by Dick Francis
“Letting the effing carabinieri eff up the R.V.”
“Have you tried giving orders to the Italian army?”
He sniffed as a reply. He himself was an ex-S.A.S. sergeant, now nearing forty, who would never in his service days have dreamed of obeying a civilian. He could move across any terrain in a way that made a chameleon look flamboyant, and he had three times tracked and liberated a victim before the ransom had been paid, though no one, not even the victim, was quite sure how. Tony Vine was the most secretive of the whole tight-lipped bunch, and anything he didn’t want to tell didn’t get told.
It was he who had warned me about knives inside rolled-up magazines, and I’d guessed he’d known because he’d carried one that way himself.
His humor consisted mostly of sarcasm, and he could hardly get a sentence out without an oiling of fuck, shit, and piss. He worked nearly always on political kidnaps because he, like Pucinelli, tended to despise personal and company wealth.
“If you’re effing poor,” he’d said to me once, “and you see some capitalist shitting around in a Roller, it’s not so effing surprising you think of ways of leveling things up. If you’re down to your last bit of goat cheese in Sardinia, maybe, or short of beans in Mexico, a little kidnap makes effing sense.”
“You’re romantic,” I’d answered. “What about the poor Sardinians who steal a child from a poor Sardinian village, and grind all the poor people there into poorer dust, forcing them all to pay out their pitiful savings for a ransom?”
“No one’s effing perfect.”
For all that he’d been against me joining the firm in the first place, and in spite of his feeling superior in every way, whenever we’d worked together it had been without friction. He could feel his way through the psyches of kidnappers as through a minefield, but preferred to have me deal with the families of the victims.
“When you’re with them, they stay in one effing piece. If I tell them what to do, they fall to effing bits.”
He was at his happiest cooperating with men in uniform, among whom he seemed to command instant recognition and respect. Good sergeants ran the army, it was said, and when he wanted to he had the air about him still.
No one was allowed to serve in the S.A.S. for an extended period, and once he’d been bounced out because of age, he’d been bored. Then someone had murmured in his ear about fighting terrorists a different way, and Liberty Market had never regretted taking him.
“I put you in for Sunday midnight on the blower, did you see, instead of me?” he said.
I nodded.
“The wife’s got this effing anniversary party organized, and like as not by midnight I’ll be pissed.”
“All right,” I said.
He was short for a soldier: useful for passing as a woman, he’d told me once. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and light on his feet, he was a fanatic about fitness, and it was he who had persuaded everyone to furnish (and use) the iron-pumping room in the basement. He never said much about his origins: the tougher parts of London, from his accent.
“When did you get back?” I asked. “Last I heard you were in Colombia.”
“End of the week.”
“How was it?” I said.
He scowled. “We winkled the effing hostages out safe, and then the local strength got excited and shot the shit out of the terrorists, though they’d got their effing hands up and were coming out peaceful.” He shook his head. “Never keep their bullets to themselves, those savages. Effing stupid, the whole shitting lot of them.”
Shooting terrorists who’d surrendered was, as he’d said, effing stupid. The news would get around, and the next bunch of terrorists, knowing they’d be shot if they did and also shot if they didn’t, would be more likely to kill their victims.
I had missed the Monday meeting where that debacle would have been discussed but meanwhile there was my own report to write for the picking over of Bologna. I spent all Saturday on it and some of Sunday morning, and then drove seventy-five miles westward to Lambourn.
Popsy Teddington proved to live in a tall white house near the center of the village, a house seeming almost suburban but surprisingly fronting a great amount of stabling. I hadn’t until that day realized that racing stables could occur actually inside villages, but when I remarked on it Popsy said with a smile that I should see Newmarket, they had horses where people in other towns had garages, greenhouses, and sheds.
She was standing outside when I arrived, looming over a five-foot man who seemed glad of the interruption.
