Balkan hustle.

Winter, Scott

When he moved to a new city, the first thing Tyler checked out was the local tennis scene. He'd scout a couple of the fanciest clubs, find the first open tournament, sign up for the most difficult division and win the whole damn thing. If he could bet on matches, he'd be a hustler, like Paul Newman in that movie.

He liked to live efficiently with no extra things or people in his life. Few nouns. He liked to go to cops-and-robbers movies without friends, read books in restaurants without eating food and win tennis tournaments without owning a racquet.

Ty had played No. 1 singles at a small liberal arts school in Minnesota, but rarely went to practice and won only half his matches. He spent most of college in the library, reading Russian literature, his major, and picking up female English majors, his minor.

After college, he traveled for a year throughout Russia and the Balkans on trust money left him by his grandfather, whose North Dakota farm sat above the biggest oil basin in North America. He liked the spicy carnivorous meals of Eastern Europe and the people-watching made for cheap entertainment. He wound up in Kosovo, the southern point of what was left of Yugoslavia, and the poorest country in Europe. In Pristina, the capital city, Ty signed up for a tournament at the only tennis club, and showed up for his first match in jeans and a black T-shirt. When he hit his first one-hand backhand, with a topspin that cleared the net by ten feet, bounced a foot from the baseline and jumped over his opponents' heads, the matches were pretty much over. If not, Ty's first left-handed serve that dove right and spun into his opponents' ribs would end things before they started. All with a demo racquet borrowed from the front desk.

In the finals, Ty straight-setted the highest-rated Kosovar, a Roger Federer-looking Albanian named Luzlim Rexhep, who at twenty-two owned a piece of a nightclub called Club2008, which lubricated crowds with hip-hop on weeknights and live Bulgarian punk bands on weekends. After the match, Luzlim invited Ty to the club, where a Bulgarian band named Righteous Mothers cranked out a high-distortion speed version of Lionel Richie's "Easy (Like Sunday Morning)."

Luzlim took Ty to a C-shaped, corner booth straight out of an Italian mafia movie and introduced him to Nora and Naser, his sister and brother. The three of them owned the club.

"You win in blue jeans over Luzlim?" he said. "Crazy good."

Naser was shaped like a cannon pointing into the ground. He had never played tennis, but he had fought in the 1998-99 civil war for the Kosovo Liberation Army against the Serbs, and he'd eaten dirt in the Rugova Mountains while he waited for Bill Clinton to bomb the Orthodox Christians back north. He named Club2008 after the year Kosovo achieved independence from Serbia. Now, the newest nation on the planet was full of ethnic Albanians with no money to arm themselves or to build a capitalist economy. For Naser, tennis would be his revenge on the Serbs and all Communism. He directed the Kosovo Tennis Federation and offered to hire Ty on the spot to build and coach a national tennis team.

All of this had been decided over the first round of drinks, which were local beers and Raki, a national plum moonshine.

Ty then danced with the sister, a 25-year-old bank manager at the Austrian Raffeissen Bank near the tennis center. She promised to be his tour guide and translator while he recruited players at tennis clubs throughout the country during the next two weeks.

"You like this music?" she shouted over the screaming metal version of Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy."

"No."

"Good. It is most terrible."

She took him outside and asked him if he had American cigarettes, which he did because he'd bought cartons in the airport duty-free shop. He lit her one and realized he liked that everyone smoked in Kosovo. Nobody gave him that look when he lit up, and smoking connected people without awkwardness.

Under the streetlights of Bill Clinton Boulevard, Ty could see that Nora Rexhep wore no makeup. She was thin and bony everywhere except her face, which was full and smiled when she didn't seem to be thinking anything. Ty liked that, too. He'd always had these moments of noticing when he liked something and he liked to process why. Mostly, people back home only noticed when things went wrong. When they were sick, when their flights were delayed, when weather turned nasty or when their French fries were cold--an awful way to spin tethered to the planet. Even American news just translated everything that was wrong into a variety show.

"You know, if we travel around the country, we'll stay in hotels, and we'll have to talk about how many rooms we are to buy," she said. "This club loses money. I can't afford hotel rooms."

Ty nodded, and brought her to the Grand Hotel in the center of the city. On the fifth floor, they shared a Camel by the open windows overlooking Pristina, where lights lasered out of the clubs and the night masked the dark clouds of ash from Soviet-era power plants. Nora sat on his lap with her bony rear end digging into his right thigh until his leg fell asleep. She crossed her feet on the windowsill.

"Kosovo is not so much a bad place from here," she said. "The night covers up all the bad."

She pulled her red-dyed hair around her left ear and took drags from the cigarette in his hand. She explained that she worked in a bank because she learned English from watching pirated DVDs of American bank heist movies she bought on the streets.

