The Danger

by Dick Francis

  “The same guy,” Wagner said, switching off. “Different voice, same brain.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Get Patrolman Rossellini in here,” he told the lieutenant and it was Stavoski, this time, who put his head out of the door and yelled for the help. Patrolman Rossellini, large-nosed, young, black-haired, very American, brought his Italian grandparentage to bear on the third of the tapes and translated fluently as it went along. When it came to the last of the series of threats to Alessia’s body his voice faltered and stopped, and he glanced uneasily around, as if for escape.

  “What is it?” Wagner demanded.

  “The guy says,” Rossellini said, squaring his shoulders to the requirement, “well to be honest, Captain, I’d rather not say.”

  “The guy roughly said,” I murmured, coming to the rescue, “that bitches were accustomed to dogs and that all women were bitches.”

  Wagner stared. “You mean . . . ?”

  “I mean,” I said, “that that threat was issued to reduce her father to pulp. There seems to have been no intention whatsoever of carrying it out. The kidnappers never threatened anything like it to the girl herself, nor anything indeed about daily beatings. They left her completely alone.”

  Patrolman Rossellini went away looking grateful, and I told Wagner and Stavoski most of what had happened in Italy and England and in what ways the similarities of the two kidnappings might be of use to them now. They listened silently, faces impassive, reserving comments and judgment to the end.

  “Let’s get this straight,” Wagner said eventually, stirring. “One; this Giuseppe-Peter is likely to have rented a house in Washington, reasonably near the Ritz Carlton, within the last eight weeks. That, as I understand it, is when Morgan Freemantle accepted Eric Rickenbacker’s invitation.”

  I nodded. “That was the date given us by the Jockey Club.”

  “Two; there are likely to be at least five or six kidnappers involved, all of them American except Giuseppe-Peter. Three; Giuseppe-Peter has an inside edge on racecourse information and therefore must be known to people in that world. And four,” with a touch of grim humor, “at this moment Morgan Freemantle may be getting his ears blasted off by Verdi.”

  He picked up the photocopy likeness of Giuseppe-Peter.

  “We’ll paper the city with this,” he said. “If the Nerrity kid recognized him, anyone can.” He gave me a look in which, if there wasn’t positive friendship, one could at least read a sheathing of poison fangs.

  “Only a matter of time,” he said.

  “But . . . er . . .” I said diffidently. “You won’t of course forget that if he sees you getting close, he’ll kill Morgan Freemantle. I’d never doubt he means that part. Kill him and bury him. He’d built a tomb for little Dominic that might not have been found for years.”

  Wagner looked at me with speculation. “Does this man Giuseppe-Peter frighten you?”

  “As a professional adversary, yes.”

  Both men were silent.

  “He keeps his nerve,” I said. “He thinks. He plans. He’s bold. I don’t believe a man like that would turn to this particular crime if he were not prepared to kill. Most kidnappers will kill. I’d reckon Giuseppe-Peter would expect to kill and get away with it, if killing were necessary. I don’t think he would do it inch by inch, as the tape threatened. But a fast kill to cut his losses, to escape, yes, I’d bet on it.”

  Kent Wagner looked at his hands. “Has it occurred to you, Andrew, that this Giuseppe-Peter may not like you personally one little bit?”

  I was surprised by his use of my first name but took it thankfully as a sign of a working relationship about to begin; and I answered similarly, “Kent, I don’t think he knows I exist.”

  He nodded, a smile hovering, the connection made, the common ground acknowledged.

  17

  Silence from the kidnappers, indignation from the about-to-be-dunned members of the Jockey Club and furor from the world’s sporting press: hours of horrified talk vibrating the airwaves, but on the ground overnight a total absence of action. I went to the press breakfast in consequence with a quiet conscience and a light heart, hoping to see Alessia.

