Blood Sport

Chapter Twelve

Walt said ‘For God’s sake’ four times and admitted Buttress Life might be willing to send him from coast to coast if Allyx were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

‘Los Caillos is a short distance north-east of Los Angeles,’ I said. ‘I thought of staying a bit farther north, on the coast.’

‘If you like.’

‘Come to The Vacationer, Grand Beach, Santa Barbara, then. I’ll meet you there tomorrow.’

He repeated the address. ‘Who’s paying?’ he said.

‘Buttress Life and Dave Teller can fight it out between them. I’ll put the motel on Teller’s expenses. Can you wring the fare out of your office?’

‘I guess so.’ His sigh came wearily over the wire. ‘My wife and kids aren’t going to like it. I was fixing to take them on a picnic this Sunday.’

‘Postpone it a week,’ I suggested.

‘It’s been postponed twice already, on your account.’

‘Oh.’

After a short pause, he said, ‘Around six, tomorrow, local time. That do?’

‘That would do very well.’

‘See you,’ he said briefly, and put down his receiver with a crash. I returned the Teller instrument more kindly to its cradle and surveyed the green and tomato room.

Nothing to do.

Mixed a drink with precision, and drank it. Wandered down to the pool, thought about a swim in the dusk, and couldn’t be bothered to undress. Went back to the house, and ate a dinner cooked and served by Eva, who chattered so long in her pleasure at having someone to speak to in her own language that I heartily regretted I’d ever used it. Wished desperately she would stop and go away, and when at last she did, that was no good either.

Tried to read and turned six pages without taking in a word. Wandered restlessly again into the black velvet deep green garden, and sat in one of the chairs by the pool, looking at darkness inside and out. Unreasonable, I thought drearily, that I shouldn’t have recovered normally from losing Caroline, that I didn’t value the freedom other men envied, that I couldn’t be content with all I had: cruel that depression was no respecter of status or achievement and struck so deep that no worldly success could alleviate it.

Great fame, universal honour, droves of personal friends had demonstrably failed to save a whole string of geniuses from its clutches, and every year it bagged its thousands from unimportant people like me who would never see their name in print or lights, and didn’t necessarily want to. Probably depression was an illness as definite as jaundice, and one day they would inoculate babies against it. I supposed I could count myself lucky not to have had it in its acute form, where its grey-black octopus tentacles reached out and sucked into every corner of the spirit until quite quickly life became literally unbearable, and the high jump suddenly presented itself with blinding clarity as the only logical, the only possible relief.

I wouldn’t come to that day, if I could help it. I would not.

The Vacationer was right down on the beach, with the sound of the bright blue Pacific creeping in a murmur under the transistors, the air-conditioning, the civilized chatter, the squalling of children, and the revving of cars. There were no ocean rooms left. Walt and I, next door to each other, overlooked the parking lot.

Eunice and Lynnie were out when I arrived and still out when Walt checked in at six, but they were back when I went down with him for a drink before dinner. I had left a note at the desk for Eunice, but I hadn’t told Walt she would be there. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her sitting with Lynnie, and turned on me a narrow-eyed composite glance of dislike and anger. If I’d told him she was to be with us, he wouldn’t have come: he knew that I knew it. He was entitled to his rage.

Eunice was, however, the wife of a very good client of his firm. He swallowed his feelings like a pill, and chased them down with a double bourbon in silence. Eunice and Lynnie were on frosted looking daiquiris and happy with it. They both looked marvellous, with honey-brown skin and a languorous and sun-filled way of moving. Eunice wore fluorescent green with bits of gold at anatomical points like ears, wrists, and feet. Lynnie had acquired a locally grown hot pink-orange tunic, and the few straps of her sandals seemed to be made of polished semi-precious stones. Even Walt, after a while, couldn’t take his eyes away from them for long.

We had dinner outside, under a trellis lit by hundreds of tiny multi-coloured lights, on a shallow terrace which led directly out on to the sand. Eunice’s language was for once as soft as the sea breeze, and consequently as a social evening it developed into a reasonable success.

Over the coffee I asked Eunice with a casualness which drew a piercing glance from Walt, ‘Have you by any chance heard of a racehorse breeder called Culham James Offen?’

