The Mirror of Present Events

by Brian Stableford

  He was philosophizing thus when a fresh young voice spoke behind him.

  “Master, can you spare me a few moments?”

  It was the daughter of the President of the Council of the Just, a tall child of twenty. She leaned on the flowery pedestal on which the laurelled head rested, near a window open to the delicious spring night, similar to the one on which Jacobus van Brucktel had found the secret of life.

  From the fortieth floor of the palace, built on an artificial hill in the middle of parks, Paris extended, dotted with stars, which were lamps at windows.

  The young woman spoke to the head, who replied now, in a different voice: “Yes, Mademoiselle, it’s to you, it’s to you above all that I ought to give the formula of my elixir. Don’t hold anything against me; people have thought for a long time that I wouldn’t surrender the recipe of my discovery out of jealousy of all those robust and healthy people. That isn’t true...

  “I shall try everything. Come and see my tomorrow; perhaps you’ll discover among my papers, which you’ll show to me, a clue, a sign, that will put me on the right track. I doubt it, but I’d like to do what I can for you.

  “I’d like to conserve for you, firstly, that youth and that charming purity, but I’d like it, above all, because you remind me of the most cherished memories.

  “More than seven hundred years ago, my dear child, I led to the altar of a church of which nothing much remains today a young woman who resembled you.

  “Forgive my emotion, your eyes are the same violet color, your lips have the same shape.

  “Look, would you like to accord me a favor, would you care to give me a kiss?”

  The young woman’s beautiful lips were near the doctor’s mouth.

  She leaned forward, but the head balanced on the flowery cushion titled backwards at the impact of the pure carcass, and, the window being open, the head fell from the fortieth floor into the street.

  There were terrible cries, and everyone rushed forward. The young woman recounted what had happened.

  When the head was found, it no longer had any form. Only one eye was still alive, as clear and lucid as that of a child. The soul of Jacobus van Brucktel had taken refuge there. He was not yet dead.

  The Council sentenced the young woman to carry the living eye, set in a golden bracelet and protected by a thin sheet of crystal—a crystal chemically prepared, which nothing could dent or break.

  And when nothing else remains of the world, when monuments of granite are nothing more than sections of crumbled walls, after centuries and centuries, at the end of everything, in the twilight of everything, in a clump of grass, only that strange pupil will continue to live, in the tarnished gold of the bracelet, and to remember.

  Georges de La Fouchardière: The Galloping Machine

  (1910)

  Foreword

  Even today, old sportsmen still cannot think without a sentiment of anguished curiosity about the mysterious events that unfolded on the turf twenty years ago and ended in the simultaneous and inexplicable disappearance of the trainer T. Griffith, senior, his crack horse Peau-de-Balle55 and Baron Isaac de l’Échelle-Jacob.

  With their vain investigations, seekers of enigmas have exceeded the patience of Comte Jérôme Thomas and the infinite forbearance of Monseigneur Bénin-Despalmes, the archbishop of Caudebec-en-Caux. Those honorable witnesses could provide no enlightenment, because they did not know anything, and had not seen anything or heard anything. Their role, although they had apparently been in the foreground, had been passive and unconscious.

  I want to attempt to provide here a scientific explanation of that strange story; my task is facilitated by discreet and recent revelations.

  I apologize to the readers of Paris Sport for fulfilling that office too simply, without literary effort and without employing the effort of preparation. I shall neglect the traditions of modern feuilleton fiction, whose formula is not dissimilar to that of a horse race: all the characters in the story start in a line; if one of them is detached at the beginning it is a deceptive sham; it is only a hundred meters before the finish—I mean the last hundred lines of the feuilleton—that one sees the outsider surge forth, the important and unexpected character, the one who has murdered the old lady or who will marry the general’s daughter.

  My method will be quite different; I shall represent the events in the order in which they happened, and immediately put in the light the principal facts and individuals. Readers will perhaps be grateful to me for not having decorated the narrative with any love story, however slight, in order not to hinder the rapidity of the action.

