Second Wind Page 21

  I disconnected from Zipalong with fulsome thanks, and called the cell phone number of Oliver Quigley, anxious racehorse trainer, all now, it seemed, restored to his normal self of trembles and shakes.

  When my phone caught up with his phone, he was again at Cheltenham races, outside the Golden Miller bar. He offered a stuttery greeting that ignored the stripped-down personality I’d seen at Doncaster.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I wondered what happened with Zipalong Couriers.”

  The stuttering reply included stableyard language at its roughest, but meant in essence that when Oliver Quigley was reported to be receiving and signing for couriered envelopes in Newmarket at noon yesterday, Friday, he had been at Cheltenham races saddling his runner in the three-year-old hurdle. A pointless exercise, as the horse in question had one speed only—slow—and wouldn’t have won even if Perry Stuart had been where he ought to have been—in front of the cameras with details of the weather—instead of fussing over a couple of bruises in hospital.

  At my third try of “Mr. Quigley?” he slowed down and said “What—what?” If he had been at Cheltenham, I asked, who had signed for Glenda’s package?

  Oliver was inclined in bad temper to think it was none of my business. I would be happy to help him with last-minute underfoot forecasts, I murmured. In that case ... Oliver Quigley believed that when the courier found no one at home yet again, he was so pissed off (Oliver said), he just signed as if he were Quigley, and took the package away with him and chucked it in a ditch.

  “Do you really think so?” I asked.

  “Mark my words,” Oliver said, the receiver clattering with shakes against his teeth, “they never delivered that parcel and I’ll sue the pants off them until I get it back.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “I could kill that bitch Glenda,” he said. “If she weren’t already dead I’d kill her. If Zipalong don’t find my package soon it won’t be worth suing them ... but I’d do it anyway. I’ll get that thief of a motorcyclist run off the road.”

  I was glad, while listening to him moaning on and on, that Cheltenham racetrack was a hundred or more miles west of where I sat.

  After Oliver I spent a silent hour or two by myself while smooth cogwheels like quiet fruit machines clicked gently into place, and I made at the end of that time two telephone calls, one to the Bedford Arms Hotel in Newmarket and the other to the Meteorological Office at Bracknell.

  John Rupert and Ghost had got things right. The murder of one of the Traders was splitting the others apart.

  As John Rupert had given me his own cell phone number (“in case,” he explained), I called him in the middle of a golf game, which he put on hold with good grace.

  “You’re not worse, I hope,” he said.

  “No, the opposite. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Always ask.”

  “Then how serious are you about the book on storms?”

  “Oh!” I’d really surprised him. He said guardedly, “Why?”

  I said frankly, “Because I need a contract... actually I don’t need a contract, I need an advance.”

  “An advance ... for anything special? I mean, is this urgent? It’s Saturday afternoon.”

  “I think I can get you another Trader, but I need a ticket to Miami.”

  He took barely ten seconds to make up his mind.

  “Tomorrow do?” he said.

  By lunchtime on Sunday (“tomorrow”) Ravi Chand was peering at my fading rash with a magnifying glass, a bright light and a disappointed expression.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked anxiously.

  “From your point of view, nothing. From mine, my laboratory animal is walking out with only half of my investigations complete.” He sighed. “Jett promises she will week by week bring you back for continuing treatment. I will publish as soon as I can.”

  I asked diffidently, “What about the owners of the herd that gave me this disease? Doesn’t my rash belong to them?”

  “The owners, whoever they are, are using that herd as a living laboratory totally isolated from outside factors. Ideal. They might stand to make millions from new pasteurization methods.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “The present law states that raw milk has to be raised to 71.7 degrees centigrade, that’s 161 degrees Fahrenheit, for a minimum of fifteen seconds to be pasteurized. If anyone could patent a new procedure which reduced the temperature or the time, then they would make a fortune due to the fuel saving. That’s what they’re after. They are not interested in, or experimenting on, a new disease infecting humans. If they were, there would be immense interest in any affliction resembling your illness. Instead, there has been no reaction at all to your progress. The incubation time was short, the onset sudden, and now the speed of your recovery is conclusive. This illness is new. It’s different. You are unique. I have incidentally named your illness in our joint honor, Mycobacterium paratuberrulosis Chand-Stuart X.”

