The Danger

SEVENTEEN

Silence from the kidnappers, indignation from the about-to-be-dunned members of the Jockey Club and furore from the world's sporting press: hours of horrified talk vibrating the air-waves, but on the ground overnight a total absence of action. I went to the Press Breakfast in consequence with a quiet conscience and a light heart, hoping to see Alessia.

The raceclub lounges we're packed when I arrived, the decibel count high. Glasses of orange juice sprouted from many a fist, long-lensed cameras swinging from many a shoulder. The sportswriters were on their feet, moving, mingling, agog for exclusives, ears stretching to hear conversations behind them. The majority, knowing each other, clapped shoulders in passing. Trainers held small circular conferences, the press heads bending to catch vital words. Owners stood around looking either smug or bemused according to how often they'd attended this sort of shindig; and here and there, like gazelles among the herd, like a variation of the species, stood short light-boned creatures, heads thrown back, being deferred to like stars.

'Orange juice?' someone said, handing me a glass.

Thanks.'

I couldn't see Rickenbacker, nor anyone I knew.

No Alessia. The gazelles I saw were all male.

I wandered about, knowing that without her my presence there was pointless; but it had seemed unlikely that she would miss taking her place among her peers.

I knew she'd accepted Laurel 's invitation, and her name was plainly there at the breakfast, on a list pinned to a notice board on an easel, as the rider of Brunelleschi. I read through the list, sipping orange juice. Fourteen runners; three from Britain, one from France, one from Italy, two from Canada, two from Argentina, all the rest home-grown. Alessia seemed to be the only jockey who was a girl.

Presumably at some sort of signal the whole crowd began moving into a large side room, in which many oblong tables were formally laid with flowers, tableclothes, plates and cutlery. I had vaguely assumed the room to be made ready for lunch, but I'd been wrong. Breakfast meant apparently not orange juice on the wing, but bacon and eggs, waitresses and hot breads.

I hung back, thinking I wouldn't stay, and heard a breathless voice by my left ear saying incredulously, 'Andrew?' I turned. She was there after all, the thin face strong now and vivid, the tilt of the head confident. The dark bubble curls shone with health, the eyes below them gleaming.

I hadn't been sure what I felt for her, not until that moment. I hadn't seen her for six weeks and before that I'd been accustomed to thinking of her as part of my job; a rewarding pleasure, a victim I much liked, but transient, like all the others. The sight of her that morning came as almost a physical shock, an intoxicant racing in the bloodstream. I put out my arms and hugged her, and felt her cling to me momentarily with savagery.

'Well…' I looked into her brown eyes. 'Want a lover?'

She gasped a bit and laughed, and didn't answer. 'We're at a table over there,' she said, pointing deep into the room. 'We were sitting there waiting. I couldn't believe it when I saw you come in. There's room for you at our table. A spare place. Do join us.

I nodded and she led the way: and it wasn't Ilaria who had come with her from Italy, but Paolo Cenci himself. He stood up at my approach and gave me not a handshake but an immoderate Italian embrace, head to head, his face full of welcome.

Perhaps I wouldn't have recognised him, this assured, solid, pearl-grey-suited businessman, if I'd met him unexpectedly in an American street. He was again the man I hadn't known, the competent manager in the portrait. The shaky wreckage of five months earlier had retreated, become a memory, an illness obliterated by recovery. I was glad for him and felt a stranger with him, and would not in any way have referred to the anxieties we had shared.

He himself had no such reservations. 'This is the man who brought Alessia back safely,' he said cheerfully in Italian to the three other people at the table, and Alessia, glancing briefly at my face said, 'Papa, he doesn't like us to talk about it.'

'My darling girl, we don't often, do we?' He smiled at me with intense friendship. 'Meet Bruno and Beatrice Goldoni,' he said in English. 'They are the owners of Brunelleschi.'

I shook hands with a withdrawn-looking man of about sixty and a strained-looking woman of a few years younger, both of whom nodded pleasantly enough but didn't speak.

'And Silvio Lucchese, Brunelleschi's trainer,' Paolo Cenci said, introducing the last of the three.

We shook hands quickly, politely. He was dark and thin and reminded me of Pucinelli; a man used to power but finding himself at a disadvantage, as he spoke very little English very awkwardly, with an almost unintelligible accent.

Paolo Cenci waved me to the one empty chair, between Alessia and Beatrice Goldoni, and when all in the room were seated a hush fell on the noisy general chatter and Rickenbacker, followed by a few friends, made a heralded entrance, walking in a modest procession down the whole room, heading for the top table facing everyone else.