  The raceclub lounges were packed when I arrived, the decibel count high. Glasses of orange juice sprouted from many a fist, long-lensed cameras swinging from many a shoulder. The sportswriters were on their feet, moving, mingling, agog for exclusives, ears stretching to hear conversations behind them. The majority, knowing each other, clapped shoulders in passing. Trainers held small circular conferences, the press heads bending to catch vital words. Owners stood around looking either smug or bemused according to how often they’d attended this sort of shindig; and here and there, like gazelles among the herd, like a variation of the species, stood short light-boned creatures, heads thrown back, being deferred to like stars.

  “Orange juice?” someone said, handing me a glass.

  “Thanks.”

  I couldn’t see Rickenbacker, nor anyone I knew.

  No Alessia. The gazelles I saw were all male.

  I wandered about, knowing that without her my presence there was pointless; but it had seemed unlikely that she would miss taking her place among her peers.

  I knew she’d accepted Laurel’s invitation, and her name was plainly there at the breakfast, on a list pinned to a notice board on an easel, as the rider of Brunelleschi. I read through the list, sipping orange juice. Fourteen runners; three from Britain, one from France, one from Italy, two from Canada, two from Argentina, all the rest home grown. Alessia seemed to be the only female jockey.

  Presumably at some sort of signal the whole crowd began moving into a large side room, in which many oblong tables were formally laid with flowers, tablecloths, plates, and cutlery. I had vaguely assumed the room to be made ready for lunch, but I’d been wrong. Breakfast meant apparently not orange juice on the wing, but bacon and eggs, waitresses, and hot breads.

  I hung back, thinking I wouldn’t stay, and heard a breathless voice by my left ear saying incredulously, “Andrew?” I turned. She was there after all, the thin face strong now and vivid, the tilt of the head confident. The dark curls shone with health, the eyes below them gleaming.

  I hadn’t been sure what I felt for her, not until that moment. I hadn’t seen her for six weeks and before that I’d been accustomed to thinking of her as part of my job; a rewarding pleasure, a victim I much liked, but transient, like all the others. The sight of her that morning came as almost a physical shock, an intoxicant racing in the bloodstream. I put out my arms and hugged her, and felt her cling to me momentarily with savagery.

  “Well . . .” I looked into her brown eyes. “Want a lover?” She gasped a bit and laughed, and didn’t answer. “We’re at a table over there,” she said, pointing deep into the room. “We were sitting there waiting. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you come in. There’s room for you at our table. A spare place. Do join us.”

  I nodded and she led the way: and it wasn’t Ilaria who had come with her from Italy, but Paolo Cenci himself. He stood up at my approach and gave me not a handshake but an immoderate Italian embrace, head to head, his face full of welcome.

  Perhaps I wouldn’t have recognized him, this assured, solid, pearl-gray-suited businessman, if I’d met him unexpectedly in an American street. He was again the man I hadn’t known, the competent manager in the portrait. The shaky wreckage of five months earlier had retreated, become a memory, an illness obliterated by recovery. I was glad for him and felt a stranger with him, and would not in any way have referred to the anxieties we had shared.

  He himself had no such reservations. “This is the man who brought Alessia back safely,” he said cheerfully in Italian to the three other people at the table, and Alessia, glancing briefly at my face, said, “Papa, he doesn’t like us to talk about it.”

  “My darling girl, we don’t often, do we?” He smiled at me with intense friendship. “Meet Bruno and Beatrice Goldoni,” he said in English. “The
y are the owners of Brunelleschi.”

  I shook hands with a withdrawn-looking man of about sixty and a strained-looking woman a few years younger, both of whom nodded pleasantly enough but didn’t speak.

  “And Silvio Lucchese, Brunelleschi’s trainer,” Paolo Cenci said, introducing the last of the three.

  We shook hands quickly, politely. He was dark and thin and reminded me of Pucinelli; a man used to power but finding himself at a disadvantage, as he spoke very little English very awkwardly, with an almost unintelligible accent.

  Paolo Cenci waved me to the one empty chair, between Alessia and Beatrice Goldoni, and when all in the room were seated a hush fell on the noisy general chatter and Rickenbacker, followed by a few friends, made a heralded entrance, walking in a modest procession down the whole room, heading for a top table facing everyone else.