  He shook my hand warmly. “I cannot lock you in a safe with my notes, but please, please, dear Dr. Stuart, dear Perry, keep yourself alive until I publish.”

  When Jett drove her car to collect me, Ravi Chand in his white coat stood on his doorstep waving us a sorrowful if temporary goodbye. I’d been in his care so far only from Wednesday to Sunday, but the swift Chand-Stuart disease (curable, thank the fates) struggled in many a Petri dish in his laboratory towards universal recognition.

  Jett drove to my grandmother’s apartment, where she was due to start work again the next day. She seemed pleased at the prospect, but to me it meant an end to the nearness I’d valued all week. Jett had definitely burrowed far under my unattractive skin.

  My grandmother exclaimed in alarm at my thinness but was enjoying the company of John Rupert, who had postponed another game of golf on my behalf and was covering every surface in sight with contracts for a gathering of Storm.

  With everything signed he shook hands with my grandmother and left me with a vast check made out to a credit card company to cover every expense.

  “Instant money and more to come,” he promised, “when Ghost starts Page One.”

  When he’d gone my grandmother asked the resident “dear girl” to give me the little parcel the postman had delivered for me the morning before. According to its postmark it had been sent from Miami, and only to one person there had I given my grandmother’s address.

  Unwin of the yellow-toothed grin had amazingly sent me the best gift he could, because when I’d threaded a way through yards of bubble packing I found a note wrapped round a plastic sandwich bag, and, inside that, my small old familiar mud-filled camera. With surprise and jubilation I opened and read the note.

  Perry,

  I flew a load of people to Trox. There was a woman in

  charge. She says the island is hers. She was the pits. I

  found your camera where you said. All the pax were

  bloody rude all day, so I didn’t tell them I’d found it.

  Best of luck.

  Unwin.

  Explaining to the others where it came from, I put the camera contentedly in my pocket and on a different tack set about making calls to find Kris and Bell. Result, Bell had gone home to Newmarket, where she and her father were now presently in unofficial charge of the Loricroft stable.

  “It’s all dreadful,” Bell, said, tears in the offing. “Oliver Quigley and Dad are singleminded about this wretched folder, which still hasn’t turned up anywhere. They’ve both gone to Cheltenham again today and left me looking after things. Dad’s berserk with worry and he won’t tell me why.”

  “Where’s Kris?” I asked with sympathy, and she said he would be at the Weather Center doing radio forecasts until midnight; and he would be sleeping in his own apartment, as far as she knew.

  “Are you better?” she remembered to ask, and I thanked her and said I’d been let out of the cage.

  “What does pax mean?” Jett asked, reading Unwin’s notes.

&
nbsp; “Passenger,” said my grandmother, who’d been one most of her life. “And Perry, after supper from the take-away, and when you’ve said good night later to our dear Jett van Els, you can lie down here on the sofa and have a good restful sleep. Don’t think of going home. You look far too frail for climbing all those very steep stairs.”

  I never entirely disobeyed her but I wasn’t bad at finding ways to modify the format, so that when I asked to borrow her warm deep-pocketed Edwardian Sherlock Holmes look-alike cloak, all she said was “Take some gloves” and “Come back safe.” Nothing, I was encouraged to hear, about heebies orjeebies.

  I kissed her on her forehead, our tiredness mutual, and traveled with Jett in her car to Paddington Station, terminus of trains to the west, playground of suicidal manic-depressives (but not of Glenda) and home of a simple coin-in-the-slot photocopying machine.

  After a Romeo and Juliet length and intensity of good nights, Jett confessed to receiving a Ravi Chand medical opinion, Sunday morning edition.

  “What was it?”

  “Wait a week.”

  I had already waited too long.

  “With such a slow start,” I said, “our disengagement should take fifty years.”