'Welcome to Laurel racecourse,' he said genially, reaching his centre chair, his white hair crowning his height like a cloud. 'Glad to see so many overseas friends here this morning. As I expect most of you have now heard, one of our good friends is missing. I speak of course of Morgan Freemantle, Senior Steward of the British Jockey Club, who was distressfully abducted here two days ago. Everything possible is being done to secure his early release and of course we'll keep you all informed as we go along. Meanwhile, have a good breakfast, and we'll all talk later.'

A flurry of waitresses erupted all over the place, and I suppose I ate, but I was conscious only of my stirred feelings for Alessia, and of her nearness, and of the question she hadn't answered. She behaved to me, and I dare say I to her, with civil calm. In any case, since everyone else was talking in Italian, my own utterances were few, careful, and limited in content.

It seemed that the Goldonis were enjoying their trip, though one wouldn't have guessed it from their expressions.

'We are worried about the race tomorrow,' Beatrice said. 'We always worry, we can't help it.' She broke off. 'Do you understand what I'm saying?'

'I understand much more than I speak.'

She seemed relieved and immediately began talking copiously, ignoring repressive looks from her gloomier husband. 'We haven't been to Washington before. Such a spacious, gracious city. We've been here two days… we leave on Sunday for New York. Do you know New York? What should one see in New York?"

I answered her as best I could, paying minimal attention. Her husband was sporadically discussing Brunelleschi's prospects with Lucchese as if it were their fiftieth reiteration, rather like the chorus of a Greek play six weeks into its run. Paolo Cenci told me five times he was delighted to see me, and Alessia ate an egg but nothing else.

An ocean of coffee later the day's real business began, proving to be short interviews with all the trainers and jockeys and many of the owners of the following day's runners. Sports-writers asked questions, Rickenbacker introduced the contestants effusively, and everyone learned more about the foreign horses than they'd known before or were likely to remember after.

Alessia interpreted for Lucchese, translating the questions, slightly editing the answers, explaining in one reply that Brunelleschi didn't actually mean anything, it was the name of the architect who'd designed a good deal of the city of Florence; like Wren in London, she said. The sportswriters wrote it down. They wrote every word she uttered, looking indulgent.

On her own account she said straightforwardly that the horse needed to see where he was going in a race and hated to be shut in.

'What was it like being kidnapped?' someone asked, transferring the thought.

'Horrible' She smiled, hesitated, said finally that she felt great sympathy for Morgan Freemantle and hoped sincerely that he would soon be free.

Then she sat down and said abruptly, 'When I heard about Morgan Freemantle I thought of you, of course… wondered if your firm would be involved. That's why you're here, isn't it? Not to see me race.'

'Both,' I said.

She shook her head, 'One's work, one's luck." She sounded merely practical. 'Will you find him, like Dominic?'

'A bit unlikely,' I said.

'It brings it all back,' she said, her eyes dark.

'Don't…'

'I can't help it. Ever since I heard… when we got to the track this morning… I've been thinking of him.'

Beatrice Goldoni was talking again like a rolling stream, telling me and also Alessia, who must have heard it often before, what a terrible shock it had been when dear Alessia had been kidnapped, and now this poor man, and what a blessing that I had been able to help get dear Alessia back… and I thought it colossally lucky she was speaking in her own tongue, which I hoped wouldn't be understood by the newspaper ears all around.

I stopped her by wishing her firmly the best of luck in the big race, and by saying my farewells to the whole party. Alessia came with me out of the dining room and we walked slowly across the bright club lounge to look out across the racecourse.

'Tomorrow,' I said, 'they'll be cheering you.'

She looked apprehensive more than gratified. 'It depends how Brunelleschi's travelled.'

'Isn't he here?' I asked, surprised.

'Oh yes, but no one knows how he feels. He might be homesick… and don't laugh, the tap water here tastes vile to me, God knows what the horse thinks of it. Horses have their own likes and dislikes, don't forget, and all sorts of unimaginable factors can put them off.'

I put my arm round her tentatively.

'Not here,' she said.

I let the arm fall away, 'Anywhere?' I asked.

'Are you sure…?'

'Don't be silly. Why else would I ask?'

The curve of her lips was echoed in her cheekbones and in her eyes, but she was looking at the track, not at me.

'I'm staying at the Sherryatt,' I said. 'Where are you?'

'The Regency. We're all there: the Goldonis, Silvio Lucchese, Papa and I. All guests of the racecourse. They're so generous, it's amazing.'

'How about dinner?' I said.

'I can't. We've been invited by the Italian ambassador… Papa knows him… I have to be there.'

