by Dick Francis
‘It’s a long time since lunch.’
‘A terribly long time …’ She suddenly looked me straight in the face, which she had mostly been avoiding, and with devastating innocence said, ‘I’m so glad you’re alive.’
I turned a hopeless wince into a laugh. ‘I’m so glad Dave Teller is.’
‘Both of you,’ she said. ‘It was the worst thing in my whole life when you didn’t come up.’
A child untouched by tragedy, I thought. A pity the world was such a rough place, would catch her by her pretty neck one day and tear her guts apart. No one ever escaped. To have got to seventeen unlacerated was merely a matter of luck.
When we had finished the coffee she insisted on doing the dishes, but when she hung up the tea towel I saw all her mother’s warnings pour back, and she glanced at me and quickly away, and stood stiffly in the centre of the room, looking nervous and embarrassed.
‘Why don’t you have any pictures on your walls?’ she said jerkily.
I gestured to the trunk in the corner. ‘There are some in there, but I don’t like them very much. Not enough to bother with hanging them up … Do you know it’s after ten? I’d better take you home or the hostel will shut you out.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said in great relief, and then hearing her own voice, added in confusion, ‘I mean … I didn’t know if you would think me very rude, dashing off as soon as we’d finished eating.’
‘Your mother is quite right to tell you to be cautious,’ I said lightly. ‘Little Red Riding Hood couldn’t tell a wolf from her grandmother … and you can never rely on a woodcutter turning up in the nick of time.’
The rigidity dissolved like mist. ‘You do say some extraordinary things,’ she said. ‘As if you could read my mind.’
‘I could,’ I smiled. ‘You’d better put that cardigan on. It will be cold outside.’
‘OK.’ She pulled a dark brown jersey out of her bucket-shaped holdall and put it on. I bent to pick up a clean folded handkerchief which had fallen out with it, and when she was ready, handed it to her.
‘Thanks,’ she said, looking at it casually. ‘That’s the one Peter found in the punt.’
‘In the punt?’
‘Yes, down a crack between two of the cushions. He gave it to me because it was too small for him, he said. Too cissy.’
‘Did he find anything else?’
‘I don’t think so … I mean it isn’t stealing or anything, is it, to keep her handkerchief? I’ll give it to her of course if she comes back, but by the time Peter was sitting in the punt, they had been gone already for ages.’
‘No, it’s not stealing,’ I reassured her, though technically it was doubtful. ‘But may I have a look at it?’
‘Of course.’
She gave it back and I unfolded it: a white square of thin gauzy material. In one corner, a stylized bear in a flat straw hat.
‘Is that out of Walt Disney?’ I asked.
She shook her head and said with surprise at my ignorance, ‘Yogi Bear.’
‘Who is Yogi Bear?’
‘I can’t believe it! Well, he’s a character in a lot of cartoon films. Like Top Cat and Atom Ant and the Flintstones.’
‘I’ve seen the Flintstones,’ I agreed.
‘Like them, then. The same people make Yogi Bear.’
‘Do you mind if I keep it for a day or two?’
‘Of course, if you really want to,’ she said, puzzled. ‘But it surely hasn’t any value.’
Down in the street I said I might as well finish the job and drive her to her hostel.
‘I’m really all right now,’ she protested. ‘You don’t need to come.’
‘Yes I do. Your father said to look after you, and I’m seeing you safe to your door.’
She raised her eyebrows and gave me a comical look, but compliantly went round to the passenger’s seat. I started the car, switched on the lights, and started towards Kensington.
‘Do you always do what Daddy tells you?’ she asked, smiling.
She was feeling much surer of herself, I thought.
‘Yes, when I want to.’
‘That’s a contradiction in terms.’
‘So it is.’
‘Well, what do you actually do? What does anyone do in the Civil Service?’
‘I interview people.’
‘What sort of people?’
‘People who want jobs in Government departments.’
‘Oh!’ She laughed. ‘A sort of Personnel Officer?’
‘Sort of.’
‘It sounds a bit drizz.’
‘The sun shines occasionally.’
