by Dick Francis
I didn’t ask how. Some questions are so silly they are better unsaid. I could feel the sweat prickling out on my body and I was sure he could read the apprehension on my face: and he had done nothing at all yet, nothing but threaten.
‘Alessandro will ride Archangel,’ he said. ‘The day after tomorrow. In the Two Thousand Guineas.’
His face was close enough for me to see the blackheads in the unhealthy putty skin.
I said nothing. He wasn’t asking for a promise. He was telling me.
He took a pace backwards and nodded his head at Carlo. Carlo picked up the holdall and produced from it a truncheon very like the one I had removed from him in Buckram’s box.
Promazine first?
No promazine.
They didn’t mess around making things easy, as they had for the horses. Carlo simply walked straight up to me, lifted his right arm with truncheon attached, and brought it down with as much force as he could manage. He seemed to be taking a pride in his work. He concentrated on getting the direction just right. And it wasn’t any of the fearsome things like my twisted elbow that he hit, but my collar-bone.
Not too bad, I thought confusedly in the first two seconds of numbness, and anyway steeplechase jockeys broke their collar-bones any bloody day of the week, and didn’t make a fuss of it … but the difference between a racing fall and Carlo’s effort lay in the torque and tension all the way up my arm. They acted like one of Archimedes’ precious levers and pulled the ends of my collar-bone apart. When sensation returned with ferocity, I could feel the tendons in my neck tighten into strings and stand out taut with the effort of keeping my mouth shut.
I saw on Enso’s face a grey look of suffering: narrow eyes, clamped lips, anxious, contracted muscles, lines showing along his forehead and round his eyes; and realized with extraordinary shock that what I saw on his face was a mirror of my own.
When his jaw relaxed a fraction I knew it was because mine had. When his eyes opened a little and some of the overall tension slackened, it was because the worst had passed with me.
It wasn’t sympathy, though, on his part. Imagination, rather. He was putting himself in my place, to savour what he’d caused. Pity he couldn’t do it more thoroughly. I’d break a bone for him any time he asked.
He nodded sharply several times, a message of satisfaction. There was still a heavy unabated anger in his manner and no guarantee that he had finished his evening’s work. But he looked regretfully at the pistol, unscrewed the silencer, and handed both bits to Cal, who stowed them away under the raincoat.
Enso stepped close to me. Very close. He ran his finger down my cheek and rubbed the sweat from it against his thumb.
‘Alessandro will ride Archangel in the Guineas,’ he said. ‘Because if he doesn’t, I will break your other arm. Just like this.’
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t, really.
Carlo unfastened the strap from my right wrist and put it with the truncheon in the holdall, and they all three turned their backs on me and walked away across the field and through the wood to the waiting Mercedes.
It took a long inch-by-inch time to get my right hand round to my left, to undo the other strap. After that I sat on the ground with my back against one of the posts, to wait until things got better. They didn’t seem to, much.
I looked at my watch. Eight o’clock. Time for dinner, down at the Forbury Inn. Enso probably had his fat knees under the table, tucking in with a good appetite.
In theory it had seemed reasonable that the most conclusive way to defeat him had been to steal his son away. In practice, as I gingerly hugged to my chest my severely sore left arm, I doubted if Alessandro’s soul was worth the trouble. Arrogant, treacherous, spoilt little bastard … but with guts and determination and talent. A mini battlefield, torn apart by loyalty to his father and the lure of success on his own. A pawn, pushed around in a power struggle. But this pawn was all … and whoever captured the pawn won the game.
I sighed, and slowly, wincing, got back to my feet. No one except me was going to get me home and bandaged up.
I walked. It was less than a mile. But far enough.
The elderly doctor was fortunately at home when I telephoned.
‘What do you mean, you fell off a horse and broke your collar-bone?’ he demanded. ‘At this hour? I thought all horses had to be off the Heath by four?’
‘Look,’ I said wearily. ‘I’ve broken my collar-bone. Would you come and deal with it?’
