Blood Sport

Chapter Four

The Buttress Life Offices on Thirty-Third Street were high on customer appeal on the sixth floor. On the fifth and seventh they tucked the computers and electric typewriters into functional plasterboard cubicles. I sat three inches deep in black leather and considered that of all American craftsmen, I admired their chair designers most: in no other country in the world could one sit on the same seat for several hours without protest from the sacro-iliac.

I had waited forty pleasantly cool minutes already. Long enough to discover that the rows of pot plants along the low wall dividing the forty-foot-square hall into five smaller bays were made of plastic. Long enough to admire the pinewood walls, the ankle-deep carpet, the carefully lowered ceiling with its inset lights. In each bay there was a large desk, with one large chair behind it, one at the side, one in front. Nearly all occupied. Dividing each bay neatly in two stood a second, smaller desk; for the secretary-receptionist with his back discreetly to his boss. In front of him, in each bay, the long black leather bench for waiting on.

I waited. There was still someone for the big man to see before me. Very sorry, said the secretary apologetically, but the schedule had been crowded even before Mr Teller’s cable arrived. Could I possibly wait?

So why not? I had three weeks to spare.

The light was dim, and piped music poured over everything like syrup. That and the built-in deadness of the acoustics made the earnest consultations going on at the five big desks completely inaudible to the waiting benches, while at the same time giving the customers a comforting illusion that they weren’t alone in their troubles. Everyone, at the core of things, was alone. Just some more than others.

I hadn’t slept all night after leaving Lynnie; but not her fault. It had been one long stupid struggle between a craving for oblivion and conviction that appeasing it wasn’t so much morally wrong as a thoroughgoing defeat. I had never learnt to accept defeat. Obstinacy had given me what success I had had in my job, and it alone seemed to be keeping me alive, since all other props were as much use as toothpicks in an avalanche. Enthusiasm for finding Dave Teller’s horse burned in me as brightly as wet coal dust: and the nation would hardly collapse if I left its employ.

Caroline had crowded like a flood-tide through my head and down my body. Caroline... whom I would have married, had it not been for the husband who would not divorce her.

Caroline had left him to live with me, and had felt guilty about it. A mess. An ordinary, everyday mess. Her fine passion had fretted away over six frustrating years of will-he won’t-he; and to the end he wouldn’t. Not that he’d ever got her back. In the year since she had left me she had returned to nursing and was working as a sister in a Nairobi hospital, impervious to come-back letters from either of us.

The sharp pain of her departure had dulled to the extent that I no longer felt it through every waking minute: it came stabbing back at longer and longer intervals. But when it did, I remembered her as she’d been at the beginning, and the hunger was pretty well unbearable. It was easy enough to find different girls to talk to, to work with, to take to bed: hard to find a match on all levels: and Caroline had been a match. In the past year, instead of receding, the loneliness had closed in. My work, of its nature, set me apart. And I had no one to go home to, to share with, to care for. The futility and emptiness had gone down to my roots, and nothing seemed to lie ahead but years and years more of what I was already finding intolerable.

The clients at the big desk stood up, shook hands, and left. The secretary ushered the man with the earlier appointment round into the presence. I went on waiting, without impatience. I was accustomed to it.

The punt, investigated in Henley that morning, had produced nothing but ten different sets of smudged fingerprints, of which the topmost and stickiest were Peter’s. The Yogi Bear handkerchief was on its way round the manufacturers, in the distant hope that someone could tell where it had been sold. Dave Teller, briefly visited, had said wanly to charge everything to him. The Super VC 10 which lifted off at 3 PM British Summertime from Heathrow had landed at Kennedy at 3.10. Buttress Life closed its doors at 6, which gave it still a half hour to go. And outside in the canyon streets the hundred degree heatwave crept up a notch to a hundred and one.

My turn came round for the big desk. The big man, on his feet behind it, held out a large dry flabby hand and produced the sincere smile of the professional insurance man. Having settled me into the large comfortable chair alongside he sat down himself and picked up the cable discreetly placed to hand by the secretary. A polished chunk of wood sat on the desk between us. On it, neat gold letters facing me said helpfully: Paul M. Zeissen.

