Field of 13

Nightmare

Nightmare was commissioned by The Times in April 1974. (Three thousand words, please.)

Nightmare, set loosely in horse country, USA, explains how to steal a valuable brood mare and her unborn foal.

Don’t do it!

For three years after his father died Martin Retsov abandoned his chosen profession. To be successful he needed a partner, and partners as skilled as his father were hard to find. Martin Retsov took stock of his bank book, listed his investments, and decided that with a little useful paid employment to fill the days he could cruise along comfortably in second gear, waiting for life to throw up a suitable replacement.

A day’s travel put him a welcome distance from the scene of his unhappier memories, although they themselves journeyed along with him, as inescapable as habit. Thoroughbred Foodstuffs Inc. gave him a month’s trial as a salesman and when the orders swelled everywhere in his wake, a permanent post. Martin Retsov relaxed behind the wheel of the company car and drifted easily around his new area, visiting stud farms and racing stables and persuading their managers that even if Thoroughbred Foodstuffs were no better than anyone else’s, at least they were no worse.

The customers of Thoroughbred Foodstuffs saw a big man in his late thirties with a rugged, slightly forbidding face and a way of narrowing his eyes to dark-lashed slits. The frank, open and sincere stock-in-trade expression of a salesman was nowhere to be seen, nor was there any obvious honey in his voice. The one factor which brought out the handshakes, the fountain pens and the cheque books was his formidable knowledge of horses. He could sum up a horse in a glance and make helpfully constructive suggestions in a throwaway fashion, never taking credit although it was due.

‘I expect you’ve tried remedial shoeing,’ he would say casually, or ‘Don’t you find vitamin B12 injections help build bone?’ Second time around he was greeted as a trusted friend.

He prospered.

All the same he was in trouble. There was no peace in his sleep. When he slept, he woke always from a nightmare, his heart thumping, his skin prickling with cold instant sweat. Always a dream variation on the same theme — the violent untimely death of his father. Sometimes he saw the face, dead but still talking, with blood gushing out of the mouth. Sometimes he saw the wheel, the great fat black sharp-treaded tyre biting into the soft bulging belly.

Sometimes he felt he was inside his father’s body, slipping and falling behind the loaded motor horsebox and having the life crushed out of him in one great unimaginable explosion of agony. Sometimes, but not so often, he saw the face of the other man who had been there, the callous man in the dark clothes, looking coldly down at his dying father and giving him no comfort, saying not a word.

Every morning Martin Retsov stood wearily under the shower, rinsing the stickiness from his body and wishing he could as easily sponge his subconscious mind. Every day, sliding into the car, he shed his night self and looked to the future. He saw foals born, watched them grow, traced their fortunes at auction and beyond. He could have told the trainers, better than they knew themselves, the breeding, history, career and fate of every horse he reached with Thoroughbred food.

After nearly three years he had made many acquaintances — he was not a man to make friends. He knew every horse over a wide stretch of country and hundreds that had been sold out of it. He was the most efficient salesman in his company. And even his nightmares were at last becoming rarer.

One evening in early spring he picked up Johnnie Duke. A hitchhiker, a tall thin fair-haired youth looking not much above twenty, wearing faded jeans and an old leather jacket and carrying a few extra clothes in a canvas hold-all. Martin Retsov, in an expansive mood, took him to be a college kid on vacation and agreed to drop him forty miles down the road in the next town.

‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ he asked, half puzzled, as the young man settled into the front seat beside him.

‘Shouldn’t think so.’

‘Well...’ He thought it over. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you. Day or two ago. Where would that be?’

The young man took his time over answering. Then he said, ‘I hitch up and down this road pretty regular. Maybe you saw me thumbing.’

Martin Retsov nodded several times. ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s it.’ He relaxed in his seat, glad to have resolved the small mystery. He liked to be sure of things. ‘That’s where I’ve seen you. On the road. More than once.’

The young man nodded briefly and said he was glad Martin had stopped for him because he had a date with his girl.

‘I don’t often stop for hitchers,’ Martin Retsov said, and thought with amusement that three easy years must have softened him.

They drove amicably together for five miles and passed alongside the white railed paddocks of a prosperous stud farm. Martin Retsov cast a rapid assessing eye over the small groups of animals grazing the new spring grass but kept his thoughts unspoken.

It was Johnnie Duke who said, ‘It’s odd you never get a piebald thoroughbred.’

‘You know about horses?’ Martin Retsov asked, surprised.

‘Sure. I was raised with them.’

Martin Retsov asked him where, but the young man evasively said he’d had some trouble back home and left in a hurry, and he didn’t exactly want to talk about it. Martin Retsov smiled. He dropped Johnnie Duke in the next town and drove on towards his destination, and it was only when he stopped to fill up his tank that the remains of the smile vanished as smartly as investors in a depression.