“Just see to that, Sammy. Tell them I won’t stand for it,” she was saying forcefully as I opened the car door. Her head turned my way and a momentary “who-are-you?” frown crossed her forehead. “Oh, yes, Alessia’s friend. She’s around the back, somewhere. Come along.” She led me past the house and behind a block of stabling, and we arrived suddenly in view of a small railed paddock, where a girl on a horse was slowly cantering, watched by another girl on foot.
The little paddock seemed to be surrounded by the backs of other stables and other houses, and the grass within it had seen better days.
“I hope you can help her,” Popsy said straightly, as we approached. “I’ve never known her like this. Very worrying.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“So insecure. She wouldn’t ride out yesterday with the string, which she always does when she’s here, and now look at her, she’s supposed to be up on that horse, not watching my stable girl riding.”
“Has she said much about what happened to her?” I asked.
“Not a thing. She just smiles cheerfully and says it’s all over.”
Alessia half turned as we drew near, and looked very relieved when she saw me.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” she said.
“You shouldn’t have been.”
She was wearing jeans and a checked shirt and lipstick, and was still unnaturally pale from six weeks in dim light. Popsy shouted to the girl riding the horse to put it back in its stable. “Unless, darling, you’d like . . .” she said to Alessia. “After all?”
Alessia shook her head. “Tomorrow, I guess.” She sounded as if she meant it, but I could see that Popsy doubted. She put a motherly arm around Alessia’s shoulders and gave her a small hug. “Darling, do just what you like. How about a drink for your thirsty traveler?” To me she said, “Coffee? Whisky? Methylated spirits?”
“Wine,” Alessia said. “I know he likes that.”
We went into the house; antique dark furniture, worn Indian rugs, faded chintz, a vista of horses through every window.
Popsy poured Italian wine into cut crystal glasses with a casual hand and said she would cook steaks if we were patient. Alessia watched her disappear kitchenwards and said uncomfortably, “I’m a nuisance to her. I shouldn’t have come.”
“You’re quite wrong on both counts,” I said. “It’s obvious she’s glad to have you.”
“I thought I’d be all right here . . . That I’d feel different. I mean, that I’d feel all right.”
“You’re sure to, in a while.”
She glanced at me. “It bothers me that I just can’t . . . shake it off.”
“Like you could shake off double septic pneumonia?”
“That’s different,” she protested.
“Six weeks of no sunlight, no exercise, no decent food and a steady diet of heavy sleeping pills is hardly a recipe for physical health.”
“But I . . . it’s not just . . . physical.”
“Still less can you just shake off the nonphysical.” I drank some wine. “How are your dreams?”
She shuddered. “Half the time I can’t sleep. Ilaria said I should keep on with sleeping pills for a while, but I don’t want to, it revolts me to think of it . . . But when I do sleep . . . I have nightmares . . . and wake up sweating.”
“Would you like me,” I said neutrally, “to introduce you to a psychiatrist? I know quite a good one.”
“No.” The ans
wer was instinctive. “I’m not mad, I’m just . . . not right.”
“You don’t need to be dying to go to a doctor.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to.”
She sat on a large sofa with her feet on a coffee table, looking worried.
“It’s you that I want to talk to, not some shrink. You understand what happened, and to some strange doctor it would sound exaggerated. You know I’m telling the truth, but he’d be worrying half the time if I wasn’t fantasizing or dramatizing or something and be looking for ways of putting me in the wrong. I had a friend who went to one . . . she told me it was weird, when she said she wanted to give up smoking he kept suggesting she was unhappy because she had repressed incestuous longings for her father.” She ended with an attempt at a laugh, but I could see what she meant. Psychiatrists were accustomed to distortion and evasion, and looked for them in the simplest remark.
“I do think all the same that you’d be better off with expert help,” I said.
“You’re an expert.”
“No.”
“But it’s you I want . . . Oh, dear,” she broke off suddenly, looking most confused. “I’m sorry . . . You don’t want to . . . How stupid of me.”
