Second Wind

by Dick Francis

  “Hmph.” he said. “Cold under fire.” He walked round in front of me, holding the gun loosely and removing the bullets.

  “What do you think of,” he asked with evident interest, “when you’re not sure the next instant won’t be your last? I’ve seen you twice stand motionless like that.”

  “Petrifaction,” I said. “Fear.”

  He twitched his mouth and shook his head. “Not in my book. Want a drink?”

  Evelyn made a no-no gesture, but Robin turned and walked back into the sitting room where a champagne bottle stood open alongside four crystal glasses.

  “As you ran away from me last night in London,” he said to me as I followed him, “or to put it more accurately, early this morning, I am to conclude, am I not, that you have come to apologize and return what Kris wanted to give me?”

  I tasted the champagne; dry but with too many bubbles. I set the narrow flute down. “I don’t think you should conclude anything like that,” I said peacefully.

  “Get rid of him.” Evelyn urged, looking at her watch.

  Robin also looked at his watch and then, nodding to Evelyn, said, “Of course you’re right, my dear” and to me, “Can you come back tomorrow? Same sort of time?”

  It sounded a most normal invitation. Which of us, I wondered, looked the more trusting and meant candor least?

  Evelyn ushered me fast to the front door. Robin, when I glanced back, was watching my departure with expressionless eyes. Whatever he wanted to say to me could not be said in front of his wife.

  Outside in the warm night, with the door closed firmly behind my back, I retrieved the rental car, drove it to the nearest busy shops, parked it outside a four-screen cinema and walked the short distance back to the Darcys’.

  Bright lights now shone on the driveway and on the heavy door. I waited concealed in rampant greenery across the road as near as possible to the house, knowing the expected guests could be strangers but from Evelyn’s urgency, hoping not.

  Evelyn the Pearls had done a splendid semaphore act with her watch, and also Robin with his four waiting champagne glasses, but they had flagged only half of the story. When the guests arrived both Evelyn and Robin appeared in the brightly lit doorway to greet them.

  The guests, unmistakable anywhere, were Michael Ford and Amy. Evelyn and Robin welcomed them effusively, and the car’s driver, in a black baseball cap, slipped quietly out of the long vehicle and into hiding not far from where I crouched, stepping out later from deep cover to move in and out of the striped shadows of palm fronds, slowly making a bodyguard’s circuit to keep his employers safe.

  The only real difference between him and me was that he carried a gun and I didn’t.

  The bodyguard-chauffeur finished one of his mostly invisible circuits and stopped in the roadway by Darcy’s gates, directly opposite my own patch of concealment. In the deep starlight he leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette, and there he stayed on watch, without alarm of any sort, the sweet smell of burning tobacco drifting across as the evening’s sole entertainment.

  He and I both waited two and a half hours for Michael and Amy to reappear. The chauffeur came to life with ease to open rear car doors and drive away, and I, still pinned with stiff muscles, was about to cross the road to where Robin stood in his doorway looking at his guests’ departing car when Evelyn, appearing behind him, put her hand persuasively on his shoulder and drew him into the house.

  The inside lights went off progressively until they shone only in their owners’ bedroom, and I saw no likelihood that night of getting Robin on his own. Evelyn was a complication and a nuisance.

  Thanks to her I’d wasted a long time learning the leaf-shapes of enveloping Florida bushes, and thought them a poor exchange for the rear end registration number of the visitors’ car, which showed its home state unsurprisingly to be Florida. To Michael and Amy, I learned later, the Cayman Island house was a weekend cottage. An equally grand house north of Miami was home.

  My rental car, collected from outside the cinema, had been too far away for me to be able to follow Michael and Amy if I’d tried, but it was Robin alone I wanted. I hadn’t known Michael and Amy wouldn’t be in their house on Grand Cayman, and they weren’t anywhere in sight when I returned to the middling motel one road back from the beach that had seemed to me a faceless place to stay.

