Blood Sport

by Dick Francis

  I stared at her in real surprise. ‘You must be wrong.’

  ‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ she said gloomily. ‘She has two photographs of you as well.’

  ‘What photographs?’ I was staggered.

  ‘Some her brother took. That day on the river.’

  ‘But she shouldn’t …’

  ‘Maybe she shouldn’t,’ Eunice said dryly. ‘But she does.’ She swung her legs carelessly around to sit on the edge of the bed beside me and I saw that for someone bent on seduction she had come well wrapped up.

  ‘You expected me to say no,’ I said.

  She made a face. ‘I thought you might. But it was worth a try.’

  ‘Eunice, you’re nuts,’ I said.

  ‘I’m bored,’ she said explosively, and with an undoubted depth of unbearable truth.

  ‘That puts me into the golf and bridge category.’

  She was still playing games.

  ‘At least you’re goddam human,’ she said, her mouth cracking into a smile. ‘More than you can say about most men.’

  ‘What do you like best about moving to California?’ I asked.

  She stared. ‘Your mind’s like a bloody grasshopper. What has that to do with sex?’

  ‘You tell me, and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘For God’s sake …’ But she made some effort at concentrating, and in the end came up with the answer I had been most expecting.

  ‘Fixing up the rooms, I guess.’

  ‘You did all these …’ I waved my hand around, embracing the house.

  ‘Yeah, I did. So what?’

  ‘So why don’t you start in business, doing it for other people?’

  She half laughed, ridiculing the idea, and half clung to it: and I knew she’d thought of it in the past, because I hadn’t surprised her.

  ‘I’m no bloody genius.’

  ‘You have an eye for colour. More than that: for mood. This is the most comforting house I’ve ever been in.’

  ‘Comforting?’ she said, puzzled.

  ‘Yeah. Laugh, clown, laugh. That sort of thing. You can fill other people even though you feel empty yourself.’

  Tears welled up in her grey-green eyes, and she shut the lids. Her voice remained normal.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  After a pause, she said, ‘And I suppose what it has to do with sex is that interior decorating would be a suitable sublimation for a middle-aged woman whose physical attraction is fading faster than her appetite …’ The bitterness came from long acquaintance with the jargon and its point of view.

  ‘No,’ I said mildly. ‘The opposite.’

  ‘Huh?’ She opened her eyes. They were wet and shiny.

  ‘Playing games is easier than working.’

  ‘Spell it out,’ she said. ‘You talk in goddam riddles.’

  ‘Sex … this sort of casual sex …’ I patted the bed where she’d lain, ‘can be a way of running away from real effort. A lover may be a sublimation of a deeper need. People who can’t face the demands of one may opt for passing the time with the other.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake … I don’t understand a bloody word.’ She shut her eyes and lay flat back across the bed.

  ‘Thousands of people never try anything serious because they’re afraid of failing,’ I said.

  She swallowed, and after a pause said, ‘And what if you do bloody fail? What then?’

  I didn’t answer her, and after a while she repeated the question insistently.

  ‘Tell me what you do if you fail?’

  ‘I haven’t got that one licked myself, yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ She laughed weakly. ‘Oh God. The blind leading the blind. Just like the whole bloody human race.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I sighed and stood up. ‘We all stumble along in the dark, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ll believe it, but I’ve been utterly bloody faithful to Dave … except for this …’

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ I said.

  She got to her feet and stood swaying slightly.

  ‘I guess I’m tight.’

  ‘Better than loose,’ I said smiling.

  ‘For God’s sake, spare me goddam puns at one o’clock in the morning. I suppose if you’re looking for that so and so Allyx there’s no chance of you coming to California?’

  ‘I wish there were.’

  ‘Goddam liar,’ she said vaguely. ‘Goodnight.’

  She made straight for the door and didn’t look back.

  I drove them to the airport in the morning. Eunice had lent me her car and the house for as long as I needed them, and had passed off her overnight visit with one sarcastic dig at breakfast.

