High Stakes

9

Snow was falling when I flew out of Heathrow, thin scurrying flakes in a driving wind. Behind me I left a half-finished lock, a half-mended car and a half-formed plan.

Charlie had telephoned to say Bert Huggerneck had been taken on at one of the shops formerly owned by his ex-boss and I had made cautious enquiries from the auctioneers at Doncaster. I’d had no success. They had no record of the name of the person who’d bought Padellic. Cash transactions were common. They couldn’t possibly remember who had bought one particular cheap horse three months earlier. End of enquiry.

Owen had proclaimed himself as willing as Charlie to help in any way he could. Personal considerations apart, he said, whoever had bent the Lamborghini deserved hanging. When I came back, he would help me build the scaffold.

The journey from snow to sunshine took eight hours. Seventy-five degrees at Miami airport and only a shade cooler outside the hotel on Miami Beach; and it felt great. Inside the hotel the air-conditioning brought things nearly back to an English winter, but my sixth-floor room faced straight towards the afternoon sun. I drew back the closed curtains and opened the window, and let heat and light flood in.

Below, round a glittering pool, tall palm trees swayed in the sea wind. Beyond, the concrete edge to the hotel grounds led immediately down to a narrow strip of sand and the frothy white waves edging the Atlantic, with mile upon mile of deep blue water stretching away to the lighter blue horizon.

I had expected Miami Beach to be garish and was unprepared for its beauty. Even the ranks of huge white slabs of hotels with rectangular windows piercing their façades in a uniform geometrical pattern held a certain grandeur, punctuated and softened as they were by scattered palms.

Round the pool people lay in rows on day beds beside white fringed sun umbrellas, soaking up ultra-violet like a religion. I changed out of my travel-sticky clothes and went for a swim in the sea, paddling lazily in the warm January water and sloughing off cares like dead skin. Jody Leeds was five thousand miles away, in another world. Easy, and healing, to forget him.

Upstairs again, showered and dressed in slacks and cotton shirt I checked my watch for the time to telephone Allie. After the letters, we had exchanged cables, though not in code because the cable company didn’t like it.

I sent, ‘What address Miami.’

She replied: ‘Telephone four two six eight two after six any evening.’

When I called her it was five past six on January fifth, local time. The voice which answered was not hers and for a soggy moment I wondered if the Western Union had jumbled the message as they often did, and that I should never find her.

‘Miss Ward? Do you mean Miss Alexandra?’

‘Yes,’ I said with relief.

‘Hold the line, please.’

After a pause came the familiar voice, remembered but suddenly fresh. ‘Hallo?’

‘Allie... It’s Steven.’

‘Hi.’ Her voice was laughing. ‘I’ve won close on fifty dollars if you’re in Miami.’

‘Collect it,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘We have a date,’ I said reasonably.

‘Oh sure.’

‘Where do I find you?’

‘Twelve twenty-four Garden Island,’ she said. ‘Any cab will bring you. Come right out, it’s time for cocktails.’

Garden Island proved to be a shady offshoot of land with wide enough channels surrounding it to justify its name. The cab rolled slowly across twenty yards of decorative iron bridge and came to a stop outside twelve twenty-four. I paid off the driver and rang the bell.

From the outside the house showed little. The whitewashed walls were deeply obscured by tropical plants and the windows by insect netting. The door itself looked solid enough for a bank.

Allie opened it. Smiled widely. Gave me a noncommittal kiss.

‘This is my cousin’s house,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

Behind its secretive front the house was light and large and glowing with clear, uncomplicated colours. Blue, sea-green, bright pink, white and orange; clean and sparkling.

‘My cousin Minty,’ Allie said, ‘and her husband, Warren Barbo.’

I shook hands with the cousins. Minty was neat, dark and utterly self-possessed in lemon-coloured beach pyjamas. Warren was large, sandy and full of noisy good humour. They gave me a tall, iced, unspecified drink and led me into a spacious glass-walled room for a view of the setting sun.

Outside in the garden the yellowing rays fell on a lush lawn, a calm pool and white painted lounging chairs. All peaceful and prosperous and a million miles from blood, sweat and tears.

‘Alexandra tells us you’re interested in horses,’ Warren said, making host-like conversation. ‘I don’t know how long you reckon on staying, but there’s a racemeet at Hialeah right now, every day this week. And the bloodstock sales, of course, in the evenings. I’ll be going myself some nights and I’d be glad to have you along.’

The idea pleased me, but I turned to Allie.

‘What are your plans?’