  In the frugal but reasonably comfortable motel room I wrote a long letter to Jett, telling her on paper all the loving things I found it difficult to say to her face. My dear grandmother might warn her that I’d loved and left three times in the past, but Jett was different ... and how did one define “different”? Except that anyone who could love Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X was as different as Pu-239.

  The television in my room predicted a short life for tropical storm Sheila, now located over open water at sixteen degrees north, seventy-nine degrees west, and still traveling northwest at ten miles an hour. A map was screened briefly, with a storm warning issued for a place called Rosalind Bank.

  By morning it was raining on poor old Rosalind Bank, but tropical storm Sheila, although now circling with sixty-mile-an-hour winds, showed few serious signs of organization and was traveling north.

  Tropical storm Sheila, I mentally calculated, was about six hundred miles due south of Sand Dollar Beach. If she went on traveling due north (very unlikely), she would hit the Darcy house in roughly sixty hours, or nine o’clock in the evening on Thursday, two and a half days ahead.

  Tropical storm Sheila perversely then wriggled round to northwest again and, speeding up, earned hurricane status, Category I.

  Apart from swimming in the still blue and tranquil Atlantic I spent a good part of the day filling hours as profitably as possible by buying and making revealing lists from a detailed Florida racing form newspaper. I sent a copy of my labors to West Kensington by courier and then spent time repacking both clothes and mind, and used some of the hours left talking to Will on the phone at the Miami Hurricane Center (Sheila strengthening nicely) and to Unwin to thank him for the camera.

  Unwin had an answering service that said he was out, but at my third try he lifted his receiver and after surprised hellos said he was real pleased to hear I’d got pictures out of that little mud-bucket.

  I asked him about Amy’s day on Trox and learned some new four-letter profanities. Never again, Unwin said, would he fly that woman anywhere. And yes, he agreed, she had had the safe open and shut again, and wouldn’t let anyone else near it.

  He listened carefully to what I suggested, and after he’d thoroughly sucked his long yellow teeth and considered things he said there would be no difficulty, and he would call me back.

  It was much later than I’d intended to be still at the motel when he at length came on the line, but the delay had been worth it. Tomorrow was all fixed. He’d completed the paperwork.

  “Sleep well, Perry,” he said.

  I drove and walked to the same place as the evening before, and at Robin Darcy’s house pressed the bell.

  This time, as if he’d been waiting there, Robin Darcy opened the heavy door himself immediately, and stood there unmoving, the light from inside shining on his back making his whole body immobile in silhouette.

  He looked not exactly deadly, but most definitely a threat.

  From his point of view he saw, lit from in front against darkness beyond, a man taller than he, and younger and thinner and certainly with better eyesight, but one with only a fraction of the knowledge and experience he needed.

  Darcy didn’t ask me in. He said, “Where are George Loricroft’s letters?”

  I replied flatly, “Germany.”

  “For whose benefit?”

  “If you don’t know,” I said, “I’ll go home.”

  A triumphant voice of West Berkshire origin grated suddenly and loudly behind me, “You’re going nowhere, mate. And this bit of hardware jamming into your kidneys, this is no toy, it makes holes in silly boys.”

  I said light
ly to Robin Darcy, “Do you have an endless supply of these things?” and I saw the flash behind the glasses that perhaps meant a warning. In any case he turned on his heel, jerked his head at me to follow and walked silently in felt slippers across the marble and into the distant sitting room.

  I didn’t need to be told that it was Michael Ford’s shoes squeaking behind me, nor that it was Amy’s sandals tip-tapping away beside him in an echo of Glenda Loricroft’s high-heeled boots.

  “Stop there and turn round,” Michael ordered, and the brief view I had of anxiety on Darcy’s face, as I did what I was told, reminded me unsettlingly of alligators.

  Michael wore khaki-colored knee-length shorts with a white short-sleeved top that purposefully revealed his weight-trained biceps. The slight bow to his legs gave, as before, the impression that his muscular shoulders were too heavy for his knees, and his thick neck left no doubt that, in general, opposing his strength was futile.