‘We received this cable from Mr Teller,’ he said. A slight, very slight undertone of disapproval.

I nodded. I had sent it myself.

‘Our own investigators are experts.’ He didn’t like me coming: but he wouldn’t want to lose the Teller policies. His politeness had effort behind it.

I smoothed him down, more from habit than anything else.

‘Of course. Please think of me simply as an auxiliary. Mr Teller persuaded me to come over because he has unfortunately broken a leg in England, and will be immobilized in hospital for a few weeks. He sent me very much on impulse, as a personal friend, to... kind of represent him. To see if there was anything I could do. There was no suggestion that he wasn’t satisfied with your firm.’ I paused delicately. ‘If he criticized anyone, it was the police.’

Paul M. Zeissen’s smile warmed up a fraction from within: but he hadn’t risen to high executive status in his tough profession without disbelieving half that everyone said. That was all right with me. Half of what I’d said was true. Or half true, anyway.

‘Mr Teller understands of course,’ he said, ‘that it is for our own sakes that we are looking for the horse?’

‘Naturally,’ I agreed. ‘Mr Teller is also most anxious that you should succeed, as the horse is irreplaceable. He would infinitely prefer his return to any amount of insurance money.’

‘A million and a half,’ said Zeissen reverently.

‘Worth more on the hoof,’ I said.

He glanced at me with a first gleam of real welcome. Once he’d swallowed the firm’s affronted pride, it was quite clear that they’d nothing to lose by letting me in.

‘One of our best men, Walt Prensela, is in charge of the Chrysalis case,’ he said. ‘He’ll give you the picture. He knows you’re coming, I sent him a memo with a copy of the cable.’ He pressed the switch on his desk intercom.

‘Walt? We have Mr Hawkins from England here. Shall I have him come up to you now?’

The polite question was, as so often in American affairs, an equally polite order. The affirmative duly came. Zeissen flipped the switch and stood up.

‘Walt’s office is one floor up, number four seven. Anyone will direct you. Would you like to go up now?’

I would; and I went.

I’d expected to have to deal with the same ruffled feathers in four seven, but I didn’t, because Walt had done his homework, though I wasn’t sure of that at first. He greeted me with business-like casualness, shook hands, waved me to the spare chair, and sat down himself, all in five smooth seconds. Much my age, I judged, but shorter and a good deal thicker. His hands were square and powerful with nails so brief that the fingertips’ pads seemed to be boiling over backwards. There were middle European origins in the bone structure of the skull, topped by roughly cropped wiry grey-brown hair, and his deep-socketed brown eyes were set permanently into the I-don’t-believe-a-word-of-it expression of his boss downstairs, only more so.

‘So, Gene,’ he said, neither with nor without much friendliness, ‘you’ve come a long way.’

‘Dave Teller’s idea, Walt,’ I said mildly.

‘Looking for horses... do you do much of that?’ His voice was flat; uninformative.

‘Practically none. How about you?’

His nostrils twisted. ‘If you mean, was it I who didn’t find the other two, then no, it wasn’t.’

I tried a smile: didn’t get one back.

He said: ‘Buttress Life had to pay up for Allyx three years ago. One million six hundred and forty-three thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine dollars, give or take a nickel. Showman, the first one, was insured with another company.’

‘Accident?’ I murmured. ‘Or design.’

He rubbed his left thumb over the top of the round-ended fingers, the first of a hundred times I saw that gesture.

‘Now that you’ve come, design. Before, I wasn’t sure.’

‘I’m officially on holiday,’ I protested. ‘I came only because Teller asked me. You should read no meaning into it.’

He gave me a level, half sardonic stare.

‘I checked you out,’ he said, flicking at the copy of the cable, which lay on his desk. ‘I wanted to know just what sort of limey busybody was being wished on to me.’

