He waited until Samuel was alone near the office before asking for the conversation he had rehearsed in the car. He did not raise his voice, because he wanted Samuel to hear reason rather than temper. He laid it out plainly: the video was unfair, the demonstration had not been a real match, and the only clean way to settle it was a proper rematch, with rules and time and no crowd filming over shoulders. Samuel listened without interrupting, which Marcus first mistook for agreement, and then Samuel said no, simply and without heat, as if the answer had been settled long before Marcus walked in. Marcus tried again, saying people thought he had lost, and Samuel asked quietly whether he had, and Marcus felt the question land as a mirror he did not want to look into. When Marcus said he had a reputation to protect, Samuel told him a reputation was not a piece of equipment that could be repaired by winning another match. Marcus argued that he was a student too, and Samuel agreed, then told him to start acting like one. He left saying he would find Arthur himself, and Samuel warned him that approaching Arthur to settle a score would be a mistake, not because Arthur was too old to defend himself, but because Arthur was old enough to know when someone was trying to use him to repair an ego.
That evening he drove to the café across the street and asked the woman behind the counter whether she knew where Arthur lived. She said Arthur came in sometimes, usually with Coach Brooks, but she did not know where he lived and had never heard him mention a martial arts school of his own. When Marcus said he was trying to contact him, she said she did not think Arthur would appreciate being tracked down. Back at home he searched online, and the search itself became an education in absence. His own life was thoroughly documented in competition records, photographs, and interviews, but Arthur left almost nothing. There were fragments, a name in an old results list, a photograph that took too long to load, and a page that had disappeared. Marcus clicked through dead links late into the night, and the more he searched the more the absence felt deliberate, not like a man who had been forgotten but like a man who had chosen not to build his life around being found.
The only useful lead came from Robert Ellis, an older member who had trained at Blackstone for almost twenty years and remembered details other people overlooked. Robert was a retired firefighter with a gray mustache and a patient, unhurried way of speaking, and when Marcus mentioned Arthur's name his face changed, not with surprise exactly, but with recognition mixed with something quieter, almost reverent. Robert said he had thought Arthur was living in Europe, and when Marcus said everybody kept saying that, Robert smiled faintly and said that was where Arthur had gone. Marcus asked what Arthur had done, expecting a record or a title he could measure himself against, and Robert said simply that Arthur had been one of the best grapplers he had ever seen. When Marcus pressed him, asking whether that meant better than him, Robert shook his head and said that was not a useful comparison, because Arthur had never been trying to be Marcus. Arthur had competed internationally, had trained with extraordinary people, and had won tournaments most of them had only watched from the sidelines, yet he had never built his life around being famous.
Robert said Arthur had been patient in a way that was rare even among good coaches, and he listened, really listened, in a way that made people feel heard rather than evaluated. He could walk into a room full of champions and make them feel like beginners without humiliating a single one of them, not by showing them up but by asking a question or adjusting a hand position by a few inches. He let them discover, for themselves, how much they still had to learn. Marcus asked why, if Arthur had been that good, he had disappeared, and Robert paused for a long moment, looking not at Marcus but past him toward the mats. He said that story was not his to tell. He said it without drama and without apology, and Marcus understood, even as frustration rose in him, that Robert was drawing a line not out of secrecy but out of respect. Pressing harder, Marcus realised, would only prove that he had not yet learned the difference between wanting an answer and deserving one.