Johnnie Duke had stolen his wallet. Retsov kept it in the inside pocket of his jacket, and his jacket, owing to the efficiency of the heater, had been lying on the back seat of the car. He remembered Johnnie Duke putting his hold-all on the floor behind the front seats, and he remembered him leaning over to pick it up. His rugged face hardened to something his customers had never seen, and the eyes slitted as narrow and glittery as ice chips. The sum of money he had lost was small compared to the affront to his self-respect.

For several days he drove round his area actively searching for Johnnie Duke, remembering details about him from their drive together. The hesitation when Martin had said he’d seen him before. The refusal to say where he’d come from. The slickness with which he’d spotted and extracted the wallet. Martin Retsov searched for him with a hard face but without success and finally, after two or three weeks, he accepted the fact that the young man had gone away to another district where irate victims in cars were not looking for him sharp-eyed.

Regularly once a month Martin Retsov called at the furthest stud farm in his area, and it was as he left there, early one evening, that he again saw Johnnie Duke. Standing by the roadside, lifting his thumb, hesitating perhaps when he saw Retsov’s car.

Martin drove up fast beside him, braked to a wheel-locked standstill, opened his door, and stood up smoothly outside it. For a big man he moved like oiled machinery, precise and efficient; and he held a gun. ‘Get in the car,’ he said.

Johnnie Duke looked at the barrel pointing straight at his stomach and turned pale. He swallowed, his larynx making a convulsive movement in his neck, and slowly did as he was told.

‘I’ll pay back the money,’ he said anxiously, as Martin Retsov slid onto the seat beside him. The gun was held loosely now, pointing at the floor, but both were aware that this could change.

‘I should hand you over to the police,’ Martin Retsov said.

The young man dumbly shook his head.

‘Or you could do a little job for me instead.’

The young man looked at Martin Retsov’s slitted eyes and visibly shivered.

‘Is this blackmail?’ he asked him.

‘I’ll pay you, if you’re any good.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Stealing horses,’ Martin Retsov said.

He made his plans as meticulously as in the old days with his father, untraceably buying a two-horse trailer and a car to pull it; and hiding them away in a city lock-up garage. He decided against the large type of motor horsebox he had used with his father, mostly because of the nightmares about those wheels. Besides, he was not sure if his new apprentice would be suitable for long-term planning. They would do one trial run — a test, Martin Retsov thought, before he offered a steady partnership for the future.

Johnnie Duke had greeted Martin Retsov’s announcement of his chosen profession with a huge relieved grin.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I can steal horses. Which ones?’

‘It’s not so easy round here,’ Martin Retsov said. ‘Training stables and stud farms have good security arrangements.’ But he knew them all; he had been assiduously studying them for three years.

He gave Johnnie Duke a list of things to buy and some money for himself, and two days later they inspected together the resulting mole-grip wrench and bolt cutters.

‘There is no time to waste,’ Martin Retsov said. ‘We will go ahead tomorrow night.’

‘So soon?’

Martin Retsov smiled. ‘We are taking two brood mares. One is near to foaling. We want her safely away before that happens.’

Johnnie Duke looked at him in long surprise. ‘Why don’t we take good fast racers?’ he said.

‘They’re too easily identified. Tattoo marks and registrations see to that. But foals, now. Newborn foals. Who’s to say which is which? So we take a top-class mare, now in foal by the best sire, and we drive her a long way off and sell her at the end of the journey to some owner or trainer who is glad to get a fabulously bred foal for a fraction of what it would cost him at auction.

‘The star foal is swapped soon after birth with any other one handy, and is registered and tattooed in its new identity. Its new owner knows what he’s really got, so after racing it he keeps it for stud. Some of my clients in the past have made millions out of these foals. I always collect a small percentage.’

Johnnie Duke listened with his mouth open.

‘This is not casual thieving,’ Martin Retsov said with a certain pride. ‘This is like stealing the Mona Lisa.’

‘But what happens to the brood mare afterwards? And to the other foal?’

‘Some of my clients have consciences. For these, for a consideration, I collect the mare and foal and dump them in any convenient field. If the owner of the field is honest, she gets identified and sent home.’

Johnnie Duke did not ask what happened when the client had no conscience. He swallowed.

‘Do you already have a buyer for the two we’re taking tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Of course. You don’t steal a Leonardo da Vinci on spec’ Martin Retsov laughed at the idea, showing a strong row of teeth. ‘When we’ve got the mares I’ll tell you where to go. You will go alone. And you will bring back the money.’

Johnnie Duke was again surprised. ‘Can you trust me?’ he asked.

‘I want to find out.’

The following evening at dusk they collected the newly-bought car and hitched on the trailer. Martin Retsov had difficulty manoeuvring the two linked vehicles in the small courtyard which enclosed the lock-up garage, and Johnnie Duke, trying to be helpful, went to the rear of the trailer to report how much space there was for reversing.

‘Get away from there,’ Martin Retsov said sharply. ‘Get away at once.’ He stood up out of the car and Johnnie Duke saw that he was shaking.

‘I was only...’ he began.

‘You are never to go behind the trailer. Understand? Never.’

‘Well, all right. If you say so.’