“I didn’t say that. I said . . .” I too stopped. I stood up, walked over, and sat next to her on the sofa, not touching. “I’ll untie any knots I can for you, and for as long as you want me to. That’s a promise. Also a pleasure, not a chore. But you must promise me something too.”
She said “What?” glancing at me and away.
“That if I’m doing you no good, you will try someone else.”
“A shrink?”
“Yes.”
She looked at her shoes. “All right,” she said: and like any psychiatrist I wondered if she were lying.
Popsy’s steaks came tender and juicy, and Alessia ate half of hers.
“You must build up your strength, my darling,” Popsy said without censure. “You’ve worked so hard to get where you are. You don’t want all those ambitious little jockey-boys elbowing you out, which they will if they’ve half a chance.”
“I telephoned Mike,” she said. “I said . . . I’d need time.”
“Now my darling,” Popsy protested. “You get straight back on the telephone and tell him you’ll be fit a week today. Say you’ll be ready to race tomorrow week, without fail.”
Alessia looked at her in horror. “I’m too weak to stay in the saddle . . . let alone race.”
“My darling, you’ve all the guts in the world. If you want to, you’ll do it.”
Alessia’s face said plainly that she didn’t know whether she wanted to or not.
“Who’s Mike?” I asked.
“Mike Noland,” Popsy said. “The trainer she often rides for in England. He lives here, in Lambourn, up the road.”
“He said he understood,” Alessia said weakly.
“Well of course he understands. Who wouldn’t? But all the same, my darling, if you want those horses back, it’s you that will have to get them.”
She spoke with brisk, affectionate common sense, hall-mark of the kind and healthy who had never been at cracking point. There was a sort of quiver from where Alessia sat, and I rose unhurriedly to my feet and asked if I could help carry the empty dishes to the kitchen.
“Of course you can,” Popsy said, rising also, “and there’s cheese, if you’d like some.”
Alessia said horses slept on Sunday afternoons like everyone else, but after coffee we walked slowly round the yard anyway, patting one or two heads.
“I can’t possibly get fit in a week,” Alessia said. “Do you think I should?”
“I think you should try sitting on a horse.”
“Suppose I’ve lost my nerve.”
“You’d find out.”
“That’s not much comfort.” She rubbed the nose of one of the horses absentmindedly, showing at least no fear of its teeth. “Do you ride?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “And . . . er . . . I’ve never been to the races.”
She was astonished. “Never?”
“I’ve watched them often on television.”
“Not the same at all.” She laid her own cheek briefly against the horse’s. “Would you like to go?”
“With you, yes, very much.”
Her eyes filled with sudden tears, which she blinked away impatiently. “You see,” she said. “That’s always happening. A kind word . . . and something inside me melts. I do try . . . I honestly do try to behave decently, but I know I’m putting on an act . . . and underneath there’s an abyss . . . with things coming up from it, like crying for nothing, for no reason, like now.”
“The act,” I said, “is Oscar class.”
She swallowed and sniffed and brushed the unspilled tears away with her fingers. “Popsy is so generous,” she said. “I’ve stayed with her so often.” She paused. “She doesn’t exactly say ’Snap out of it’ or ’Pull yourself together,’ but I can see her thinking it. And I expect if I were someone looking at me, I’d think it too. I mean, she must be thinking that here I am, free and undamaged, and I should be grateful and getting on with life, and that far from moping I should be full of joy and bounce.”
We wandered slowly along and peered into the shadowy interior of a box where the inmate dozed, its weight on one hip, its ears occasionally twitching.
“After Vietnam,” I said, “when the prisoners came home, there were very many divorces. It wasn’t just the sort of thing that happened after the war in Europe, when the wives grew apart from the husbands just by living, while for the men time stood still. After Vietnam it was different. Those prisoners had suffered dreadfully, and they came home to families who expected them to be joyful at their release.”
Alessia leaned her arms on the half-door, and watched the unmoving horse.