I didn’t say anything, and he made a clicking noise at the side of his mouth, expressive of understanding, resignation and acceptance, all in one.

‘A screener,’ he said. ‘How come Teller found you?’

‘How come you found me?’ I asked instead.

‘I mentioned your name in two places,’ he said complacently. ‘The FBI, and the CIA. And got a positive reaction from both. A couple of useful pals there filled me in. It seems you’re a major stumbling block in the way of the planting of spies in certain Government departments and places like biological warfare research laboratories; and you’ve passed on some useful warnings on that subject to our people at Fort Detrick. They say the other side have tried to deter you, a little roughly, once or twice.’ He sighed. ‘You have a clean bill with our boys. And how.’

‘And with you?’

‘They said you didn’t like limelight.’

‘It’s all yours.’

‘Just so as I stand in right with Buttress.’

My decisive nod satisfied him. If we found the horse, he was welcome to the handshakes.

‘Fill me in, then,’ I said. ‘How did Chrysalis get lost?’

Walt glanced at his watch and checked it against the electric clock on the wall. The little box-like office had no windows, as the single glass panel faced out on to the corridor; and although it was cool and comfortable enough, it was no place to talk if one didn’t have to.

‘Five after six,’ Walt said. ‘Do you have any other engagements?’

‘Know any good bars?’ I suggested.

‘A mind reader.’ He raised eyes to heaven. ‘There’s Dalaney’s a block up Broadway.’

We stepped out of the air-conditioning into the sweltering street, up 30 degrees in two paces. With the humidity running also at 98 per cent, walking as little as a hundred yards left one damp to the skin. I never minded it: New York in a heatwave was always preferable to New York in a snowstorm, or anywhere hot to anywhere cold, for that matter. Cold seeped farther than into the bones; numbed the mind, drained the will. If the depression deepened towards winter, defeat would come with the snow.

Dalaney’s was spilling out on to the pavement with a business convention let out of school. An oblong name tab sat on each neat Terylene lapel, a confident smile hid the anxiety behind every face; they stretched from the substantial group outside into the deep cool gloom of the bar. Pushing through them looked a problem; conversation in their company an impossibility.

‘How about your hotel? Where are you staying?’ Walt said.

‘The Biltmore.’

Walt’s eyebrows rose two clear inches.

‘Teller’s paying,’ I said. ‘He has an account there.’

‘What did you do then? Save his life?’

‘Six times,’ I agreed, matching his sarcasm.

‘He must really think,’ Walt said reflectively, ‘that you might get his horse back.’

‘We,’ I said.

‘Nope. You. There’s no trail. I’ve looked.’

A coloured cab driver in rolled-up shirt sleeves took us to the hotel, hot air blowing in gusts through the open window each time he accelerated. The city moved sluggishly under the brazen sun, and there was more rubbish than usual littering the streets.

‘This is a filthy town,’ said Walt, seeing it through my eyes. ‘Give me Chicago.’

‘Too cold,’ I said automatically. ‘Beautiful, but too cold. That freezing wind off the lake...’

‘Are you guys from Chicago?’ said the cab driver. ‘I was born there, in the Loop.’

We talked to him about that. I drifted away into the disorientated state of not caring a jot about the cab driver, or Walt, or Dave Teller, or Caroline, or anyone on earth. We went up to my room in the Biltmore and I dragged through the host motions of ringing down for a bottle of Scotch and ice and seeing to heat, light and ashtrays. Walt loosened his tie and took a first appreciative swallow.

‘You look pooped,’ he said.

‘Natural state.’

‘I guess it’s midnight already, to you.’

‘I guess.’

There was a considerable drinking pause. Then he said, shifting his sturdy body in the white leather chair, ‘Well, do you want to know about this horse, or don’t you?’

‘Sure.’ The boredom in my answer came over shockingly strong, even to me. He looked faintly startled and then speculative, but when he spoke it was strictly business.