  “Welcome to Laurel racecourse,” he said genially, reaching his center chair, his white hair crowning his height like a cloud. “Glad to see so many overseas friends here this morning. As I expect most of you have now heard, one of our good friends is missing. I speak of course of Morgan Freemantle, senior steward of the British Jockey Club , who was distressfully abducted here two days ago. Everything possible is being done to secure his early release and of course we’ll keep you all informed as we go along. Meanwhile, have a good breakfast, and we’ll all talk later.”

  A flurry of waitresses erupted all over the place, and I suppose I ate, but I was conscious only of my stirred feelings for Alessia, and of her nearness, and of the question she hadn’t answered. She behaved to me, and I daresay I to her, with civil calm. In any case, since everyone at the table was talking in Italian, my own utterances were few, careful, and limited in content.

  It seemed that the Goldonis were enjoying their trip, though one wouldn’t have guessed it from their expressions.

  “We are worried about the race tomorrow,” Beatrice said. “We always worry, we can’t help it.” She broke off. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand much more than I speak.”

  She seemed relieved and immediately began talking copiously, ignoring repressive looks from her gloomier husband. “We haven’t been to Washington before. Such a spacious, gracious city. We’ve been here two days . . . we leave on Sunday for New York. Do you know New York? What should one see in New York?”

  I answered her as best I could, paying minimal attention. Her husband was sporadically discussing Brunelleschi’s prospects with Lucchese as if it were their fiftieth reiteration, rather like the chorus of a Greek play six weeks into its run. Paolo Cenci told me five times he was delighted to see me, and Alessia ate an egg but nothing else.

  An ocean of coffee later the day’s real business began, proving to be short interviews with all the trainers and jockeys and many of the owners of the following day’s runners. Sportswriters asked questions, Rickenbacker introduced the contestants effusively, and everyone learned more about the foreign horses than they’d known before or were likely to remember after.

  Alessia interpreted for Lucchese, translating the questions, slightly editing the answers, explaining in one reply that Brunelleschi didn’t actually mean anything, it was the name of the architect who’d designed a good deal of the city of Florence; like Wren in London, she said. The sportswriters wrote it down. They wrote every word she uttered, looking indulgent.

  On her own account she said straightforwardly that the horse needed to see where he was going in a race and hated to be shut in.

  “What was it like being kidnapped?” someone asked, transferring the thought.

  “Horrible.” She smiled, hesitated, said finally that she felt great sympathy for Morgan Freemantle and hoped sincerely that he would soon be free.

  Then she sat down and said abruptly, “When I heard about Morgan Freemantle I thought of you, of course . . . wondered if your firm would be involved. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Not to see me race.”

  “Both,” I said.

  She shook her head. “One’s work, one’s luck.” She sounded merely practical, “Will you find him, like Dominic?”

  “A bit unlikely,” I said.

  “It brings it all back,” she said, her eyes dark.

  “Don’t . . .”

  “I can’t help it. Ever since I heard . . . when we got to the track this morning . . . I’ve been thinking of him.”

  Beatrice Goldoni was talking again like a rolling stream, telling me and also Alessia, who must have heard it often before, what a terrible shock it had been when dear Alessia had been kidnapped, and now this poor man, and what a blessing that I had been able to help get dear Alessia back . . . and I thought it colossally lucky she was speaking in her own tongue, which I hoped wouldn’t be understood by the newspaper ears all around.

  I stopped her by wishing her firmly the best of luck in the big race, and by saying my farewells to the whole party. Alessia came with me out of the dining room and we walked slowly across the bright club lounge to look out across the racecourse.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “they’ll be cheering you.”

  She looked apprehensive more than gratified. “It depends how Brunelleschi’s traveled.”

  “Isn’t he here?” I asked, surprised.

  “Oh, yes, but no one knows how he feels. He might be homesick . . . and don’t laugh, the tap water here tastes vile to me, God knows what the horse thinks of it. Horses have their own likes and dislikes, don’t forget, and all sorts of unimaginable factors can put them off.”

