Blood Sport

Chapter Eleven

Eunice, Lynnie, Sam Kitchens, and stud groom Chub Lodovski leaned in a row on the rail of the stallions’ paddock at Midway and watched Chrysalis eat Kentucky grass with opinions varying from Lodovski’s enthusiasm to Eunice’s resignation.

The half-a-million pounds’ worth looked none the worse for his trip up the Tetons. Better than on the ranch, as Sam Kitchens had removed all the Wyoming dust from his coat on the journey back, and the bay hide shone with glittering good health in the sunshine. There wasn’t, Lodovski assured me, the slightest chance of his going missing again.

Batteries of photographers and pressmen had come and gone: the stallion had been ‘found’ straying on the land of a friend of Dave Teller’s about thirty miles from where he had disappeared. All the excitement was over.

I walked back to Dave’s house with Eunice and Lynnie, and Eunice poured me a drink which was four-fifths whisky and one-fifth ice.

‘Who put you through what meat grinder?’ she said. ‘You look like a honeymoon couple on the tenth night.’

Sam Hengelman had driven into Midway with Chrysalis at lunchtime (Tuesday). I had flown to New York with Walt the day before, and had just backtracked to Lexington, in time to catch the tail end of Eunice interviewing the press. Several of that hard bitten fraternity had tottered out past me with pole-axed expressions and Lynnie had been halfway through a fit of giggles.

I made inroads into the hefty drink.

‘I could do with a good long sleep,’ I admitted. ‘If you could give me a bed? Or there’s the motel...’

‘Stay here,’ Eunice said abruptly. ‘Of course you’re staying here.’

I looked from her to Lynnie. I couldn’t stay in the house with one alone: perfectly proper with both. Silly.

‘Thanks, then. And I must call Dave, in England.’

Dave, still in hospital, sounded incredulous.

‘I heard it on a news flash, not half an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Chrysalis just plain turned up.’

‘He sure did,’ I said dryly.

‘Where had he been?’

‘It’s a long story,’ I said, ‘and wires have ears. But the expenses stand right now at somewhere near six thousand three hundred dollars. Is that enough for you, or do you want to go on for some answers?’

‘To what questions, fella?’ He sounded uncertain.

‘To why Chrysalis was hi-jacked, and why you fell in the river. And another thing: do you want Allyx back?’

‘For God’s sake... do you know where he is?’

‘No. But maybe I could find him. However, if I do, and we get as positive an identification as on Chrysalis, the insurance money on Allyx will have to be repaid to Buttress Life. That will be the equivalent of buying him all over again. He’s three years older now, and you’ll have lost three crops of foals. He may not be a good proposition for you or your syndicate any more. In which case you might prefer not to have him found. It’s up to you.’

‘Jeez,’ he said.

‘Will you think it over, and call back?’ I suggested. ‘Your wife and Lynnie are filling me up with food and drinks, and I guess I’ll be staying here tonight. But if you want me to go on, will you clear it with Keeble? I’m due back at my desk at nine AM next Monday morning, and I might not make it.’

‘Sure,’ he said, somewhat weakly, and I handed the receiver to Eunice.

‘How’s it going, honey?’ she said, and I took a good swallow, put my head back on the chair, and listened to her long-married-wifely conversation with my eyes shut.

‘Don’t ask me how he did it, Dave, I don’t know. All I know is he rang from New York yesterday afternoon and asked me for the name of any close friend of ours who was influential and respected, preferably high up in horsebreeding circles, and whose word would be taken as gospel by the press. So, after a rake around I said I guessed Jeff Roots fitted the bill; and lo and behold Chrysalis turned up on Jeff’s land this morning... Yeah, the horse is as good as new; wherever he’s been they’ve treated him right... Look, Dave, surely enough’s enough? I heard what Gene said about finding Allyx. Well, don’t do it. We need Allyx like a dose of clap. And your boy here is no goddam Hercules, a puff of wind would knock him off, the way he’s come back... Lynnie’s fine, sure. We’re taking a trip tomorrow out to California. I’ll measure up the curtains for the new place, things like that, and Lynnie can have some days on the beach and maybe try some surfing with those de Vesey boys. So look, why don’t we take Gene with us, huh?... Sure, I’ve made reservations at The Vacationer in Santa Barbara... they’re bound to have another room...’