I nodded.

'Still,' she said. 'We might go for a drive or something this afternoon. I don't truthfully want to spend all day here on the racecourse. We were here yesterday… all the foreign riders were shown what we'll be doing. Today is free.'

'I'll wait for you here, then, on this spot.'

She went to explain to her father but returned immediately saying that everyone was about to go round to the barns and she couldn't get out of that either, but they'd all said I was very welcome to go with them, if I'd like.

'Barns?' I said.

She looked at me with amusement. 'Where they stable the horses on American racecourses.'

In consequence I shortly found myself, along with half the attendance from the breakfast, watching the morning routines on the private side of the tracks; the feeding, the mucking-out, the grooming, the saddling-up and mounting, the breezes (short sharp canters), the hot-walking (for cooling off from exercise), the sand-pit rolling, and all around, but constantly shifting, the tiny individual press conferences where trainers spoke prophesies like Moses.

I heard the trainer of the home-based horse that was' favourite saying confidently 'We'll have the speed all the way to the wire.'

'What about the foreign horses?' one of the reporters asked. 'Is there one to beat you?'

The trainer's eye wandered and lit on Alessia, by my side. He knew her. He smiled. He said gallantly, 'Brunelleschi is the danger.

Brunelleschi himself, in his stall, seemed unimpressed. Silvio Lucchese, it appeared, had brought the champion's own food from Italy so that the choosy appetite should be unimpaired. And Brunelleschi had, it seemed, 'eaten up' the evening before (a good sign), and hadn't kicked his stable-lad, as he did occasionally from displeasure. Everyone patted his head with circumspection, keeping their fingers away from his strong white teeth. He looked imperious to me, like a bad-tempered despot. No one asked what he thought of the water.

'He's nobody's darling,' Alessia said out of the owners earshot. 'The Goldonis are afraid of him, I often think.

'So am I,' I said,

'He puts all his meanness into winning. She looked across with rueful affection at the dark tossing head. 'I tell him he's a bastard, and we get on fine.'

Paolo Cenci seemed pleased that Alessia would be spending most of the day with me. He, Lucchese and Bruno Goidoni intended to stay for the races. Beatrice, with a secret, sinful smile of pleasure, said she was going to the hotel's hairdresser, and, after that, shopping. Slightly to my dismay Paolo Cenci suggested Alessia and I should give her a lift back to Washington to save the limousine service doubling the journey, and accordingly we passed the first hour of our day with the voluble lady saying nothing much at great length. I had an overall impression that separation, even temporary, from her husband, had caused an excited rise in her spirits, and when we dropped her at the Regency she had twin spots of bright red on her sallow middle-aged cheeks and guilt in every line of her heavy face.

'Poor Beatrice, you'd almost think she was meeting a lover,' Alessia said smiling, as we drove away, 'not just going shopping.'

'You, on the other hand,' I observed, 'are not blushing a bit.'

'Ah,' she said. 'I haven't promised a thing.'

'True.' I stopped the car presently in a side street and unfolded a detailed map of the city. 'Anything you'd like to see?' I asked. ' Lincoln Monument, White House, all that?'

'I was here three years ago, visiting. Did all the tours.'

'Good… Do you mind then, if we just drive around a bit? I want to put… faces… onto some of these street names.'

She agreed, looking slightly puzzled, but after a while said, 'You're looking for Morgan Freemantle.'

'For possible districts, yes.'

'What are possible?'

'Well… not industrial areas. Not decayed housing. Not all-black neighbourhoods. Not parks, museums or government offices. Not diplomatic residental areas-,.. embassies and their offices. Not blocks of flats with janitors. Not central shopping areas, nor banking areas, nor schools or colleges, nowhere with students.'

'What's left?'

'Private housing. Suburbs. Anywhere without prying neighbours. And at a guess, somewhere north or west of the centre, because the Ritz Carlton is there.'

We drove for a good long while, methodically sectioning the sprawling city according to the map, but concentrating most and finally on the north and west. There were beauties to the place one couldn't guess from the tourist round, and miles and hosts of residential streets where Morgan Freemantle could be swallowed without trace.

'I wonder if we've actually been past him,' Alessia said at one point. 'Gives me the shivers, not knowing. I can't bear to think of him. Alone… dreadfully alone… somewhere close.'

'He might be further out,' I said. 'But kidnappers don't usually go for deserted farmhouses or places like that. They choose more populated places, where their comings and goings aren't noticeable.'

