence. He knew he’d overstepped himself. Greer shook his head.

  “If he really gets to talking with Baxter, there is no way this issue is gonna disappear.”

  At that very moment, many miles away, Frank Youngsmith walked into the crowded triage ward of UCSD Medical Center in San Diego and began to wait. Frank waited for almost twenty minutes just to get to the front desk, where he was immediately told by an exasperated secretary that there was simply no way he was going to see Dr. Walcott today. Walcott was the chief of the cardiac wing. He didn’t take walk-ins, and even if he did, he wouldn’t today. He was outrageously busy.

  “Ma’am,” Frank said, sweating a bit upon the counter, “I flew from Colorado to see Dr. Walcott. I need less than five minutes with the man.”

  The secretary eyed him skeptically. His face was ruddy from the heat and his sparse mop of springy hair was smeared to his forehead. He looked half ready to keel over.

  “Dr. Walcott is in surgery,” she said pityingly.

  “I’ll wait.”

  The secretary shrugged and pointed towards one of the few empty chairs in the waiting room. Frank shuffled over, sat down, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. He awoke some time later to a large orderly with flappy arms tapping him on the shoulder.

  “I wasn’t really sleeping, just... kind of closing my eyes, you know?”

  The woman grunted and gestured at the front desk. Frank glanced behind her and saw that the secretary was twitching strangely, shifting one shoulder back and to her left where stood a thin and graying man, hunched slightly in his white lab coat. He was speaking into a Dictaphone with one hand and rubbing his eyes with the other. The secretary looked at Frank emphatically and Frank realized that Dr. Walcott had emerged for what was likely to be only a few moments.