Читать книгу The Uninvited Guest - John Degen - Страница 10

The Cup went missing in the summer of 1952. It was gone for almost two months. No details of its disappearance or its whereabouts while it was gone have ever been publicly known. Stan Cooper, now the head custodian and cleaner at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, found the Cup at centre ice one morning when he happened to be the first person in the building. Training camp for the new season had just begun, and the ice had to be maintained every day even if the team spent the whole day in the gym. He threw the switch for the secondary lights, and there it was. The League had never reported it missing. The police had never been consulted. A private investigator worked for three weeks but was eventually fired after falling down drunk in the League president’s office while making a report. There were plans in the works to create a duplicate cup from photographs, and then one morning it just appeared at centre ice in Toronto.

Stan walked out across the centre line still carrying his coffee and doughnut in a paper bag. He had seen the Cup in this building many times. He had seen the Cup both won and lost in this building. He burned at the thought of seeing the Cup being won. He felt a wave of nauseating embarrassment about it, and then embarrassment about being embarrassed. He looked at his own face reflected in the perfect silver and thought about his wife.

He circled it, shuffling around the ice in his rubber-soled work shoes, watching the shine and reflection in the dim glow of the secondary lights. He reached out and pushed at it to see if it would move. His hand left a dull smudge on the silver. It was the only print he could see on the entire trophy. Whoever had left the Cup there had polished it before they left. Stan took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away his fingerprints.

He put the doughnut shop bag on the ice beside the Cup and jogged back across the rink to the timekeeper’s booth where he knew there was a phone. By the time he returned, his coffee had melted a circle of water around the bag, soaking the apple fritter inside. League officials arrived within the hour.

While he waited for them Stan stayed on the ice, drinking cold coffee, one hand on the Cup. He helped carry the trophy into a back office and watched as it was authenticated. As they were putting it in the back of one of the official League cars, one of the men turned to Stan and said, “Well sir, I guess this makes up for that little fuck-up last year,” and then laughed, slapping Stan on the back with a gloved hand.

Stan and the Cup were driven out of the city on the same morning, bouncing down the Queen Elizabeth Highway in the back seat of a black sedan. By noon they were in Windsor, crossing the border, and at one that afternoon they were both presented to the owner of the Detroit hockey team.

There were four other men in the room, one of whom Stan recognized as Sid Abel, Detroit’s captain. Three months earlier, Abel had won the Cup, beating Montreal. He and his goalie Terry Sawchuk had been captured by a photographer hugging the Cup in the Detroit dressing room. The photo had been clipped from a Toronto paper and pinned in the lunchroom back in Toronto. Beneath it someone had written “In the arms of the enemy.” Stan looked at the photo every day for weeks. He didn’t agree with the inscription. Montreal was the enemy. By beating Montreal, Detroit had actually kept the Cup out of the arms of the enemy. When the Cup disappeared, so too did the photo and accompanying note.

Sid Abel shook Stan’s hand hard. He smiled down at him and grabbed his shoulder with muscular fingers.

“You’ve brought my baby back to me, Stan.”

“Yes sir,” Stan said.

Sid turned to the men who had driven Stan to Detroit.

“Look here,” he said, his tone turning angry, “everyone knows this is all Floyd’s fault. If Floyd hadn’t ended up face-first in the shitter when it was his turn to take the Cup, she never would have been nabbed. Floyd’s an ass, we all know that. An ass and a goddamn drunk. And don’t think we’re ever letting him near this thing again, even if he scores the goddamn winning goal next year. But you boys gotta do something about this. Make sure it doesn’t happen again. I mean, hockey players are going to get drunk at a party, you know what I mean? You can’t just hand this thing over and hope it goddamn makes it back in one piece.”

When Stan was loaded back into the sedan, alone now in the back seat, he had with him a brand new, handwritten contract from the League. He was to remain custodian in Toronto during the regular season and, in the summer, he would travel with the Cup, never letting it out of his sight. Sid Abel had put both hands on his shoulders and said, “The first goddamn thing he did was phone you guys—and he’s from Toronto. I don’t care what happened last year or whenever it was, Cooper here is your man.”

Stan had felt like he was being pushed into the floor. His stomach turned liquid while they wrote out the contract, but he signed without hesitation. He was young enough and without his wife, summers were his own. Better to be on the road than alone in the house.

Back on the highway, one of the League men passed a leather-covered flask over the seatback.

“Shit Stan, you lucked out there. There’s a dog-fuck of a job if I ever heard a one.”

“What exactly do you do?” Stan asked.

“Fuck you,” the man said, and both men in the front laughed loud and hard.

Stan felt himself laughing and was surprised. He hadn’t laughed for real in over a year. He swallowed some gin and passed the flask back up front.