The scale of it all, however, was daunting, even within the radius I thought most likely. Analysis of recent rentals wouldn't come up this time with just eleven probables: there would be hundreds, maybe one or two thousand. Kent Wagner's task was impossible, and we would have to rely on negotiation, not a second miracle, to get Morgan Freemantle safe home.

We were driving up and down some streets near Washington Cathedral, simply admiring the houses for their architecture: large old sprawling houses with frosting of white railings, lived-in houses with signs of young families. On every porch, clusters of Halloween pumpkins.

'What are those?' Alessia said, pointing at the grinning orange faces of the huge round fruits on the steps outside every front door.

'It was Halloween four days ago,' I said.

'Oh yes, so it was. You don't see those at home.'

We passed the Ritz Carlton on Massachusetts Avenue and paused there, looking at the peaceful human-scaled hotel with its blue awnings from where Morgan had been so unceremoniously snatched, and then coasted round Dupont Circle and made our way back to the more central part. Much of the city was built in radii from circles, like Paris, which may have made for elegance but was a great recipe for getting lost: we'd chased our tails several times in the course of the day.

'It's so vast,' Alessia said, sighing. 'So confusing. I'd no idea.'

'We've done enough,' I agreed. 'Hungry?'

It was three-thirty by then, but time meant nothing to the Sherryatt Hotel. We went up to my room on the twelfth floor of the anonymous, enormous, bustling pile and we ordered wine and avocado shrimp salad from room service. Alessia stretched lazily on one of the armchairs and listened while I telephoned Kent Wagner.

Did I realise, he asked trenchantly, that the whole goddam population of North America was on the move through Washington, D.C., and that a list of rentals would bridge the Potomac.

'Look for a house without pumpkins,' I said.

'What?'

'Well, if you were a kidnapper, would you solemnly carve Halloween faces on pumpkins and put them on the front steps?'

'No, I guess not.' He breathed out in the ghost of a chuckle. 'Takes a limey to come up with a suggestion as dumb as that.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'I'll be at the Sherryatt this evening and at the races tomorrow, if you should want me.'

'Got it.'

I telephoned next to Liberty Market, but nothing much had developed in London. The collective fury of the members of the Jockey Club was hanging over Portman Square in a blue haze and Sir Owen Higgs had retreated for the weekend to Gloucestershire. Hoppy at Lloyds was reported to be smiling cheerfully as in spite of advising everyone else to insure against extortion the Jockey Club hadn't done so itself. Apart from that, nix.

The food arrived and we ate roughly jockey-sized amounts. Then Alessia pushed her plate away and, looking at her wine glass, said, 'Decision time, I suppose.'

'Only for you,' I said mildly. 'Yes or no.'

Still looking down she said, 'Would no… be acceptable?'

'Yes, it would,' I said seriously.

'I…" She took a deep breath. 'I want to say yes, but I feel…' She broke off, then started again. 'I don't seem to want… since the kidnap… I've thought of kissing, of love, and I'm dead… I went out with Lorenzo once or twice and he wanted to kiss me… his mouth felt like rubber to me.' She looked at me anxiously, willing me to understand. 'I did love someone passionately once, years ago, when I was eighteen. It didn't last beyond summer… We both simply grew up… but I know what it's likes what I should feel, what I should want… and I don't.'

'Darling Alessia.' I stood up and walked to the window, thinking that for this battle I wasn't strong enough, that there was a limit to controlled behaviour, that what I myself longed for now was warmth, 'I do truly love you in many ways,' I said, and found the words coming out an octave lower than in my normal voice.

'Andrew!' She came to her feet and walked towards me, searching my face and no doubt seeing there the vulnerability she wasn't accustomed to.

'Well…' I said, struggling for lightness; for a smile; for Andrew the unfailing prop. 'There's always time. You ride races now. Go shopping. Drive your car?'

She nodded.

'It all took time," I said. I wrapped my arms around her lightly and kissed her forehead. 'When rubber begins feeling like lips, let me know.'

She put her head against my shoulder and clung to me for help as she had often clung before; and it was I, really, who wanted to be enfolded and cherished and loved.

She rode in the race the next day, a star in her own firmament.

The racecourse had come alive, crowds pressing, shouting, betting, cheering. The grandstands were packed. One had to slide round strangers to reach any goal. I had my hand stamped and checked and my name taken and ticked, and Eric Rickenbacker welcomed me busily to the biggest day of his year.

The president's dining room, so echoingly empty previously, spilled over now with chattering guests all having a wow of a time. Ice clinked and waitresses passed with small silver trays and a large buffet table offered crab cakes to aficionados.

