A Woman of Valor by Topol Allan

Author:Topol, Allan [Topol, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Trab Publishing
Published: 2011-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Michael Holt was waiting on the tennis court when Charlie got there. He was filled with fear and apprehension when he met Charlie, as he was every Wednesday evening. His eyes kept looking around the club, searching for the figure who would leap onto the court and seize him. He kept trying to formulate what he would say to the government agents as they took him away.

Then there was his peculiar, almost eerie relationship with Charlie. They never spoke to one another except for hello, goodbye, and the verbal exchanges related to the tennis game—love, out, game, etc. That was another one of Brett's instructions to Michael.

"Don't talk to him at all, Michael," Brett had admonished sternly. Michael resented the instruction. He knew what was behind it, a feeling on Brett's part that Michael was too weak, too susceptible, that he would end up befriending Charlie, even feeling sorry for him.

Brett's instruction had another strange consequence. It led Michael and Charlie to communicate with their eyes. There was Michael, who knew every detail of Charlie's life, sympathizing with the agony and anguish the man was going through. And there was Charlie, concerned mostly with his own plight, but occasionally his mind wandered, contemplating what this man Michael, who seemed typically middle-class, was really like, who he was, and what brought them together.

They were two prisoners, held captive by a more powerful force, the man Michael knew as Brett and Charlie knew as a mysterious nameless face with a glass eye in the black limousine. Like two puppets suspended on different ends of the same string, held tightly at the center, they roamed around the tennis court, serving, hitting baseline shots, and running to the net. Michael was the better player, but not by a great margin. Each had periodic lapses in concentration during the game, when the pressure of the real purpose of their silent meeting became overwhelming. Those more often than not decided the winner.

Michael realized that Brett had been quite right in silencing their verbal communication. Even without words, he began to feel an attachment for Charlie. He could see that Charlie had lost weight in the weeks that they had been playing, that there were large bags of flesh forming under his eyes, that his appearance was increasingly unkempt.

When the hour was over, Michael wanted to stop and say to him, "Don't let it eat you up, old man. We do what we have to." Or "How about joining Kate and me for dinner tonight? You look like you could use a good thick steak." But he had his orders. Instead, he gave Charlie a nod and a cursory "See you next week," as each picked up the racket cover the other had brought.

Charlie left the club immediately after the match, still wearing his sweaty tennis clothes as he did every week. Not Michael. He headed for the locker room and a long shower, to cleanse, to purify. Then with the brown envelope still carefully in the racket cover, he drove to Brett's Georgetown house and handed the sealed envelope to Brett.

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