  Amy, her small-boned pared-down little face smiling with satisfaction, clearly thought me a total fool to have walked into such a simple ambush. She, in fawn pants and look-alike white shirt like Michael’s, carried also a look-alike gun.

  Ignoring the gun as if it were invisible I said to her with gushing pleasure, “Hello Amy, how lovely to see you! It seems so long since I stayed with you the night I was rescued from Trox Island.”

  I meant what I said as simply a way towards sheathing the swords, so to speak, but Amy frowned and snapped back very sharply, “You were never,” she said, “on Trox Island.” Into my obvious amazement, she said, “Trox Island is mine, and no one has any claim to anything on it since Hurricane Odin. I repeat, you were NEVER there. You must have been saved from some other island. You have got them mixed up.”

  Michael nodded in agreement with watchful eyes, and said, “Everything on Trox Island is Amy’s. If you have never been there, which of course you have not, you cannot claim it or anything on it.”

  “Kris ...” I began.

  “Your friend Kris agrees he never went there either.”

  My friend Unwin might tell it differently, I thought, and put Trox for the while on hold. The immediate present needed more like an intensive care unit, emergency-room treatment. I still wanted to get Darcy alone.

  Michael, Amy and Robin Darcy, I thought in clarification: these three were active Traders, active middlemen. Then there were three more, at least, in their group. There was Evelyn, and the one who had done bodyguard duty the evening before, patient and loyal and carrying a gun. A sixth was perhaps the pilot who had flown the Downsouth rental aircraft that I had ridden in blindfold.

  All of them at times had borne arms, but I judged Evelyn in her jewels and grooming and forceful opinions to be most trigger-happy. She, of them all, I feared most at my back.

  I said to Michael, turning in the sitting room to face him, “Why the artillery? What’s the point?”

  “Letters in German.”

  I said, “What letters?”

  Even Robin Darcy didn’t know exactly, I saw. If Kris hadn’t told him about his joke on Oliver Quigley, the others probably wouldn’t have known the German letters existed.

  Probably ... but nothing was certain in their mixed-up world.

  Michael said, “Who did you sell those letters to?”

  Shit, I thought. I said again, “What letters?”

  Darcy said to me, “Tell him for your own good.”

  I thought only that the conversation, if one could call it that, was on many levels unsatisfactory. They wanted one thing, and I another. My turn. Plunge in.

  I said to Amy, “How did your horse run at Calder races on Saturday?”

  I might as well have thrown a bomb myself. Shock waves visibly ran down Amy’s shooting arm until the round black hole at the end of the barrel pointed to the floor instead of my navel. Her intense reaction proved satisfactorily to me that she too used racecourses as trading posts. The long list that I had sent to Kensington had been of dates and places where, as an owner, Amy had cover. The lists had been, in my mind, one of the possibilities awaiting proof. After this, I thought, John Rupert and Ghost might know where to look.

  Robin Darcy stiffened.

  Michael Ford flexed his awesome muscles.

  Evelyn walked in with the uniformed chauffeur-bodyguard—general purpose help. No one introduced him, though the others called him Arnold. He no longer wore the baseball cap or showed any sign of being a servant, and I wouldn’t have recognized him if I hadn’t watched him smoking a whole packet of cigarettes for nearing two hours.

  Arnold, in his black shirt, wore his pistol bolstered under his left arm with straps like braces to hold its weight.

  Brought up from childhood in a no-handguns culture, I’d never fired a shot, and had never before regretted it, but in the Darcy house I felt naked. To go barehanded into a gun-fight promised a shortcut to the hearse.

  Evelyn carried—of course—her weapon of yesterday, presumably now refilled with bullets. It would be pointless to ask her to lower the rising temperature of threat in the room when she was more likely with her loud menacing voice to stoke things up.

  Only Robin Darcy, at the moment unarmed. made anxious attempts at common sense.