‘Millie and I split up,’ she said without visible regret. ‘She said when we were through with Christmas and New Year she would be off to Japan for a spell, so I grabbed a week down here with Minty and Warren.’

‘Would you come to the races, and the sales?’

‘Sure.’

‘I have four days,’ I said.

She smiled brilliantly but without promise. Several other guests arrived for drinks at that point and Allie said she would fetch the canapés. I followed her to the kitchen.

‘You can carry the stone crabs,’ she said, putting a large dish into my hands. ‘And okay, after a while we can sneak out and eat some place else.’

For an hour I helped hand round those understudies for a banquet, American-style canapés. Allie’s delicious work. I ate two or three and like a true male chauvinist meditated on the joys of marrying a good cook.

I found Minty at my side, her hand on my arm, her gaze following mine.

‘She’s a great girl,’ she said. ‘She swore you would come.’

‘Good,’ I said with satisfaction.

Her eyes switched sharply to mine with a grin breaking out. ‘She told us to be careful what we said to you, because you always understood the implications, not just the words. And I guess she was right.’

‘You’ve only told me that she wanted me to come and thought I liked her enough to do it.’

‘Yeah, but...’ She laughed. ‘She didn’t actually say all that.’

‘I see what you mean.’

She took out of my hands a dish of thin pastry boats filled with pink chunks of lobster in pale green mayonnaise. ‘You’ve done more than your duty here,’ she smiled. ‘Get on out.’

She lent us her car. Allie drove it northwards along the main boulevard of Collins Avenue and pulled up at a restaurant called Stirrup and Saddle.

‘I thought you might feel at home here,’ she said teasingly.

The place was crammed. Every table in sight was taken, and as in many American restaurants, the tables were so close together that only emaciated waiters could inch around them. Blow-ups of racing scenes decorated the walls and saddles and horseshoes abounded.

Dark decor, loud chatter and, to my mind, too much light.

A slightly harassed head waiter intercepted us inside the door.

‘Do you have reservations, sir?’

I began to say I was sorry, as there were dozens of people already waiting round the bar, when Allie interrupted.

‘Table for two, name of Barbo.’

He consulted his lists, smiled, nodded. ‘This way, sir.’

There was miraculously after all one empty table, tucked in a corner but with a good view of the busy room. We sat comfortably in dark wooden-armed chairs and watched the head waiter turn away the next customers decisively.

‘When did you book this table?’ I asked.

‘Yesterday. As soon as I got down here.’ The white teeth gleamed. ‘I got Warren to do it; he likes this place. That’s when I made the bets. He and Minty said it was crazy, you wouldn’t come all the way from England just to take me out to eat.’

‘And you said I sure was crazy enough for anything.’

‘I sure did.’

We ate bluepoint oysters and barbecued baby ribs with salad alongside. Noise and clatter from other tables washed around us and waiters towered above with huge loaded trays. Business was brisk.

‘Do you like it here?’ Allie asked, tackling the ribs.

‘Very much.’

She seemed relieved. I didn’t add that some quiet candlelight would have done even better. ‘Warren says all horse people like it, the same way he does.’

‘How horsey is Warren?’

‘He owns a couple of two-year-olds. Has them in training with a guy in Aiken, North Carolina. He was hoping they’d be running here at Hialeah but they’ve both got chipped knees and he doesn’t know if they’ll be any good any more.’

‘What are chipped knees?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you have chipped knees in England?’

‘Heaven knows.’

‘So will Warren.’ She dug into the salad, smiling down at the food. ‘Warren’s business is real estate but his heart beats out there where the hooves thunder along the homestretch.’

‘Is that how he puts it?’

Her smile widened. ‘It sure is.’

‘He said he’d take us to Hialeah tomorrow, if you’d like.’

‘I might as well get used to horses, I suppose.’ She spoke with utter spontaneity and then in a way stood back and looked at what she’d said. ‘I mean...’ she stuttered.

‘I know what you mean,’ I said smiling.

‘You always do, dammit.’

We finished the ribs and progressed to coffee. She asked how fast I’d recovered from the way she had seen me last and what had happened since. I told her about the gossip columns and the car, and she was fiercely indignant; mostly, I gathered, because of the car.

‘But it was so beautiful!’

‘It will be again.’

‘I’d like to murder that Jody Leeds.’

She scarcely noticed, that time, that she was telling me what she felt for me. The sense of a smoothly deepening relationship filled me with contentment: and it was also great fun.

After three cups of dawdled coffee I paid the bill and we went out to the car.

‘I can drop you off at your hotel,’ Allie said. ‘It’s quite near here.’

‘Certainly not. I’ll see you safely home.’

