hotel in time for the morning shift change. A new young man he’d never seen before was exchanging covered trays outside his room door, loading a still-full dinner tray onto his cart and placing a breakfast plate and coffee urn on the floor. Stan waited for him to wheel the cart down the hallway before trying his key. There was no sound of jazz from behind the door, and no light from underneath. The key stuck in the lock, at first refusing to turn, and he had to stand back and make sure of the number on the door.
He saw the Cup immediately as the shaft of light from the open door hit the bed where it stood, out of its case, gleaming like a child caught in a playful prohibition. Beside it, asleep on Stan’s pillow, lay a young woman. She was curled on her side, one hand beneath her head, the sheet drawn to just below her shoulders, naked. She snored in a light, fluttering kind of way, and her blonde hair fell across her face. The Cup stood upright on the other side of the bed, bobbing slowly to the rhythm of her breathing.
Stan nudged his breakfast and coffee into the room with his shoe, and closed the door. He opened the curtains a crack and examined the Cup in a thin stream of morning light. Nothing had been added or altered and the bowl was empty. There were some fingerprints and hand smudges around the rim of the bowl and at the base, the only remnants of whoever had moved it from the bathtub. They were large fingerprints, male. Stan checked the bathroom next. A small overnight bag leaned in one corner of the counter, a toothbrush, lipstick and mascara beside it on the marble. The shower curtain was drawn just as he’d left it, and no towels had been used.
As quietly as possible, Stan removed his shoes and jacket, reclosed the curtain and stretched himself out on the small couch near the window. He listened to the beautiful snoring of the young woman and slipped into sleep. Less than an hour later he woke to the muted, almost imperceptible sound of bare feet on the carpet and turned his head in time to see a naked young woman glide into the bathroom. She returned wearing his bathrobe, picked up the breakfast tray from the floor and sat with it on her knees on the edge of the bed, smiling at him.
“You are Stanley,” she said in perfect Scandinavian English.
“That’s true,” he responded, sitting upright and rubbing sleep from his eyes. His body ached for the bed and hours more sleep.
“You are not surprised to see me here?” the girl laughed.
Stan looked at her more closely. She could not have been more than twenty and, unlike almost everyone else in the city, she was not a real blonde. Her hair fell golden past her shoulders but it was streaked with dark that pooled at the roots. She let strands of it cover her eyes, and smiled coyly through them. She bit the insides of her mouth, which pushed her lips out in a nervous kissing motion.
“Not so surprised,” he said, trying to return her smile. “The boys think this kind of thing is very funny.”
The girl removed the stainless steel lid from Stan’s breakfast and helped herself to a piece of bacon. She looked at the coffee longingly.
“Please, eat it all,” he said. “I’ve had my breakfast. It would just go to waste.”
“Yes, I am a joke,” she said. “But you ruined the joke because you weren’t here. Oleg told me to stay until you returned. He said you had probably just gone out for a walk. I listened to your music, I ate from your dinner tray, I watched a little television, but then it was so late.”
Her name was Ana, and she was a prostitute, a student at the technical school who paid for her studies with dates. She was from across the water in Copenhagen where she had been raised the youngest of seven children, all boys but her. Her father worked at a brewery, brought his work home with him every night, and her mother had walked away from the house when Ana was nine years old, never to return. Ana assumed her mother was dead.
“Otherwise, how is it possible?” she said. “I have always thought she fell into a canal. It happens, people fall into canals and they are gone.”
All this Stan learned in the first half-hour he spent with the beautiful young woman he had found sleeping in his bed. Ana had built her young professional reputation on a skill for massage and that irresistible nervous habit of biting the inside of her mouth. She worked all the downtown hotels and had a very regular clientele of visiting Danish businessmen and local politicians. Her specialty was something she called the knee massage. With the client face down on the bed, she would remove all her clothing, spread oil across the client’s back, her own arms and knees, and climb aboard. She was small enough not to do any damage but just heavy enough to make a difference. She described the whole procedure to Stan, posing in the bed to show the posture.
“It is very soothing, and Oleg has already paid for it, so it is free to you. Come, take off your clothes. You look tired. I will put you to sleep in no time.”
When Stan woke later that afternoon, he was again alone in his room. The Cup stood on the floor beside the bed where he himself had moved it. He felt rested and relaxed and his back was looser than it had felt in years. On the bedside table was a note written in green hotel pen ink.
Oleg wanted me to find out for him why you are called Two-Second Stanley. I will have to tell him I still do not know. Take care of yourself. Ana.
Stan first crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the Cup in order to escort it to Finland. This was in the 1970s, twenty years into his tenure as keeper of hockey’s championship prize. In the almost twenty years that then followed his first trip, Stan crossed the Atlantic Ocean at least once a year, often more than once. His cabin home on Lake Simcoe contained hockey pucks and shot glasses from Sweden, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia and Russia. The Iceland trip was unplanned, an emergency refuelling stop on the way back from Norway. They were let off the plane to stretch and Stan had walked the trophy around the outpost tarmac, amazed at the rawness of the landscape. Jagged rock peaks surrounded the airport and steam rose from fissures in the land all around. He told himself he’d make a special trip back there someday, but never did.
Twice in his travels, Stan was detained at borders under the suspicion the Cup or its case was being used to smuggle something in or out of the country. In 1985, the Cup was confiscated at the airport in Prague. Stan stayed awake for thirty-six hours in an airport detention cell waiting to have the Cup returned to him, and then refused to board a plane until he himself was allowed to dismantle the trophy in the airport and make sure nothing had been altered or removed. Ten armed guards watched and laughed at the old man from Canada unscrewing the bowl from the top of the trophy and sticking his arm into it up to the shoulder, feeling around inside for whatever might have been left there in the time he had lost touch with it. When he pulled out a Czech flag, the room erupted into laughter and cheers.
Flashcubes bounced off polished silver. Smiling and shaking his head, Stan respectfully folded the flag and handed it to the nearest guard, but the armed man insisted he take it with him. Then in turn, as though somehow these men had not had enough of it in the preceding thirty-six hours, each guard ran his hand along the side of the Cup.
Over the years, Stan had removed hundreds of stickers and decals from the sides and especially the bottom of the Cup. He had untied countless neckties and pairs of suspenders attached beneath the bowl, fished out any number of folded notes and foreign bills slipped behind the nameplates, and unscrewed at least three false plates containing the names of local dignitaries, children and historical figures, one, in fact, bearing the name of the Pope. From the bowl, at the end of parties, Stan had removed pieces of cake, an entire roasted turkey, numerous cigars (some uncut and still in their wrappers), many sleeping cats, and exactly twenty-three pairs of panties, sixteen bras and three garter belts. Once, in Stockholm, he woke to discover the entire Cup, top to bottom, had been painted yellow.
Late in life, Stan calculated he had
