Second Wind

by Dick Francis

  Two floors down I reversed, though already late. When I opened my front door again Kris was standing waiting, expecting me.

  “Pick me up in Wood Lane at ten-fifteen,” I said. “Don’t forget Bell said Robin Darcy will be at the races with her father.”

  Kris gave no sign of alarm. “Ten-fifteen,” I repeated, and ran. Well ... hobbled, though things were getting better from the ankle down.

  Our flight from White Waltham to Doncaster went impeccably, with Kris overmeticulous at getting every check perfect. He had actually no need to, if he wanted to impress, as I now believed (and was never going to tell him) that he was a great pilot up to a fine line on a panic scale and a lethal danger above that. Without Trox and Odin, I reckoned, there was no one safer. After that I would learn and pay attention, and know what to look for.

  Doncaster took the weather that would have smiled on poor Guy F.

  Kris and I almost missed the first race owing to the program’s early start in the short daylight, but watched the second under the bright yellow-gray sky that itself brought out smiles, good humor and the favorites as winners.

  Kris and Bell advanced and retreated all afternoon in a complicated mating dance. Caspar Harvey watched them with a scowl. George Loricroft strode past, head in air, his wife, Glenda, scuttling after him with endless complaints of “Baden-Baden.”

  Oliver Quigley trembled from owner to owner, excusing his losers before they’d lined up to run.

  People in clusters asked Kris for his autograph. “Don’t you mind,” Bell asked me, “that they’re asking him more than you?”

  “He’s welcome.” As so often on November sixth, I’d collected more of a mournful battery of young reproachful eyes than an onslaught of enthusiastic name collectors. The day it worried me, I would resign.

  I looked around and said to Bell, “Did you come with your father and Robin Darcy? I haven’t seen Robin anywhere.”

  “They came by car together,” Bell said briefly. “They said they wanted to talk. I came with Glenda and she’s driving me mad. Of course George didn’t go to Baden-Baden. whyever should he when the races are here? And as for all the other places! She never stops.”

  “What other places?” I asked her absentmindedly. watching horses walk round the parade ring and admiring as always their loose-limbed natural beauty.

  Bell dug a roughly torn memo square of pink paper out of her green coat pocket and squinted at it in the bright light.

  “Glenda says George has excuses for Budapest. where he says it was snowing, ditto heavy snow at Pardubice in the Czech Republic, more snow in Berlin, and it was freezing in Warsaw and Hamburg, and he wasn’t at any of those places. she’s sure of it. So what’s going on?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “If Glenda comes this way,” Bell said, “don’t leave me.”

  Bell’s pink eyelids fluttered over a thoroughly enticing smile. Kris finished signing autographs instantly and edged his long spine between me and his (possibly) future wife.

  They went off contentedly, for once, for a sandwich, nicely asking me to join them, but relaxed that I didn’t. I stayed near the weighing room looking out unhurriedly for Robin the Round. I wished after all I’d gone for the sandwich when Glenda and her loud Lancashire voice advanced like a storm surge and smothered me with her theories.

  Her dyed-blonde shiny hair was of Andy Warhol explicit brashness. Forty-eight identical Glendas haunted one’s nightmare of an art gallery.

  Oliver Quigley, of all people, came to my aid, or seemed to, stuttering at my shoulder while giving Glenda a stare of quite extraordinary ill will.

  I’d seldom paid Oliver’s quivering voice or problems much genuinely caring attention, and it was with similar make-believe that I asked earnestly after the sick filly’s health. Glenda suspended her animation suddenly and stood with her mouth open wide, as if waiting for Oliver’s answer; and suddenly it was as if this encounter were between two much deeper personalities than I’d superficially seen earlier. There were glints in the Lancashire eyes that were far from funny, and I began to wonder whether all the Quigley shivering was a way of camouflaging the stronger inner man, of hiding the iron foundations that he didn’t want recognized.

  I looked back to the lunch party, to the day I’d met all these Newmarket people, those strangers who now seemed familiar. Perhaps they’d showed to the world that day only their outsides, and perhaps, as with Robin Darcy, it was the inside that mattered.

