Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Except the official, who declared it out.

Tommy took a step toward the platform. The official cowered, but Tommy didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Was that ball out?”

The official nodded.

“Oh,” Tommy said, and shrugged. “From here it looked good, but I guess you can see better from where you’re sitting.”

He went back to the baseline and served the next point. He went on to win the match and advance to the finals, in which he played brilliantly, beating Roger MacReady in straight sets.

“And here’s Mrs.Tommy Terhune, the lovely Jennifer,” said the TV reporter, sticking a mike in her face. “Your husband was really commanding out there, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” she agreed.

“He played brilliant tennis, and he seems to have triumphed in the inner game as well, wouldn’t you say?”

“The inner game?”

“He didn’t lose his temper at all.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “No, he didn’t.”

“I’ll bet you’re proud of him.”

“Very proud.”

“You’ve been quoted as saying he’s always been a perfect gentleman off the court. Now he seems to be every bit the perfect gentleman on the court as well. That must be extremely gratifying to you.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling furiously. “Extremely gratifying.”

It was inthe U.S. Open that the extent of the change in Terrible Tommy Terhune became unmistakably evident. Earlier, prior to his still-secret visit to West Africa, some commentators had theorized that the brilliance of his play might be of a piece with the ungovernability of his temper. Passion, after all, was the common denominator. Put the one on a leash, they suggested, and the other might wind up hobbled in the bargain.

But this was clearly not the case. Tommy had an easy time of it in the early rounds at Flushing Meadows, winning every match in straight sets. In the quarterfinals, his Croatian opponent won a single game in the first set and none at all in the second and third, but the fellow’s play was not as pathetic as the score suggested. Tommy was simply everywhere, getting to every ball, his returns always on target and, more often than not, unreturnable.

The calls, of course, did not always go his way. But his reaction was never greater than a shrug or a raised eyebrow. Spectators looked for him to be struggling with his emotions, but what was becoming clear was that there was no struggle, and no emotions.

In the semifinals, Tommy’s opponent was the young Chinese-American Scott Chin, but most fans were looking past the semis to a final round that would see Tommy pitted once again with his Australian rival, Roger MacReady. But this was not to be — while Tommy moved easily past Chin, MacReady lost the fifth set to a previously unknown Belgian player named Claude Macquereau.

Two days later, after a women’s final in which one player grunted while the other wept, Terhune and Macquereau met for the men’s championship. If the fans had been disappointed by MacReady’s absence, the young Belgian soon showed himself as a worthy opponent for Tommy. His serve was strong and accurate, his game at net and at the baseline a near mirror image of Tommy’s. Macquereau won the first set 7–6, lost the second 7–5. Most games went to deuce, and most individual points consisted of long, wearying volleys marked by one impossible return after another.

By the third set, which Tommy won in a tiebreaker, the fans knew they were watching tennis history being made. Midway through the fourth set, won by Macquereau in an even more attenuated tiebreaker, the television commentators had run out of superlatives and the crowd had shouted itself hoarse. Both players, run ragged in the late-summer heat and humidity, looked exhausted, but both played as though they were fresh as daisies.

In the third game of the final set, a perfectly placed passing shot of Tommy’s was called out. The audience drew its collective breath — they knew the ball was in — and Tommy approached the platform.

“Ball was out?” he said conversationally.

The official managed a nod. The man must have known he’d missed the call, and must have been tempted to reverse himself. But all he did was nod.

“Okay,” Tommy said, and played the next point, while the audience released its collective breath in a great sigh that mingled relief with disappointment.

After ten games in the final set, they had taken turns breaking each other’s service, and were tied 5–5. In the eleventh game, Tommy served and went to the net, and Macquereau’s return flew past Tommy’s outstretched racquet and landed just inside the sideline.

The official called it out.

It was close, certainly closer than the call that had gone against Tommy earlier in the set, but the ball was definitely in and, more to the point, Tommy Terhune knew it was in. The game had been tied at 15–all, and this point put Tommy ahead, 30–15.

His response was immediate. He went to the service line, hit two serves into the net to tie the score at 30–all, then deliberately double-faulted a second time, putting Macquereau a point ahead, as he would have been had the call been correct.

The act was uncommonly gracious, and all the more so for coming when it did. It is, as one reporter pointed out, easier to give back a questionable point when you’re winning or losing by a considerable margin, but Tommy’s unprecedented act of chivalry might well cost him the championship.

Not so. Trailing 40–30, he won the next point with a service ace, then won the game by playing brilliantly for the next two points. The final game was almost anticlimactic; Macquereau, serving, seemed to know how it was going to end, and scored only a single point while Tommy broke his service to take the game, the set, the match, and the United States Open championship.

All of which made the aftermath just that much more tragic.

The whole worldknows the rest. How Tommy Terhune, flushed with triumph, accompanied by his curiously unemotional wife, returned to his hotel, racquet in hand. How Roger MacReady was waiting for them in the lobby, and accompanied them upstairs to their suite. How Jennifer explained haltingly that she and MacReady had fallen in love, that they had been, like, having an affair, and that she wanted Tommy to give her a divorce so that she and MacReady could be married.

She said all this calmly, expecting Tommy to take it every bit as calmly. Perhaps she thought it was a good time to tell him — riding high after his victory, he could presumably take a lost love in stride. In any event, Tommy had never shown much emotion off the court, and now was equally cool on it, so she knew she could count on him to be a gentleman about this. If he could be gallant enough to hand two points to Claude Macquereau through purposeful double faults, wouldn’t he be equally gallant and self-sacrificing now?

As it happened, he would not.

He was clutching his tennis racquet when she told him all this. It was the racquet he had been using ever since his return from Togo, and it had lasted longer than any racquet he had previously owned, because he had not once swung it at anything harder than a tennis ball.

By the time he let go of it now, it was in pieces, and his wife and his rival were both dead. He smashed the edge of the racquet into Roger MacReady’s head, striking him five times in all, fracturing his skull even as he smashed the racquet, and he went on swinging until all he had left in his hand was the jagged handle.

Which he continued to hold as he backed the terrified Jennifer into a corner, where he pinned her against the wall and drove the racquet handle into the hollow of her throat.

Then he picked up the phone and told the desk clerk to summon the police.