‘Heard of him,’ she said. ‘Of course I have. Everyone has.’

‘I haven’t,’ Walt said flatly. One couldn’t expect complete capitulation. He was doing very well.

‘I mean, everyone in the bloodstock world would have heard of him,’ Eunice explained without obvious patience. ‘He has that terrifically successful stallion Moviemaker. And Dave says one ought to think of sending mares to another one of his, Centigrade... The first crop of foals is winning two-year-old races this season all over the place. But quite apart from that,’ she smiled broadly, ‘I guess we’ll be seeing a good deal of him from now on.’

‘Er... why?’ I asked diffidently.

‘Our new place is right next to his.’

Walt’s mouth fell open and I stopped stirring my coffee.

‘What did you say?’ I said, feeling my eyes go blank, as I knew they always did under shock.

Our new place, where we’re moving to, is right across the road from Offen. We can see his paddocks from our bedroom windows.’ I gaped in fascination at Eunice while she outlined in such blissful ignorance the reason for the attempted murder of her husband. He himself had told me that the executors of the late Davis L. Davis had accepted his tender for the farm only recently, during the week before our momentous trip on the river. So the something ‘goddam stupid’ which had happened to Yola and Matt Clive’s scheme was that they had discovered that of all the people on earth it was to be Dave Teller who was to be Offen’s new close neighbour. They had discovered it after they’d hi-jacked the horse, or they wouldn’t have gone ahead with the plan.

‘Why are you laughing?’ Eunice asked, frowning. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘It’s not funny,’ I agreed, straightening my face, ‘Far from it. Do you know Culham James personally?’

‘Not yet. Does it matter?’ She still looked puzzled.

‘It would be wiser not to make close friends with him in too much of a hurry.’

‘Why not?’

‘Might prove a prickly flower.’ I had a mental vision of Dave looking out of his bedroom window day after day, looking over to the paddocks where Chrysalis and Allyx were let out to graze. He might never have recognized them. But also he might. Culham James simply couldn’t take the risk. Yola and Matt had flown immediately to England to dispose of Dave a long way from the real scene of danger.

While Allyx remained at Orpheus Farm and Dave continued making active plans to move alongside, the explosive situation would still exist. Though Matt Clive might have given up temporarily, I fervently hoped that Radnor-Halley wouldn’t let their vigilance slide a millimetre. A call to Keeble would be wise... even at California — London rates.

I’m going for a walk on the shore,’ said Lynnie, kicking off the pebbly sandals. ‘Who’s coming?’

I beat Walt to it by quicker reflexes, and collected a grim look from him as I left him alone with Eunice. Lynnie remarked on it, grinning as we ambled silently away on the trickling sand.

‘He’s put off by the bloodies,’ I explained. ‘That’s all.’

‘She says it less often over here,’ Lynnie commented. ‘And she doesn’t drink, except one or two before lunch, until after we’ve changed in the evening. Why is that, do you think?’

‘She’s escaped from the Lexington cage.’

‘That heavenly house... a cage?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘The new one isn’t half so beautiful,’ she protested.

‘It will be, when Eunice has finished. And then the walls will close in again.’

‘Another cage, do you mean?’ She sounded uncertain.

‘Another cage,’ I agreed.

‘Life can’t be just escaping from one cage and ending up in another,’ she said explosively, repudiating violently so bleak a vision.

‘Everyone lives inside bars,’ I said. ‘The trick is not to want to get out.’

‘Stop it,’ she said in distress. ‘I don’t want to hear that.’

‘They used to keep linnets as pets,’ I said. ‘But there aren’t any linnets in cages any more. Budgerigars instead. You’ll be all right, little linnet.’

‘I never know when you’re being serious.’

‘Always.’

‘But half the time what you say is so... so crazy.’

‘Life is serious, life is crazy. Anything crazy is serious, and everything serious is crazy... I’ll race you along to that beach hut.’

She beat me to it in her bare feet, and leaned against the rough wooden wall laughing and getting her breath back while I tipped half-a-ton of sand out of my shoes. We walked on a little farther, and then sat down in the warm night and looked out across the shadowy peaceful ocean. No land between us and Japan, half a world away.