  “It’s because of you,” Glenda said suddenly with venom, closing her lips together with pinching force. “It’s you that’s taking George to Baden-Baden, and don’t you deny it.” She was accusing Oliver. She seemed oblivious of me.

  Oliver Quigley certainly looked blank, but not, to my fresh vision, from ignorance, but rather from the shock of having Glenda put into public words what should have lived in secrecy and silence.

  “And,” continued Glenda spitefully, “it’s no good trying to tell me you didn’t go with him to Poland and Germany and all those places, it was snowing a lot of the time and Perry could prove it if he could only be bothered...”

  “Glenda!” Oliver interrupted with straightforward warning and oblivious menace, wiping out in one word all the dithery presentation of ages.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Glenda said dismissively. “you’re all angry because of the filly.”

  She swiveled on her high-heeled shiny boots and marched away, her weight forward on her toes, leaving Oliver Quigley speechless and aghast, as if he’d lost both his sword and his shield at one stroke.

  He switched his gaze back to me, and although it was far too late in reality, he chose to believe I’d seen and heard nothing. The quakes came back into his manner. He stuttered a good deal, but no intelligible words came out. After a while, as if he’d resumed his habitual role, he nodded vaguely in my direction, and as his own personal quiver counter was more or less back to normal he unglued himself from my vicinity and was soon to be seen talking with jerkily disturbed hand movements to the filly’s owner, Caspar Harvey. Neither man looked even reasonably calm, let alone happy.

  Kris, further away. bent his height down to accommodate the size of a short plump man that I with a faint shock saw to be Robin Darcy. Though I knew he had arrived at Doncaster with Caspar Harvey. Robin Darcy in actual living presence was somehow disturbing.

  The last time I’d seen him had been on Trox Island, when he’d been dressed in disguising overalls and helmet, and had watched Michael carry the folder from hut to aircraft, when Michael had transported before my eyes the same sort of ultra-sensitive package that I’d been told had brought finis to a careless man from Mexico.

  I watched Robin Darcy amiably pat Kris on the arm without in any way being repulsed. Normally Kris jerked away from any affectionate touch, even from Bell, though if he himself was the toucher, that was different.

  Kris, I reflected without excitement, had been determined to please Robin by having us detour to Trox. Kris liked pleasing Robin, and I would do well not to forget it.

  The two of them spoke intensely for a short while with Kris nodding assent. When they parted, they shook hands. I watched and wondered if Kris would tell me what they’d said. On past form, I supposed with a shrug, quite probably not.

  I leaned against the rails round the weighing room and the winners’ unsaddling enclosure and did my best to pretend that the comings and goings of other trainers and jockeys were of far greater interest than anything Glenda had said. I stood with laziness in the bright air and, as quite often, simply let random thoughts drift with disorganization, until “Baden-Baden” and “Poland” and “snow” announced themselves to me insistently as somehow meaningful, and meaningful because of Glenda and the filly.

  Glenda was tit-tupping away in the distance. Glenda was jealous of Quigley and of Harvey ...

  Nonsense, I thought. As a result of the filly’s illness, Harvey had transferred his other horses from Quigley to her own husband, Loricroft, a
nd I doubted if that outcome was what she’d intended.

  Unexpectedly, with one of those inexplicable shifts in the drifting brain that delivers a revelation to a vacuum, a word arrived in my mind with such clarity that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it earlier. The word had been part of the heading on one of the letters in the folder on Trox. I’d thought I could remember only Hippostat, but now I knew there was another—and probably more significant—address, though it still lacked pinpoint direction.

  Rennbahn.

  Baden-Baden Rennbahn.

  Turn titty turn tum.

  Rennbahn, in German script.

  I did what half an hour earlier I would have classed as impossible, and deliberately moved into Glenda’s path. Her own thoughts were elsewhere. She tripped over my foot with her fancy boots.

  She said, “Baden-Baden,” under her breath, not paying me any attention, a view of life that changed rapidly when I offered after all to look up for her the weather, past, present and anywhere, and any time she wanted.

