Flood

33

MARGOT HAD NO sooner walked out the door than Max appeared-he waits as silently as he does everything else. I gave him four grand, holding out one for myself for the running expenses of this case, and told him to stash it for me someplace. Less four hundred for Max, this thing still had the chance to show a decent profit if it worked out.

I asked Max if he wanted something to eat, purposely avoiding the subject of horseracing, and I saw a tiny flicker pass across his face. So he thought I already knew the results and wasn’t admitting anything. Okay, just for that I’d torture him until he demanded to know the truth.

I didn’t have long to wait. As soon as we got to the restaurant Max made the sign of a galloping horse to ask me what happened last night. Instead of telling him I showed him that harness horses don’t gallop-that’s against the rules. In fact, they’re called standardbreds instead of thoroughbreds because they’re bred to a standard gait, either a trot or a pace. They evolved from working horses, not from rich men’s playthings like the useless nags who run in the Kentucky Derby. I showed him with my fingers how pacers move their outside legs together and then their inside legs together in rolling motion, while trotters put one front leg and the opposite rear leg forward at the same time. I showed him what it meant to break stride, or go off gait, and why pacers were generally faster and less likely to break than trotters.

Max sat through this entire explanation with the patience of a tree, figuring he would outwait me. But he finally cracked under the strain, just as I was explaining about new breeds now being developed in Scandinavia, how they aren’t as fast as American-style trotters but they have tremendous endurance. Jumping up, he stalked over to the cash register for the News and fired it over to me hard enough to break bones. Then he folded his arms across his chest and waited.

As I opened the paper I had a momentary flash of panic. What if the goddamned Times was wrong? But there it was in greasy black and white. We won. I showed Max the chart of the ninth race-Honor Bright had left cleanly, grabbed a quick tuck fourth at the quarter, moved outside with cover at the half, then fired with a big brush on the final paddock turn to blow past the leaders and win going away by almost two lengths. Max insisted I show him what the charted race would have actually looked like if we’d been there watching, so I got some paper and diagrammed the whole thing for him. Max really showed class. He never asked how much we had won-the victory itself seemed enough. Of course, he could have already figured it out. But the real class showed when he agreed to pick the money up from Maurice and never said a word about making another bet. I’d proved something to him, and that was enough-he didn’t think he’d found the key to the vault.

I dropped Max at the warehouse where I used a pay phone to call Flood and tell her I wouldn’t be seeing her until very early the next morning. I told her I’d ring her from downstairs before I came up.

My face hurt a bit and I wanted to change the dressing-and I wanted to sleep. But when I got back to the office I had to explain the whole race again to Pansy and feed her too, so it was after four in the afternoon when I finally lay down.