  Finally, it is necessary, in order to avoid any malevolent supposition with regard individuals presently in view, not to lose sight of the fact that the affair happened not long after the Exposition of 1889—which is to say, in an epoch when jockeys still placed their backsides on their saddles, when trainers watched their colts gallop instead of watching the needle of a stop-watch turn, and when, finally, horses did not know the charms of the starting gate and only remained at the starting-post when they wanted to.

  PART ONE: MADAME TAFOIREAU’S CRACK

  I. In which the trainer Griffith receives strange visitors.

  As all the sporting papers did not fail to report the following day, with touching unanimity, that the 26 April race meeting at Maisons-Lafitte was marked by two circumstances that had tended to become habitual since the beginning of the season: firstly, a diluvian rain that would have put out a Krakatoa—which deplorable weather, the reporters added, judiciously, using a formula that had never served any purpose, had had an unfortunate repercussion on the entrance receipts and the elegance of the paddock—and, secondly, the persistent bad luck, to the point of becoming proverbial, of the trainer T. Griffith senior.

  In the course of the day, the stable had put five representatives in the starting line, three of which wore the striking colors of Madame Tafoireau and the other two the discreet silks of Comte Jérôme Thomas. All of them had met the same fate and had finished last, completely exhausted. The jockey, Blight, had the reputation, in fact, of not sparing either his whip or his spurs and striping the horses he rode even when all was lost, for honor’s sake; he was a jockey of the old school.

  T. Griffith senior, therefore, on returning home, had five good reasons for being in a filthy mood. He shut himself in his smoking room and, as it was necessary to expect, by eight o’clock in the evening he was the most perfectly drunk man in all Chantilly—which, in that epoch, supposed a veritable tour de force.

  That was his fashion of consoling himself. In ordinary times he was very sober, and agreeable company; his intelligence and his culture put his professional qualities in relief; but in periods of bad luck, his capacities as a trainer gave way to a unique, exceptional quality as a recipient of alcohol. And, as the run of bad luck surpassed all measure this time, as much in intensity as duration, he beat his own consumption record every evening—which did not help at all, and gave no supplementary value to the next day’s training.

  Griffith had invented extraordinary mixtures in which champagne, pale ale and whisky, confusing their floods, were additionally seasoned by pimento and Cayenne pepper.

  That evening, he was on his fifteenth glass when someone rang his doorbell.

  “Eh! Joe, you damned blockhead! Go and open the door if you value your accursed jaw!”

  Joe was Griffith’s domestic. He had once been a jockey, but age, weight and, above all, a progressive stupidity had forced him to renounce his métier. Toward the end of his career he had not run a single race without taking the wrong course if it was not a straight line, and in that circumstance he mistook the finishing post.

  Griffith had immediately taken him into his personal service. As a domestic, Joe had two precious qualities; firstly, he bore with a smile the volleys of blows administered to him by his employer; and secondly, when the trainer got drunk, he rapidly caught up with him. Certainly, in that special sport, Joe did not have the same ex
pertise, or the same impressive style—the same class, in a word—but he was a good handicapper; he carried weight well.

  Without staggering, Joe went as far as the entrance gate; he saw on the other side two people that he did not know. He decided, judiciously, that it must have been them who had rung the bell and examined them. One of them was enormous in every sense; the other, in Joe’s intuitive opinion, could not have put up fifty-two kilos.

  “Is Monsieur Griffith at home?” asked the big one, in French.

  “He’s in his fumier,56 Monsieur,” replied Joe, who could only speak English correctly.

  “Well, go find him in his smoking-room and tell him that two gentlemen desire to talk to him about an urgent matter.”

  The gentlemen followed Joe as far as a tiled parlor abundantly decorated with portraits of horses.

  A moment later, Griffith appeared. With a dazed expression he inspected the visitors from head to toe, as one looks at something one wishes to buy. A baroque association of ideas formed in his brain, and he suddenly burst out laughing.

