Murder Is My Racquet (23 page)

I may have heard something later on radio or television about the postmortem on poor Jozsef Stanski. They concluded he died from blood poisoning. Samples were sent for further analysis, but the lab couldn’t trace the source. At the inquest, a pathologist mentioned the scratch on the arm and said some sharp point had dug quite deep into the flesh. The match umpire gave evidence and spoke of the needle Stanski had picked up. He described the small eye close to the point. Unfortunately the needle had not been seen since the day of the match. In summing up, the coroner said it would not be helpful to speculate about the needle. The match had been played in full view of a large crowd and there was no evidence of anyone attempting to cause Stanski’s death.

Huge controversy surrounded the verdict. The international press made a lot of the incident, pointing out that as recently as 1978 a Bulgarian writer, Georgi Markov, a rebel against his Communist government, had been executed in a London street by a tiny poison pellet forced into his thigh, apparently by the tip of an umbrella. The poison used was ricin, a protein derived from the castor-oil seed, deadly and in those days almost undetectable in the human bloodstream. He took four days to die, protesting that he was the victim of political assassination. Nobody except his wife took him seriously until after he died. The presence of the poison was discovered only because the pellet was still embedded in a piece of Markov’s flesh sent for analysis. If ricin could be injected in a public street using an umbrella, was it so fanciful to suggest Jozsef Stanski was targeted by the KGB and poisoned at Wimbledon two years later?

In Poland, the first months of 1981 had been extremely tense. A new prime minister, General Jaruzelski, had taken over and a permanent committee was set up to liaise with Solidarity. Moscow was incensed by this outbreak of liberalism and summoned Jaruzelski and his team to the Kremlin. The Politburo made its anger known. Repression followed. Many trade union activists were beaten up.

The papers noted that Stanski’s opponent Voronin had quit Britain by an Aeroflot plane the same evening he had lost. He was unavailable for comment, in spite of strenuous efforts by reporters. The Soviet crackdown on Solidarity was mentioned. It was widely suspected that the KGB had been monitoring Stanski for over a year. He was believed to be acting as a conduit to the free world for Walesa and his organization. At the end of the year, martial law was imposed in Poland and the leaders of Solidarity were detained and union activity suspended.

Although nothing was announced officially, the press claimed Scotland Yard investigated the assassination theory and kept the file open.

Since the Cold War ended and the Soviet bloc disintegrated, it is hard to think oneself back into the oppression of those days, harder still to believe orders may have been given for one tennis player to execute another at the world’s top tournament. In the years since, I kept an open mind about the incident, troubled to think murder may have happened so close to me. In my mind’s eye I can still see Stanski rubbing his arm and reaching for the water I poured.

Then, last April, I had a phone call from Eddie Pringle. I hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years. He was coming my way on a trip and wondered if we might meet for a drink.

To be truthful, I wasn’t all that keen. I couldn’t imagine we had much in common these days. Eddie seemed to sense my reluctance, because he went on to say, “I wouldn’t take up your time if it wasn’t important—well, important to me, if not to you. I’m not on the cadge, by the way. I’m asking no favors except for one half-hour of your time.”

How could I refuse?

We arranged to meet in the bar of a local hotel. I told him I have a beard these days and what I would wear, just in case we didn’t recognize each other.

I certainly wouldn’t have known Eddie if he hadn’t come up to me and spoken my name. He was gaunt, hairless and on two sticks.

“Sorry,” he said. “Chemo. Didn’t like to tell you on the phone in case I put you off.”

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” I said. “Is the treatment doing any good?”

“Not really. I’ll be lucky to see the year out. But I’m allowed to drink in moderation. What’s yours?”

We found a table. He asked what line of work I’d gone into and I told him I was a journalist.

“Sport?”

“No. Showbiz. I know why you asked,” I said. “That stint we did as ball boys would have been a useful grounding. No one ever believes I was on court with McEnroe and Borg, so I rarely mention it.”

“I made a big effort to forget,” Eddie said. “The treatment we got from that Brigadier fellow was shameful.”

“No worse than any military training.”

