He could have delivered it on the first day. He had rehearsed, in the weeks before, the small speech of a man returning property: *These were your guest instructor's. They begin here. I believe they are yours.* But standing in Antoniou's academy with the box still at home under the bench, he had understood what Adeyemi would have said about that delivery, in that order, on that day: it would have walked into the room ahead of him like a surname, and coloured every honest thing that happened after it. A name used as a key is a name used as a lever, and the law of the warehouse had been plain about what his gifts were for. So the rounds would be finished first, on their own terms, by a piano tuner with no belt and no story. Then, on Thursday or whenever the thing was done, win or lose—he smiled slightly, alone, at the inadequacy of the words—he would ask George Antoniou for ten minutes, and put forty years of another man's attention on his desk, and let the past make its own introductions.
He closed the seventh notebook and replaced it among its brothers, oldest to newest, the way he always shelved them. He tied the cord again, not tightly, and slid the box back under the bench into the dark it preferred. Then he stood a while in the narrow space between the piano and the wall, where the floorboards were worn by exactly this, and moved through the oldest of the warehouse sequences at the pace of a man walking in his sleep: slowly, with his eyes low and his attention lower, listening to the building settle and the pipes tick and the strings of the unrestored piano answer his footsteps, now and then, with the faintest sympathetic hum. Listen with your body, the old man had said, the first evening and the last. Tomas finished the sequence, bowed to the empty room out of a habit eleven years deep, and went to wash his cup, and to sleep, and to be ready.
By six o'clock the academy was fuller than it had been on the day of the evaluation, and by half past six Hannah Weiss had stopped trying to keep count. She stood at the door with the register open on her forearm, ticking off the regular students as they came in out of the Fenwick rain, and after a while she simply closed the book and held the door. They came the way people come to accidents and to weddings, in twos and threes, shedding wet coats in the corridor, speaking in the lowered voices that a crowd uses when it expects something it cannot name. The mats had been extended to cover the whole floor. The chairs from the viewing room had been carried in and set along the far wall, and when the chairs ran out, people stood.
Duarte arrived at twenty to seven with two of his own training partners, both black belts from his competition team, both in jackets with the team's crest on the back. He warmed up at the far end of the mat with the unhurried completeness of a man who has never once been the least prepared person in a room. He drilled entries. He drilled the spin. He did everything at the speed he intended to use, which was the first announcement of the evening, and everyone in the room understood it as one.
His partners fed him attacks in a set order, and he answered each one with the same glittering chain: the collar grip taken before the other man's hands had settled, the feint at the guard, the sudden drop of level into the legs, and then the spin — the deep, rolling turn underneath that carried him behind a man's hips faster than the eye wanted to follow, so that for a half-second there were two bodies moving as one and then only one of them in charge. He did it four times. He did it left and right. Each time he finished in control, smiling, and slapped his partner's shoulder and sent him back to the beginning to be beaten again. It was a magnificent piece of work and it was meant to be watched, and in the ordinary way of things it would have been the only thing in the room worth watching.