‘Mm,’ he grunted. ‘All right.’
He came within half an hour, equipped with what looked like a couple of rubber quoits. Clavical rings, he said, as he proceeded to push one up each of my shoulders and tie them together behind my back.
‘Bloody uncomfortable,’ I said.
‘Well, if you will fall off horses …’
His heavy eyes assessed his handiwork with impassive professionalism. Tying up broken collar-bones in Newmarket was as regular as dispensing coughdrops.
‘Take some codeine,’ he said. ‘Got any?’
‘I don’t know.’
He clicked his tongue and produced a packet from his bag. ‘Two every four hours.’
‘Thank you. Very much.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said, nodding. He shut his bag and flipped the clips.
‘Have a drink?’ I suggested, as he helped me into my shirt.
‘Thought you’d never ask,’ he said smiling, and dealt with a large whisky as familiarly as with his bandages. I kept him company, and the spirit helped the codeine along considerably.
‘As a matter of interest,’ I said as he reached the second half of his glassful. ‘What illnesses cause sterility?’
‘Eh?’ He looked surprised, but answered straightforwardly. ‘Only two, really. Mumps and venereal disease. But mumps very rarely causes complete sterility. Usually affects one testicle only, if it affects any at all. Syphilis is the only sure sterility one. But with modern treatment, it doesn’t progress that far.’
‘Would you tell me more about it?’
‘Hypothetical?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you don’t think you yourself may be infected? Because if so …’
‘Absolutely not,’ I interrupted. ‘Strictly hypothetical.’
‘Good …’ He drank efficiently. ‘Well. Sometimes people contract both syphilis and gonorrhoea at once. Say they get treated and cured of gonorrhoea, but the syphilis goes unsuspected … Right? Now syphilis is a progressive disease, but it can lie quiet for years, doing its slow damage more or less unknown to its host. Sterility could occur a few years after infection. One couldn’t say exactly how many years, it varies enormously. But before the sterility occurs, any number of infected children could be conceived. Mostly, they are stillborn. Some live, but there’s almost always something wrong with them.’
Alessandro had said his father had been ill after he was born, which seemed to put him in the clear. But venereal disease would account for Enso’s wife’s extreme bitterness, and the violent break up of the marriage.
‘Henry VIII,’ the doctor said, as if it followed naturally on.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Henry VIII,’ he repeated patiently. ‘He had syphilis. Katherine of Aragon had about a dozen stillborn children and her one surviving child, Mary, was barren. His sickly son Edward died young. Don’t know about Elizabeth, not enough data.’ He polished off the last drop in his glass.
I pointed to the bottle. ‘Would you mind helping yourself?’
He got to his feet and refilled my glass, too. ‘He went about blaming his poor wives for not producing sons, when it was his fault all the time. And that extreme fanaticism about having a son … and cutting off heads right and left to get one … that’s typical obsessive syphilitic behaviour.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The pepper king,’ he said, as if that explained all.
‘What had he got to do with pepper, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Not Henry VIII,’ he said impatie
ntly. ‘The pepper king was someone else … Look, in the medical textbooks, in the chapter on the advanced complications which can arise from syphilis, there’s this bit about the pepper king. He was a chap who had megalomania in an interim stage of GPI, and he got this obsession about pepper. He set out to corner all the pepper in the world and make himself into a tycoon, and because of his compulsive fanaticism, he managed it.’
I sorted my way through the maze. ‘Are you saying that at a further stage than sterility, our hypothetical syphilitic gent can convince himself that he can move mountains?’
‘Not only convince himself,’ he agreed, nodding. ‘But actually do it. There is literally no one more likely to move mountains than your megalomaniac syphilitic. Not that it lasts for ever, of course. Twenty years, perhaps, in that stage, once it’s developed.’
‘And then what?’
‘GPI.’ He took a hefty swallow. ‘General paralysis of the insane. In other words, descent to cabbage.’