She grinned. ‘There isn’t much danger. All the alligators in Florida are a hundred miles away in the Everglades.’

‘Some alligators have two feet.’

‘Okay, then.’ She drove slowly southwards, the beginnings of a smile curling her mouth all the way. Outside her cousin’s house she put on the handbrake but left the engine running.

‘You’d better borrow this car to go back. Minty won’t mind.’

‘No, I’ll walk.’

‘You can’t. It’s all of four miles.’

‘I like seeing things close. Seeing how they’re made.’

‘You sure are nuts.’

I switched off the engine, put my arm round her shoulders and kissed her the same way as at home, several times. She sighed deeply but not, it seemed, with boredom.

I hired an Impala in the morning and drove down to Garden Island. A cleaner answered the door and showed me through to where Warren and Minty were in swim-suits, standing by the pool in January sunshine as warm as July back home.

‘Hi,’ said Minty in welcome. ‘Alexandra said to tell you she’ll be right back. She’s having her hair fixed.’

The fixed hair, when it appeared, looked as smooth and shining as the girl underneath. A black-and-tan sleeveless cotton dress did marvellous things for her waist and stopped in plenty of time for the legs. I imagine appreciation was written large on my face because the wide smile broke out as soon as she saw me.

We sat by the pool drinking cold fresh orange juice while Warren and Minty changed into street clothes. The day seemed an interlude, a holiday, to me, but not to the Barbos. Warren’s life, I came to realise, was along the lines of perpetual summer vacation interrupted by short spells in the office. Droves of sharp young men did the leg-work of selling dream retirement homes to elderly sun-seekers and Warren, the organiser, went to the races.

Hialeah Turf Club was a sugar-icing racecourse, as pretty as lace. Miami might show areas of cracks and rust and sun-peeled poverty on its streets, but in the big green park in its suburb the lush life survived and seemingly flourished.

Bright birds in cages beguiled visitors the length of the paddock, and a decorative pint-sized railway trundled around. Tons of ice cream added to weight problems and torn up Tote tickets fluttered to the ground like snow.

The racing itself that day was moderate, which didn’t prevent me losing my bets. Allie said it served me right, gambling was a nasty habit on a par with jumping off cliffs.

‘And look where it’s got you,’ she pointed out.

‘Where?’

‘In Ganser Mays’ clutches.’

‘Not any more.’

‘Which came first,’ she said, ‘the gamble or the race?’

‘All life’s a gamble. The fastest sperm fertilizes the egg.’

She laughed. ‘Tell that to the chickens.’

It was the sort of day when nonsense made sense. Minty and Warren met relays of drinking pals and left us much alone, which suited me fine, and at the end of the racing programme we sat high up on the stands looking over the course while the sunlight died to yellow and pink and scarlet. Drifts of flamingoes on the small lakes in the centre of the track deepened from pale pink to intense rose and the sky on the water reflected silver and gold.

‘I bet it’s snowing in London,’ I said.

After dark and after dinner Warren drove us round to the sales paddock on the far side of the racecourse, where spotlights lit a scene that was decidedly more rustic than the stands. Sugar icing stopped with the tourists: horse-trading had its feet on the grass.

There were three main areas linked by short undefined paths and well-patronised open-fronted bars; there was the sale ring, the parade ring and long barns lined with stalls, where the merchandise ate hay and suffered prods and insults and people looking at its teeth.

Warren opted for the barns first and we wandered down the length of the nearest while he busily consulted his catalogue. Minty told him they were definitely not buying any more horses until the chipped knees were all cleared up. ‘No dear,’ Warren said soothingly, but with a gleam in his eye which spelt death to the bank balance.

I looked at the offerings with interest. A mixed bunch of horses which had been raced, from three years upwards. Warren said the best sales were those for two-year-olds at the end of the month and Minty said why didn’t he wait awhile and see what they were like.

The lights down the far end of the barn were dim and the horse in the last stall of all was so dark that at first I thought the space was empty. Then an eye shimmered and a movement showed a faint gleam on a rounded rump.

A black horse. Black like Energise.

I looked at him first because he was black, and then more closely, with surprise. He was indeed very like Energise. Extremely like him.

The likeness abruptly crystallised an idea I’d already been turning over in my mind. A laugh fluttered in my throat. The horse was a gift from the gods and who was I to look it in the mouth.

‘What have you found?’ Warren asked, advancing with good humour.

‘I’ve a hurdler like this at home.’

Warren looked at the round label stuck onto one hind-quarter which bore the number sixty-two.

