Twice Shy Page 22

  For about a week I moseyed around all over the place with detours to race meetings and to Luke’s two trainers in Berkshire, and spent every spare waking minute with the stud book. Sim Shell said severely that he wished to be present and in full consultation whenever I bought anything for him personally to train, and Mort with every nerve twitching asked for Sir Ivor, Nijinsky and Northern Dancer, all at once, and at the very least.

  Cassie came with me to the evening session on the first day of the sales, roaming about on the forever legs and listening engrossed to the gossip. Every year, Newmarket sale ring saw fortunes lost quicker than crashing stock markets, but the talk was all of hope and expectation, of slashing speed and breeding potential, all first-day euphoria and unspent checks.

  “What excitement,” Cassie said. “You can see it in every face.”

  “The joy of acquisition. Disillusion comes next week. Then optimistic gloom. Then, if you’re lucky, complacent relief.”

  “But today—”

  “Today,” I nodded. “There’s still the chance of buying the winner of the Derby.”

  I bought two colts and a filly on that evening for staggering sums, reassured to a point by having competed against top echelons of bloodstock agents but pursued by the sapping fear that it was I who had pressed on too far, not they who had stopped too soon.

  We stayed to the end of the program, partly because of Cassie’s fascination with a new world but also because it was when the big buyers had gone home that a bargain sometimes arose, and I did in fact buy the last lot of the day, a thin-looking ponylike creature, because I liked his bright eyes.

  The breeder thanked me. “Is it really for Luke Houston?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He won’t be sorry. He’s intelligent, that little colt.”

  “He looks it.”

  “He’ll grow, you know,” he told me earnestly. “His dam’s family are all late growers. Come and have a drink. It isn’t every day I sell one to Luke Houston.”

  We went back, however, to drink and eat with Bananas, and from there to the cottage, where I sent off a Telex to Luke, for whom our midnight was three in the afternoon.

  Luke liked Telexes. If he wanted to discuss what I’d sent, he would telephone after his evening dinner, catching me at six in the morning before I left for the gallops, but more normally he would reply by Telex or not at all.

  The dining room was filled with equipment provided by Luke: a videodisc recorder for rewatching and analyzing past races, a print-out calculator, a photocopier, a row of filing cabinets, an electric typewriter, the Telex machine and a complicated affair which answered the telephone, took messages, gave messages, and recorded every word it heard, including my own live conversations. It worked on a separate line from the telephone in the sitting room, a good arrangement which most simply divorced our private calls from his business, allowing me to pay for one and him the other. All he hadn’t given me—or had had me collect from an unwilling Warrington Marsh—was a computer.

  When I came down the following morning I found the Telex had chattered during the night.

  WHY DIDN’T YOU BUY THE FISHER COLT? WHY DID YOU BUY THE CHEAP COLT? GIVE MY BEST TO CASSIE.

  He had never actually met Cassie but only talked to her a few times on the telephone. The politeness was his way of saying his questions were simply questions, not accusations. Any Telexes which came without “best to Cassie” were jump-to-it matters.

  I Telexed back.

  TWO PRIVATE OWNERS WHO DETEST EACH OTHER, SCHUBMAN AND MRS. CRICKINGTON, BEAT EACH OTHER UP TO 340,000 FOR THE FISHER COLT, WAY BEYOND ITS SENSIBLE VALUE. THE CHEAP COLT MIGHT SURPRISE YOU YET. REGARDS, WILLIAM.

  Cassie these days was being collected and brought back by a slightly too friendly man who lived near the pub and worked a street away from Cassie in Cambridge. She said he was putting his hand on her knee instead of the steering wheel increasingly often and she would be extremely glad to be rid of both him and the cast. In other respects than driving, the cast had been accommodated, and our nighttime activities were back to their old joy.