  Smiling with shiny eyes she helped me make a set of copies of Vera’s equine research work, and when she finally left me two short streets later I had a set of Vera-copies in a buff folder in one deep front pocket, and Vera’s originals in a paper clip in the other.

  By midnight or soon after I was sitting on Kris’s doorstep waiting like the Zipalong rider for the weatherman to come home.

  He stopped, key in hand, surprised to see me there so late.

  “I locked myself out,” I said, shrugging. “Do you mind if I sleep here?”

  He looked at his watch. He said “O.K.,” without huge enthusiasm, but he’d landed on my own doorstep often enough at midnight.

  “Come on in,” he said. “Take your coat off. You look awfully ill. Coffee or tea?”

  I said I was too cold to take my coat off. He boiled water and clattered some mugs.

  I said, faintly smiling, “Whatever you sent to Newmarket with Zipalong’s motorbike, it wasn’t what Glenda took from George.”

  He stared. “How the hell do you know?”

  “Well ... who else but you could make sure that Zipalong’s motorcyclist reached Quigley’s house at the right time? You kept the poor man eating toast and generally waiting about until you were sure that he would arrive after Quigley had gone to Cheltenham races.”

  Kris said, laughing, “It was only a joke on fussy old Oliver.”

  I nodded. “He’s easy to make fun of.”

  “Glenda,” Kris said, “drove us half crazy all day Thursday saying she’d got a whole lot of George’s papers that were proof of his out-and-out treason in Germany. We got fed up with it. Then Oliver called and he and Glenda had a frightful row. He told her what she’d taken was a list of horses that would be running in Germany, and it was his, Oliver’s, and he wanted it back.”

  “But you didn’t send it back,” I said.

  “Well, no.” He grinned. “It stirred silly old Oliver up a treat.”

  “What did you send with the courier to Newmarket?”

  “A list of horses. I clipped them out of newspapers. What else?”

  “Did you read the list you were supposed to have sent?”

  Kris said, “Of course not. It’s all in German.”

  “Show me,” I asked persuasively.

  He nodded, and, willingly moving into his spartan bedroom, pulled open a drawer and picked out a completely ordinary buff folder from underneath his socks.

  Without any sort of dismay he handed it to me, and one brief glance verified its contents. Different from those on Trox but for the same purpose.

  “There you are.” Kris said. “Love letters, Glenda had once thought. But they’re really only lists of horses. See that word?” He pointed. “That word means racehorses.”

  The word he pointed to was Pferderennbahn.

  “That word,” I contradicted mildly, “is Horseracetrack.”

  “Well? So what?”

  “So ... er,” I asked, “who met the motorcyclist at Oliver’s house to sign for the package?”

  “Guess.”

  “I’d guess ... how about Robin Darcy?”

  “You’re too bloody smart.”

  “You and Robin are friends and he was staying at the Bedford Arms Hotel, which is barely a hundred yards down the road from Quigley’s stable, I’m told. So who else was more likely? It was obvious, not smart.”

  “Yeah ... well, it was only a joke. How did you get it right?”

  “You told us Robin left for Miami on Tuesday ... what does it matter? I happened to be phoning that hotel and they said he left yesterday. Never mind. How about if we made a copy of these German letters. We can do it easily along at Paddington, and then you can see Oliver’s face when you show him you’ve got his precious list safe after all. It’s always prudent to make copies. It would be a disaster if Oliver could sue you because you’d lost the originals.”

  Kris yawned, sighed and agreed.

  “I’ll do it for you,” I said, “if you like.”

  “I suppose I’d better come. Let’s go now and get it over.”

  “Right.”

  I picked up the folder and, summoning energy I didn’t think I had, headed out of Kris’s bedroom, down the hall and out of the front door without looking back, happily humming a marching tune as if the whole thing were a prearranged jaunt.

  I could hear Kris behind me saying, “Well ...” doubtfully, but it wasn’t far to the station, and my enthusiasm kept us both going the whole way.

  I sent Kris off to get more coins for the machine and made copies quickly with a German list on top for all the world—and Kris—to see. We set off back to his apartment with me grasping a folder inside my grandmother’s cloak and Kris clutching Glenda’s folder to his chest.