  “Do you mean it?” she demanded, eyes. voice and mind all sharpening fast to an acute awareness quite at odds with her glittery hair.

  “I can’t do it until Monday.” I said. “I can’t use the necessary computer until then.”

  She objected, “Bell says you’re the head of home forecasting. I’d have thought you could do what you like as such.” I said I was only the deputy head, and to myself I added that I wasn’t going to use up any favors on results I thought of as highly speculative. I smiled my best apologetic excuse to Glenda and truthfully explained that the mainframe computer ran on Sundays for strictly necessary reasons. Tracing errant husbands wasn’t classed as essential or necessary.

  “And why,” I asked without pressure, “does he go to Baden-Baden and those other places?”

  “Girls, of course! I’ll give you the list.” Glitzy Glenda wasn’t quite a fool. “All those places are racecourses,” she said. “I suppose you don’t know.”

  “No,” I agreed. “All in Germany?”

  “What a clever boy! Not all, but most.”

  “And does your husband have runners there?”

  “Haven’t I told you, he says so? He says the races are abandoned because of snow, but I’m telling you, it doesn’t snow when he says it does.”

  “I’ll look it up for you,” I promised.

  She gave me from her handbag a copy of the list she’d given to Bell, and I glanced at it briefly before stowing it in a pocket.

  “Baden-Baden,” she said. “It’s rubbish.”

  I was so close to her at that moment that I could smell alcohol on her breath and see little black beads on the ends of her rigid eyelashes. The shiny blonde hair had minuscule black roots.

  “I’ll divorce George,” she said with sudden and vicious intent. “And it will serve him right:”

  I suddenly couldn’t be bothered to try any more at that moment to unwind any of Newmarket’s twisted and destructive personalities. I spent the hour round the November Handicap simply watching the mechanics of the different, bewitching, wider world of racing. and winning a tiny amount when Harvey’s runner, the second favorite, came in third.

  I wasn’t sure whether or not Robin Darcy was actively avoiding me, but in the end the meeting certainly looked accidental: one of those times when two people turn together and find themselves face to face.

  We must both have had hours to prepare. We said to each other everything appropriate. I bewailed the loss of his beautiful aircraft, he rejoiced in the survival of Kris and myself. He thanked me for the letter I’d sent him from Miami airport half an hour before I left to fly home. I hoped he’d had a good journey himself: he had arrived at Newmarket yesterday, he confided.

  He was friendly. He shook hands. He invited me anytime to visit again with himself and Evelyn. I wanted to say to him, “Where’s the folder? For whom will you fix the sale of the next bargaining chip. the next bit of bomb?”

  In the brown eyes behind the big black frames there was the same sort of question and answer: “Did Perry Stuart read those lists in the folder? He can’t have done. He couldn’t have opened the safe. He certainly heard my password, Hereford, but it would have meant nothing:”

  I wanted to say, “Whichever of you thought of the blindfold, thank you”; and I read, “You don’t know how close you came to a bullet.”

  I wondered what he had said to Kris ... wondered what he wanted Kris to do.

  I wished Robin Darcy had been an ally, not an enemy. Born clever ... why should such a man trade in death?

  Too many clever men chose to trade in death.

  He gave me a nod and moved off to where, not far away. Caspar Harvey, able but not brilliant. received lukewarm plaudits for his horse’s third place in the November Handicap. Nothing but winning would have pleased his bullish attitude to racing, and I thought Oliver Quigley literally to be inviting trouble when in Caspar’s hearing he said that given his training methods and his instructions to the jockey. the horse would have won.

  By the end of six races, when Kris and I went back to the airfield to fly home, the extra physical demands of the past ten days had drained my normally perceptive self to the equivalent of a worn-out battery. We spent long minutes on farewells to most of the Newmarket contingent in the car park nearest to the landing ground, and I was dozing even when Kris was taxiing down the field for takeoff. He changed fuel tanks ostentatiously. I pretended not to notice.

