White snow on black marble.
A light snow speckled down onto on the streets of Manhattan. The monolithic black marble tower of Morgan Lynch Investments Inc. only blended in with the rows of skyscrapers for financial and stock investment companies. It had been a row that had been rocked in recent years... and most say deservedly so. Except for maybe those that worked within the buildings. Russel David was deep within the financial district after all, looking out on the cars whipping down Wall Street. Sleek black luxury cabs outnumbered yellow taxis almost two-to-one. David shivered, as he waited underneath the grand marble arced entrance to MLI. He wasn't a smoker, but at least the others standing around smoking in the falling snow, at least looked warmer.
David, preoccupied with keeping warm, missed Sonja Duke walking right past him.
He had been waiting for her, so this was a problem.
Sonja Duke was dressed in appropriate attire for an investment brokerage's research analysist. Black jacket, black skirt, blue blouse. Intensely black hair, up in a bun on the back of her head. The look belied two things, Russel thought, one) she was... really quite attractive, underneath the librarian/school marm outfit. Olive skin, Mediterranean features, strong nose... dark eyes. If he wasn't sure she was a Duke, David might even mistake her for being Jewish, as opposed to Italian. And two) the woman was profressional, and breathed that very fact. She was proud of it, and had to be to keep her job.
"Excuse me! Ms. Duke!" Russel David shouted out to get her attention. Sonja, however, didn't even break stride as Russel David ran to catch up with her.
"I told you, no. I'm not going to talk to you about this anymore. So just walk away Mr. David."
Okay, so Russel David had been sending her message after message about Legion, since he had gotten information on it's availability, it's full relevance, three weeks ago. However, Sonja Duke wasn't like her grandfather, her grandfather's grandfather, or simply her father. No, unlike most in the Duke lineage, she had absolutely no interest in being an architect for another age of Legion. She had watched it haunt her father, until his untimely death of a heart attack last fall. Her grandfather, Peter Duke, had been so proud of Legion and it had destroyed... so her father wanted to bring back the league, make it proud again. But he was just a blue collar guy, with a restaurant. He never had the money for the wrestling business. And now, Sonja didn't have the time. She needed to get home, check on her mother, see if she needed anything. See if her cat, Cat, was keeping mom company.
"Isn't this what your father would have wanted?" Russel David blurted out, one last ditch effort before Sonja reached the line of taxis, one of them waiting to take her back to Queens. She stopped in her tracks, and pivoted in her black heels. Russel David took a step back... I mean, at least it stopped her.
"Are you really going to go there?"
Duke stared a hole through Russel, looking to scare him off now, and for good. He paused, took it in and grinned. It couldn't get any worse, right?
"Yes?"
Sonja had to hold back and smile, to her surprise. The audacity of this man. She just shook her head, and rubber the temple of her forehead. There wasn't going to be an easy way to get rid of this guy, and she really wanted to get out of the cold. She tilted her head, and looked Russel David straight in the eye.
"If I let you know where the Cup is, will you at least name it after my father?"
"Yes." Russel didn't miss a beat in replying, but it still came off as a really shite lie. He turned away and paced a few steps before turning back to her and shrugging his shoulders. Hell, he tried. Probably could have tried harder, but he was a writer damn it, and it wouldn't have to be her Cup, so why name it after the Duke's. Not a bad idea, but it wasn't there spirit as much anymore. Not now.
"Okay, look I don't care what you call it. I honestly couldn't give a shit about this wrestling stuff. I know you must love it, but let me just tell you, Mr. David... it's been a plague on my family." she points her finger at him to put an exclamation mark on it, "You hear me? A plague. This sport of yours has done nothing but hold my family back. Generation after generation after generation wasting there hard work and potential on fake fluff. A family like mine, with a history of business going back as far as it does, that should mean something, you know? Except when it comes to business like yours where men can lose everything and be blackballed and forgotten about, and your a bankrupt footnote! My family just doesn't want to learn from it's mistakes. From my great great, seven-times great grandfather to my stupid little brother."
Her fists where clenched now, she was almost in tears, Sonja's eyes darted to Russel and then she looked away embarrassed.
"I think it's more like eight or nine greats." Russel David said with a grin, trying to cheer her up. All he got this time was a glare in return.
"Legion has had it's rough past. Yes." Russel then said, using all the warm charm he could possibly muster. "But it's potential is still there. Still totally there in full. Wrestling these days is all about the individual all about me, me, me. The bigger and the better. People want to be the best, so they get eaten up by steroids and drugs and they end up going crazy. The community has been lost, the team aspect as been forgotten. The leaders, they don't lead by example anymore, they lead by mistakes. With Legion... we can... make a better, cooler world."
Okay, thought Russel. Maybe he kind of went big with that last statement. Sonja Duke let a grin slipped and just looked at David like he was crazy. So she said just that.
"Are you crazy?"
"Nah.", he grinned back at her and looked up and away, "I'm Legion."
Duke just shook her head, again, widened her eyes. This guy might be crazy, but at least he was sure about what he wanted. "Fine." And digging into the purse under her arm, she grabbed todays copy of the New York Times. Obama's face was the picture on the front page, but she folded it in half horizontally, grabbed a pen from her bag and scrawled something along the top between the headline and the Times information scrawl. She handed Russel David the newspaper.
"This is the address for the storage locker, where the Cup is in Newark. Probably. There should be a bunch of musky boxes in there as well. I don't think my brother pillaged any of those, since he's not so much into reading as he is reacting, you know what I mean? There should be stuff in there, of interest to you... as long as it hasn't been destroyed by water." She gave David a curt nod, but then turned back around, "And this doesn't mean you've gotten any of the rights. The Cup is on loan, and everything that still belongs to my family... belongs to my family. Any of the rights that I inherited, are still mine. I'm not stupid. I might not respect it, but I know not to sell it wholesale to the first man to come along with interest... and you're not even the first. Write out the royalty check for my mother, please"
Sonja Duke slipped into the closest cab, and Russel David held the door open for a moment. "The checques will come in the mail, with a couple of tickets to each show."
He closed the door, and the cab merged into the Manhattan traffic. It was really the biggest thank you that Russel David could give to Sonja Duke. A chance to see her families dream become something more...
Something concrete. Russel looked down at the copy of the New York Times. There it was, the location to the Legion Cup, written below the type face... what would become known as the Dunn Cup, soon enough. What different men, with different histories, with different paths in life would all be looking to hold high. It held the past, and it held the future.
Yeah, this newspaper was going to have to be framed.
That black ink on white paper.