I listened to her plans with disappointment. If I wanted to laze anywhere, it was right where I was, on the Midway Farm. By the peaceful pool in the quiet green garden, sleeping, drinking, and looking at Lynnie.

Eunice put down the receiver, and we had dinner, and late in the evening Dave rang through again.

‘Gene?’ he said. ‘Now listen, fella. Apart from curiosity, is there any good reason for finding those answers you talked about?’

‘Forestalling repetition,’ I said promptly.

‘No more stolen stallions and no more attacks on me?’

‘That’s right.’

There was a pause.

‘I’ll buy the answers, then,’ he said. ‘If you can get them. And as for Allyx... if you think there’s any chance of finding him alive and vigorous, then I guess I’m morally obliged to give you the go-ahead. I’d have to syndicate him all over again, of course. He’ll be twelve now. That would give him only about six to eight more years of high potency... But his get from before his disappearance are winning all over Europe. Business-wise I’m not too happy about those three lost years. But blood-wise, it would be criminal not to try to get him back.’

All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘What you spent on finding Chrysalis is less than his fee for covering a single mare. You’ve a free hand again for Allyx.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘Sim Keeble says you’ve got seven days’ extension of leave. Something about it being due to you anyway, from a week you were entitled to at Christmas and didn’t take.’

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘I guess I could fix it with him for more, if the extra week isn’t enough.’

‘If I haven’t finished by then I’ll have failed anyway, and might as well go home.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘Very well, we’ll leave it like that for the present.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Eunice didn’t seem to think you looked too well.’

‘The boy on the punt who knocked you out did the same thing for me.’

‘Gene!’ His voice was shocked.

‘Yeah. Don’t tell my boss I’m that incompetent. Though come to think of it, he knows.’

He laughed. ‘When you find that boy again give him a one-two from both of us.’

‘Sure,’ I said. But I’d been taught my job by cerebral people who didn’t reckon a screener would ever have to fight for his life, and by the time I proved them wrong I was too old to become expert at boxing or judo, even if I’d liked the idea, which I didn’t. I had learnt instead to shoot straight, and the Luger had in the past three years extricated me unharmed from two sticky situations. But in a stand up hand-to-hand affair with that young bull Matt Clive I would be a five hundred to one loser, and ‘giving him a one-two from both of us’ in any physical sense was a very dim possibility indeed.

‘Keep in touch, fella,’ Dave said.

‘Sure,’ I answered again, meaning it as little: and we rang off.

Curled opposite in a tomato armchair, Eunice said gloomily, ‘I gather we’re stuck with that bloody Allyx.’

‘Only if we find him.’

‘Oh, you’ll do that, blast you.’ Her bitterness was so marked that Lynnie stared at her. Too young to understand, I thought, that it wasn’t me particularly that Eunice wanted to hurt, but life in general.

They went upstairs shortly afterwards murmuring about California in the morning, and I switched off the light and sat in near darkness, finishing the fourth of Eunice’s massive ideas on drink and working out the questions I would ask the next day. I could find Allyx on paper, if I were lucky: but he could hardly turn up loose after three years. Three weeks had been strictly the limit. The whole thing might have to be more orthodox, more public. And I wouldn’t again, I decided mildly, put myself within accident reach of the murderous Clives.

After a while I deserted the last half of the drink and wandered upstairs to the spacious air-conditioned room Eunice had given me. With a tired hand I switched on the light inside the door, and yellow pools in frilly shades shone out on brown and gold and white furnishings.

One splash of jarring bright pink. Eunice herself, in a fluffy trimmed wrapper, was lying on my bed.