  ‘Better undersexed than sorry.’

  ‘What?’ said Lynnie.

  ‘Eunice is offering a solution to the population explosion,’ I explained.

  Lynnie giggled. Eunice showed me a double row of teeth and told me to pass the cream.

  When I’d seen them off I followed a local road map and Eunice’s inaccurate directions, and eventually arrived at the Perry Stud Farm, home of Jefferson L. Roots, chairman, among other things, of the Bloodhorse Breeders’ Association. A houseboy in a spotless white coat showed me through the house and on to the patio: a house made of large cool concrete boxes, with rough-cast white walls and bare golden wood floors. The patio was shaded by a vine trained across a trellis. There was a glass and metal table, and low comfortable lounging chairs around it. From one of these Jeff Roots extricated himself and held out a welcoming hand.

  He was a thick man with a paunch which had defied health farms, and he worried about his weight. His manner had the gentle, deprecating ease of the really tough American; the power was inside, discernible but purring, like the engine in a Rolls. He was dressed in a tropical-weight city suit, and while I was there an efficient girl secretary came to remind him that time and his connection to Miami would wait for no man.

  ‘A drink?’ he suggested. ‘It’s a hot day already. What would you like?’

  ‘Lime juice?’ I asked. ‘Or lemon.’

  I got lime, squeezed fresh on to crushed ice. My host drank sugar-free tonic water and made a face over it.

  ‘Just the smell of french fries and I’m a size larger in shirts,’ he complained.

  ‘Why worry?’ I said.

  ‘Ever heard of hypertension?’

  ‘Thin people can have it too.’

  Tell that to the birds … or rather, tell it to my wife. She starves me.’ He swirled his glass gloomily, ice and lemon rising perilously to the rim. ‘So, anyway, Mr Hawkins, how can I help you today?’

  He pushed a folded newspaper across the table and pointed at it with an appreciative smile.

  ‘Chrysalis cocooned,’ the headlines said. And underneath, in smaller letters, ‘High price stallion loses liberty, corralled at Perry, reshipped to Midway. And are the mares there glad, or are they? Our tip is syndicators breathe again.’ There was a picture of Chrysalis in his paddock, some mention of Dave’s leg, and a few snide remarks about the police and the local horse folks who hadn’t been able to spot a million dollars at ten paces.

  ‘Where did you rustle him up from?’ Roots asked. ‘Sam Hengelman wouldn’t say. Most unlike him.’

  ‘Sam was an accessory to a conjuring trick. A little matter of substitution. We left a horse and took a horse … I guess he didn’t want to talk himself into trouble.’

  ‘And naturally you paid him.’

  ‘Er, yes,’ I agreed. ‘So we did.’

  ‘But I gather from your call that it’s not about Chrysalis that you want to see me now?’

  ‘No. It’s about Allyx.’

  ‘Allyx?’

  ‘Yes, the other stallion which …’

  ‘I know about all that,’ he interrupted. ‘They turned the whole state upside down looking for him and they found just as much trace as they did of Chrysalis.’

  ‘Do you by any chance remember, ten years ago, another
horse called Showman?’

  ‘Showman? Showman? He got loose from a groom who was supposed to be exercising him, or something like that, and was killed in the Appalachians.’

  ‘How certain was the identification?’

  He put his tonic water down carefully on the table.

  ‘Are you suggesting he’s still alive?’

  ‘I just wondered,’ I said mildly. ‘From what I’ve been told, they found a dead horse two years after Showman vanished. But although he was in a high state of decomposition, he’d only been dead about three months. So it easily might not have been Showman, just somewhat like him in colour and size.’

  ‘And if it wasn’t?’

  ‘We might just possibly turn him up with Allyx.’

  ‘Have you …’ he cleared his throat. ‘Have you any idea where they … er … might be … turned up?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Not yet.’

  ‘They weren’t … wherever you found Chrysalis?’

  ‘No. That was only a shipping station, so to speak. Chrysalis was intended to go on somewhere else.’