‘They were taking him in a horse van from Kennedy Airport to Lexington, Kentucky. He’d spent the compulsory twenty-four hours immigration quarantine in the airport stable, along with six other horses which came over on the same flight. All normal at that time. They loaded Chrysalis and four others into the van, and drove westwards from New York on the Pennsylvania turnpike.’

‘Time?’ I asked.

‘Left Kennedy 4 PM Monday. Last Monday, that is. A week today. Estimated Lexington midday Tuesday. Seven hundred miles.’

‘Stops?’

‘Yeah,’ Walt said. ‘Stops. That’s where the trouble started.’ He swirled the clinking ice round in his glass. ‘They took their first meal stop at a diner near Allentown, about eighty-five miles from New York. There were four men in the van, two drivers and two grooms. Drivers in the cab, grooms in back with the cargo. At the first stop they took turns to eat, drivers first, grooms after. The drivers chivvied the grooms, and gave them too short a time to eat a good meal. There was an unfriendly argument.’

‘They all say so?’

‘Yeah. I’ve talked to all four, one at a time. They’re all trying their hardest to pin the blame on the others. They left the diner and went about two hundred miles to their night stop at Bedford. That was no better. Far from cooling off, they had begun to scuffle.

‘They turned off the turnpike on to the interstate highway — seventy — south of Pittsburg, and left that again at Zanesville, taking the south-west fork to Cincinatti. About fifty miles farther on they turned due south to cross the Ohio River into Kentucky, and go on through Paris and down the Paris Pike to Lexington.’

‘I’ll need to see it on a map,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘From Zanesville to Paris they took secondary routes, though all paved roads, of course. Right? Now it was in Ohio that the van was hi-jacked, and it was over the state border in Kentucky when it was found, which has caused a couple of arguments here and there.’

‘Hi-jacked! That’s the first I’ve heard of that.’

‘It was hi-jacked by mistake for a truckful of liquor which was about twenty miles behind it along the road. The vans looked alike, same colour, same size, and neither of them had any large identifying signs.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘By that time, Tuesday morning, the drivers and grooms were all eating at the same time, though at each end of the lunch counter. They left the horses unguarded for a full quarter hour, and during that time someone simply drove off with the whole works.’

‘Surely the drivers locked up, and took the keys, at least?’

‘Oh sure. It was an expert job though. A direct wire contact from the battery terminals to the starter motor.’

‘So then what?’

‘When they found the van gone the drivers called the police but it wasn’t until Wednesday morning that the van was found off the road and out of sight around a hill in Kentucky. But — no horses. The ramps were down, and all the horses had been let loose.’

‘Deliberately.’

‘Sure. Untied. All the halters were still in the van. Those racehorses were all free with no bridle or anything to catch them by. The Kentucky boys reckon the horses were let out to create a diversion, to get the cops off the tails of the hi-jackers by making them chase horses all over.’

‘And it worked.’

‘Yeah,’ said Walt gloomily. ‘The owner kicked up stink. All the horses were valuable, not only Chrysalis. But only Chrysalis was insured with Buttress.’

‘Did they get all the others back?’

‘Yeah. But Chrysalis has as good as disappeared off the face of the earth.’

‘How do you know the hi-jackers meant to take the liquor truck?’

‘The only thing they left in the cab of the horse van was a screwed-up scrap of paper. It was a note of the time the liquor company’s truck made its daily run along that route.’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘Gloves. Even for writing the note.’

Walt had talked himself dry. I refuelled his glass and felt like sleep.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘It was Chrysalis they really wanted. The timetable note was the blind.’

‘But why? Why should anyone want to steal a stallion? That’s what’s got us all floored. I don’t know much about horses, I’m a false claims man really. I just got pitched into this between cripple cases, if you get me. But even I know that it’s the stallion’s name that brings in the stud fee. Say someone’s stolen Chrysalis, what’s the point? They can’t advertise him for stud, so he isn’t worth a dime. We figured someone might be nutty enough to want him all to themselves, like some world famous painting, but you can hide a painting quietly in a cellar, which you can’t do with a horse. The whole thing don’t make sense.’