  The impetus was draining away in us both and the night suddenly felt very cold indeed when Kris uneasily said, “I hope Robin will think these copies a good idea. Anyway, he’ll be coming for the folder at any minute now. Any time after one o’clock, he said, when I’d finished my shift for the day.”

  “I thought he was in Miami,” I said, uneasy in my turn.

  “No, he’s going tomorrow. He changed his plans, I think.” He looked at his watch again. “Any time from now on, he’ll be here.”

  “Really?”

  I didn’t like that. I needed a peaceful retreat, and a gentle walk away.

  Kris was in front of me, suddenly deeper in doubt, equally suddenly taking quick steps ahead and saying, “I don’t know ... There he is!” he joyfully shouted, pointing. “Let’s tell him now ...”

  I stopped walking, stopped listening, turned fast on my heel and started back towards the station at a paratuberculosis effort of a shambling run.

  It was my day for spending another of those twenty-nine lives.

  Kris could always run faster than I could, but not faster than a roving taxi whose driver was convinced he was saving his passenger from a mugging. As I scrambled untidily into the cab it circled on two wheels into a side road, and I glimpsed the two figures stop running after me and stand with arms akimbo just short of Kris’s apartment. looking along the road in my wake, deprived of their quarry.

  Under the lights the heavy dark spectacle frames flashed on the round head of the short, unmistakable Robin. Behind him stood the tall, blond, frustrated, godlike Norseman.

  Kris still firmly clutched Glenda’s buff folder, though it now contained, not dangerous requisites in German, but the plain English copies made, with Jett’s help, of Vera’s records of the filly’s radiation history at the Equine Research Establishment.

  In one deep pocket, I carried Vera’s originals, as before, and in the other a true Trading gift to mankind, the Loricroft legacy of the where, the how much, the how soon and the strength of available U-235 and
Pu-239.

  The cab driver asked where I wanted to go, which if answered literally would have meant to bed with Jett, warm, loved and healthy. Instead I opted for round the block and back to the station, where warmth in some places kept total misery at bay.

  I sat on a bench in a waiting room, sharing limbo with bona-fide travelers and the hungry dispossessed.

  My immediate impulsive reaction, to run away from Kris and Robin, was on reflection stupid, and could quite likely never be explained or given an adequate apology. Temporary madness, that flight had been. True, I had in my pocket lists of illegal materials, a damning piece of evidence, but evidence against whom? To whom should I give the folder? To someone one rung up from John Rupert? So where would I find him? And who would he be?

  I thought for a long time about the enigmas that had been handed down.

  Win quietly.

  Look sideways at what you learn.

  I had done neither.

  If there was a path through a maze—if there were a maze—would the riddle be solved by going outward, or by searching deeper in?

  The folder with the Vera copies in it could have been explained as a further teasing of Oliver Quigley. I had meant to laugh it off and could have done. Why had I run from Robin?

  I chased the reason in the end to a dream of delirium, when Robin and Kris stood hand in hand beckoning me towards a gun to end my life. Subconsciously from then on I’d thought of them as allies, yet not believing Kris capable of real atrocious crime. Believing two opposite things at once was highly common though, like people who couldn’t abide the rich but bought lottery tickets every week, hoping to become what they said they despised.

  Look at things sideways ... What did he mean?

  I tried looking sideways at the island of Trox. At mushrooms and cattle and worldwide anarchy.

  Looked sideways at Odin ...

  Went to sleep.

  When I woke at six I found that my sleeping brain had sorted out the sideways factor. Sideways, I yawned, was fast asleep.

  No one had disturbed me during the four or five hours I’d spent in my huddled corner, but a quick glance in a looking glass disguised as a beer advertisement on the wall there revealed that although the rash had faded to a mottled pinkish brown, my eyes had now swollen to puffballs and my unshaven chin was a stubblefield in black. As no one, I imagined, would recognize this wreck as the well-brushed me, I left things as they were and sorted out the contents of my grandmother’s Sherlock Holmes cape-coat pockets, which I’d filled the evening before.