The Mystery of the Russian Ransom (5 page)

“Say it,” Muck said.

“Okay,” Nish said with a sullen look. “I’ll pay for whatever needs to be done – but I have no money.”

Mr. Yakushev translated for the police. Travis figured he’d left out the bit about Nish having no money.

The policeman nodded at his colleagues and they released their grip on Nish’s arms.

The officer walked up to Nish, put his face right up to the young hockey player’s, and bawled him out loudly in Russian for a full minute, then suddenly stopped, turned, and walked angrily away.

“Man,” Nish said. “That is baaaaaad breath!”

“Just be thankful you have any breath of your own left in you, young man,” said Muck. “This was even stupider than usual for you. Another trick like that, and you’ll not only not be playing, you’ll be on your way home.”

Muck walked away as abruptly as the policeman had, and before long the crowd had all departed.

Nish blinked after them; only a small group of Owls were left now at the side of the giant table-top game.

“Can’t anyone around here take a joke?”

Sam had had enough. “Don’t you get it?” she said to him. “
You
are the joke.”

O
lga brought me a gift this morning. She was smiling again and very friendly. Too friendly. And why a gift? What is she expecting in return? I have nothing here but my pack. I have no money.

“Open,” she kept saying. I didn’t want to open any gift. Then I’d have to say thank you or something. Thanks for keeping me locked up away from my mother and father?

But she wouldn’t leave until I opened it, so I gave a big sigh she couldn’t possibly miss and I
opened the bag she’d brought. I pulled out a wooden doll. It was mostly round and smooth and beautifully painted, a young girl with fair hair, a nice smile, and cheeks as red as a fire engine.

Olga said the doll looked like me. I couldn’t really see that, but I did sort of like it – even if I stopped playing with dolls years ago.

“
Matryoshka
,” Olga said several times until I was able to repeat it: “
ma-tree-oosh-ka
.”

“That is name of doll,” Olga said. “They are called
matryoshka
. I will show you.”

Olga twisted the doll sharply so that it came apart in the middle. She pulled off the top. Inside the doll was another doll, exactly the same.

“Neat!” I said.

“Wait,” she said. “There is more.”

She pulled out the inside doll and twisted it apart, revealing yet another doll: exactly the same but smaller, so that it fit inside the other.

She did this five times until there were six identical dolls lined up, each one an exact copy of the other, except smaller. I put the smallest one back inside the second-smallest one, then that one
back inside the third-smallest, until finally there was just the one again, so perfectly painted it seemed there could only be the one doll.

“It is yours,” Olga said. “Gift from Olga to Sarah.”

“
Spasiba
,” I said to her. She had taught me the Russian word for thank you.

It seemed odd to be receiving a gift from your kidnapper, and even odder to be grateful for it, but everything about this experience is odd.

The doll – or dolls – remind me of that funny thing Muck said to our parents the evening we got together to talk about this trip. What was it again? Russia is a riddle or something, inside a mystery, wrapped in an … an … enigma. Yes, enigma. Something impossible to understand – sort of like Nish!

Olga said I should get ready for another workout on the ice, so I did. I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I was glad for the chance to burn off some energy doing what I like to do best.

The two young men, Pavel and Sacha, were there again. Both had on the same socks and jerseys
as Olga had given me to wear – all red, except for the golden two-headed eagle.

Sacha spoke very little English, but Pavel knew lots of English words. He was friendly – more so than Sacha. Pavel said we should run some more drills together.

That was fine with me. It’s not much fun skating alone anyway. Once you’ve done the “alone” tricks – fire a puck off the crossbar, skate some crossover patterns, fool with the pucks – it quickly gets old.

We were warming up when the quieter guy, Sacha, skated over to me.

“Show me trick,” he said.

I wasn’t sure what he meant. So he pretended to be scooping the puck up the way I’ve been doing lately. He bent over, laid his stick flat on the ice, twirled it, and then held it out to me as if a puck were sitting on the blade.

