Harlan Coben - Play Dead

The vibrations her leg caused eventually knocked her pencil-holder off the desk, but she did not stop to pick it up. After a few more minutes of leg shaking, Laura managed to dismiss the basketball player from her mind as Marty Tribble, her Director of Marketing, entered her office with a large smile.

Marty Tribble was not a man who smiled all that often during working hours. Laura watched him confidently stroll into her office, his hand pushing away the few strands of gray hair that had lasted the five decades of his life, his face beaming like a Little Leaguer after his first homerun.

‘We’ve just made the advertising coup of the year,’ Marty exclaimed.

Laura had never seen him act like this before. Marty Tribble had worked with Laura from Svengali’s conception. He was a serious-faced executive, a down-to-earth conservative in a rather liberal, flighty business. His sense of humor was famous around the office only because no one believed he had one. Crack a joke in front of ol’ Marty and you’d see the same reaction if you tickled a file cabinet. He was the office rock, not a man who became excited over trivialities.

‘Which product?’ she asked.

‘Our new line.’

‘The casual walking shoes and sport sneakers?’

‘The same.’

Her eyes met his and she smiled. ‘Sit down and start talking.’

The plodding Marty (he wanted to be called Martin but everyone called him Marty for that very reason) practically leaped into the chair, his legs showing a spry-ness not yet seen in the downtown Svengali headquarters.

‘We’re going to run a national advertising campaign on television starting this fall. We’ll introduce the entire line to the public.’

Laura waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He just continued to smile, looking like a game-show host who was trying to build suspense by not revealing the answer until after the last commercial. ‘Marty, that’s hardly an earth-shattering announcement.’

He leaned forward and spoke slowly. ‘It is when your spokesman is the sport’s idol of the decade. It becomes even more earth-shattering when that sport’s idol has never endorsed a product before.’

‘Who?’

‘David Baskin, alias White Lightning, the Boston Celtics superstar and three-time league MVP.’

His name struck her like a sharp slap. ‘Baskin?’

‘You heard of him?’

‘Of course, but you say he’s never done any endorsing before?’

‘Only those ads for handicapped children.’

‘Then why us?’

Marty Tribble shrugged. ‘Beats the hell out of me, but Laura, all we have to do is throw a good advertising blitz during basketball games in the fall and David Baskin’s broad shoulders will carry Svengali’s sneakers to the top of the sporting world. He’ll give us instant recognition and legitimacy in the market. It can’t miss. I’m telling you the public loves him.’

‘So what’s our next step?’

He reached into his breast pocket where he neatly kept his matching Cross gold pen and pencil. His fingers plucked out two tickets.

‘You and I are going to the Boston Garden tonight.’

‘What?’

‘We’re going to watch the Celtics play the Nuggets. The contracts are to be signed afterwards.’

‘So why do we have to go to the game?’

Again he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. For some strange reason, Baskin himself insisted on it. He said it would be good for your soul or something.’

‘You’re kidding.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s part of the deal.’

‘Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that if I don’t go to this game – ’

‘Then the deal is off. Right.’

Laura tilted her chair back again, her fingers interlocked, her elbows resting against the arm-rests. Her right leg started doing its gyrating dance of annoyance again. Slowly, a smile formed on her lips. She began to nod her head, quietly chuckling to herself.

Marty eyed her worriedly. ‘So, Laura, what do you say?’

For a moment, the room was still. Then Laura turned her eyes toward her Director of Marketing.

‘It’s game time.’

The Boston Garden experience had been nothing short of shocking. When Laura first entered the old eyesore in North Station, she was skeptical. The Garden? This decrepit old building was the Boston Garden? It looked more like the Boston Penitentiary. Most arenas in the country were modern glass and chrome towers, shining and sleek with air-conditioning and cushioned seats. But not the Garden. The Celtics’ home was a run-down, seedy hunk of cement with a beer-stale odor and an oppressive heat all its own. The splintered seats were hard, broken, uncomfortable. Glancing around her, Laura was reminded more of a Dickens novel than a sporting event.

But then she watched the thousands of anxious fans fill the Garden like parishioners on Christmas morning. To them, the climate was utopian, the aroma was that of roses, the seating arrangements plush and luxurious. It was as if these people thrived on escaping the niceties of the day to delve into the more perfect dwelling of their Celtics. Here was the Boston Garden, the zenith of the world’s millions of college, high-school, backyard and driveway basketball courts, the place that countless children had imagined hitting the winning jump shot, grabbing the winning rebound. She looked up at the rusted rafters and saw the championship banners and retired numbers standing proudly like medals on a general’s chest. Silly as it sounded, this place was history, as much a part of Boston as the Bunker Hill Monument and Paul Revere’s house, but there was one big difference: the Celtics were living history, constantly changing, consistently unpredictable, always coddled and loved by their fair city.

The frenzied crowd cheered when the players took the floor for warm-ups. Laura spotted David immediately. From her seat in the third row, she tried to catch his eye but it was as if he were alone on the parquet floor, completely oblivious to the thousands who surrounded him. His eyes were those of a man possessed, of a man on a mission from which he could not be diverted. But Laura thought she also noted a peacefulness in the bright green, the calmness of a man who was where he wanted to be.

Next: the opening tap.

Laura’s skepticism dissolved away slowly, like acid eating through a steel chain. By the end of the first quarter, she found herself smiling. Then laughing. Then cheering. Finally awestruck. When she turned around and gave the man behind her a ‘high five,’ she had officially been converted. The basketball game reminded her of the first time she had been to the New York Ballet at Lincoln Center as a wide-eyed five-year-old girl. There was a similar artistry to the basketball players’ movements, like a complicated, well-choreographed dance interrupted by unpredictable obstacles that only made the spectacle all the more fantastic to the eye.

And David was the principal dancer.

She immediately understood the sweeping praise. David was poetry in motion, diving, leaping, swooping, spinning, twisting, chasing, ducking, pirouetting. There was a tenacious, aggressive gracefulness to his movements. One moment he was the cool floor leader, the next a daredevil trying the impossible like some comic-book hero. He would drive toward the basket only to have a man cut him off and then, like a true artist, he created, often in mid-air. When he shot, his eyes would focus on the rim with a concentration so strong she was sure the backboard would shatter. He had a sixth sense on the court, never looking where he passed, never glancing at the ball on his fingertips. When he dribbled, it was like the ball was part of him, just an extension of his arm that had been there since birth.

And then the finale.

Scant seconds remained, the outcome very much in doubt. The beloved boys from Beantown were down by one point. A man wearing the familiar Celtics green and white passed the ball to David. Two men from the enemy camp covered him like a blanket. One second remained. David turned and launched his unique, high-arching, fade-away jumpshot. The shot lofted the orange sphere impossibly high, heading for its target from an impossible angle. The crowd stood in unison. Laura’s pulse raced as she watched the ball begin its descent, the game and hearts of the crowd riding on its slow movement toward the basket. A buzzer sounded. The ball gently kissed the top of the glass backboard, and then the bottom of the net danced as the ball went through for two points. The crowd screamed. Laura screamed.