‘Inevitable?’
‘After this megalomania stage, yes. But not everyone who gets syphilis gets GPI, and not everyone who gets GPI gets megalomania first. They’re only branch lines … fairly rare complications.’
‘They would need to be,’ I said with feeling.
‘Indeed yes. If you meet a syphilitic megalomaniac, duck. Duck quickly, because they can be dangerous. There’s a theory that Hitler was one …’ He looked at me thoughtfully over the top of his glass, and his old damp eyes slowly widened. His gaze focused on the sling he had put round my arm, and he said as if he couldn’t believe what he was thinking. ‘You didn’t duck quick enough …’
‘A horse threw me,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘It was a direct blow. I could see that … but I couldn’t believe it. Thought it very puzzling, as a matter of fact.’
‘A horse threw me,’ I repeated.
He looked at me in awakening amusement. ‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘A horse threw you. I’ll write that in my notes.’ He finished his drink and stood up. ‘Don’t stand in his path any more, then. And I’m serious, young Neil. Just remember that Henry VIII chopped off a lot of heads.’
‘I’ll remember,’ I said.
As if I could forget.
I rethought the horse-threw-me story and substituted a fall down the stairs for Etty’s benefit.
‘What a damn nuisance,’ she said in brisk sympathy, and obviously thought me clumsy. ‘I’l1 drive you along to Waterhall in the Land Rover, when we pull out.’
I thanked her, and while we were waiting for the lads to lead the horses out of the boxes ready for the first lot, we walked round into bay one to check on Archangel. Checking on Archangel had become my most frequent occupation.
He was installed in the most secure of high-security boxes, and since Enso’s return to England I had had him guarded day and night. Etty thought my care excessive, but I had insisted.
By day bay one was never left unattended. By night the electric eye was positioned to trap unwanted visitors. Two specially engaged security men watched all the time, in shifts, from the owners’ room, whose window looked out towards Archangel’s box: and their Alsatian dog on a long tethering chain crouched on the ground outside the box and snarled at everyone who approached.
The lads had complained about the dog, because each time they had to see to any horse in bay one, they had to fetch the security guard to help them. All other stables, they had pointed out, only had a dog on duty at night.
Etty waved an arm to the guard in the window. He nodded, came out into the yard, and held his dog on a short leash so that we could walk by safely. Archangel came over to the door when I opened the top half, and poked his nose out into the soft Mayday morning. I rubbed his muzzle and patted his neck, admiring the gloss on his coat and thinking that he hadn’t looked better in all the weeks I’d been there.
‘Tomorrow,’ Etty said to him with a gleam in her eyes. ‘We’ll see what you can do, boy, tomorrow.’ She smiled at me in partnership, acknowledging finally that I had taken some share in getting him ready. During the past month, since the winners had begun mounting up, her constant air of worry had mostly disappeared, and the confidence I had remembered in her manner had all come back. ‘And we’ll see how much more we’ll have to do with him, to win the Derby.’
‘My father will be back for that,’ I said, intending to reassure her. But the spontaneity went out of her smile, and she looked blank.
‘So he will,’ she said. ‘Do you know … I’d forgotten.’
She turned away from his box and walked out into the main yard. I thanked the large ex-policeman guard and begged him and his mate to be especially vigilant for the next thirty-four hours.
‘Safe as the Bank of England, sir. Never you fear, sir.’ He was easy with certainty, but I thought him optimistic.
Alessandro didn’t turn up to ride out, not for either lot. But when I climbed stiffly out of the Land Rover after the second dose of Etty’s jolting driving, he was standing waiting for me at the entrance to the yard. When I walked towards the door of the office he came to meet me and stopped in my way.
I stopped also, and looked at him. He held himself rigidly, and his face was thin and white with strain.
‘I am sorry,’ he said jerkily. ‘I am sorry. He told me what he had done … I did not want it. I did not ask it.’
