beating Montreal, Detroit had actually kept the Cup out of the arms of the enemy. When the Cup disappeared, so too did the photo and accompanying note.
Sid Abel shook Stan’s hand hard. He smiled down at him and grabbed his shoulder with muscular fingers.
“You’ve brought my baby back to me, Stan.”
“Yes sir,” Stan said.
Sid turned to the men who had driven Stan to Detroit.
“Look here,” he said, his tone turning angry, “everyone knows this is all Floyd’s fault. If Floyd hadn’t ended up face-first in the shitter when it was his turn to take the Cup, she never would have been nabbed. Floyd’s an ass, we all know that. An ass and a goddamn drunk. And don’t think we’re ever letting him near this thing again, even if he scores the goddamn winning goal next year. But you boys gotta do something about this. Make sure it doesn’t happen again. I mean, hockey players are going to get drunk at a party, you know what I mean? You can’t just hand this thing over and hope it goddamn makes it back in one piece.”
When Stan was loaded back into the sedan, alone now in the back seat, he had with him a brand new, handwritten contract from the League. He was to remain custodian in Toronto during the regular season and, in the summer, he would travel with the Cup, never letting it out of his sight. Sid Abel had put both hands on his shoulders and said, “The first goddamn thing he did was phone you guys—and he’s from Toronto. I don’t care what happened last year or whenever it was, Cooper here is your man.”
Stan had felt like he was being pushed into the floor. His stomach turned liquid while they wrote out the contract, but he signed without hesitation. He was young enough and without his wife, summers were his own. Better to be on the road than alone in the house.
Back on the highway, one of the League men passed a leather-covered flask over the seatback.
“Shit Stan, you lucked out there. There’s a dog-fuck of a job if I ever heard a one.”
“What exactly do you do?” Stan asked.
“Fuck you,” the man said, and both men in the front laughed loud and hard.
Stan felt himself laughing and was surprised. He hadn’t laughed for real in over a year. He swallowed some gin and passed the flask back up front.
Five
A cool July evening in 1979, at the Hotel Royal in Göteborg, Sweden. Stan wheeled the Cup to his room using a luggage dolly he borrowed from the bell captain. The party had been short and respectful, one of the family- and officials-only events Stan preferred, since rarely did anyone get too drunk at one of these and make a mess he would have to clean. The formal ceremonies had finished early, around ten in the evening, after a nine-course meal and several rounds of toasts. The young champion Swede, Oleg Bandol, had moved his smaller party of friends from the dining hall into the hotel bar, giving Stan a chance to put the Cup to bed early for a change.
As was his habit, he closed the trophy into the bathroom, in the tub behind a drawn shower curtain, then locked and unlocked the room door several times to test for any quirks in the ancient mechanism. Leaving lights on and the room radio tuned to a jazz station, just loud enough to be heard from the hallway, he hung the paper Do Not Disturb flyer on the doorknob and slipped quietly down the stairwell to the ornate lobby. Having earlier sussed the entire hotel, Stan knew to turn left at the tiny bronze statue of a naked woman and continue through a small wallpapered door, out the staff entrance and into a short alleyway leading to Drottninggatan, a main street in the city centre. In this way, he need not cross in front of the threshold to the bar where the remainder of the party could be heard singing and laughing.
Rooms are made secure through ideas as much as through locks. Stan tried always to leave hotels by himself, while others believed him still there. He had a reputation among the players for always retiring to his room as early as possible and staying there until very near flight time. He ordered a schedule of meals ahead of time through room service to maintain a steady pattern of food trays on the floor outside his door. A careful eye would notice the plate covers had been untouched, but hotels are not places for careful eyes. Being the boring old man who slept with the Cup was a style he cultivated. It was his freedom.
Stan walked the darkened streets of Göteborg in a fog of cool salt air, following a long canal east out of the main tourist district and into the first ring of homes. In the car on the way from the airport, he had begun to orient himself with the grid, using the position of the sun to get a sense of the city’s layout. Harbour to the southwest, municipal buildings in the east, houses in concentric rings from the centre to the suburbs. The front desks of hotels always had maps for the taking, and he would spend the short hours before any party, in any new city, studying the streets, delineating neighbourhoods and thumbing through the ads in local newspapers and telephone books for business addresses, marking out his route in his mind.
Such was his science that Stan rarely had any trouble finding a good tavern or local restaurant in any city he visited. He had no interest in hotel bars and recommended tourist spots. His habit was to find the quiet rooms where people were comfortable, where they might even be bored, near where lives were lived and children slept. Since his divorce, a domestic life had to be borrowed, and Stan found most good-sized cities to be generous with these things, if you knew where to look. He preferred streets trimmed with sitting rooms where open windows spilled the sounds of conversation and favourite television shows onto the road. He liked to watch men talk with each other in low-voiced, finger-pointing intimacy.
Past the edge of the deep, black Trädgårdsföreningen Park, the stable squares of downtown began to soften and curve. He walked the broad avenue of Norra Gubberogatan, slowing to watch two young women buy cigarettes from a wall-mounted machine on the edge of a small traffic oval. He stopped behind them and fiddled with the foreign change in his pocket. It was scenes like this he watched for, evidence of the hidden life of a town. The girls smiled at him, took their cigarettes and continued on down the road. Stan watched them turn into a doorway less than a block away. He bought himself a soft package of Kents and walked the short distance to the tavern.
As often happened for Stan in new cities, the evening became a corner table, some sweet dark local beers and his cigarettes. The two girls from the street sat at the bar and talked each other into tears about something lost to him. Wives came to retrieve their husbands and stayed for a short drink themselves before heading home, all arms at elbows and comfortable laughter. Old men in hats played cards. There was a smell of fish and malted vinegar. A newspaper on the next table showed the handsome young Bandol, local hero, in front of the Cup at the airport reception the day before. Stan recognized his own shoulder in the corner of the shot. But for the crazy language and the extreme blondness and beauty of all the women, Sweden had the feel of Canada. If you ignored the age of buildings and looked instead at how people walked down streets, Göteborg might be Thunder Bay. Even in July, you could see boys carrying bundles of hockey sticks, giant gear bags slung over their shoulders.
When the tavern closed for the night, Stan walked the residential streets, observing the turning out of bedroom lights, the soft blue flickering of late-night televisions. An hour before the sun, he made his way to the harbour on the Skeppsbron. There, a small restaurant fed breakfast to fishermen and dockworkers. He ate a cold herring salad and drank more beer. Knowing, obviously, Stan was not a local, the cook tried out his English on him. He talked to Stan about relatives in Sudbury, about watching hockey at the Montreal Forum on a vacation ten years earlier. At sunrise, he poured a shot of vodka for himself and Stan, to toast the day.
Stan made his way back downtown through a morning rush hour of bicycles and fresh blond people walking the sidewalks with purposeful strides. Shops and offices opened,