‘You’re pretty quick. We only made up drizz yesterday.’
‘A very useful word.’
‘Yes, we thought so, too. Covers a lot of things nicely.’
‘Like wet boyfriends?’
She laughed. ‘Actually, it’s pretty drizz to have a wet boyfriend.’ She pointed. ‘The hostel’s down there, but we have to drive around and find somewhere to park the car all night. One or two squares down here don’t have meters yet.’
The nearest empty space was a good quarter of a mile from the hostel, so I walked her back.
‘You don’t need to …’ she began. ‘Well … don’t say it. Daddy said.’
‘Right,’ I agreed.
She sniffed resignedly and walked beside me out of step, the leather bucket bag swinging and her flat shoes silent on the pavement. At the hostel’s glossy black well-lit front door she came to a stop and hovered on one foot, her half anxious uncertain expression saying clearer than words that she wasn’t sure how to part from me. I wasn’t old enough for uncle terms or young enough for a casual contemporary brush-off. I worked for her father, but wasn’t his servant. Lived alone, looked respectable, asked nothing: I didn’t fit into any of the categories she had yet learnt how to deal with. I put out my hand and smiled.
‘Goodnight, Lynnie.’
Her clasp was brief, warm, relieved.
‘Goodnight …’ There was a pause while she made up her mind to it; and even then it was little more than a breath. ‘… Gene.’
‘I wish you,’ I said, ‘blind traffic wardens and foam rubber bumpers.’
‘Goodnight.’ The chuckle rolled spontaneously in her throat. ‘Goodnight.’ She turned on one toe and jumped the two steps up to the door, then looked over her shoulder and waved as she went inside.
Little Lynnie, I thought, whistling to a passing taxi, little Lynnie, right at the beginning of it. Flying half consciously, half unconsciously, the notice-me flags of the pretty young female; and it was no use pretending that she didn’t make me hungry; that she wasn’t absolutely what I would have liked as an oasis in my too continent life. But if I had learnt anything in thirty-eight years it was who not to go to bed with.
And, more drearily, how not to.
Chapter Four
The Buttress Life Offices on Thirty-Third Street were high on customer appeal on the sixth floor. On the fifth and seventh they tucked the computers and electric typewriters into functional plasterboard cubicles. I sat three inches deep in black leather and considered that of all American craftsmen, I admired their chair designers most: in no other country in the world could one sit on the same seat for several hours without protest from the sacro-iliac.
I had waited forty pleasantly cool minutes already. Long enough to discover that the rows of pot plants along the low wall dividing the forty-foot-square hall into five smaller bays were made of plastic. Long enough to admire the pinewood walls, the ankle-deep carpet, the carefully lowered ceiling with its inset lights. In each bay there was a large desk, with one large chair behind it, one at the side, one in front. Nearly all occupied. Dividing each bay neatly in two stood a second, smaller desk; for the secretary-receptionist with his back discreetly to his boss. In front of him, in each bay, the long black leather bench for waiting on.
I waited. There was still someone for the big man to see before me. Very sorry, said the secretary
apologetically, but the schedule had been crowded even before Mr Teller’s cable arrived. Could I possibly wait?
So why not? I had three weeks to spare.
The light was dim, and piped music poured over everything like syrup. That and the built-in deadness of the acoustics made the earnest consultations going on at the five big desks completely inaudible to the waiting benches, while at the same time giving the customers a comforting illusion that they weren’t alone in their troubles. Everyone, at the core of things, was alone. Just some more than others.
I hadn’t slept all night after leaving Lynnie; but not her fault. It had been one long stupid struggle between a craving for oblivion and conviction that appeasing it wasn’t so much morally wrong as a thoroughgoing defeat. I had never learnt to accept defeat. Obstinacy had given me what success I had had in my job, and it alone seemed to be keeping me alive, since all other props were as much use as toothpicks in an avalanche. Enthusiasm for finding Dave Teller’s horse burned in me as brightly as wet coal dust: and the nation would hardly collapse if I left its employ.