  “Why, it’s the band!” he said

  The fact is that the smaller of the strangers, with his clean-shaven, impassive face and his long gray hair carefully combed and swept backwards, really did look like a violinist, and the giant, with his curly beard and bald cranium, on which a russet patch looked more like mildew than a sprinkling of hair, irresistibly evoked the image of a trombone-player.

  The two of them exchanged a glance and a shrug of the shoulders, the significance of which was obvious.

  He’s in a fine state! indicated the first.

  It’s to be expected—we were warned! suggested the second.

  After which, they addressed gracious smiles to the trainer, which uncovered two rich sets of teeth, in the sense the gold played a large role therein.

  At that sight, Griffith’s ideas changed direction. Yankees! This time, his perspicacity was not in doubt.

  The bearded giant, who seemed to want to take the lead, said: “Yes, Monsieur Griffith, we’ve come from Chicago. We’ve come especially, to talk to you about serious and confidential matters, and that’s why we permitted ourselves to present ourselves at your home at this undue hour.”

  He waited for a polite protestation, but Griffiths attitude was not at all encouraging. He was thinking: If these fellows have come to ask me for tips, or if they bring out a subscription list for the flood victims of Arkansas, or if they’ve come to disturb me in order to stick me with shares in Atkinson-Topeka Gold Mining, I’ll bring my lads down and we’ll escort these clients back to the railway station with the aid of pitchforks.

  The bearded Yankee continued: “I know, Monsieur Griffith, that in spite of your well-known skill, chance isn’t smiling upon you at the moment. Your horses are having difficulty finding their form…and you also have other troubles...”

  What’s it got to do with him? wondered the trainer.

  “So, Fred and I—my name’s Tod—have crossed the herring-pond to say to you: Monsieur Griffith, would you like to win races again—lots of races? Would you like to make an excellent deal with us?”

  No longer able to contain himself, Griffith howled: “So you’ve come, have you, to propose some new method of doping to me, some new drug? A scam, eh? I know your type. Either that or you want to sell me a new kind of horseshoe, a shoe that will make nags win, a shoe for galloping in heavy ground, with an excellent modification for hard going?”

  He advanced menacingly. “Would you like to get out of here? Or you’ll see that I can fix things too—would you like to bet that I can fix you a swing in the stomach?”

  And the excellent man would have done as he said if Tod, the bearded Yankee, had not, with a simple parry, sent him rolling on the tiles of the parlor.

  Fred, the little clean-shaven man, watched the scene with a remarkable indifference, as if absent-mindedly.

  Griffith got up, astonishingly calmed down, and suddenly seemed to have returned to a more exact sentiment of the duties of hospitality.

  “In sum, Messieurs, tell me what you want...sit down, I beg you.”

  Tod continued, tranquilly: “Monsieur Griffith, we want to sell you a horse of the highest quality: a unique opportunity; one can’t do better, I assure you...”

  That fashion of offering a horse like a set of binoculars or an Oriental carpet returned Griffith’s hilarity.

  “A horse? But I have more than enough of them here!”

  “Which don’t win, Monsieur Griffith, which no longer win! Ours, on the contrary, will win all the races you could wish.”

  “Oho!” said the trainer, who seemed to have decided to take the joke in good part. “That’s lucky! I was just looking for a good horse, not too shabby, to prepare for the Cup. Who’s he by, your horse?”

  “By?”

  “Yes…his breeding. His sire and dam. And how old is he?”

  Tod turned indecisively to Fred, who emerged from his mutism to say, with a gesture of indifference: “We don’t know. It’s of no interest...”

  “It’s of no interest—understood. But your horse has papers?”

  “Oh yes, certainly, he has papers...they must be in the trunk, mustn’t they, Tod? But we haven’t looked at them. We’re trainers, and horses’ family affairs, you know...”

  “Yes, you’re not curious.”

  Tod darted a glance at Fred, as if to say to him: This isn’t starting well; then, abruptly making a decision, he took an immense wallet out of his pocket.