  ‘And at that somewhere else, one might find …?’

  ‘There’s a good chance, I think.’

  ‘They might have been shipped abroad again. Down to Mexico or South America.’

  ‘It’s possible; but I’m inclined against it, on the whole.’ Uncle Bark, whoever he was, lived somewhere in the States. Yola had not needed to call the overseas operator to get through to him, on the telephone. She hadn’t even made it person to person.

  ‘The whole thing seems so extraordinary,’ Roots said, shaking his head. ‘Some nut going around stealing stallions whose value at once drops to zero, because he can’t admit he’s got them. Do you think some fanatic somewhere is conducting experiments. Trying to produce a super-horse? Or how about a criminal syndicate all getting their mares covered by bluest blood stallions at donkey prices?… No, that wouldn’t work, they’d never be able to sell the foals for stud, they wouldn’t be able to cash in on the blood lines …’

  ‘I think it’s a good deal simpler than either of those,’ I said, smiling. ‘Much more down to earth.’

  ‘Then what?’

  I told him.

  He chewed it over and I drank my lime juice.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d try along those lines, and see if it leads anywhere.’

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ Roots said. ‘And I hope to God you’re wrong.’

  I laughed. ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘It’ll take you months to plough through all that work yourself … and I don’t suppose you have too close a knowledge of the thoroughbred scene over here … so why don’t I get you some help?’

  ‘I’d be very grateful.’

  There was an outside extension telephone close to his chair. He lifted the receiver and pressed buttons. I listened to him arranging with the publishers of a leading horse journal for me to have the run of their files and the temporary services of two long-memoried assistants.

  ‘That’s fixed, then,’ he said, standing up. ‘The office is on North Broadway, along in Lexington. I guess you’ll let me know how you make out?’

  ‘I certainly will.’

  ‘Dave and Eunice … they’re great guys.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Give her my best,’ he said, looking at his watch.

  ‘She’s gone to California …’

  ‘The new place?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Crazy idea of Dave’s, moving to the coast. The centre of the bloodstock industry is right here in Lexington, and this is the place to be.’

  I made the sort of non-critical, non-committal noise in my throat necessary on such occasions, and Jeff Roots thrust out a rounded hand.

  ‘I have this stockholders’ meeting in Miami,’ he said, apologetically, and he walked with me through the house to where his secretary waited in a Cadillac parked beside Eunice’s Toronado Oldsmobile.

  At the newspaper offices, I found, anything Jeff Roots wanted done was done whole-heartedly and at the double. My two temporary assistants proved to be an elderly man who spent most of his time compiling an annual stallion register, and a maiden lady in her fifties whose horse face and crisp masculine voice were easy to take, as she had an unexpectedly sweet smile and a phenomenal memory.

  When I explained what I was looking for they both stared at me in dumb-struck silence.

  ‘Isn’t it possible?’ I asked.

  Mr Harris and Miss Britt recovered themselves and said they guessed so.

  ‘And while we’re at it, we might make a list of anyone whose name or nickname might be Bark. Or Bart, perhaps; though I think it’s Bark.’

  Miss Britt promptly reeled off six names, all Barkleys, living in and around Lexington.

  ‘Maybe that’s not such a good idea,’ I sighed.

  ‘No harm in it,’ Miss Britt said briskly. ‘We can make all the lists simultaneously.’

  She and Mr Harris went into a huddle and from there to the reference room, and were shortly up to their elbows in papers and books. They told me to smoke and wait, which I did all day.

  At five o’clock they came across with the results.

  ‘This is the best we can do,’ Miss Britt said doubtfully. ‘There are well over three thousand stallions at stud in the States, you see. You asked us to sort out any whose fees had risen steadily over the past eight or nine years … there are two hundred and nine of them.’ She put a closely typed list in front of me.

  ‘Next, you wanted the names of any stallions who had been conspicuously more successful at stud than one would have expected from their own breeding. There are two hundred and eighty two of those.’ She gave me a second sheet.