Caroline had crowded like a flood-tide through my head and down my body. Caroline … whom I would have married, had it not been for the husband who would not divorce her.
Caroline had left him to live with me, and had felt guilty about it. A mess. An ordinary, everyday mess. Her fine passion had fretted away over six frustrating years of will-he won’t-he; and to the end he wouldn’t. Not that he’d ever got her back. In the year since she had left me she had returned to nursing and was working as a sister in a Nairobi hospital, impervious to come-back letters from either of us.
The sharp pain of her departure had dulled to the extent that I no longer felt it through every waking minute: it came stabbing back at longer and longer intervals. But when it did, I remembered her as she’d been at the beginning, and the hunger was pretty well unbearable. It was easy enough to find different girls to talk to, to work with, to take to bed: hard to find a match on all levels: and Caroline had been a match. In the past year, instead of receding, the loneliness had closed in. My work, of its nature, set me apart. And I had no one to go home to, to share with, to care for. The futility and emptiness had gone down to my roots, and nothing seemed to lie ahead but years and years more of what I was already finding intolerable.
The clients at the big desk stood up, shook hands, and left. The secretary ushered the man with the earlier appointment round into the presence. I went on waiting, without impatience. I was accustomed to it.
The punt, investigated in Henley that morning, had produced nothing but ten different sets of smudged fingerprints, of which the topmost and stickiest were Peter’s. The Yogi Bear handkerchief was on its way round the manufacturers, in the distant hope that someone could tell where it had been sold. Dave Teller, briefly visited, had said wanly to charge everything to him. The Super VC 10 which lifted off at 3 PM British Summertime from Heathrow had landed at Kennedy at 3.10. Buttress Life closed its doors at 6, which gave it still a half hour to go. And outside in the canyon streets the hundred degree heatwave crept up a notch to a hundred and one.
My turn came round for the big desk. The big man, on his feet behind it, held out a large dry flabby hand and produced the sincere smile of the professional insurance man. Having settled me into the large comfortable chair alongside he sat down himself and picked up the cable discreetly placed to hand by the secretary. A polished chunk of wood sat on the desk between us. On it, neat gold letters facing me said helpfully: Paul M. Zeissen.
‘We received this cable from Mr Teller,’ he said. A slight, very slight undertone of disapproval.
I nodded. I had sent it myself.
‘Our own investigators are experts.’ He didn’t like me coming: but he wouldn’t want to lose the Teller policies. His politeness had effort behind it.
I smoothed him down, more from habit than anything else.
‘Of course. Please think of me simply as an auxiliary. Mr Teller persuaded me to come over because he has unfortunately broken a leg in England, and will be immobilized in hospital for a few weeks. He sent me very much on impulse, as a personal friend, to … kind of represent him. To see if there was anything I could do. There was no suggestion that he wasn’t satisfied with your firm.’ I paused delicately. ‘If he criticized anyone, it was the police.’
Paul M. Zeissen’s smile warmed up a fraction from within: but he hadn’t risen to high executive status in his tough profession without disbelieving half that everyone said. That was all right with me. Half of what I’d said was true. Or half true, anyway.
‘Mr Teller understands of course,’ he said, ‘that it is for our own sakes that we are looking for the horse?’
‘Naturally,’ I agreed. ‘Mr Teller is also most anxious that you should succeed, as the horse is irreplaceable. He would infinitely prefer his return to any amount of insurance money.’
‘A million and a half,’ said Zeissen reverently.
‘Worth more on the hoof,’ I said.
He glanced at me with a first gleam of real welcome. Once he’d swallowed the firm’s affronted pride, it was quite clear that they’d nothing to lose by letting me in.
‘One of our best men, Walt Prensela, is in charge of the Chrysalis case,’ he said. ‘He’ll give you the picture. He knows you’re coming, I sent him a memo with a copy of the cable.’ He pressed the switch on his desk intercom.
‘Walt? We have Mr Hawkins from England here. Shall I have him come up to you now?’
The polite question was, as so often in American affairs, an equally polite order. The affirmative duly came. Zeissen flipped the switch and stood up.