Paolo Cenci was there with the Goldonis and Lucchese, all of them looking nervous as they sat together at one of the tables. I collected a glass of wine from an offered trayful and went over to see them, wishing them well.

'Brunelleschi kicked his groom,' Paolo Cenci said.

'Is that good or bad?'

'No one knows,' he said.

I kept the giggle in my stomach. 'How's Alessia?' I asked.

'Less worried than anyone else.'

I glanced at the other faces; at Lucchese, fiercely intense, at Bruno Goldoni, frowning, and at Beatrice, yesterday's glow extinguished.

'It's her job,' I said.

They offered me a place at their table but I thanked them and wandered away, too restless to want to be with them.

'Any news from London?' Eric Rickenbacker said in my ear, passing close.

'None this morning.'

He clicked his tongue, indicating sympathy. 'Poor Morgan. Should have been here. Instead…' he shrugged resignedly, moving away, greeting new guests, kissing cheeks, clapping shoulders, welcoming a hundred friends.

The Washington International was making the world's news. Poor Morgan, had he been there, wouldn't have caused a ripple.

They saved the big race until ninth of the ten on the card, the whole afternoon a titillation, a preparation, with dollars flooding meanwhile into the Pari-mutuel and losing tickets filling the trashcans.

The whole of the front of the main stands was filled in with glass, keeping out the weather, rain or shine. To one slowly growing used to the rigours of English courses the luxury was extraordinary but, when I commented on it, one of Rickenbacker's guests said reasonably that warm betters betted, cold betters stayed at home. A proportion of the day's take at the Pari-mutuel went to the racecourse: racegoer comfort was essential.

For me the afternoon passed interminably, but in due course all the foreign owners and trainers left the president's dining room to go down nearer the action and speed their horses on their way.

I stayed in the eyrie, belonging nowhere, watching the girl I knew so well come out onto the track; a tiny gold and white figure far below, one in a procession, each contestant led and accompanied by a liveried outrider. No loose horses on the way to the post, I thought. No runaways, no bolters.

A trumpet sounded a fanfare to announce the race. A frenzy of punters fluttered fistfuls of notes. The runners walked in procession across in front of the stands and cantered thereafter to the start, each still with as escort. Alessia looked from that distance identical with the other jockeys: I wouldn't have known her except for the colours.

I felt, far more disturbingly than on the English tracks, a sense of being no part of her real life. She lived most intensely there, on a horse, where her skill filled her. All I could ever be to her as a lover, I thought, was a support: and I would settle for that, if she would come to it.

The runners circled on the grass, because the one and a half mile International was run on living green turf, not on dirt. They were fed into the stalls on the far side of the track. Lights still flickered on the Pari-mutuel, changing the odds: races in America tended to start when the punters had finished, not to any rigid clock.

They were off, they were running, the gold and white figure with them, going faster than the wind and to my mind crawling like slow motion.

Brunelleschi, the brute who kicked, put his bad moods to good use, shouldering his way robustly round the first bunched-up bend, forcing himself through until there was a clear view ahead. Doesn't like to be shut in, Alessia had said. She gave him room and she held him straight: they came past the stands for the first time in fourth place, the whole field close together. Round the top bend left-handed, down the back stretch, round the last corner towards home.

Two of the leaders dropped back: Brunelleschi kept on going. Alessia swung her stick twice, aimed the black beast straight at the target and rode like a white and gold arrow to the bull.

She won the race, that girl, and was cheered as she came to the winners' enclosure in front of the stands. She was photographed and filmed, her head back, her mouth laughing. As Brunelleschi stamped around in his winner's garland of laurels (what else?) she reached forward and gave his dark sweating neck a wide-armed exultant pat, and the crowd again cheered.

I wholeheartedly shared in her joy: and felt lonely.

They all came up to the dining room for champagne - winners, losers and Eric Rickenbacker looking ecstatic.

'Well done,' I said to her.

'Did you see?' She was high, high with achievement.

'Yes, I did.'

'Isn't it fantastic?'

'The day of a lifetime.'

'Oh, I do love you,' she said, laughing, and turned away immediately, and talked with animation to a throng of admirers. Ah, Andrew, I thought wryly, how do you like it? And I answered myself; better than nothing.

When I finally got back to the hotel the message button was flashing on my telephone. My office in England had called when I was out. Please would I get through to them straight away.

Gerry Clayton was on the switchboard.

'Your Italian friend rang from Bologna,' he said. 'The policeman, Pucinelli…'

'Yes?'

'He wants you to telephone. I couldn't understand him very well, but I think he said he had found Giuseppe-Peter.'