"Nothing is more sexy than a smart bank robber," she said. "He has a good plan to take from the rich like Robin Hood or Butch and Sundance, no? I dream to one day be in a bank when it is being robbed by men like these men."

"You wouldn't be scared?"

"To be scared is so much better than to be bored. You know this."

She especially liked the movie about the two bank robbers who rampaged the West Coast by holding bank managers hostage in their homes the night before, then taking them to the banks before they opened in the mornings to finish the jobs before the dayshift employees or police had even had their coffees. The shootout at the end was glorious, as was Bruce Willis' smile.

"You've seen this movie?" she said. "I love to watch these movies alone in bed on my computer."

Though Ty liked to go to movie theaters alone, he immediately pictured himself taking Nora to American theaters, in Uptown Minneapolis or in St. Paul's university neighborhoods, where she would cross her legs over his knees in the dark. He told her about Chekhov's gun theory. Then he retold Steinbeck's little-known bank robbery short story: A grocery store owner robs a bank next door after calling in a fire alarm. He wears a mask that he later rips up and flushes down the toilet and returns to his register before anyone realizes he was gone. The whole robbery takes three minutes, planned and executed by a boring shop owner with a loving wife and two happy kids.

"Exactly," Nora said.

Ty and Nora drove treacherous highways to tennis clubs in Prizren, Mitrovica, Orahovac and Gnjilane with no plan of attack. The players weren't good enough to compete internationally, but they were strong and fearless Balkan athletes who craved coaching, and he bought them bus tickets to Pristina.

The Kosovo hotels didn't always have running water, but they had well-stacked and well-packed bars and restaurants with attentive service and spicy meat stews and fried cheese. Nora made quick friends in each city, and Ty smiled and danced through the nights until they watched pirated movies at night on Nora's computer.

Only in Mitrovica, in the north, did they have trouble. Nora had no patience for the Serbians who still lived up there and controlled the politics, and didn't hide her disgust, even when they held guns at roadside checkpoints or glared at her in coffee shops. She both pouted and became exhilarated after these confrontations. On the Mitrovica streets, though, Ty found all three Oceans movies, and they watched them the next three nights in their hotel and Nora gave up her anger to him.

"You are my bad boy George Clooney, yes?" she said.

"No, you are my Balkan Julia Roberts."

The men's and women's national teams never won a match forTy, but Nora hosted elaborate parties in the basement of Hotel Afa with their opponents the night before home matches, getting them hungover. Eventually, the tennis federation went bust from the travel costs through Eastern Europe, and the plans of taking over the world with backhands and overheads fell through. The Rexheps were accustomed to failure and Naser beamed at Ty while telling him everything was over, without ever getting to play the Serbs, who laughed at Ty's requests for matches. Serbian Novak Djokovic was the top player in the world.

"You did great things," Naser said. "We are friends now. So what will you do next?"

"I think I'll steal your sister."

"I'm thinking that's a good thing for her."

With the last of his oil and coaching cash, and after fighting with the American Embassy over a visa for Nora, Ty bought two Lufthansa tickets back to Minnesota, where he found a second-floor brownstone apartment off Grand Avenue in St. Paul, blocks from an Irish pub and a liberal arts college. Nora wanted a teller job at a Wells Fargo bank branch in a high-crime neighborhood, but had to settle for the branch two blocks from home. On her second training day, she learned that tellers get $200 bonuses if they sneak a high-combustion blue dye pack into a moneybag before robbers take off. They didn't sleep at all that night.

Ty got himself into a high-end USTA tournament. He wore cutoffs and, with a demo racquet from the club pro shop, made the finals, where he lost to a nationally ranked 20-year-old German who played on the state university team. At a wine-and-cheese event after the match, Ty met the women's coach from a neighborhood small-college team, who said he needed an assistant coach who knew how to recruit European players.

"I coached in the Balkans. I lost matches all over Eastern Europe. I know the players."

The salary barely paid rent, but travel was free. Each May for the next two years, Ty and Nora flew to European tennis tournaments, luring Polish, Bosnian and Latvian players to Minnesota. Nora wouldn't allow him to sign any Serbians, even though she conceded that they were better-looking and better players. Ty and Nora smoked while looking out top-floor windows in four- and five-star hotels in Budapest, Vienna, Riga, Warsaw, Belgrade and Sarajevo.

"It's good that you like where I live and I like where you live," she said. "That way, every place can be home."

Ty liked that Nora was never jealous of the younger, prettier and muscular girls they met on these trips. She seemed to get a charge out of watching him talk the players into trading in their tennis resort lives for American educations without ever flattering them or lying to them. He never promised them they'd be the best player on the team or become professional stars. He just described American theaters and literature classes and coffee shops and bars. And the lakes. My god, the lakes.