  Michael Ford’s opening attitude of belligerence had increased as if self-generating. He bunched his muscles repeatedly until it seemed it was solely for destruction’s sake that he had developed them. Those descriptive words “spoiling for a fight” flickered across my own pacific mind and I sought automatically for body language that would defuse him.

  The Perry Stuart of his grandmother’s greatcoat, however, thought cringing to be not much of an option. Whatever Michael read of involuntary defiance in my face, it only enraged him more.

  Amy, who seemed to read her husband as clearly as the Racing Form. quite obviously put her money on the champ, not just to win but to deter any thought I might have had of taking him on again afterwards. She was smiling. She likes to see him fight, I thought. She’s aroused by it. She would have howled for blood in the Colosseum.

  “Go on, Michael,” she urged him. “Make him tell you what he really did with those German orders. You can’t let him get away with it. Chop him up. Michael.”

  None of them bar Robin Darcy showed any wish or indeed any ability to discuss anything, including the German letters, except at the point of a waving firearm. They violently invented gruesome threats (but not about alligators) until, encouraged and wound up by noise and shouting from the others, Michael’s core of basic lawlessness let go like an avalanche, at first beginning in a slow slide and then pouring itself out at an increasing speed until its momentum couldn’t be stopped.

  In Michael Ford terms an avalanche meant a full heavy attack with bunched fists and with lifting his victim clean off the floor and throwing him against sharp-edged furniture to the accompaniment of cheering from his wife.

  Evelyn and Arnold applauded.

  Only my host was silent.

  My efforts at lessening Michael’s onslaught by punching where I could, at dodging and at kicking or crashing his head on the wall, weren’t enough. I couldn’t ever at the best of times have beaten him at his own professional skill.

  He took his time. He was deliberate. He made every contact count.

  At one point when I’d escaped from him across the room, and he was pausing to take breath, I rolled on Evelyn’s best rug and kicked Darcy’s feet from under him, pulling his head down by the hair, his ear to my mouth, and I said clearly but intensely, and with no little desperation, “Open the terrace door and go to bed.”

  I saw his eye-widening astonishment before Michael came roaring back from his breather, and with increasing mindless urging from his cohorts set about proving again the pulping potential of his muscles, and it seemed that he himself was unleashing his maximum power simply because he had so few opportunities for it in real life.

  Exhausted defeat was already a close certainty, and I was on my knees, both in fact and metapho
rically, when Darcy reached the heavy sliding glass doors to the terrace. I couldn’t by then have pulled even one those open myself at any speed, but when I saw Robin Darcy yank a huge glass panel aside against friction and heard the grate of the door’s gliders, when I heard the waves down below on the shore and smelled the salt air, when a way out of being kicked to extinction lay there for the taking, then from somewhere I scraped up every vestige of resilience uneaten by mycobugs, and I rolled under Michael’s hammering foot and crawled a yard like an infant and thrust every enfeebled sinew into panic action ... and I was out through the glass door and halfway across the terrace before they began with shouts to follow.

  I stumbled as if inebriated down the stone staircase from terrace to pool deck, and untidily fell rather than dived into the water, horrified by the weakness that made a futility of my efforts to swim at even half of my normal speed in my own natural element.

  If I’d hoped the one-sided fight would end at that point, I was wrong. Michael Ford’s appetite merely changed direction. He decided against following me fully clothed into the water but instead snatched his gun back from Amy and shot at me, the bullets splashing with appalling heat a great deal too close.

  The prospect of a dead well-known meteorologist in a private pool in Florida, a body moreover plugged with bullets from a registered gun, still seemed not to deter Michael, nor get it through the thick skulls of Michael’s pack that his success would be their time in jail.

  I no longer tried swimming in fast circles to avoid straight lines from his barrel. I could no longer work out lines of refraction. I simply clung in wretched feebleness to the bar round the inside of the top of the pool and I shrank into the too-small shadow of the tiled overhang while Michael whooped with undiminished bloodlust, and, having no success from where he stood, galloped round the pool deck to get at me from the other side.