“Yes, but we were young kids barely into our teens. At that age it amounted to brainwashing.”

“That’s a bit strong, Eddie.”

“Think about it,” he said. “He had us totally under his control. Destroyed any individuality we had. We thought about nothing else but chasing after tennis balls and handing them over in the approved style. It was the peak of everyone’s ambition to be the best ball boy. You were as fixated as I was. Don’t deny it.”

“True. It became my main ambition.”

“Obsession.”

“Okay. Have it your way. Obsession.” I smiled, wanting to lighten the mood a bit.

“You were the hotshot ball boy,” he said. “You deserved to win.”

“I doubt it. Anyway, I was too absorbed in it all to see how the other kids shaped up.”

“Believe me, you were the best. I couldn’t match you for speed or stillness. The need to be invisible he was always on about.”

“I remember that.”

“I believed I was as good as anyone, except you.” Eddie took a long sip of beer and was silent for some time.

I waited. It was obvious some boyhood memory was troubling him.

He cleared his throat nervously. “Something has been on my mind all these years. It’s a burden I can’t take with me when I go. I don’t have long, and I want to clear my conscience. You remember the match between the Russian and the Pole?”

“Voronin and, er…?”

“Stanski—the one who died. It should never have happened. You’re the one who should have died.”

Staring at him, I played the last statement over in my head.

He said, “You’ve got to remember the mental state we were in, totally committed to being best boy. It was crazy, but nothing else in the world mattered. I could tell you were better than I was, and you told me yourself that the Brigadier spoke to you after one of your matches on Ladies’ Day.”

“Did I?” I said, amazed he still had such a clear recollection.

“He didn’t say anything to me. It was obvious you were booked for the final. While you were on the squad, I stood no chance. It sounds like lunacy now, but I was so fired up I had to stop you.”

“How?”

“With poison.”

“Now come on, Eddie. You’re not serious.”

But his tone insisted he was. “If you remember, when we were in the first year, there was a sensational story in the papers about a man, a Bulgarian, who was murdered in London by a pellet the size of a pinhead that contained an almost unknown poison called ricin.”

“Georgi Markov.”

“Yes. We talked about it in chemistry with Blind Pugh. Remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“He said a gram of the stuff was enough to kill thirty-six thousand people and it attacked the red blood cells. It was obtained from the seeds or beans of the castor-oil plant,
Ricinus communis
. They had to be ground up in a pestle and mortar because otherwise the hard seed coat prevented absorption. Just a few seeds would be enough. Old Pugh told us all this in the belief that castor-oil plants are tropical, but he was wrong. They’ve been grown in this country as border plants ever since Tudor times.”

“You’re saying you got hold of some?”

“From a local seedsman, and no health warning. I’m sorry if all this sounds callous. I felt driven at the time. I plotted how to do it, using this.”

Eddie spread his palm and a small piece of metal lay across it. “I picked it out of a litter bin after Stanski threw it away. This is the sewing machine needle he found. My murder weapon.”

I said with distaste, “You were responsible for that?”

“It came from my mother’s machine. I ground the needle to a really fine point and made a gelatine capsule containing the poison and filled the eye of the needle with it.”

“What were you going to do with it—stick it into my arm?”

“No. Remember how we were drilled to return to the same spot just behind the tramlines beside the umpire’s chair? If you watch tennis, that place gets as worn as the serving area at the back of the court. The ball boys always return to the same spot. My plan was simple. Stick the needle into the turf with the sharp point upward and you would kneel on it and inject the ricin into your bloodstream. I’m telling you this because I want the truth to come out before I die. I meant to kill you and it went wrong. Stanski dived at a difficult ball and his arm went straight down on the needle.”

“But he went on to win the match.”

“The effects take days to kick in, but there’s no antidote. Even if I’d confessed at the time, they couldn’t have saved him. It was unforgivable. I was obsessed and it’s preyed on my mind ever since.”

“So all that stuff in the papers about Voronin being an assassin…”

“Was rubbish. It was me. If you want to go to the police,”
he said, “I don’t mind confessing everything I’ve told you. I just want the truth to be known before I go. I’m told I have six months at most.”