  By day we slowly repaired or replaced everything which had been smashed, using as references the pieces Bananas had stacked in the garage. Television, vases, lamps, all as near as possible to the originals. Even six corn dollies hung again in their mobile group, dollies freshly and intricately woven from the shiny stalks of the new harvest by an elderly lady who said you had to cut the corn for them specially nowadays by hand, because combine harvesters chopped the straw too short.

  Bananas thought that replacing the corn dollies might be going too far, but Cassie said darkly that they represented pagan gods who should be placated, and deep in the countryside you never knew . . .

  I carpentered new pieces into both the damaged doors and fitted a new lock to the front. All traces of Angelo gradually vanished, all except his baseball bat which lay along the sill of the window which faced the road. We had consciously kept it there to begin with as a handy weapon in case he should come back, but even as day after peaceful day gave us a growing sense of ease we let it lie: another hostage to the evil eye, perhaps.

  Jonathan telephoned me one evening, and although I was sure he wouldn’t approve of what I’d done, I told him everything that had happened.

  “You kept him in the cellar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good God.”

  “It seems to have worked.”

  “Mm. I can’t help being sorry that Angelo finally has that system.”

  “I know. I’m sorry too, after all you did to keep it from him. I really hated giving it to him. But you were right, he’s dangerous, and I don’t want to vanish to California; the life I want is right here on English turf. And about the system—don’t forget, it isn’t enough just to possess it. You’d have to operate it discreetly. Angelo knows just about nothing about racing, and he’s impetuous and undisciplined, not cunning and quiet.”

  “He may also,” Jonathan said, “think that the system gives a winner every time, which it doesn’t. Old Mrs. O’Rorke said it steadily gave an average of one winner in three.”

  “Angelo versus the bookies should be quite a match. And by the way, I told him you were dead.”

  “Thanks very much.”

  “Well you didn’t want him turning up one day on your sunny doorstep, did you?”

  “He’d never get a visa.”

  “You can walk across the Canadian border,” I said, “without anyone being the wiser.”

  “And the Mexican,” he agreed.

  I told him in detail about Ted Pitts’s house, and he sounded truly pleased. “And the little girls? How are they?”

  “Grown up and pretty.”

  “I envied him those children.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. Well, there you are. It’s the way life turns out.”

  I listened to the regret in his voice and understood how much he himself had wanted a daughter, a son . . . and I thought that I too would regret it one day if I didn’t . . . and that maybe it would be terrific fun if Cassie . . .

  “Are you still there?” he said.

  “Yeah. If I get married, will you come over to the wedding?”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You never know. I haven’t asked her yet. She might not want to.”

  “Keep me posted.” He sounded amused.

  “Yeah. How’s Sarah?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “So long,” I said, and he said, “So long,” and I put down the receiver with the usual feeling of thankfulness that I had a brother, and that he was specifically Jonathan.

  More days passed. By the end of the first week’s sales I’d bought twelve yearlings for Luke and lost five more to higher bidders, and I’d consulted with Sim until he was sick of it and given Mort a filly that was on her toes if not actually a Dancer, and spent two evenings in the Bedford Arms with the Irish trainer Donavan, listening to his woes and watching him get
drunk.

  “There’s more good horses in Ireland than ever come out,” he said, wagging an unsteady finger under my nose.

  “I’m sure.”

  “You want to come over, now. You want to poke around them studs, now, before you go to the sales.”

  “I’ll come over soon,” I said. “Before the next sales, two weeks from now.”

  “You do that.” He nodded sagely. “There’s a colt I have my eye on, way down below Wexford. I’d like to train that colt, now. I’d like for you to buy that little fella for Luke, that I would.”

  In that particular year, as a trial, the first Newmarket Yearling Sales had been held early, at the beginning of September. The Premium Sales, when most of the bluestblooded youngsters would come under the hammer, were as usual at the end of the month. The colt Donavan had his eye on was due to be sold two weeks ahead, but unfortunately not only Donavan had his eye on it. The whole of Ireland and most of England seemed also to have their optics swiveled that way. Even allowing for Irish exaggeration, that colt seemed the best news of the season.

