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talked much, and I had the strong impression of an imminent shift in the weather.
    Olaf told me during a water break that Charlie and Hadnot didn’t get along. The court had no fountain. Most players brought their own bottle, but if it ran out you had to wander through the bowels of the arena to fill up at the locker room sink. Olaf always added a tab of magnesium, which fizzed whitely and tasted of chalk, and made full use of these breaks, sometimes drawing me into his little truancies. Basketball players are ass-kissers, he said. They like to suck up to the big stars (this was his phrase), and Charlie had had the whole show to himself for about a month. Now Hadnot was back everyone had to work out who was boss. Don’t be surprised, he said, if Charlie makes a move on you. Olaf was very funny on the subject; he had no respect for the team mentality. He was also boasting about his own sullen independence, but I liked him for it, even if his account put our relations in an awkward light.
    Henkel spent most of the second hour walking us through our offensive sets. Practice was light enough, in fact, that I skipped the showers and made straight for the open air. It was a clear late summer’s day, as clear as autumn but a few degrees warmer, and I sometimes felt about the gym the way I used to feel about school: it was the window I leaned out of. Which was why my heartsank a little when Charlie caught up to me at the bike racks. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘young man, let me take you to lunch; you look like you need it.’ I saw Darmstadt walking off with his two friends – six hands in six pockets, three heads bent – and envied them briefly.

7
    Charlie led the way to his apartment. The Sports Halle stood in the new section of town: lots of chunky sixties architecture, the sorts of buildings a child would design who had just been given his first ruler. Square and brightly painted. But the new cobbled streets gave way to old cobbled streets as we approached the river. The courthouse and the theater, overlooking the water, were equally simple but much more elegant; they showed to its best advantage the virtue of German order.
    Landshut had its heyday in the 1500s when some Prince of Bavaria settled there. It was the market town into which all the hills surrounding poured their harvests. The Isar connected it to Munich and the rest of Germany, and the place still had an air of commercial pride and prosperity, which only partly depended on tourists. Trains ran every hour from Munich. We got some of the spillover from Oktoberfest and even out of season attracted just enough Americans and Brits to support a few kitsch Biergartens on the High Street. Charlie, in fact, lived next to one of them, on the top floor of a sagging medieval townhouse, whose stairs were so short and narrow that I had to bend double and climb them with my hands on the steps in front.
    â€˜How long have you lived here?’ I asked, when he showed me in. The apartment was lighter, more spacious than I had expected, but practically unfurnished. A chair in one corner of the room faced one of those cheap wooden rolling units on which you can stack a TV and VCR. Other than that, there was nowhere to sit, apart from the two bar stools pushed up to the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. A row of cookbooks from the same Learn to Cook series (Italian, Thai, French, etc.) leaned against the counter wall. French windows at the far side of the living room gave on to a deep narrow balcony all but overgrown with flowerpots.
    â€˜I don’t live here, I work here,’ he said. It was the tone he would have taken on the basketball court, where his motto was: always correct. And then, a little embarrassed, he added, ‘About four years.’
    We ate lunch on the balcony. Charlie had prepared it before practice: a cold pasta dish with chili and soy and fish. He offered me a beer, a local Pilsener, which I accepted but