‘Good,’ I said casually. I thought about the way I was carrying my head on one side because it was less painful like that. I felt it was time to straighten up. I straightened.
‘He said you would now agree to me riding Archangel tomorrow.’
‘And what do you think?’ I asked.
He looked despairingly, but he answered without doubt. ‘I think you will not.’
‘You’ve grown up a lot,’ I said.
‘I have learned from you …’ He shut his mouth suddenly and shook his head. ‘I mean … I beg you to let me ride Archangel.’
I said mildly, ‘No.’
The words burst out of him, ‘But he will break your other arm. He said so, and he always does what he says. He’ll break your arm again, and I … and I …’ He swallowed and took a grip on his voice, and said with much more control, ‘I told him this morning that it is right that I do not ride Archangel. I told him that if he hurt you any more you would tell the Stewards about everything, and I would be warned off. I told him I do not want him to do any more. I want him to leave me here with you, and let me get on on my own.’
I took a slow deep breath. ‘And what did he say to that?’
He seemed bewildered as well as distraught. ‘I think it made him even more angry.’
I said in explanation. ‘He doesn’t so much care about whether or not you ride Archangel in the Guineas. He cares only about making me let you ride it. He cares about proving to you that he can give you everything you ask, just as he always has.’
‘But I ask him now to leave you alone. Leave me here. And he will not listen.’
‘You are asking him for the only thing he won’t give you,’ I said.
‘And what is that?’
‘Freedom.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Because he did not want you to have freedom, he gave you everything else. Everything … to keep you with him. As he sees it, I have recently been holding out to you the one thing he doesn’t want you to have. The power to make a success of life on your own. So his fight with me now is not really about who rides Archangel tomorrow, but about you.’
He understood all right. It drenched him like a revelation.
‘I will tell him he has no fear of losing me,’ he said passionately. ‘Then he will do you no more harm.’
‘Don’t you do that. His fear of losing you is all that’s keeping me alive.’
His mouth opened. He stared at me with the black eyes, a pawn lost between the rooks.
‘Then what … what am I to do?’
‘Tell him that Tommy Hoylake rides Archangel tomorrow.�
��
His gaze wandered down from my face to the hump made by the clavicle rings and the outline of my arm in its sling inside my jersey.
‘I cannot,’ he said.
I half smiled. ‘He will find out soon enough.’
Alessandro shivered slightly. ‘You don’t understand. I have seen …’ His voice trailed away and he looked back to my face with a sort of awakening on his own. ‘I have seen people he has hurt. Afterwards, I’ve seen them. There was fear in their faces. And shame, too. I just thought … how clever he was … to know how to make people do what he wanted. I’ve seen how everyone fears him … and I thought he was marvellous …’ He took a shaky breath. ‘I don’t want him to make you look like those others.’
‘He won’t,’ I said, with more certainty than I felt.
‘But he will not just let Tommy ride Archangel, and do nothing about it. I know him … I know he will not. I know he means what he says. You don’t know what he can be like … You must believe it. You must.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said drily, and Alessandro almost danced with frustration.
‘Neil,’ he said, and it was the only time he had used my first name, ‘I’m afraid for you.’
‘That makes two of us,’ I said without seriousness, but he was not at all cheered. I looked at him with compassion. ‘Don’t take it so hard, boy.’
‘But you don’t … you don’t understand.’
‘I do indeed understand,’ I said.
‘But you don’t seem to care.’
‘Oh I care,’ I said truthfully. ‘I’m not mad keen on another smashing up session with your father. But I’m even less keen on crawling along the ground to lick his boots. So Tommy rides Archangel, and we keep our fingers crossed.’
He shook his head, intensely troubled. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘I know him …’
‘Next week at Bath,’ I said, ‘you can ride Pullitzer in the apprentice race, and Clip Clop at Chester.’
His expression said plainly that he doubted we would ever reach next week.
‘Did you ever have any brothers or sisters?’ I asked abruptly.