  “Luke would want that fella, now,” Donavan said.

  “I’ll bid for it,” I said mildly.

  He peered boozily into my face. “What you want to do, now, is to get Luke to say there’s no ceiling. No ceiling, that’s the thing.”

  “I’ll go to Luke’s limit.”

  “You’re a broth of a boy, now. And it’s write to Luke I did, I’ll admit it, to say you were as green as a pea and no good to man nor horse, not in the job he’d given you.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, now, if you get me that little colt I’ll write again and say I was wrong.” He nodded heavily and half fell off the bar stool. He was never drunk on the gallops or at the races or indeed by the sale ring itself, but at all other times . . . probably. The owners didn’t seem to mind and nor did the horses: drunk or sober Donavan produced as many winners year by year as anyone in Ireland. I didn’t like or dislike him. I did business with him before ten in the morning and listened intently in the evenings, the time when through clouds of whisky he spoke the truth. Many thought him uncouth, and so he was. Many thought Luke would have chosen a smoother man with tidier social manners, but perhaps Luke had seen and heard Donavan’s intimate way with horses, as I now had, and preferred the priceless goods to a gaudier package. I had come to respect Donavan. Two solid days of his company were quite enough.

  When the flood of purchasing trainers and agents and go-it-alone owners had washed out of town temporarily, Sim gave a brown short-necked filly a final workout and afterward rather challengingly told me she was as ready as could be to win the last race on St. Leger day, that Saturday.

  “She looks great,” I said. “A credit to your care.”

  Sim half scowled. “You’ll be going to Doncaster, I suppose?”

  I nodded. “Staying up there, Friday night. Mort’s running Genotti in the St. Leger.”

  “Will you help me saddle mine up?” Sim said.

  I tried to hide my astonishment at this olive branch of epic proportions. He usually attempted to keep me as far from the runners as possible.

  “Be glad to,” I said.

  He nodded with customary brusqueness. “See you there, then.”

  “Good luck.”

  He was going up on the Wednesday for the whole of the four-day meeting, but I didn’t particularly want to, not least because Cassie still found it difficult to manage on her own with the rigid arm. I left her on the Friday, though, and drove to Doncaster, and almost the first person I saw as I walked through the racecourse gates was Angelo.

  I stopped abruptly and turned aside, willing him not to spot me, not to speak.

  He was buying two racecards from one of the booths near the entrance, holding up the queue while he sorted out coins.

  I suppose it was inevitable I would one day see him if he took to racegoing at all often, but somehow it was still quite a shock. I was glad when he turned away from the booth in the opposite direction to where I stood: there might be a truce between us but it was fragile at best.

  I watched while he barged his way through the swelling crowd with elbows like battering rams and thighs like rocks: and he was heading not to anywhere where he could place a bet but toward the less populated area near the rails of the track itself, where supporters had not yet flocked to see the first race. Reaching the rails, he stopped beside an elderly man in a wheelchair and unceremoniously thrust one of the racecards into his hands. Then he turned immediately on his heel and bulled his way purposefully toward the serried ranks of bookmakers inside the stands, where I lost sight of him, thankfully, for the rest of the day.

  He was back, however, on the Saturday. Although I seldom bothered with gambling I decided to have a small bet on Genotti in the St. Leger, infected no doubt by Mort’s fanatical eagerness, and as I stood near a little Welsh bookmaker whom I’d long known I saw Angelo, thirty feet away, frowning heavily over a small notebook.

  “Genotti,” my bookmaker friend said to his clerk, who wrote down every transaction in the book. “Three tenners at fives, William Derry.”

  “Thanks, Taff,” I said.

  Along the row Angelo began arguing about a price on offer, which was apparently less than he thought fair.

  “Everyone else is at five to one.” His voice was a growl which I knew all too well.

  “Try someone else, then. It’s fours to you, Mister Gilbert.”

