by Dick Francis
It was more in my nature to be a persuader than an ogre, but sometimes, as with Howard, when persuasion failed to work, the ogre surfaced. I knew, too, that it was what O'Hara expected and in fact required of me. Use your power, he'd said.
Now everyone working on the film would read the piece in the Drumbeat. Half of Newmarket also. Even if O'Hara left me in charge, my job would be difficult to impossible, all my authority gone. If I had to, I would fight to get that back.
The helicopter landed near the Doncaster winning post, where a senior official was waiting to give Nash a suitable greeting and to lead him to the mandarins. The minute I followed him onto the grass my mobile phone buzzed, and I told him to go ahead, I would join him after I'd talked to O'Hara; if it Were in fact O'Hara.
He looked at me straightly and asked the official to pause for my call.
I answered the phone's summons. “Thomas,” I said.
“Thomas!” O'Hara's voice was loud with annoyance. “Where are you?” Nash could hear him shouting: he winced.
“Doncaster racecourse.”
“I've had Hollywood on the line. It's not yet five in the morning there but the company is already furious. Someone made a phone call and then sent a fax of the Drumbeat.”
said stupidly, “A fax?”
“A fax,” he confirmed.
“Who sent it?”
“The mogul I talked to didn't say.”
I swallowed. My heart raced. The hand holding the instrument visibly trembled beside my eye. Calm down, I thought.
“Who did Tyler talk to?” O'Hara demanded furiously.
“I don't know.”
“You don't know?”
“No. He was grumbling to everyone who would listen. He may not have known he was spouting to a journalist - or to someone who knew a journalist.”
“What does he say about it?”
“The hotel says he blasted off the minute he saw the paper. No one knows where he's gone.”
“I tried his home number,” O'Hara shouted. “They say he's in Newmarket.”
“More likely the moon.”
“The mogul I talked to is one of the very top guys, and he wants your head.”
This was it, I thought numbly: and I couldn't think of anything to say. I needed an impassioned plea in mitigation. Drew a blank.
“Are you there, Thomas?”
“He says you're fired.”
I was silent.
“Hell's teeth, Thomas, defend yourself.”
“I warned Howard yesterday not to shoot his mouth off, but I think now that he'd already done it.”
“Two weeks ago he tried to get the moguls to fire you, if you remember. I pacified them then. But this!” Words failed him.
I began finally to protest. “We're on target for time. We're within budget. The company themselves insisted on story changes. I'm making a commercial motion picture, and it isn't true that there are rows and discord, except with Howard himself.”
“What's he saying?” Nash demanded impatiently.
“I'm sacked.”
Nash snatched the phone out of my hand.
“O'Hara? This is Nash. You tell those brain-deads who are our masters that I did not say what the Drumbeat says I did. Your boy is doing an OK job on this movie and if you take him off it at this stage you will get a bummer of a film, and what's more, they can whistle for me to sign with them ever again.”
Aghast, I snatched the phone back. “Nash, you can't do that. O'Hara, don't listen to him.”
“Put him back on the line.”
I handed the phone over, shaking my head. Nash listened to O'Hara for a while and finally said, “You told me to trust him. I do. This movie has a good feel. Now you trust me, trust my nose in these matters.”
He listened a bit longer, said “Right” and pressed the power-off button.
“O'Hara says he'll call you back in five hours when they will have talked it through in Hollywood. They're going to hold a breakfast meeting there at nine o'clock, when the big-wigs are all up. O'Hara will sit in on a conference call.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He smiled briefly. “My reputation is at stake here, same as yours. I don't want my green light turning amber.”
“It never will.”
“Bad reviews give me indigestion.”
We walked with the patient official across the track and up to the stewards' privacy. Heads turned sharply all the way as racegoer after racegoer did a double take at the sight of Nash. We had asked for no advance publicity - the parent film company was security hyper-conscious - so that only the top echelon knew whom to expect. I was glad, I found, to have an anonymous face.
They hadn't waited lunch. Even for mega-stars, racing time tables couldn't be changed. About twenty stewards and friends were at their roast beef and suitable Yorkshire pudding.
From behind the forks the welcome was as warm and impressed as the most inflated ego could desire, and Nash's ego, as I was progressively discovering, was far more normal and unassuming than seemed consistent with his eminence.
I'd been in awe of him before I'd met him. I'd metaphorically approached him on my knees, and I'd found, not the temperamental perfectionist I'd been ominously told to expect, but essentially the man I'd seen him play over and over again on the screen, a man, whatever the role or the make-up, of sane intelligence, mentally tough.
I forlornly hoped that the Doncaster stewards and their wives and other guests weren't avid readers of Drumbeat's 'Hot from the Stars', and with relief I saw that the two papers most in evidence were the Racing Gazette and the Daily Cable, both of them lying open at the obituary page for Valentine.
Nash and I shook a fair number of hands and were seated in prestigious places, and while Nash asked a dumbstruck waitress for fizzy mineral water, nearly causing her to faint from her proximity to the sexiest eyes in screendom, I read both farewells to Valentine, and found they'd done the old man proud. Cremation, the Gazette also noted, was set for 11 a.m., Monday, and a memorial service would be arranged later. If I were truly out of work, I thought gloomily, I could go to both.
By the coffee stage, the Drumbeat's pages were fluttering across the table and inevitably someone commiserated with Nash over the mess his director was making of his film. My own identity, remarked on round the table behind sheltering hands, produced universally disapproving stares.
Nash said with authority, his expert voice production easily capable of silencing other conversations, “Never believe what you read in the papers. We're making an excellent film in Newmarket. We're being bad-mouthed by a spiteful little man. I did not say what I am reported to have said, and I have complete confidence in Thomas here. I shall complain to the paper and demand they print a retraction.”