  “Look, Monsieur Griffith, there are things we’ll tell you later. But it’s necessary to understand right away that we’re not jokers. Here’s five thousand francs; that’s all we possess. We want to treat this affair squarely, as we would at home, in America. I’ll put our five thousand-franc bills on your table and I’ll leave them there. Good. Tomorrow morning, at six o’clock, you’ll come to your training track—it’s the Allée des Éléphants, I believe—with your horses, with any horses you like, the best you have, and we’ll bring our horse for sale, and we’ll try him out against yours: two races, three, as many as you like. If our champion doesn’t win every one, and easily, our five thousand francs are yours. Take note that we’re not asking for anything in exchange. You’re not risking anything, you’re not promising anything, and you’ll be free, afterwards as before, to accept, to refuse or to discuss the deal.”

  Griffith could not help being, if not seduced, at least greatly intrigued. He looked carefully at the banknotes, and then at his visitors.

  A thought occurred to him. If they’re crooks and they’ve stolen the horse in question, I can always do useful work in having them pinched tomorrow.

  “It’s agreed, Messieurs,” he said. “Until tomorrow morning. Oh, take back your bills, I beg you. I trust you, I trust you...”

  When he had shown the strangers out and closed the door behind them, he added: “That’s annoying; I would have liked to finish that bottle of whisky, but if I drink it, I won’t get up tomorrow morning... Yes, but if it stays there within arm’s reach, I’ll certainly drink it...”

  He called Joe. “Joe, drink this bottle for me right away. If a single drop remains in five minutes, I’ll clip your damned old ears!”

  II. In which Griffith discovers that he is not completely blasé regarding the surprises of the Turf.

  Although he was rather skeptical about the matter of the proposed trial, Griffith took with him to the Terrain des Éléphants two old horses of a rather high class, which could give him a serious line. The first, Cauchemar II, was a very reliable miler, which, in spite of the general poor form of the stable, had figured honorably under a big weight in the first handicaps of the year. The second, Salsifis, was endowed with a remarkable stamina, and could make the best gallop, especially on heavy ground, over long distances.

  On arriving at the rendezvous, Griffith perceived a group consisting of the two Americans of the previous evening and a superb negro, who was holding by the bridle a horse of which not much
could be seen; the animal’s head was hooded, its back covered by a sort of blanket, and its limbs bandaged with flannel.

  Where did they find that? the trainer wondered.

  He increased the pace of his cob, however, and advanced toward his visitors, smiling. He was in a good mood, having slept well and recovered his equilibrium.

  “Aha! There’s the crack. We’ll examine him, if you’d care to undress him.”

  The Yankees manifested a sharp anxiety. “No, no, if you please! It’s understood that before anything else, we’ll hold the trial. Try him—we’ll chat later.”

  Evidently, the horse is stolen, the trainer thought. They’re afraid I’ll recognize him. But he replied: “As you wish. Over what distance shall we gallop? What are his aptitudes?”

  “He has all aptitudes,” pronounced the huge Tod, forcefully.

  “That’s admirable. Then, with your permission, I’ll match him first against Cauchemar over sixteen hundred meters, and then against Salsifis over three thousand.”

  The Americans did not flinch. They didn’t know the first thing about horses, that was becoming evident—and Griffith began to be amused.

  “But who’s going to ride your beast? I warn you that there’s a forty-kilo lad on Cauchemar II.”

  “Fred will begin. He’s a little heavier than your man, I think he weighs fifty-five—but that’s nothing.

  The negro briskly removed the blanket, under which appeared, ready-saddled, a thoroughbred that Griffith judged to be ordinary. The little Yankee with the violinist’s head hoisted himself awkwardly on to the beast, with his friend’s help. He was in city clothes, and his trousers immediately rode up ridiculously to his knees, uncovering bright-red long johns. As soon as he was in the saddle he took hold resolutely of his mount’s mane.