  With half my mind I was satisfied that Angelo was indeed rushing in stupidly with the system where Liam O’Rorke and Ted Pitts had taken care not to tread, but I was also uneasy that he should be arousing opposition so soon. I positively needed for him to win for a while. I’d never envisaged him sticking to the anonymous drudgery required for long-term success, but the honeymoon period should not already have been over.

  Taff-the-bookmaker glanced over his shoulder at the altercation and gave his clerk an eyes-to-heaven gesture.

  “What’s all the fuss about?” I asked.

  “He’s a right gitt, that man.” Taff divided his comment impartially between me, his clerk, and the world in general.

  “Angelo Gilbert.”

  Taff’s gaze sharpened on me directly. “Know him, do you?”

  “Somebody pointed him out. He murdered somebody, years ago.”

  “That’s right. Just out of the jug, he is. And stupid—you wouldn’t credit it.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “He came up to York last week with a fistful of bank-notes, laying it about as if there were no tomorrow, and us not knowing who he was at that moment. And there’s us thinking we were all taking lollipops off a baby when, whammo, this outsider he’d invested about six big ones on comes cantering in from nowhere and we’re all paying out and wincing and scratching our heads over where he got the info, because the trainer hadn’t had as much as a quid on, as far as we knew. So Lancer, that bloke along there arguing with this Gilbert, he asks this geezer straight out who’d put him onto the winner, and that stupid gitt smirked and said Liam O’Rorke did.”

  Taff peered at my face, which I felt must have mirrored my feeling of inner shock, but apparently it merely looked blank, because Taff, who was a good sixty-plus, made a clicking sound with his mouth and said, “Before your time, I suppose.”

  “What was?”

  Taff’s attention was torn away by several customers who crowded to place bets, and he seemed vaguely surprised to see me still there when they’d gone.

  “Are you that interested?” he asked.

  “Got nothing else to do.”

  Taff glanced along to where Angelo had been, but Angelo had gone. “Thirty years ago. Thirty-five. Time goes so quick. There was this old Irishman, Liam O’Rorke, he’d invented the only system I ever knew that would guarantee you’d win. Course, once we’d cottoned to him we weren’t all that keen to take his bets. I mean, we wouldn’t be, would we, knowing he had the edge on us somehow. Anyway, he would never part with hi
s secret, how he did it, and it went with him to the grave, and good riddance, between you and me.”

  “And now?”

  “And now here’s this geezer rocking us back on our heels with this huge win at York and then he’s sneering at us and calling us mugs, and saying we don’t know what’s hit us yet, and what he’s using on us is Liam O’Rorke’s old system resurrected. And now he’s all indignant and complaining that we won’t give him a good price. Acting all hurt and angry.” Taff laughed contemptuously. “I mean, how stupid can you get?”

  17

  Genotti won the St. Leger by an easy four lengths.

  Mort’s excitement afterward seemed to levitate him visibly off the ground, the static electricity about him crackling in the dry September sunshine. He wrung my hand with bone-scrunching enthusiasm and danced around the unsaddling enclosure giving rapturous responses to all who congratulated, reacting with such uncomplicated delight to his victory that he had all the crowd smiling. It was easy, I reflected, to think of Mort as simple through and through, whereas, as I had gradually discovered, he traversed tortuous routes through mental mazes where pros and cons battled like chessmen to arrive at the plans and solutions that seemed so obvious once they had turned out to be right.

  I collected my winnings from Taff, who gloomily said he would never have given anyone five to one if he’d known beforehand that Genotti was Angelo Gilbert’s fancy.

  “Did Angelo win?” I asked.

  “Of course he did. He must have had a grand on. None of us would take his money at the finish.”

  “So he didn’t get fives?”

  “More like evens,” he said sourly.

  At evens Angelo would still have doubled his money, but for Angelo that might not be enough. Grievance, I could see, might raise a very ugly head.

  “No system could win every single time,” I said. “Angelo won’t.”