  I put my arm round her tentatively.

  “Not here,” she said.

  I let the arm fall away. “Anywhere?” I asked.

  “Are you sure . . . ?”

  “Don’t be silly. Why else would I ask?”

  The curve of her lips was echoed in her cheekbones and in her eyes, but she was looking at the track, not at me.

  “I’m staying at the Sherryatt,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “The Regency. We’re all there . . . the Goldonis, Silvio Lucchese, Papa and I. All guests of the racecourse. They’re so generous, it’s amazing.”

  “How about dinner?” I said.

  “I can’t. We’ve been invited by the Italian ambassador. Papa knows him . . . I have to be there.”

  I nodded.

  “Still,” she said, “we might go for a drive or something this afternoon. I don’t truthfully want to spend all day here on the racecourse. We were here yesterday . . . all the foreign riders were shown what we’ll be doing. Today is free.”

  “I’ll wait for you here, then, on this spot.”

  She went to explain to her father but returned immediately saying that everyone was about to go round to the barns and she couldn’t get out of that either, but they’d all said I was very welcome to go with them, if I’d like.

  “Barns?” I said.

  She looked at me with amusement. “Where they stable the horses on American racecourses.”

  In consequence I shortly found myself, along with half the attendance from the breakfast, watching the morning routines on the private side of the tracks; the feeding, the mucking-out, the grooming, the saddling-up and mounting, the breezes (short sharp canters), the hot-walking (for cooling off from exercise), the sand-pit rolling, and all around, but constantly shifting, the tiny individual press conferences where trainers spoke prophecies like Moses.

  I heard the trainer of the home-based horse that was favorite saying confidently, “We’ll have the speed all the way to the wire.”

  “What about the foreign horses?” one of the reporters asked. “Is there one to beat you?”

  The trainer’s eye wandered and lit on Alessia, by my side. He knew her. He smiled. He said gallantly, “Brunelleschi is the danger.”

  Brunelleschi himself, in his stall, seemed unimpressed. Silvio Lucchese, it appeared, had brought the champion’s own food from Italy so that the choosy appetite should be unimpaired. And Brunelleschi had, it seemed, “eaten up” the
evening before (a good sign), and hadn’t kicked his stable-lad, as he did occasionally from displeasure. Everyone patted his head with circumspection, keeping their fingers away from his strong white teeth. He looked imperious to me, like a bad-tempered despot. No one asked what he thought of the water.

  “He’s nobody’s darling,” Alessia said out of the owners’ earshot. “The Goldonis are afraid of him, I often think.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  “He puts all his meanness into winning.” She looked across with rueful affection at the dark tossing head. “I tell him he’s a bastard, and we get on fine.”

  Paolo Cenci seemed pleased that Alessia would be spending most of the day with me. He, Lucchese, and Bruno Goldoni intended to stay for the races. Beatrice, with a secret, sinful smile of pleasure, said she was going to the hotel’s hairdresser, and, after that, shopping. Slightly to my dismay Paolo Cenci suggested Alessia and I should give her a lift back to Washington to save the limousine service doubling the journey, and accordingly we passed the first hour of our day with the voluble lady saying nothing much at great length. I had an overall impression that separation, even temporary, from her husband, had caused an excited rise in her spirits, and when we dropped her at the Regency she had twin spots of bright red on her sallow middle-aged cheeks and guilt in every line of her heavy face.

  “Poor Beatrice, you’d almost think she was meeting a lover,” Alessia said smiling, as we drove away, “not just going shopping.”

  “You, on the other hand,” I observed, “are not blushing a bit.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I haven’t promised a thing.”

  “True.” I stopped the car presently in a side street and unfolded a detailed map of the city. “Anything you’d like to see?” I asked. “Lincoln Monument, White House, all that?”

  “I was here three years ago, visiting. Did all the tours.”

  “Good . . . Do you mind then, if we just drive around a bit? I want to put . . . faces . . . onto some of these street names.”

  She agreed looking slightly puzzled but after a while said, “You’re looking for Morgan Freemantle.”