  On this Saturday, late in the year for daylight landings. Kris had arranged with his friend in the control tower at White Waltham to put car-battery-powered lamps down the runway to shine a path for his quiet approach and arrival at about five o’clock, half past toast and teatime.

  We were in the air and a long way south of Doncaster when Kris shook me awake.

  “Sorry,” I said, yawning and reaching for the map. “Where are we?” It was still just light enough to see the three Rs, roads, rivers and railways. “No problem with those,” I said. He always flew a straight heading.

  Kris however wasn’t worrying about being lost but about oil on the windshield. he said.

  “What?” I asked blankly.

  “Oil. On the windshield. Perry, wake up.”

  It was the urgency of those last three words that sharply reached my senses. I did wake up. My heart lurched.

  There were dark gold threadlike lines on the windshield, which as I watched were joined by more lines, which were running and spreading upwards over the glass.

  Horrified, we both understood what was happening. The hot oil that should have been circulating inside the engine case, lubricating the four thundering pistons. was somehow coming out into the engine compartment itself, and from there it was sliding upwards and backwards in droplets through the engine cowling’s cracklike edges to hit the glass of the windshield ... and from there. gradually to spread and cover the whole windshield with oil ... and so. effectively, blind the pilot.

  The oil itself wasn’t the dirty brown-black old stuff that had been cleansing inner engine surfaces for many hours of flight. Kris always looked after his pride and joy, and he had changed his oil regularly. The disaster on the windshield had been clean for the Newmarket lunch.

  “God Almighty.” Kris said. “What the hell do we do now?”

  “Keep straight on our course,” I said automatically, “so we know where we are.”

  “That’s the easiest. What if all the oil comes out? The engine will go dry and seize up.” Kris suddenly sounded comically unconcerned. “And how do we land, if we can’t see where we’re going?”

  “Can we break the windshield?” I suggested.

  “Get with it, Perry.” He was both sarcastic and fatalistic. “The windshield’s made of toughened glass to withstand birdstrike. And even if we could break it—and what with— we’d have our faces cut to ribbons, and we’d need goggles as in the old Tiger Moth days. and even then we’d be going too fast, it would be like facing a Category 3 hurricane
wind. it can’t be done.”

  “Forget it.” I said, “keep our course and height. We’ll have to find a large public commercial airport open late on a Saturday afternoon.”

  “Oh great.” He glanced across at me. “How do we find one of those?”

  “It’s a doddle.” With immense thankfulness I took note that this time we were sensibly in contact by radio with the outside world, as we did have an aeronautical map giving the radio frequencies of airports. We didn’t have parachutes or ejector seats—coutdn’t have everything.

  “You keep straight:” I told Kris. ”I’ll get us down to an airfield.”

  “You get us down,” he repeated, making a joke of it. “and I’ll crash.”

  Such a damned stupid way to die, I thought. Blinded by oil ... the only thing worse would be to switch on the windshield wipers, which would fatally smear the oil into a thick continuous curtain, whereas now it was just possible to see through the thread lines to the ground far beneath.

  Far ... Kris was giving in to the temptation of losing height so as to see the ground better, but height gave us a better chance of clear radio reception by any airfield.

  “Go back up,” I said coaxingly.

  “It’s my bloody airplane.”

  “It’s my bloody life.”

  We needed a big airport as soon as possible, and fortune smiled on us for once. I asked Kris dryly if he had any objection to Luton, almost dead ahead.

  “You’re joking! A real live airport? Not so much of the dead.”

  I told the area radio controller about the oil and said we would aim for Luton, approximately only thirty miles away. There was an incredulous silence at Luton at our lack of any radio aid except radio itself, and we got only a laid-back assessment of our chances (slim) from a useful man in Luton’s control tower, who said he could put us over the runway and clear everything else off it, and after that it was up to us.

  He gave us a private frequency for talking to him direct, so as not to clutter other air traffic.

  “On second thoughts, better than trains, perhaps,” Kris yelled to me, grinning, manic spirits ascendant in the actual face of mortal danger.