I had my own views on that, but I said only, ‘What happened to Allyx?’

‘I only know about that from the files. I got the case out and looked it up this morning. Allyx was a French horse, apparently one of the best young sires in Europe. He was nine when he came over here, and already his get had won a list of races as long as your arm. Dave Teller was head of the syndicate which bought him; that’s why he was insured with us, as we do all the Teller estate work. Allyx was delivered safely to the Teller stud farm. No trouble in transit that time. But he was there only four days. Then there was a fire in the stables one night and they took all the horses out of the barn and turned them loose into a small corral.’

‘And when they came to fetch them — no horses?’

He nodded. ‘There was a broken rail over the far side, which no one knew about. All the horses had got through it, including Allyx. They caught all the others, though some were free for days. No sign ever of Allyx. The company had to face that he probably got into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and maybe broke his neck, and in the end they had to pay up.’

‘What about that fire?’

‘There was apparently nothing suspicious about it at the time. One of our very best men found no evidence of a fire being set. Still, stable fires can be started so easily... a cigarette butt in a pile of straw leaves no trace. This one didn’t do much damage before they put it out. No question of kerosene, for instance. The whole chain of events was agreed to be accidental.’

I smiled thinly.

‘What about Showman?’

Walt shook his head. ‘I don’t know how he got loose. But they found him. Dead, of course. He’d been dead some time, I think.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh, in the Appalachians. He came from that area, same as the others. But then Lexington has more stud farms than anywhere else in the States, so there’s no significance in that really.’

‘You went down to Lexington last week?’

He nodded. ‘Flew there Wednesday, when Mrs Teller called us.’

‘Mrs Dave Teller?’

‘Uh huh.’ Something moved obscurely in Walt’s face. Dave’s wife had made an impression. ‘She’s English, like you.’

‘I’ll go down there tomorrow,’ I said. I watched him waver and decide not to tell me about her. Instead, he looked at his watch, put down his glass firmly, and stood up.

‘Must be off,’ he said. ‘It’s our anniversary, and my wife’s fixed something special.’

‘Give her my apologies for keeping you.’

‘That’s all right. It fitted in fine. I go home from Grand Central, right downstairs. A quarter of an hour to train time.’

I walked with him to the door.

‘Walt... would you be free to come down to Lexington in the morning?’ As he hesitated, I added, ‘There’s no point in my covering all the ground twice. I’d appreciate having you along.’

‘Be glad to, Gene,’ he said too politely, and I thought to hell with you Walt, to hell with everything on earth, including me, but I’m stuck with this horse nonsense for the next three weeks, and if I say go to Lexington, you go. I hid the violent moment of irritation in turning from him to open the door, and I understood his reluctance anyway, as who likes to be dragged down to do the same piece of work twice, especially under the critical eye of an imported limey busybody? He shook my hand. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he said, his feelings under better control than mine.

‘Seven-thirty?’

All right.’ He loosened his jaw muscles into what looked like going to be a smile but didn’t quite make it, sketched a salute with the thick-topped fingers, and ambled unhurriedly away down the passage.

I had dinner in the hotel restaurant. A steak. Never eat steak west of Nebraska, they used to say. The beef was bred on the prairie and walked eastwards to the markets: when it got to Nebraska it hit the corn belt and only after that was it fat enough to kill. New York steaks were mostly superb, but I didn’t suppose they’d walked in through the New Jersey Tunnel. Long distance haulage took care of that... and whoever had removed Allyx and Chrysalis had had a haulage problem too. You couldn’t ride a stallion along state highways. For one thing, they no longer took kindly to a saddle after years at stud, even if they had been reasonable to handle in the first place.

Nightclubs attract me like wet Mondays in Manchester, and apathy kept me from even reading the list of shows. I went straight upstairs after dinner to catch up on a lot of lost sleep and woke again infuriatingly at two, dead tired and with a restless brain.

From habit, the Luger lay under my pillow.

It was another long night.