For the other 11 months, Ty worked all the tedium of coaching a minor college sport. The schedule, the travel, and contracts for racquets, uniforms and shoes. The administrative meetings and the budget spreadsheets, which he left to Nora. But May trips made all the minutiae tolerable.

Nora worked the middle of three teller windows inside her branch, where she wore her best dresses and put on only lipstick to match. On breaks, she studied all the bank's security measures, and asked managers to tell her stories of heists they'd heard about when they returned from national banking conventions. Mondays to Thursdays were slow, and Fridays were busy check-cashing days that moved quickly. And she volunteered to work overtime Saturday shifts, just in case.

Outside work, Ty and Nora spent days in coffee shops, where Nora ate yellow-frosted cinnamon rolls and drank double-espressos. They spent nights at the Irish pub, which would move tables to let them turn drinkers into dancers. Ty taught Nora his backhand and serve on days off and she was a natural because she was a little mean and swung as hard as she could at every ball, even at the net. All power, no finesse.

Nora cast Ty in her bank robbery fantasies in both rooms of their apartment, and even in the shower. She typed out elaborate scenes with authentic dialogue in script form off an Internet screen-writing template. Ty liked her enthusiasm and attention to detail, all the way down to the guns she crafted out of toilet paper rolls and tinfoil. And he played his roles as he thought Paul Newman or George Clooney would play them.

"Once the cash is in my backpack, I want all the tellers to undress to their underwear," he'd say. "My wife needs new clothes for work."

"You are an animal," Nora would shout to distract him while slipping a blue Post-it notepad into his backpack that would explode later. "A predator, a pervert."

On an overcast Saturday in April, while Ty's team, now ranked in the top 10, hosted the No. 1 team in the nation from a Massachusetts women's college, two men in black leather jackets and blue jeans pulled up to Nora's Wells Fargo on one Honda CB500X motorcycle, the same one her brother Naser rode in Kosovo. Her teller station faced the front windows and glass doors of the branch and she could see the two black helmets and reflective visors through the window decal of the Wells Fargo prairie schooner logo. They'd parked the bike right on the sidewalk near the doors.

The team score was even after eight matches and would come down to the top doubles match between Ty's Latvian and Polish recruits and two Serbians from the rich Massachusetts school. The Serbians were tall and lithe Gwyneth Paltrows who could run down any ball and knew all the angles on the court from their Sarajevo tennis academy childhoods. Ty's recruits were shorter and stronger, trying to pound balls past the Gwyneths and force their way to the net. The match went to three sets.

At her counter, Nora helped a middle-aged Hispanic man who had pulled up in a Jessie's Heating and Air van and who couldn't understand her accent when she told him his third-party check wouldn't clear for another 24 hours, as per bank policy. He wanted his money now. She looked past him at the motorcycle outside and she reached into the back of her right-hand drawer under the register to grip a blue dye pack, which was made of flexible, cool plastic that resembled a small stack of bills and was attached to a magnetic plate that kept it in safe mode. She moved it into her register under the 100s.

Before the match, Ty's head coach had announced to the team that he was retiring and hoped this match would be the culmination of his career, which included 24 trips to the national tournament, but no titles. He also was pushing the athletic director to hire Ty as next year's head coach, which would allow Ty to get rid of the minutiae and just teach his backhand and serve when he wasn't in Europe. He doubted he would take the job, but he wanted the team to win this match for his boss.

Each of the three tellers had customers but nobody waiting in line, and Nora lied to her customer as the men got off their bike and approached the door without removing their helmets with the reflective visors.

"OK, sir. I will talk my manager into making the money available to you now. Please take a seat over there while 1 prepare some paperwork. You can do that, no?"

The Serbian Gwyneths wouldn't wear down like most Midwestern players. They ran down shots that should have ended points and broken their spirits. They sidestepped forehands aimed at their hips and flicked them down the line past Ty's Latvian and Polish players. Before the final game tie-breaker, he called a timeout to let his team rest. He didn't say anything to them. He just smiled until they smiled. Then he told a joke that Nora had told him that first night outside Club2008.

"What do you call a Serbian with goats under each arm?"

The players didn't answer and just gulped water.

"A pimp."

They shook their heads.

"I'm taking off," he told them. "I can't stand to watch such shitty tennis. You can't even beat Serbian goats."

As the motorcyclists opened the glass doors, Nora rocked forward and back on the bony balls and heels of her shoeless feet under her plum dress that she had bought from her cousin, a famous dressmaker and fashionista in Pristina circles. The short dress had full sleeves and an open back to her waist with three diagonal straps crisscrossing her shoulder blades. She had gained a few pounds since coming to America because of the coffee shop cinnamon rolls, which made the dress fit more tightly and look even better than when she'd first put it on. Her legs had gained muscle from Ty's tennis lessons. She smiled and asked if she could help one of the motorcyclists as he approached. The other one stayed by the door, looking out the window.

