Šíma looks at me for a moment. “Very calm.”
“It’s a quarterfinal that doesn’t exist yet. Ask me after the R16 match.”
“What’s the report for Mexico?”
“Win.”
He nods as if I’ve said something wise. I’ve said something obvious. Around here, the difference is mostly volume.
Training is training. We run the shape until the shape stops needing thought, and the staff film all of it from a little scaffold tower, as if the tower will protect them if the shape turns out to be wrong. On the bus back, I sleep eleven minutes. Quality minutes. Novotný claims I snored, which is rich, coming from a man whose sinuses hold their own training camp every night.
Back in the room, he opens the argument anyway, because Novotný without an argument is a man without a hobby.
“I don’t snore,” he says.
“The walls disagree.”
“That’s the air conditioning.”
“The air conditioning doesn’t apologize in its sleep. You apologized to somebody named Roman at three in the morning. Twice.”
“I don’t know anybody named Roman.”
“Then you owe a stranger two apologies.” I take my jacket. “Dinner. Damián found the place, so wear something you can concentrate in.”
Damián picks the restaurant because Tobík Hájek found it first and apparently Atlanta has handed him a map the rest of us haven’t earned. A smokehouse a few blocks off the Beltline. Brick walls and no menus on the tables. There’s a line out the door, and Damián walks us past it with one nod at the counter. The nod privileges are Tobík’s, earned one brisket at a time. Damián has apparently borrowed them for the evening.
“You don’t order here,” he says. “You accept what they are willing to put in front of you.”
I respect this restaurant already.
The trays come out loaded. Brisket, ribs, sausage, white bread nobody needs and everybody takes. I go quiet the way you go quiet in a church. Somebody kept a fire honest for fourteen hours to make this happen, and they don’t even put that on a sign. They just hand you the tray and let you find out.
Tomáš reaches for the sauce.
“Put that down.”
“It’s sauce. It’s on the table.”
“So are napkins. You don’t put napkins on the brisket.” I take his plate and build it properly. Slice, pickle, onion, bread underneath to catch what matters. “Sauce is for doubt. There is no doubt at this table. Now eat.”
He eats, and his eyes close.
“Kovár.”
“I know.”
Damián watches the ceremony with his arms crossed and the particular smile of a man being proven right in public. “Two weeks of hotel food,” he says. “I should have staged this rescue earlier.”
“The eggs are a cover-up. I’m still building the case.”
“Tobík found this place his first month over here. He says he’s tried many barbecue places but keeps coming back here.”
“It would be hard to go anywhere else,” I say. “And now you get to come here whenever you want.”
“I know,” he says, happier than the sentence deserves.
He looks good. Not the face, the posture. He sits the way you sit when a city has started asking you a question and you are pretending you have not already heard it. Something about that tilts the room a few degrees. I put it level again. Different life. Different math. Not my situation.