I was silent, reflecting on what I’d heard, the conflicting motives that had driven a young boy to kill and a dying man to confess twenty years later.

“Or you could wait until after I’ve gone. You say you’re a journalist. You could write it up and tell it in your own way.”

He left me to make up my own mind.

Eddie died in November.

And you are the first after me to get the full story.

THE REMATCH

M
IKE
L
UPICA

H
e sat down near the court in the temporary bleachers they’d put up along the first fairway at Westchester Country Club, waiting to see for himself if the prick had changed now that he’d finally agreed to play on the has-been circuit.

How long had it been? Could it have been nine years already? It was, nine going on ten, since the semifinals of the Open that time, in what Ted Carlyle had always thought of as Louis Armstrong Stadium at the National Tennis Center. The prick—Tony Douglass—was making his last run at an Open title that year, what would have been his third, unseeded after taking most of the year off, even skipping Wimbledon for the first time since he was a teenager while he supposedly rehabbed a knee injury, though Ted had always suspected Douglass might have been rehabbing the booze again, though no one could ever prove it. But he got well by the time he got to New York in September, upsetting seeds in the first round and Round of 16, finally knocking out Andre Agassi in the quarters, a five-setter they still talked about as some kind of
classic. And the idiot New York crowds, filled with people who’d always forgiven Douglass everything even though he was a Brit, came back to him bigger and louder than they ever had.

The tennis writers, of course, sensing a Big Story, sniffing around it like dogs in heat, immediately developed fucking amnesia about the way Douglass had always treated them, which meant the same way he had treated umpires and linesmen and lineswomen and ball boys and ball girls and, if the tabloids were right—please, God, let them be right—a topless dancer one time.

Somehow everybody forgot all the times when a call would go against Tony Douglass and he would pitch such a fit you thought someone had set the sonofabitch on fire.

All they cared about was that he might win again. Winning had always made everything all right with Douglass, from the beginning. Ted Carlyle had always wanted tennis to be different from the other sports, better, more dignified, more
old-school
. But when it came to keeping score, it was exactly the same as everything else; all that mattered was the bottom line, everybody acting as if winning could even cure cancer.

So this is what you always heard about Tony Douglass:

He just acts out this way because he wants to win so badly.

He’s just a perfectionist, is all, the way any high-strung artist would be.

And besides, isn’t the kid great box office, the way Nastase and Connors and McEnroe, the other bad boys, were before him?

Ted Carlyle, who’d followed tennis his whole life—for whom tennis was the one enduring love of his life—knew it
was all bullshit. He saw that from that first year at the French when Douglass came out of nowhere to make the finals at the age of seventeen. And what Ted who came out of the fifties, who grew up watching Laver and Rosewall and Hoad and Gonzales, mostly saw, what he
knew
, was that this kid was just a nasty fuck who had been blessed by the gods with gifts of touch and spin and the best and hardest and most accurate serve Ted had ever seen.

They said he had a genius for tennis.

He did, only a fool would dispute that.

But Ted Carlyle, who’d seen them all come and go, knew Tony Douglass had an even greater genius for something else:

Meanness.

He’d hit one of his huge right-handed serves and the ball would be called out. Only Douglass would think it was in. And that was all it took for the day or night to suddenly go terribly, hatefully wrong, no matter where the match was being played, no matter what the stakes. No matter how many innocent bystanders, calling the lines, sitting in the umpire’s chair, would be hurt before he was through. Suddenly there would be that madness in his eyes, in the whole way he carried himself, and he would be walking toward another chair umpire, pointing with his Wilson racket, saying, “Okay, now it’s my turn.”

That was his trademark line.

My turn….

It turned out Douglass didn’t make it past the semis of the Open that year, didn’t get his fourth Open title. He finally ran into a nineteen-year-old phenom named Ken Lockhart, one for whom that particular U.S. Open would be a coming-out party, Lockhart going on from winning that
Open to rule men’s tennis for the next ten years. Somehow he would do that as a complete gentleman, this left-hander from Armpit, Florida, who somehow evoked memories of Laver, as much for the way he carried himself as the way he played the game.