After practices, when players were tired from the drills and scrimmages, Ty would show them trick shots or mimic famous players' strokes or victory celebrations. The players' favorite was Ty's Andre Agassi impression. With Ty in the middle of his court, often in his cutoff jeans, a player on the other side of the net would hit a medium-heavy stroke past his forehand and yell, "Go." Ty would turn and sprint after the ball and, with his back to the net, hit a down-the-line winner between his legs, just like Agassi in the 1996 Lipton Championships. Ty's Latvian recruit had been secretly practicing the shot to show Ty once she'd mastered it.

Nora had always envisioned them having a gun, or at least pretending to have one in their pockets, which was always ridiculous, but a threat she knew she couldn't ignore. As he approached, the motorcyclist slid off a camouflage backpack, which seemed ridiculous, too. She thought it should be black, or at least unremarkable.

"Hi," he said in a voice that was more teen-age boy than George Clooney, and too muffled by the visor. "You're pretty, even without makeup. Can you fill this up?"

Not a bad line, but he should have just passed her a note, so she wouldn't be able to recognize the voice in police lineups later. She started with three packs of 20s, three packs of 10s, then two packs of 100s and the dye pack she had just activated by removing it from its magnetic plate.

The Gwyneths took a 5-2 lead on points in the tiebreaker to seven. Then Ty's team won four straight points to get to match point with the Gwyneths serving.

With $200, Nora knew she could buy one high-end dress from her cousin, or eight mediocre ones from Target. She could buy ten new release action films, or rent two hundred. She'd probably do that, rent heist movies for the next two hundred nights with Ty.

The Latvian short-hopped the Gwyneth serve and returned it deep down the line and charged to join her partner at the net.

Nora added the last of the money stacks in her drawer and smiled at herself in the reflection of the robber's helmet visor. "You sure are pretty," the helmet repeated. She didn't look left or right, but could feel the customers and tellers at either side sneaking looks, but they were too American, too Midwestern, to act on their curiosity or fear. She didn't have to look behind her or to the offices to know the managers would be too buried in their computer screens to understand the significance of the moment.

"Thank you, I do look pretty today in my cousin's dress. Do you need an account balance or can I help you with anything else?"

That last sentence she had rehearsed consciously and in her dreams. She had even said it to Ty when they acted out scenarios in their apartment or in Balkan hotel rooms. She knew her coolness would keep his panic from devouring him like she'd seen so many times in movies and even in Kosovo's civil war, when even the toughest of her brothers and uncles lost their toughness when waves of Serb soldiers knocked on their doors. Maybe this robber would even think to take her hostage, a good move if he had more room on his motorcycle.

Ty's doubles team hit volleys that made him shift and curl his body to mimic the shots as he leaned against the baseline fence as far from the action as he could get and still see it. Sometimes his arms even flared out to make the shots. But the Gwyneths ran down four volleys before one of them put heavy topspin on a lob down the line past the Latvian, who retreated in a sprint.

Nora watched her bank robber walk back to the door and reach into the backpack to take out a pistol that looked too modern and shiny to be real.

"Just pretend nothing happened," he said too loudly and unnecessarily and stupidly to everyone in the bank. Any guilt she had about the dye pack or empathy she'd had for him before that moment evaporated immediately. She stopped imagining Ty behind that visor.

"Shoot me," she whispered, surprising herself by going off script.

The Latvian raced with quick, short steps away from the net, beyond the baseline. Before she reached the ball on its bounce, she jumped and whipped her racquet from above her head down through her spread legs to send a Penn 4 the opposite direction, down the line and past a Gwyneth who was still watching her own lob, which had to have been a winner. The Latvian and Pole both mimicked Agassi going to his knees and to the ground after his first Wimbledon victory. Ty tried not to smile and thought he should teach the shot to Nora.

The motorcyclist didn't shoot, not like Ty would have in their apartment from the bedroom door. He just followed his doubles partner out the glass doors, which set off the radio transmitter above the doorframe and tripped the 25-second timer on the dye pack.

Nora slipped on her plum pumps, grabbed herring of keys and smiled to her seated customer as she walked around the counter to the door and locked it with an elaborate twist and jingle of keys.

She pressed her nose to the cool glass door to look down the street, where she saw the motorcycle driver's camo backpack blow up in a cloud of blue dye, blue smoke and tear gas, knocking the passenger behind him off the bike and into a rolling skid on the pavement. The driver wobbled but kept driving as cash billowed out of him and onto Grand Avenue like smoke out of communist power plants.