‘Did you come out here to be with... us, or to find Allyx?’ she said.

‘Both.’

She shook her head. ‘You brought Walt. That makes it to find Allyx.’

‘Walt would have chosen to stay somewhere else,’ I said, smiling. ‘So California for Allyx, Santa Barbara for you. Satisfied?’

She murmured something unintelligible, and we sat in silence while she scuffed sand into a heap with her toes.

‘Will you find him, do you think?’ she asked in the end.

‘Allyx? We might do.’

‘When, roughly?’

‘I don’t know. Tomorrow, maybe.’

‘And then... you’ll go home?’

‘I guess.’

‘Back to an office...’ She swept out an arm, embracing the wide sky. Back to an office, I thought coldly: and to the perpetual digging into people’s privacy, to the occasional snaring of a bent applicant, to drizzle, to Putney, to the vacuum of the flat. To, in short, my normal life. The trick was not to want to slip through the bars.

‘What are you going to do, now that you’ve left school?’ I asked.

She sucked in a breath. ‘After this, all the old things seem horribly dreary.’

‘They’ll soon give Dave a walking plaster...’

‘I know,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t think I don’t know. I was supposed to be starting a secretarial course in September... I utterly don’t want to, any more. Why can’t everyone just live on the beach and be warm all the time...’ She rocked with her arms laced round her bent up knees.

‘Not enough beach.’

She giggled. ‘You are just about the least romantic man alive. Comes of being a civil servant, I suppose. Like Daddy.’

In time we walked back along by the edge of the sea and paused when we came level with the motel. She put her hand on my arm and simply stood there waiting. I kissed her forehead, and then her nose, and finally her mouth. It was all very gentle, and utterly unnerving.

‘This is no good,’ I said, taking my hands from her shoulders. ‘No good at all.’

‘I’ve been kissed before,’ she said anxiously. ‘I really have.’

‘That isn’t what I meant,’ I said, half laughing. ‘You’d qualify for a diploma. No... it’s just, little Lynnie, that we’re a long way from home... and I never kiss brunettes more than once on a Friday.’ I turned away towards the motel and jerked my head for her to follow. The best resolutions in the world would come a cropper faced with something like Lynnie, and immediate flight was the only course. It didn’t seem to be popular with Lynnie herself, but I couldn’t help that. I walked her briskly up the beach and made a joke about what Walt would be saying to Eunice, and we arrived in reasonable order to find that it was nothing: they were sitting across the table from each other in a miles-apart silence. Eunice gave us a long cool look and Walt one of disillusion, and Lynnie quite unnecessarily blushed, confirming their obvious suspicions. The harmless little walk hadn’t been a good idea from any one of four points of view.

Walt and I drove quietly into Orpheus Farm the following morning. He did the talking: a thoroughly professional piece of work, insurance patter at the double. A survey for new fire regulations, he glibly explained, necessitated us seeing over the entire establishment.

We saw. Every stall in every barn, every hay loft, every straw bale, every inch. We saw Moviemaker. We saw Centigrade. We made a great many notes.

Culham James Offen himself escorted us round the coolest barn containing his four prize stallions. A great deal of self satisfaction sat on his shoulders like an impervious duck‘s-back mantle. I considered this with uneasy suspicion.

Uncle Bark was not only a man in his fifties with white hair, but he had a grey station wagon in a third of his large garage. I saw Walt giving it a sidelong glance. Undoubtedly it was Uncle Bark who had delivered the Snail Express trailer to old Hagstrom’s boy at Rock Springs; and very likely Uncle Bark who had followed Sam Hengelman’s van along the turnpike. Impossible to prove, though, at this distance.

The colour of his hair was premature. Very few wrinkles marked the smooth suntanned face, from which white eyebrows stood out like a bracket of snow, nearly meeting over the nose. His eyelashes were also white, but the albino non-pigmentation stopped short of the eyes: not pink, but a clear pale blue.