‘Walt’s office is one floor up, number four seven. Anyone will direct you. Would you like to go up now?’
I would; and I went.
I’d expected to have to deal with the same ruffled feathers in four seven, but I didn’t, because Walt had done his homework, though I wasn’t sure of that at first. He greeted me with business-like casualness, shook hands, waved me to the spare chair, and sat down himself, all in five smooth seconds. Much my age, I judged, but shorter and a good deal thicker. His hands were square and powerful with nails so brief that the fingertips’ pads seemed to be boiling over backwards. There were middle European origins in the bone structure of the skull, topped by roughly cropped wiry grey-brown hair, and his deep-socketed brown eyes were set permanently into the I-don’t-believe-a-word-of-it expression of his boss downstairs, only more so.
‘So, Gene,’ he said, neither with nor without much friendliness, ‘you’ve come a long way.’
‘Dave Teller’s idea, Walt,’ I said mildly.
‘Looking for horses … do you do much of that?’ His voice was flat; uninformative.
‘Practically none. How about you?’
His nostrils twisted. ‘If you mean, was it I who didn’t find the other two, then no, it wasn’t.’
I tried a smile: didn’t get one back.
He said: ‘Buttress Life had to pay up for Allyx three years ago. One million six hundred and forty-three thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine dollars, give or take a nickel. Showman, the first one, was insured with another company.’
‘Accident?’ I murmured. ‘Or design.’
He rubbed his left thumb over the top of the round-ended fingers, the first of a hundred times I saw that gesture.
‘Now that you’ve come, design. Before, I wasn’t sure.’
‘I’m officially on holiday,’ I protested. ‘I came only because Teller asked me. You should read no meaning into it.’
He gave me a level, half sardonic stare.
‘I checked you out,’ he said, flicking at the copy of the cable, which lay on his desk. ‘I wanted to know just what sort of limey busybody was being wished on to me.’
I didn’t say anything, and he made a clicking noise at the side of his mouth, expressive of understanding, resignation and acceptance, all in one.
‘A screener,’ he said. ‘How come Teller fo
und you?’
‘How come you found me?’ I asked instead.
‘I mentioned your name in two places,’ he said complacently. ‘The FBI, and the CIA. And got a positive reaction from both. A couple of useful pals there filled me in. It seems you’re a major stumbling block in the way of the planting of spies in certain Government departments and places like biological warfare research laboratories; and you’ve passed on some useful warnings on that subject to our people at Fort Detrick. They say the other side have tried to deter you, a little roughly, once or twice.’ He sighed. ‘You have a clean bill with our boys. And how.’
‘And with you?’
‘They said you didn’t like limelight.’
‘It’s all yours.’
‘Just so as I stand in right with Buttress.’
My decisive nod satisfied him. If we found the horse, he was welcome to the handshakes.
‘Fill me in, then,’ I said. ‘How did Chrysalis get lost?’
Walt glanced at his watch and checked it against the electric clock on the wall. The little box-like office had no windows, as the single glass panel faced out on to the corridor; and although it was cool and comfortable enough, it was no place to talk if one didn’t have to.
‘Five after six,’ Walt said. ‘Do you have any other engagements?’
‘Know any good bars?’ I suggested.
‘A mind reader.’ He raised eyes to heaven. ‘There’s Dalaney’s a block up Broadway.’
We stepped out of the air-conditioning into the sweltering street, up 30 degrees in two paces. With the humidity running also at 98 per cent, walking as little as a hundred yards left one damp to the skin. I never minded it: New York in a heatwave was always preferable to New York in a snowstorm, or anywhere hot to anywhere cold, for that matter. Cold seeped farther than into the bones; numbed the mind, drained the will. If the depression deepened towards winter, defeat would come with the snow.
Dalaney’s was spilling out on to the pavement with a business convention let out of school. An oblong name tab sat on each neat Terylene lapel, a confident smile hid the anxiety behind every face; they stretched from the substantial group outside into the deep cool gloom of the bar. Pushing through them looked a problem; conversation in their company an impossibility.