“The wives tried to make allowances, but a lot of the men were impotent, and would burst into tears in public, and many of them took offense easily . . . and showed permanent symptoms of mental breakdown. Hamburgers and Coke couldn’t cure them, nor going to the office nine to five.” I fiddled with the bolt on the door. “Most of them recovered in time and lead normal lives, but even those will admit they had bad dreams for years and will never forget clear details of their imprisonment.”
After a while she said, “I wasn’t a prisoner of war.”
“Oh, yes, just the same. Captured by an enemy through no fault of your own. Not knowing when—or whether—you would be free. Humiliated . . . deprived of free will . . . dependent on your enemy for food. All the same, but made worse by isolation . . . by being the only one.”
She put the curly head down momentarily on the folded arms. “All they ever gave me, when I asked, were some tissues, and I begged . . . I begged . . . for those.” She swallowed. “One’s body doesn’t stop counting the days, just because one’s in a tent.”
I put my arm silently round her shoulders. There were things no male prisoner ever had to face. She cried quietly, with gulps and small compulsive sniffs, and after a while simply said “Thank you,” and I said “Any time,” and we moved on down the line of boxes knowing there was a long way still to go.
7
Manning the office switchboard day and night was essential because kidnappers kept antisocial hours; and it was always a partner on duty, not an employee, for reasons both of reliability and of secrecy. The ex-spies feared “moles” under every secretarial desk and ran a security check on the janitor.
That particular Sunday night was quiet, with two calls only: one from a partner in Ecuador saying he’d discovered the local police were due to share in the ransom he was negotiating and asking for the firm’s reactions, and the second from Twinkletoes, who wanted a copy of the set of precautions we’d drawn up for Luca Oil.
I made a note of it, saying, “Surely Luca Oil have one?”
“The kidnappers stole it,” Twinkletoes said tersely. “Or bribed a secretary to steal it. Anyway, it’s missin
g, and the manager was abducted at the weakest point of his daily schedule, which I reckon was no coincidence.”
“I’ll send it by courier straight away.”
“And see who’s free to join me out here. This will be a long one. It was very carefully planned. Send me Derek, if you can. And oh . . . consider yourself lucky I’m not there to blast you for Bologna.”
“I do,” I said, smiling.
“I’ll be back,” he said darkly. “Goodnight.”
I took one more call, at nine in the morning, this time from the head of a syndicate at Lloyds which insured people and firms against kidnap. Much of our business came direct from him, as he was accustomed to make it a condition of insurance that his clients should call on our help before agreeing to pay a ransom. He reckoned we could bring the price down, which made his own liability less; and we in return recommended him to the firms asking our advice on defenses.
“Two English girls have been snatched in Sardinia,” he said. “The husband of one of them insured her against kidnap for her two-weeks’ holiday as he wasn’t going to be with her, and he’s been on to us. It seems to have been a fairly unplanned affair—the girls just happened to be in the wrong place, and were ambushed. Anyway, the husband is distraught and wants to pay what they’re asking, straight away, so can you send someone immediately?”
“Yes,” I said. “Er . . . what was the insurance?”
“I took a thousand pounds against two hundred thousand. For two weeks.” He sighed. “Win some, lose some.”
I took down names and details and checked on flights to Sardinia, where in many regions bandits took, ransomed, and released more or less as they pleased.
“Very hush hush,” the Lloyds man had said. “Don’t let it get to the papers. The husband has pressing reasons. If all goes well she’ll be home in a week, won’t she, and no one the wiser?”
“With a bit of luck,” I agreed.
Bandits had nowhere to keep long-term prisoners and had been known to march their victims miles over mountainsides daily, simply abandoning them once they’d been paid. Alessia, I thought, would have preferred that to her tent.
The partners began arriving for the Monday conference and it was easy to find one with itchy feet ready to go instantly to Sardinia, and easy also to persuade Derek to join Twinkletoes at Luca Oil. The coordinator wrote them in on the new week’s chart and I gave the request from the partner in Ecuador to the chairman.