He carried his head stiffly on a thick muscular neck, and the large body beneath the airy white shirt looked solid more than soft. Not a man to ignore in any company. A physique which teemed naturally with success: and success had given him an arrogance of expression where a decent humility would have been more fitting.

The whole farm had the high gloss of money-no-object. Mathematically precise white-painted wood railings ringed the paddocks, and the approach to the Spanish-style house was landscaped with watered lawns and palms and an occasional bed full of spiky red flowers with sharp purplish leaves. We didn’t penetrate the house: Walt’s fire insurance only stretched to the stabling.

After we’d seen the stallions Offen handed us over to his stud groom, a fair, surprisingly young man he called Kiddo, who had a drawling western voice and an air of having been born without urgency. Every second word was ‘uh’, and his walk was thirty-two frames a second; slow motion.

‘Been here long?’ I asked him, as he pointed out the spotless foaling stalls.

‘Five or six months,’ he said, showing no resentment at a personal question; good natured, unsuspicious, no sign of nerves.

‘You must be good, to get, a job like this so young,’ I congratulated him.

After a pause he said, ‘I got a feeling for horses, see? Mares, they foal down nearly always at night. Comes from having to give birth in the dark out in the wild, you understand?’

‘Why in the dark?’ asked Walt, puzzled.

Another pause. Not for a deliberate choice of what or what not to say, I realized, but just a moment of waiting while the instinctive knowledge coalesced into words.

‘They drop ’em by day, some hungry hyena comes along and kills the foal in the first half hour. Foals, now, they’re readier to run at birth than most other critturs, but you’ve got to give ‘em a half hour to dry off.’

‘But they don’t have to run, here,’ Walt protested.

‘Nature don’t know that,’ Kiddo pointed out reasonably. ‘Another thing, mares mostly drop their foals pretty quick. Don’t take some of them no time at all. And then, see, I always know when a mare’s ready, and most often I go to the stall and make sure she’s doing all right.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked, fascinated.

A much longer pause. Then he said, ‘I don’t know how I know, I got a feeling for it. I just wake up some nights and think, that Rose is about ready, and I go on out to her, and maybe there she is, not needing a bit of help, or maybe with the cord round the foal’s neck, strangling it. I bin with horses, see, all my life.’

‘Where were you before you came here?’ I asked.

‘Uh... all over. Had a job in Lexington a while back, but they said I didn’t keep good time turning up at work.’ He grinned suddenly, a big mischievous lighting-up of the passive patient face. ‘Then... uh... I was with a feller in Maryland... he had a barn was falling down and honeysuckle breaking his fences and creeping into his windows, but he sure had some pretty mares and one of them was the dam of the horse who won the Preakness a year back. Though I don’t go to the races, myself.’

‘Where after Maryland?’ I asked.

‘Uh... here. I seen this ad in the Blood Horse, and I wrote. It was a joke, mostly. I never expected to hear a word, knowing this was a big place and everything. But Mr Offen, it seems he didn’t want no great business man, just someone with a feeling for the mares... and he’s keeping me on, he says, though there was two before me he let go after they’d been here a month.’

It didn’t seem to worry him. He had the God-will-provide nature which doesn’t understand anxiety and never stores up winter nuts. Not that he had any need to. His ‘feeling for mares’ was in fact priceless: he would probably never cash in on it as he could but he’d never want for a job.

Kiddo watched us go in the same calm friendliness with which he’d shown us round. Walt and I agreed on the way back to Santa Barbara that he was only potentially an opponent. Loyalty might be given to Offen if he demanded it, but at present Kiddo had no idea what was going on.

‘Unless,’ Walt said thoughtfully, ‘he’s a brilliant actor.’

I shook my head. ‘He wasn’t acting. None of the signs.’

Walt looked at me curiously, taking his eyes too long off the road. ‘Can you always tell?’

I smiled. ‘That’s one of those unanswerable questions. I’ve a feeling for it, like Kiddo with his mares. But if it lets me down sometimes, how am I to know?’

‘You’d know soon enough when secrets started leaking to the other side,’ Walt pointed out. ‘Have you ever passed as clear anyone who turned out to be a spy?’

‘Yes.’

‘How often?’

‘Once.’

