The open house had been Simon Greer's idea in the way that most things at Copperline were Simon Greer's idea, which was to say it had begun as a sentence spoken too loudly. A free evening, he had announced on Tuesday, doors open, mats open, bring a friend, bring a neighbour, bring anyone who had ever walked past the big copper-coloured sign on Alameda and wondered what went on inside. There would be juice for the visitors and coffee in paper cups and a timetable of small demonstrations, and at the centre of it, because Simon could never resist a centre, there would be a friendly technical exhibition between the club's own champion and, well, and Dee.
By six o'clock on Friday the club was fuller than Dolores Marenco had ever seen it on a night when she was not alone with a mop. The front desk, which she wiped down every evening after closing, was covered in sign-up sheets and a bowl of mints that Simon kept replenishing from a bag in his pocket as if the bowl refilled itself by magic and he was only helping. The big windows that faced the street had been cleaned that afternoon, not by her, which she noticed at once and tried generously not to mind, though whoever had done them had left a long arc of smear at exactly head height, right where the evening light came through. Families stood along the wall where the heavy bags hung. A man she recognised from the morning classes held a toddler up on his shoulders. Two women from the bakery across the road had come in their work aprons. Somebody's grandfather had brought a folding chair of his own and set it down in the front row with the air of a man who had attended enough events in his life to know that seating was always somebody else's afterthought.
Dee stood at the edge of the main mat in clothes that were not hers in any way she was used to. Jenna Park had lent her a clean white gi top, because her own had gone into the wash on Thursday and had not come out in time, and the belt Jenna had found for her in the lost property cupboard was a brown so old and frayed that it might once have been black or might once have been anything. She had refused, at first. She had refused for a day and a half, in fact, in several rooms and to several people, and then Yusuf Adeyemi had telephoned her on Thursday evening and had not argued with her at all, which was his way, and had simply said that a demonstration was a thing one person owed another when both of them had agreed to learn something, and that she was not being asked to prove anything, and that if Blake Rennert wanted to make a fool of the occasion then the occasion would survive him. Yusuf was sixty-eight and retired and his knees sounded like gravel in a bucket when he stood up, and Dee had known him since she was nineteen years old, and she had never once won an argument against his silences.
So the terms had been set, in writing, because Sam Whitaker had insisted on it with a referee's horror of the unofficial. One demonstration round. Standing start. No strikes of any kind. No slamming. If either of them went to the ground it would be controlled or Sam would step in. A tap, a verbal stop, or Sam's hand on a shoulder ended everything, instantly, no argument, no finishing a technique for the look of it. Sam had read the terms aloud in the office with Simon nodding over his desk and Eddie Krol standing in the doorway with his arms folded, and Dee had watched Blake while the terms were read, and Blake had examined his fingernails through all of them like a man being read the weather in a city he did not live in.
"You good with all that, champion?" Sam had asked, in the mild voice he used for people he suspected were not listening.
"I'm good," Blake had said. "It's a demo. How complicated can it get?"