‘Hip number sixty-two,’ he said, flicking the pages of the catalogue. ‘Here it is. Black Fire, five-year-old gelding. Humph.’ He read quickly down the page through the achievements and breeding. ‘Not much good and never was much good, I guess.’

‘Pity.’

‘Yeah.’ He turned away. ‘Now there’s a damned nice looking chestnut colt along there...’

‘No, Warren,’ said Minty despairingly.

We all walked back to look at the chestnut colt. Warren knew no more about buying horses than I did, and besides, the first thing I’d read on the first page of the catalogue was the clear warning that the auctioneers didn’t guarantee the goods were of merchantable quality. In other words, if you bought a lame duck it was your own silly fault.

‘Don’t pay no attention to that,’ said Warren expansively. ‘As long as you don’t take the horse out of the sales paddock, you can get a veterinarian to check a horse you’ve bought, and if he finds anything wrong you can call the deal off. But you have to do it within twenty-four hours.’

‘Sounds fair.’

‘Sure. You can have x-rays even. Chipped knees would show on an x-ray. Horses can walk and look okay with chipped knees but they sure can’t race.’

Allie said with mock resignation, ‘So what exactly are chipped knees?’

Warren said ‘Cracks and compressions at the ends of the bones at the knee joint.’

‘From falling down?’ Allie asked.

Warren laughed kindly. ‘No. From too much hard galloping on dirt. The thumping does it.’

I borrowed the sales catalogue from Warren again for a deeper look at the regulations and found the twenty-four hour inspection period applied only to brood mares, which wasn’t much help. I mentioned it diffidently to Warren. ‘It says here,’ I said neutrally, ‘that it’s wise to have a vet look at a horse for soundness before you bid. After is too late.’

‘Is that so?’ Warren retrieved his book and peered at the small print. ‘Well, I guess you’re right.’ He received the news good-naturedly. ‘Just shows how easy it is to go wrong at horse sales.’

‘And I hope you remember it,’ Minty said with meaning.

Warren did in fact seem a little discouraged from his chestnut colt but I wandered back for a second look at Black Fire and found a youth in jeans and grubby sweat shirt bringing him a bucket of water.

‘Is this horse yours?’ I asked.

‘Nope. I’m just the help.’

‘Which does he do most, bite or kick?’

The boy grinned. ‘Reckon he’s too lazy for either.’

‘Would you take him out of that dark stall so I could have a look at him in the light?’

‘Sure.’ He untied the halter from the tethering ring and brought Black Fire out into the central alley, where the string of electric lights burned without much enthusiasm down the length of the barn.

‘There you go, then,’ he said, persuading the horse to arrange its legs as if for a photograph. ‘Fine looking fella, isn’t he?’

‘What you can see of him,’ I agreed.

I looked at him critically, searching for differences. But there was no doubt he was the same. Same height, same elegant shape, even the same slightly dished Arab-looking nose. And black as coal, all over. When I walked up and patted him he bore it with fortitude. Maybe his sweet nature, I thought. Or maybe tranquillisers.

On the neck or head of many horses the hair grew in one or more whorls, making a pattern which was entered as an identifying mark on the passports. Energise had no whorls at all. Nor had Padellic. I looked carefully at the forehead, cheeks, neck and shoulders of Black Fire and ran my fingers over his coat. As far as I could feel or see in that dim light, there were no whorls on him either.

‘Thanks a lot,’ I said to the boy, stepping back.

He looked at me with surprise. ‘You don’t aim to look at his teeth or feel his legs?’

‘Is there something wrong with them?’

‘I guess not.’

‘Then I won’t bother,’ I said and left unsaid the truth understood by us both, that even if I’d inspected those extremities I wouldn’t have been any the wiser.

‘Does he have a tattoo number inside his lip?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, of course.’ The surprise raised his eyebrows to peaks, like a clown. ‘Done when he first raced.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well, gee, I don’t know.’ His tone said he couldn’t be expected to and no one in his senses would have bothered to ask.

‘Take a look.’

‘Well, okay.’ He shrugged and with the skill of practice opened the horse’s mouth and turned down the lower lip. He peered closely for a while during which time the horse stood suspiciously still, and then let him go.

‘Far as I can see there’s an F and a six and some others, but it’s not too light in here and anyway the numbers get to go fuzzy after a while, and this fella’s five now so the tattoo would be all of three years old.’

‘Thanks anyway.’

‘You’re welcome.’ He pocketed my offered five bucks and took the very unfiery Black Fire back to his stall.

I turned to find Allie, Warren and Minty standing in a row, watching. Allie and Minty both wore indulgent feminine smiles and Warren was shaking his head.