‘In your first year, I suppose,’ Walt said with mild sarcasm.

‘In my second year. He was the first serious spy I had to deal with, and I didn’t spot him. The counterespionage chaps turned him up six months later when he’d done a good deal of damage, and the press made the usual scathing remarks about the feebleness of our screening system.’

‘Which you took to heart,’ Walt said dryly.

‘I guess so.’

He drove a mile and then said, ‘And now you’re so good at it that they beat you up. What do you think about things when that happens?’

‘That there’s a big fish coming down the pipeline and they want me out of the way.’

‘So you look all the harder.’ A statement, not a question.

‘You might say so. Yes.’

‘They’ll kill you one of these days.’

I didn’t answer. Walt flicked a glance sideways and sighed. ‘I suppose you don’t care.’

‘There are a lot of others in the department.’

Walt drove into Santa Barbara without another word, where we joined Eunice and Lynnie in the terrace restaurant for lunch. They had, they said, bought that morning the big bright dangling earrings which swung with every turn of their heads. Lynnie’s were scarlet, Eunice’s acid green; otherwise identical. Still friends, I thought in some relief. Still in harmony. Whether Eunice would do a small chore for me was, however, another matter.

We had clam chowder with shrimp to follow, and Lynnie said with all this seafood she’d be growing fins. During coffee, when she stood up restlessly and said she was going down to the sea, it was Walt, after a pause, who said he would go with her. She looked at me questioningly, worriedly, and then turned and walked quickly off with him, talking a good deal too brightly.

‘Don’t you hurt that child,’ Eunice said fiercely.

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You’re too bloody attractive.’

‘Yeah. Charm the birds off the trees,’ I agreed sardonically. ‘Little wives spill their husbands’ secrets into my bloody attractive ears.’

She looked shocked. Quite a change, I thought, from dishing it out.

‘You mean you... use it?’

‘Like a can opener. And as a catalyst. Who doesn’t? Salesmen, politicians, actors, women, all using it like mad.’

‘For God’s sake...’ Her voice was faint, but she was also laughing.

‘But not on Lynnie,’ I added wryly.

‘You didn’t need to, I guess. Dragging Dave out of the Thames was a lot more effective.’

I watched Lynnie’s and Walt’s backs as they reached the tide line.

‘So that’s why...?’ I said, almost to myself.

‘Hero worship,’ Eunice said with barbs. ‘Does it give you a kick?’

‘Like a mule’s in the stomach...’

She laughed. ‘It’s not that you’re so madly handsome in any obvious way.’

‘No,’ I agreed with truth, ‘I’m not.’

She looked as if she were going to say more and then thought better of it. I jumped straight in while her mind was still half flirting, knowing, and despising the knowledge, that in that mood she was more likely to do what I asked.

‘Has Lynnie still got those photographs of me?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said sarcastically. ‘In a fire, she’d save them first.’

‘I’d like Culham James Offen to see them.’

‘You’d like what? What are you talking about?’

‘About you and Lynnie driving over to pay a neighbourly call on Culham James this afternoon, and easily, dearest Eunice, you could tell him about me pulling Dave out of the Thames, and Lynnie could show him my photograph. Especially the one of me sitting by a table outside a pub. That group of all of us.’

She gaped and gasped, and then started thinking.

‘You really can’t be as pleased with yourself as all that... so for God’s sake, why?’

‘An experiment.’

‘That’s no answer.’

‘Earning my keep at The Vacationer.’

A look of disgust turned down her mouth.

‘Finding that bloody horse?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘You don’t mean... surely you can’t mean that Offen has anything to do with it?’

‘I’d like to make sure he hasn’t.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, I guess that’s not much to ask. Sure. I’ll get Lynnie to come with me.’

‘And tell him I’m looking for Allyx.’

She gave me a straight assessing stare, and said, ‘How about Chrysalis?’

‘Whatever you like. Say that Dave employed me to get him back.’

‘I don’t know why I’m doing it.’

‘More interesting than golf?’ I suggested.

‘Is it a game?’ She was sceptical.

‘Well... like hunting bears,’ I smiled.

‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded sardonically. ‘A sport.’