“Tomorrow night we have our first game,” he said. “This is the round-robin part of the tournament. From now on there’s going to be scouts in the crowds checking you out. Remember four things.…”

He pulled out a piece of paper and started reading from it.

“The first thing is that these coaches know basketball; you’re not going to impress them with any sloppy play. The second thing is that they already have their squads at their schools, and they’re looking for players who can fit in with their team, not be the team. Third, they’re looking for guys with a complete game. That means defense as well as offense. And last, and most important, don’t talk to any of them without my permission. I see you talking to anybody that even smells like a scout and I’m putting you on the bench for the next game. Everybody dig that?”

Everybody said that they dug it, and Cal told us to go on home and report back to the gym the next night at six o’clock. I took a quick shower and then found Cal. He was talking to Matt Lee. I waited for him to finish, and then I went up to him. We went across town, and he took me down to Fifty-third Street to the Museum of Modern Art. We walked around there while we talked.

“So how he know about the team?” he said.

“I don’t know how he know,” I said. “I think he does, though.”

“Why?” Cal asked

I ran down the stuff about Paul getting into trouble with the guy who ran the club and that this Rashid character worked for the same guy. All the time I’m rapping Cal is looking at pictures, but I could tell his mind was working overtime. If I even said a word that he didn’t get, he would make me go back over it again. I told him all about the checks, how me and Mary-Ann had got them, about Ugly, the whole bit.

“What you know about this guy who runs the club?” Cal asked.

“He thinks he’s bad,” I said. “Always trying to style, showing off his bread and that kind of thing.”

“Is he bad?”

“He don’t look that bad to me,” I said. “I seen some bad dudes before. Badder than this guy.”

“Yeah, and you and Mary-Ann went into his office and took the checks and he didn’t say nothing to nobody?”

“No,” I said. “And he had to know it was gone because he was only in Chicago for a day, he couldn’t have forgot it.”

Cal stopped dead in his tracks and looked at me. His face changed so quick I thought he was going off or something. He looked at me for a minute and then walked over to a bench that faced a large painting.

“See this picture?” he said. “It’s about the Spanish Civil War.”

“If you say so, man,” I said.

“This cat from Chicago?” he asked.