I walked slowly across the thick white carpet and sat beside her on the white spotted muslin coverlet.

‘What do you want?’ I said gently.

‘What do you think?’

I shook my head.

‘Does that mean no?’ Her voice was abruptly matter of fact.

‘I’m afraid it does,’ I said.

‘You said you weren’t queer.’

‘Well... I’m not.’ I smiled at her. ‘But I do have one unbreakable rule.’

‘And that is?’

‘Not to sleep with the wives... or daughters... of the men I work for.’

She sat bolt upright so that her face was close to mine. Her eyes had the usual contracted pupils of the quarter drunk.

‘That includes Lynnie,’ she said.

‘Yes. It does.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned. You mean that night you spent in New York with her you didn’t even try...’

‘It wouldn’t have been much good if I had,’ I said, half laughing.

‘Don’t you believe it. She never takes her eyes off you, and when you were away she talked about nothing else.’

I stared at her in real surprise. ‘You must be wrong.’

‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ she said gloomily. ‘She has two photographs of you as well.’

‘What photographs?’ I was staggered.

‘Some her brother took. That day on the river.’

‘But she shouldn’t...’

‘Maybe she shouldn’t,’ Eunice said dryly. ‘But she does.’ She swung her legs carelessly around to sit on the edge of the bed beside me and I saw that for someone bent on seduction she had come well wrapped up.

‘You expected me to say no,’ I said.

She made a face. ‘I thought you might. But it was worth a try.’

‘Eunice, you’re nuts,’ I said.

‘I’m bored,’ she said explosively, and with an undoubted depth of unbearable truth.

‘That puts me into the golf and bridge category.’

She was still playing games.

‘At least you’re goddam human,’ she said, her mouth cracking into a smile. ‘More than you can say about most men.’

‘What do you like best about moving to California?’ I asked.

She stared. ‘Your mind’s like a bloody grasshopper. What has that to do with sex?’

‘You tell me, and I’ll tell you.’

‘For God’s sake...’ But she made some effort at concentrating, and in the end came up with the answer I had been most expecting.

‘Fixing up the rooms, I guess.’

‘You did all these...’ I waved my hand around, embracing the house.

‘Yeah, I did. So what?’

‘So why don’t you start in business, doing it for other people?’

She half laughed, ridiculing the idea, and half clung to it: and I knew she’d thought of it in the past, because I hadn’t surprised her.

‘I’m no bloody genius.’

‘You have an eye for colour. More than that: for mood. This is the most comforting house I’ve ever been in.’

‘Comforting?’ she said, puzzled.

‘Yeah. Laugh, clown, laugh. That sort of thing. You can fill other people even though you feel empty yourself.’

Tears welled up in her grey-green eyes, and she shut the lids. Her voice remained normal.

‘How do you know?’

‘I know.’

After a pause, she said, ‘And I suppose what it has to do with sex is that interior decorating would be a suitable sublimation for a middle-aged woman whose physical attraction is fading faster than her appetite...’ The bitterness came from long acquaintance with the jargon and its point of view.

‘No,’ I said mildly. ‘The opposite.’

‘Huh?’ She opened her eyes. They were wet and shiny.

‘Playing games is easier than working.’

‘Spell it out,’ she said. ‘You talk in goddam riddles.’

‘Sex... this sort of casual sex...’ I patted the bed where she’d lain, ‘can be a way of running away from real effort. A lover may be a sublimation of a deeper need. People who can’t face the demands of one may opt for passing the time with the other.’

‘For Christ’s sake... I don’t understand a bloody word.’ She shut her eyes and lay flat back across the bed.

‘Thousands of people never try anything serious because they’re afraid of failing,’ I said.

She swallowed, and after a pause said, ‘And what if you do bloody fail? What then?’

I didn’t answer her, and after a while she repeated the question insistently.

‘Tell me what you do if you fail?’

‘I haven’t got that one licked myself, yet.’