  ‘Next, you wanted to know if any of this year’s two-year-olds had proved conspicuously better at racing than one would normally have expected from their breeding. There are twenty-nine of those.’ She added the third list.

  ‘And lastly, the people who could be called Bark … thirty-two of them. From the Bar K Ranch to Barry Kyle.’

  ‘You’ve done wonders,’ I said sincerely. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that any one farm is concerned on all four lists?’

  ‘Most of the stallions on the first list are the same as those on the second. That stands to reason. But none of the sires of the exceptional two-year-olds are on either of the first two lists. And none of the two-year-olds were bred by any of the Barks.’ Both of them looked downcast at such negative results after all their work.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘We’ll try another way tomorrow.’

  Miss Britt snorted, which I interpreted as agreement. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ she said, nodding. Mr Harris seemed to doubt that this particular Rome could be built at all with the materials available, but he turned up uncomplaining at nine the following morning, and they both dived in again, on new permutations.

  By noon the first two lists had been reduced to twenty. We all adjourned for a sandwich. At two the searching began again. At three ten Miss Britt gasped sharply and her eyes went wide. She scribbled quickly on a fresh piece of paper, considered the result with her head on one side, and then looked across to me.

  ‘Well …’ she said. ‘Well …’ The words wouldn’t come.

  ‘You’ve found them,’ I said.

  She nodded, only half believing it.

  ‘Cross-checking them all by where they raced, their years of purchase, their markings and their approximate ages, as you asked … we came up with twelve possibles which appeared on the first two lists. And one of the sires of the two-year-olds fits your requirements and comes from the same farm as one of the first twelve. Er … do you follow me?’

  ‘On your heels,’ I said, smiling.

  Mr Harris and I both joined her and looked over her shoulder at what she had written.

  ‘Moviemaker, aged fourteen years; present stud fee ten thousand dollars.

  ‘Centigrade, aged twelve years; this year’s stud
fee fifteen hundred dollars, fee next year twenty-five hundred.

  ‘Both standing at Orpheus Farm, Los Caillos.

  ‘The property of Culham James Offen.’

  Moviemaker and Centigrade: Showman and Allyx. As clear as a frosty sky.

  Stallions were normally booked for thirty to forty mares each breeding season. Forty mares at ten thousand dollars a throw meant four hundred thousand dollars every year, give or take a live foal or two. Moviemaker had cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at public auction ten years ago, according to Miss Britt’s researches. Since then Offen had been paid somewhere near two-and-a-half million dollars in stud fees.

  Centigrade had been bought for a hundred thousand dollars at Keneland sales. At twenty-five hundred a time he would earn that hundred thousand next year alone. And nothing was more likely than that he too would rise to a much higher fee.

  ‘Culham James Offen is so well regarded,’ Miss Britt said in consternation. ‘I simply can’t believe it. He’s accepted as one of the top rank breeders.’

  ‘The only thing is, of course,’ said Mr Harris, regretfully, ‘that there’s no connection with the name Bark.’

  Miss Britt looked at me and her smile shone out sweet and triumphant.

  ‘But there is, isn’t there? Mr Harris, you’re no musician. Haven’t you ever heard of Orpheus in the Underworld … by Offenbach?’

  Chapter Twelve

  Walt said ‘For God’s sake’ four times and admitted Buttress Life might be willing to send him from coast to coast if Allyx were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  ‘Los Caillos is a short distance north-east of Los Angeles,’ I said. ‘I thought of staying a bit farther north, on the coast.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Come to The Vacationer, Grand Beach, Santa Barbara, then. I’ll meet you there tomorrow.’

  He repeated the address. ‘Who’s paying?’ he said.

  ‘Buttress Life and Dave Teller can fight it out between them. I’ll put the motel on Teller’s expenses. Can you wring the fare out of your office?’

  ‘I guess so.’ His sigh came wearily over the wire. ‘My wife and kids aren’t going to like it. I was fixing to take them on a picnic this Sunday.’

  ‘Postpone it a week,’ I suggested.