But I was alone when I did that the other day. They had come out later.

They must have filmed me doing it. I guess Sacha saw it and was impressed.

We went over to where the other skater, Pavel, had dropped some pucks. The ice was still forming, and the pucks weren’t frozen, so it was easy enough to do the trick. I got mine up first scoop, twirled, and handed it to Sacha.

He tried it several times with no luck. Pavel came over and began working on it, too. He almost succeeded on the first try, but the puck flew away when he tried the twirl move to bring the puck onto the surface of the blade.

I worked with them for a while. They were laughing at their mistakes, but soon they started to get the hang of it. Pavel picked one up perfectly and did a big whoop of triumph.

A whistle blew. Loud.

Standing on the players’ bench, staring hard at us from under his hat, was the tall man I had seen watching me before.

He shouted out something in Russian. He seemed angry. Sacha and Pavel jumped at his orders. Pavel seemed especially upset.

We began running drills. They set up the first ones: breakout patterns, three-on-ones against a
pylon – hardly tough to get around that! – and a few skating drills that involved turning at full speed once you hit the red line and skating backward at top speed until you crossed the blue lines. I could soon tell that I was better at that drill than the young men.

I didn’t see the tall man again – thankfully! – but I was aware that the cameras were tracking us. You could sometimes even hear the whirr of a camera turning if you were close enough to the boards.

But why? What is the purpose of it all?

What is at the bottom of this
matryoshka
of a hockey prison?

T
ravis leaned back and strained to look down the bench, all the way to the far end, where the spare goalie sat during games.

Jenny was there in full equipment, gloves on, mask off, Screech Owls ball cap on her head, with her brown ponytail sticking out the back. Jeremy was in nets today for the Owls’ match against Saint Petersburg, considered one of the tournament favorites to take the gold medal.

Normally, as the backup goaltender, Jenny would be the last Owl along the bench. But there was one more player sitting beyond her, one player seemingly separated from the rest of the team.

Nish.

Travis could see enough of the chubby Owls defenseman to know that Nish was in his “keep-out-the-world” position. His back was almost horizontal, meaning Nish was sitting with his head resting on his shin pads, his face staring directly down at his skates. Travis didn’t have to see Nish’s round face to know what color it would be.

It was a wonder there wasn’t steam coming out Nish’s ears. Muck had told him to “staple” his big butt there right after warm-up. He didn’t need to explain. Nish was still in the coach’s bad books. First it was the glory goal against Minsk, then the incident with the giant-sized table-hockey game. Muck was sending a tough message to their assistant captain.

Travis breathed deeply. The Owls
needed
Nish. The Saint Petersburg Pushkins were no
push
overs. They were well outfitted, well coached and extremely
fast. Not only that, but they had a good feel for the larger ice surface, which the Owls had only played on a few times. Dmitri had helped explain the added importance of “cycling” pucks out of corners and the little bit of extra time defense had to get shots in from the point, but being told in the dressing room and putting it into practice on the ice were worlds apart.

The Owls could use Nish on defense. More significantly, they needed Sarah’s speed up front. Andy was a good fill-in, but he wasn’t the fastest skater, and so Travis’s line – with Dmitri on the far wing – was struggling.

Muck had told them before the game that the Pushkins were named after a famous Russian poet. Travis thought a North American team named for a poet would be laughed off the ice, but the tough Russian side was up 3–0 before the Owls finally caught a break. It was Fahd, of all people, who broke up the middle with the puck. Fahd was the last Owl you’d expect to carry the puck – usually he was quick to dish off to whomever was closest to him – but it was almost as if little Fahd knew that
if Nish wasn’t there to lug the puck out of the Owls’ end, he had better do so instead.

Travis moved in behind Fahd and tapped his stick twice, quickly, just to let him know he was there. Muck had told them no one was more disliked on a team than a player who hammered his stick endlessly on the ice to signal he was open and wanted a pass. If you wanted to tell a teammate you were open, Muck said, a quick tap would do.