‘Oh.’ She laughed weakly. ‘Oh God. The blind leading the blind. Just like the whole bloody human race.’

‘Yeah.’ I sighed and stood up. ‘We all stumble along in the dark, and that’s a fact.’

‘I don’t know if you’ll believe it, but I’ve been utterly bloody faithful to Dave... except for this...’

‘I’m sure of it,’ I said.

She got to her feet and stood swaying slightly.

‘I guess I’m tight.’

‘Better than loose,’ I said smiling.

‘For God’s sake, spare me goddam puns at one o’clock in the morning. I suppose if you’re looking for that so and so Allyx there’s no chance of you coming to California?’

‘I wish there were.’

‘Goddam liar,’ she said vaguely. ‘Goodnight.’

She made straight for the door and didn’t look back.

I drove them to the airport in the morning. Eunice had lent me her car and the house for as long as I needed them, and had passed off her overnight visit with one sarcastic dig at breakfast.

‘Better undersexed than sorry.’

‘What?’ said Lynnie.

‘Eunice is offering a solution to the population explosion,’ I explained.

Lynnie giggled. Eunice showed me a double row of teeth and told me to pass the cream.

When I’d seen them off I followed a local road map and Eunice’s inaccurate directions, and eventually arrived at the Perry Stud Farm, home of Jefferson L. Roots, chairman, among other things, of the Bloodhorse Breeders’ Association. A houseboy in a spotless white coat showed me through the house and on to the patio: a house made of large cool concrete boxes, with rough-cast white walls and bare golden wood floors. The patio was shaded by a vine trained across a trellis. There was a glass and metal table, and low comfortable lounging chairs around it. From one of these Jeff Roots extricated himself and held out a welcoming hand.

He was a thick man with a paunch which had defied health farms, and he worried about his weight. His manner had the gentle, deprecating ease of the really tough American; the power was inside, discernible but purring, like the engine in a Rolls. He was dressed in a tropical-weight city suit, and while I was there an efficient girl secretary came to remind him that time and his connection to Miami would wait for no man.

‘A drink?’ he suggested. ‘It’s a hot day already. What would you like?’

‘Lime juice?’ I asked. ‘Or lemon.’

I got lime, squeezed fresh on to crushed ice. My host drank sugar-free tonic water and made a face over it.

‘Just the smell of french fries and I’m a size larger in shirts,’ he complained.

‘Why worry?’ I said.

‘Ever heard of hypertension?’

‘Thin people can have it too.’

Tell that to the birds... or rather, tell it to my wife. She starves me.’ He swirled his glass gloomily, ice and lemon rising perilously to the rim. ‘So, anyway, Mr Hawkins, how can I help you today?’

He pushed a folded newspaper across the table and pointed at it with an appreciative smile.

‘Chrysalis cocooned,’ the headlines said. And underneath, in smaller letters, ‘High price stallion loses liberty, corralled at Perry, reshipped to Midway. And are the mares there glad, or are they? Our tip is syndicators breathe again.’ There was a picture of Chrysalis in his paddock, some mention of Dave’s leg, and a few snide remarks about the police and the local horse folks who hadn’t been able to spot a million dollars at ten paces.

‘Where did you rustle him up from?’ Roots asked. ‘Sam Hengelman wouldn’t say. Most unlike him.’

‘Sam was an accessory to a conjuring trick. A little matter of substitution. We left a horse and took a horse... I guess he didn’t want to talk himself into trouble.’

‘And naturally you paid him.’

‘Er, yes,’ I agreed. ‘So we did.’

‘But I gather from your call that it’s not about Chrysalis that you want to see me now?’

‘No. It’s about Allyx.’

‘Allyx?’

‘Yes, the other stallion which...’

‘I know about all that,’ he interrupted. ‘They turned the whole state upside down looking for him and they found just as much trace as they did of Chrysalis.’

‘Do you by any chance remember, ten years ago, another horse called Showman?’