Martin Retsov took several deep breaths and wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers. He was horrified at the strength of his own reaction. Three years, he thought, had hardly blunted the terror at all. He wondered whether, if his nerves were so jumpy, it might not be better to abandon the whole project. He wondered whether the fact that it had taken him three years to get back to his business meant that deep down he was afraid to get back.

He licked his lips. His heart-beat settled down. This time there would be no ambush when he took the horses. That last time his potential client had betrayed him to the police, but this time it was perfectly safe. This client had bought three top-grade foals in the past and had been delighted to hear he could now have two more. Martin Retsov eased himself back into the car, and Johnnie Duke climbed in beside him.

‘What’s the matter?’ Johnnie asked.

‘I saw an accident once. Man fell behind a horsebox.’

‘Oh.’

Martin Retsov shut his mouth on the untellable details, but they rolled on inexorably through his mind. The ambush. Police spotlights suddenly shining out before his father was safe up beside him in the horsebox’s cab. He’d had to reverse a yard or two to get a clear run at the only space left between the police cars and the fence. He’d thrown the lever, stamped on the accelerator, shot backwards — he would never forget his father’s scream. Never.

Just one scream, cut short. He’d jumped from the cab and seen the tyre cutting into the belly, seen the blood pouring out of the dying mouth... and the other man, the policeman, standing there looking down and doing nothing to help.

‘Help him!’ Retsov had said frantically.

‘Help him yourself.’

He leaped back to the cab, climbed panic-stricken into the driving seat, knowing even as he pushed at the gear lever with a disembodied hand that his father was dead.

Dead. Past help, past saving, past everything.

He rolled the horsebox forward off the crushed body and he kept on going. He took the police by surprise. He drove the horsebox at 65 for two miles, and long before they caught up he had abandoned it and taken to the woods.

The police had not known his name, which he prudently never divulged to his clients. All the police had was one quick sight of him in extremis, which was not enough, and evasion and escape had in the end proved the smallest of his personal problems.

He had never forgotten the face of the policeman who had looked down at his father. A senior policeman, wearing authority and insignia. He saw him too often in his uneasy dreams...

Martin Retsov shook off the regretted past and applied his concentration to the theft in hand. He had expected to feel the old anticipation, the old excitement, the pleasing racing of the pulse. He felt none of these things. He felt old.

‘Come on,’ said Johnnie Duke. ‘Or it will be light again before I deliver the goods.’

Martin Retsov nodded unwillingly and committed them both to the enterprise. Half an hour later when they pulled up in a dark side road he had succeeded in thrusting his soul’s shadows back into their closet and was approaching the next half-hour with cool, calm practicality.

They stepped quietly from the car and let down the ramp of the trailer. The night closed around them — small sounds, light sighing wind, stars showing in sparkling bunches between greyly drifting clouds. Traffic on the high road half a mile away swept past now and then, more a matter of flashing lights than of noise. Martin Retsov waited for his eyes to grow used to the dark, then he put his hand lightly on the young man’s arm.

‘This way,’ he said. His voice was a gentle whisper and when he moved his feet were soundless on the grass verge. Johnnie Duke followed him, marvelling at the big man’s silence and easy speed.

‘Where are we?’ Johnnie whispered. ‘Whose horses are we taking?’

‘Never you mind.’

They came to a gate, padlocked. The bolt cutter made it easy. They slid through into the field. Martin Retsov whistled gently in the dark, a seductive gypsy trill in the teeth.

He pulled out a handful of Thoroughbred horse nuts and called persuasively into the blackness ahead.

‘Come on, then, girl. Come on.’

There was a soft warm whinny and movement somewhere out beyond sight. Then they came, slowly, enquiringly, moving towards this human voice. They ate the nuts held out to them and made no fuss when the two men took hold of their head-collars.

‘You go ahead,’ Martin Retsov said softly to Johnnie Duke. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

They went sweetly, the two great mares big with four-legged assets. Out of the gate and down the road to the transport. Easy as ever, thought Martin Retsov, once you knew what to take. Johnnie Duke led his mare into the trailer and fastened her there.

And that was when the nightmare began again. That was when the lights shone out, blinding Martin Retsov’s adjusted sight. That was when the man stepped out to confront him. The same man. The face from the dreams. The same callous face, dark clothes, high-rank insignia.

‘Martin Retsov,’ he was saying, ‘I arrest you...’

Martin Retsov was not listening. He was thinking wildly that it simply couldn’t be true. This particular client would never betray him. Never.

The police took the mare from his unresisting charge and put handcuffs round Martin Retsov’s wrists.

‘How did you get here?’ he asked blankly.

‘We’ve been looking for you for three years,’ said the policeman with smug satisfaction. ‘A few weeks ago we found you. But we had no conclusive evidence against you, so we’ve been keeping you in sight ever since.’

Johnnie Duke came out of the trailer, and Martin Retsov thought it was hard on the boy, being caught on his first job. The cold policeman walked over to him, looking pleased.

He brought out no handcuffs. He patted Johnnie on the shoulder.

‘Well done, Sergeant Duke,’ he said.