Fahd dropped the puck as he went over the Saint Petersburg blue line, and Travis picked it up, curling over against the boards.

He saw Dmitri coming hard down the right side, but there was no clear lane for a safe pass.

Travis fired the puck hard instead, far ahead of Dmitri. It hit the far boards and spurted back, perfectly timed for Dmitri to pick it up in full flight.

The Owls had seen it a hundred times before: Dmitri using his speed on the outside to loop around the defense; Dmitri cutting back to the net, a shoulder deke, front-hand fake, backhand, roofer – the water bottle spinning high as the puck flew in just under the crossbar.

“I didn’t know you could carry the puck like that,” Travis said as he gently cuffed the back of Fahd’s helmet.

Fahd was laughing. “Neither did I.”

The Owls took it to 3–2 when Derek Dillinger managed to tip a Fahd shot –
Fahd again! –
from the point late in the second when the Owls got a power play after one of the Pushkins had tripped Jesse Highboy.

And they tied the game 3–3 halfway through the third when Willie Granger took a hard shot from the right circle that bounced off two different Pushkin defenders, looped high in the air, and somehow dropped onto the back of the Pushkin goaltender and dribbled into the net.

Five minutes left in the game. Muck walked to the far end of the bench. He passed right by Jenny and stood for a moment behind Nish, who was still sitting there with his face pressed hard between his knees.

Muck leaned over and touched Nish’s shoulder.

He hadn’t said a word. Nish hadn’t looked back to ask. Both of them knew exactly what it meant.
Nish was over the boards in a flash, not even waiting for Jenny to open the gate, and was stretching and twisting as he moved down ice to take up his position for the face-off. Lars, the Owls’ other best defenseman, was on the other side. Travis knew immediately Muck’s strategy: go for it; put Nish out when he had something to prove.

Travis smiled to himself. It was a wonder that Nish didn’t come with a bunch of buttons and switches down his front, because Sarah and Sam knew exactly what buttons to push to get him going or to bring him down. And Muck always knew which switch to flip when he needed something special from the goofy defenseman.

But that was Wayne Nishikawa, thought Travis. You couldn’t have one side without the other. You got the total nutcase, the troublemaker, the goof one minute; and the next minute, you got the skilled hockey player with the heart of a lion.

Gordie Griffith took the face-off and managed to kick the puck back to Lars, who immediately skated back behind the Screech Owls’ net – “Lars’s Office” the Owls sometimes called it – and there he
waited. A Pushkin forechecker swooped in to see if he could scare up a pass, but Lars calmly tapped the puck off the back boards and back to his own stick as the checker flew by.

Lars faked a pass to Jesse on the one side, and instead backhanded the puck over to Nish in the far corner. Nish began to rumble down the ice, lugging the puck as if it were taped to his stick.

Nish worked past all three forwards – then, just as he hit the blue line, he put the puck over to Gordie, who quickly rapped it off the boards back to Lars.

Lars took it as he crossed the blue line, then did his spinnerama move to elude one checker. He faked a shot, balked on the down-swing as a Pushkin defender went down to block the shot, and gently threw a saucer pass over the outstretched body of the checker that landed to the left of the net, right in Nish’s wheelhouse.

Nish hammered home a slap shot that gave the goaltender no chance.

Owls 4, Saint Petersburg 3. Four goals in a row by the Owls to take the lead and only minutes left to play.

The Owls on the ice raced to congratulate Nish, who could normally be expected to throw his body against the glass or go down spinning on his knees and fake he was shooting an arrow into the net. But this time there was nothing.

Nothing.

Travis and Dmitri started laughing. Here was something brand-new: Humble Nish. Humble Nish lowered his head, gave no high-fives, no cheers, not even a smile. He returned to the bench as quietly as if he were returning a library book, and sat once again at the far end.

Travis couldn’t resist. He turned to look back. Muck was staring at Mr. D, who was rolling his eyes.

Travis couldn’t be certain, but he thought that Muck was stifling a laugh.