‘That horse has won a total of nine thousand three hundred dollars in three years’ racing,’ he said. ‘He won’t have paid the feed bills.’ He held out the catalogue opened at Black Fire’s page, and I took it and read the vaguely pathetic race record for myself.

A modest success as a three-year-old, but all in fairly low-class races. I handed the catalogue back to Warren with a smile of thanks, and we moved unhurriedly out of that barn and along to the next. When even Warren had had a surfeit of peering into stalls we went outside and watched the first entries being led into the small wooden-railed collecting ring.

A circle of lights round the rails lit the scene, aided by spotlights set among the surrounding trees. Inside, as on a stage, small bunches of people anxiously added the finishing touches of gloss which might wring a better price from the unperceptive. Some of the horses’ manes were decorated with a row of bright wool pompoms, arching along the top of the neck from ears to withers as if ready for the circus. Hip No. 1, resplendent in scarlet pompoms, raised his long bay head and whinnied theatrically.

I told Allie and the Barbos I would be back in a minute and left them leaning on the rails. A couple of enquiries and one misdirection found me standing in the cramped office of the auctioneers in the sale ring building.

‘A report from the veterinarian? Sure thing. Pay in advance, please. If you don’t want to wait, return for the report in half an hour.’

I paid and went back to the others. Warren was deciding it was time for a drink and we stood for a while in the fine warm night near one of the bars drinking Bacardi and Coke out of throwaway cartons.

Brilliant light poured out of the circular sales building in a dozen places through open doors and slatted windows. Inside, the banks of canvas chairs were beginning to fill up, and down on the rostrum in the centre the auctioneers were shaping up to starting the evening’s business. We finished the drinks, duly threw away the cartons and followed the crowd into the show.

Hip № 1 waltzed in along a ramp and circled the rostrum with all his pompoms nodding. The auctioneer began his sing-song selling, amplified and insistent, and to me, until my ears adjusted, totally unintelligible. Hip № 1 made five thousand dollars and Warren said the prices would all be low because of the economic situation.

Horses came and went. When Hip № 15 in orange pompoms had fetched a figure which had the crowd murmuring in excitement I slipped away to the office and found that the veterinary surgeon himself was there, dishing out his findings to other enquirers.

‘Hip number sixty-two?’ he echoed. ‘Sure, let me find my notes.’ He turned over a page or two in a notebook. ‘Here we are. Dark bay or brown gelding, right?’

‘Black,’ I said.

‘Uh, uh. Never say black.’ He smiled briefly, a busy middle-aged man with an air of a clerk. ‘Five years. Clean bill of health.’ He shut the notebook and turned to the next customer.

‘Is that all?’ I said blankly.

‘Sure,’ he said briskly. ‘No heart murmur, legs cool, teeth consistent with given age, eyes normal, range of movement normal, trots sound. No bowed tendons, no damaged knees.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Is he tranquillised?’

He looked at me sharply, then smiled. ‘I guess so. Acepromazine probably.’

‘Is that usual, or would he be a rogue?’

‘I wouldn’t think he’d had much. He should be okay.’

‘Thanks again.’

I went back to the sale ring in time to see Warren fidgeting badly over the sale of the chestnut colt. When the price rose to fifteen thousand Minty literally clung on to his hands and told him not to be a darned fool.

‘He must be sound,’ Warren protested, ‘to make that money.’

The colt made twenty-five thousand in thirty seconds’ brisk bidding and Warren’s regrets rumbled on all evening. Minty relaxed as if the ship of state had safely negotiated a killing reef and said she would like a breath of air. We went outside and leaned again on the collecting ring rails.

There were several people from England at the sales. Faces I knew, faces which knew me. No close friends, scarcely acquaintances, but people who would certainly notice and remark if I did anything unexpected.

I turned casually to Warren.

‘I’ve money in New York,’ I said. ‘I can get it tomorrow. Would you lend me some tonight?’

‘Sure,’ he said good-naturedly, fishing for his wallet. ‘How much do you need?’

‘Enough to buy that black gelding.’

‘What?’ His hand froze and his eyes widened.

‘Would you buy it for me?’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No.’

He looked at Allie for help. ‘Does he mean it?’

‘He’s sure crazy enough for anything,’ she said.

‘That’s just what it is,’ Warren said. ‘Crazy. Crazy to buy some goddamned useless creature, just because he looks like a hurdler you’ve got back home.’

To Allie this statement suddenly made sense. She smiled vividly and said, ‘What are you going to do with him?’

I kissed her forehead. ‘I tend to think in circles,’ I said.