‘Showman? Showman? He got loose from a groom who was supposed to be exercising him, or something like that, and was killed in the Appalachians.’

‘How certain was the identification?’

He put his tonic water down carefully on the table.

‘Are you suggesting he’s still alive?’

‘I just wondered,’ I said mildly. ‘From what I’ve been told, they found a dead horse two years after Showman vanished. But although he was in a high state of decomposition, he’d only been dead about three months. So it easily might not have been Showman, just somewhat like him in colour and size.’

‘And if it wasn’t?’

‘We might just possibly turn him up with Allyx.’

‘Have you...’ he cleared his throat. ‘Have you any idea where they... er... might be... turned up?’

‘I’m afraid not. Not yet.’

‘They weren’t... wherever you found Chrysalis?’

‘No. That was only a shipping station, so to speak. Chrysalis was intended to go on somewhere else.’

‘And at that somewhere else, one might find...?’

‘There’s a good chance, I think.’

‘They might have been shipped abroad again. Down to Mexico or South America.’

‘It’s possible; but I’m inclined against it, on the whole.’ Uncle Bark, whoever he was, lived somewhere in the States. Yola had not needed to call the overseas operator to get through to him, on the telephone. She hadn’t even made it person to person.

‘The whole thing seems so extraordinary,’ Roots said, shaking his head. ‘Some nut going around stealing stallions whose value at once drops to zero, because he can’t admit he’s got them. Do you think some fanatic somewhere is conducting experiments. Trying to produce a super-horse? Or how about a criminal syndicate all getting their mares covered by bluest blood stallions at donkey prices?... No, that wouldn’t work, they’d never be able to sell the foals for stud, they wouldn’t be able to cash in on the blood lines...’

‘I think it’s a good deal simpler than either of those,’ I said, smiling. ‘Much more down to earth.’

‘Then what?’

I told him.

He chewed it over and I drank my lime juice.

‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d try along those lines, and see if it leads anywhere.’

‘It’s fantastic,’ Roots said. ‘And I hope to God you’re wrong.’

I laughed. ‘Yes, I can see that.’

‘It’ll take you months to plough through all that work yourself... and I don’t suppose you have too close a knowledge of the thoroughbred scene over here... so why don’t I get you some help?’

‘I’d be very grateful.’

There was an outside extension telephone close to his chair. He lifted the receiver and pressed buttons. I listened to him arranging with the publishers of a leading horse journal for me to have the run of their files and the temporary services of two long-memoried assistants.

‘That’s fixed, then,’ he said, standing up. ‘The office is on North Broadway, along in Lexington. I guess you’ll let me know how you make out?’

‘I certainly will.’

‘Dave and Eunice... they’re great guys.’

‘They are.’

‘Give her my best,’ he said, looking at his watch.

‘She’s gone to California...’

‘The new place?’

I nodded.

‘Crazy idea of Dave’s, moving to the coast. The centre of the bloodstock industry is right here in Lexington, and this is the place to be.’

I made the sort of non-critical, non-committal noise in my throat necessary on such occasions, and Jeff Roots thrust out a rounded hand.

‘I have this stockholders’ meeting in Miami,’ he said, apologetically, and he walked with me through the house to where his secretary waited in a Cadillac parked beside Eunice’s Toronado Oldsmobile.

At the newspaper offices, I found, anything Jeff Roots wanted done was done whole-heartedly and at the double. My two temporary assistants proved to be an elderly man who spent most of his time compiling an annual stallion register, and a maiden lady in her fifties whose horse face and crisp masculine voice were easy to take, as she had an unexpectedly sweet smile and a phenomenal memory.

When I explained what I was looking for they both stared at me in dumb-struck silence.

‘Isn’t it possible?’ I asked.

Mr Harris and Miss Britt recovered themselves and said they guessed so.

‘And while we’re at it, we might make a list of anyone whose name or nickname might be Bark. Or Bart, perhaps; though I think it’s Bark.’

Miss Britt promptly reeled off six names, all Barkleys, living in and around Lexington.

‘Maybe that’s not such a good idea,’ I sighed.

‘No harm in it,’ Miss Britt said briskly. ‘We can make all the lists simultaneously.’

She and Mr Harris went into a huddle and from there to the reference room, and were shortly up to their elbows in papers and books. They told me to smoke and wait, which I did all day.

At five o’clock they came across with the results.

‘This is the best we can do,’ Miss Britt said doubtfully. ‘There are well over three thousand stallions at stud in the States, you see. You asked us to sort out any whose fees had risen steadily over the past eight or nine years... there are two hundred and nine of them.’ She put a closely typed list in front of me.

‘Next, you wanted the names of any stallions who had been conspicuously more successful at stud than one would have expected from their own breeding. There are two hundred and eighty two of those.’ She gave me a second sheet.

‘Next, you wanted to know if any of this year’s two-year-olds had proved conspicuously better at racing than one would normally have expected from their breeding. There are twenty-nine of those.’ She added the third list.

‘And lastly, the people who could be called Bark... thirty-two of them. From the Bar K Ranch to Barry Kyle.’

‘You’ve done wonders,’ I said sincerely. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that any one farm is concerned on all four lists?’

‘Most of the stallions on the first list are the same as those on the second. That stands to reason. But none of the sires of the exceptional two-year-olds are on either of the first two lists. And none of the two-year-olds were bred by any of the Barks.’ Both of them looked downcast at such negative results after all their work.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘We’ll try another way tomorrow.’

Miss Britt snorted, which I interpreted as agreement. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ she said, nodding. Mr Harris seemed to doubt that this particular Rome could be built at all with the materials available, but he turned up uncomplaining at nine the following morning, and they both dived in again, on new permutations.

By noon the first two lists had been reduced to twenty. We all adjourned for a sandwich. At two the searching began again. At three ten Miss Britt gasped sharply and her eyes went wide. She scribbled quickly on a fresh piece of paper, considered the result with her head on one side, and then looked across to me.

‘Well...’ she said. ‘Well...’ The words wouldn’t come.

‘You’ve found them,’ I said.

She nodded, only half believing it.

‘Cross-checking them all by where they raced, their years of purchase, their markings and their approximate ages, as you asked... we came up with twelve possibles which appeared on the first two lists. And one of the sires of the two-year-olds fits your requirements and comes from the same farm as one of the first twelve. Er... do you follow me?’

‘On your heels,’ I said, smiling.

Mr Harris and I both joined her and looked over her shoulder at what she had written.

‘Moviemaker, aged fourteen years; present stud fee ten thousand dollars.

‘Centigrade, aged twelve years; this year’s stud fee fifteen hundred dollars, fee next year twenty-five hundred.

‘Both standing at Orpheus Farm, Los Caillos.

‘The property of Culham James Offen.’

Moviemaker and Centigrade: Showman and Allyx. As clear as a frosty sky.

Stallions were normally booked for thirty to forty mares each breeding season. Forty mares at ten thousand dollars a throw meant four hundred thousand dollars every year, give or take a live foal or two. Moviemaker had cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at public auction ten years ago, according to Miss Britt’s researches. Since then Offen had been paid somewhere near two-and-a-half million dollars in stud fees.

Centigrade had been bought for a hundred thousand dollars at Keneland sales. At twenty-five hundred a time he would earn that hundred thousand next year alone. And nothing was more likely than that he too would rise to a much higher fee.

‘Culham James Offen is so well regarded,’ Miss Britt said in consternation. ‘I simply can’t believe it. He’s accepted as one of the top rank breeders.’

‘The only thing is, of course,’ said Mr Harris, regretfully, ‘that there’s no connection with the name Bark.’

Miss Britt looked at me and her smile shone out sweet and triumphant.

‘But there is, isn’t there? Mr Harris, you’re no musician. Haven’t you ever heard of Orpheus in the Underworld... by Offenbach?’