“Sue them,” someone said.
“Perhaps I will.”
“And as for you, Thomas,” said one of the stewards whom I knew personally, “you must definitely sue.”
I said, “I'm not sure that I can.”
“Of course you can!” He stabbed at the pages with a forefinger. “This is defamatory in the extreme.”
I said, “It's difficult to sue anyone for asking questions.”
“Those defamations are written carefully in the form of questions. The question marks tend to take the certainty out of the slurs.”
“I don't believe it!”
A head further along the large table was gravely nodding. “A scurrilous suggestion, if it is expressed as a question, may or may not be considered libel. There are grey areas.”
My steward friend said blankly, “That's not justice!”
“It's the law.”
“You knew that?” Nash said to me.
“Did Howard know it?”
“Whoever wrote that piece certainly did.”
Nash said, “Shit!” and not a single face objected.
“What Nash really needs,” I said, “is a reliable tip for the Lincoln.”
They laughed and with relief
turned to the serious business of the day. I half-heard the knowledgeable form-talk and thought that five hours could be a long torture. Barely forty minutes of it had so far passed. My pulse still raced from anxiety. My whole professional life probably hung on whether the moguls who would be bidden to the breakfast table were putting in a good night's sleep. Saturday morning. Golf day. I would be doubly unpopular.
I went down with Nash and a couple of the stewards' other lunch guests to see the horses walking round the parade ring before the first race. Nash looked at the horses: the racecrowd progressively looked at Nash. He seemed to take the staring for granted, just as he would have done back home in Hollywood, and he signed a few autographs for wide-eyed teenagers with pleasant politeness.
“How do I put a bet on?” he asked me, signing away.
“I'll do it for you if you like. Which horse, how much?”
“Hell knows.” He raised his eyes briefly and pointed to a horse being at that point mounted by a jockey in scarlet and yellow stripes. “That one. Twenty.”
“Will you be all right if I leave you?”
“I'm a grown boy, you know.”
Grinning, I turned away, walked to the Tote, and bet twenty pounds to win on the horse called Wasp. Nash, waiting for me to retrieve him, returned with me to the stewards' room, from where we watched Wasp finish an unobtrusive fifth.
“I owe you,” Nash said. “Pick me one yourself for the next race.”
The races as always were being shown on closed-circuit television on sets throughout the bars and the grandstands. A set in the stewards' room was busy with a replay of the just-finished race, Wasp still finishing fifth, the jockey busy to the end.
I stared breathlessly at the screen.
“Thomas? Thomas,” Nash said forcefully in my ear, “come back from wherever you've gone.”
“Television,” I said.
Nash said ironically, “It's been around a while, you know.”
“Yes, but ...” I picked up a copy of the Racing Gazette that was lying on the table and turned from Valentine's obituary to the pages laying out the Doncaster programme. Television coverage of the day's sport, I saw, was, as I'd hoped, by courtesy of a commercial station that provided full day-by-day racing for grateful millions. For the big-race opening of the Flat season, they would be there in force.
“Thomas,” Nash repeated.
“Er ...” I said, “how badly do you want to save our film? Or, in fact... me?”
“Not badly enough to jump off a cliff.”
“How about an interview on TV?”
He stared.
I said, “What if you could say on television that we're not making a bummer of a movie? Would you want to do it?”
“Sure,” he said easily, “but it wouldn't reach every reader of the Drumbeat.”
“No. But what if O'Hara could get the interview transmitted to Hollywood? How about the moguls seeing it at breakfast? Your own face on the screen might tip things where O'Hara's assurances might not. Only ... how do you feel about trying?”
“Hell, Thomas, get on with it.”
I went out onto the viewing balcony and pressed the buttons to get O'Hara: and let me not get his message service, I prayed.
He answered immediately himself, as if waiting for calls.
“It's Thomas,” I said.
“It's too early to hear from Hollywood.”
“No. It's something else.” I told him what I'd suggested to Nash, and he put his finger at once on the snags.
“First of all,” he said doubtfully, “you'd have to get the TV company to interview Nash.”
“I could do that. It's getting the interview onto the screen in the Hollywood conference room that I'm not sure of. Live pictures get transmitted regularly from England to the States, but I don't know the pathways. If we could get to an LA station we could have a tape rushed round for our moguls to play on a VCR”
“Thomas, stop. I can fix the LA end. The transmission from England ...” he paused, sucking his teeth. “What station are we talking about?”
I told him. “The people they'll have here are an outside broadcast unit. They'll have engineers and camera crews and a producer or two and three or four interviewers and commentators, but they won't have the authority or the equipment to transmit overseas. The OK would have to come from their headquarters, which are in London. They'll have Doncaster races on their screen there. They can transmit to anywhere. Their number will be in the phone book ...”
“And you need me to use my clout.” He sounded resigned, seeing difficulties.
“Um,” I said, “if you want Unstable Times to reach the cinema, it might be worth trying. I mean, it's your picture too, you know. Your head on the block for engaging me.”
“I see that.” He paused. “All right, I'll start. It's a hell of a long shot.”
“They've been known to win.”
“Is Nash with you?”
“Five paces away.”
“Get him, would you?”
Nash came outside and took the phone. “I'll do the interview. Thomas says he can fix it, no problem.” He listened. “Yeah. Yeah. If he says he can, I guess he can. He doesn't promise what he can't deliver. O'Hara, you get off your ass and put Thomas and me into that meeting. It's damn stupid to let that son-of-a-bitch Tyler sink the ship.” He listened again, then said, “Get it done, O'Hara. Hang the expense. I'll not be beaten by that scribbler.”
I listened in awe to the switched-on power of the ultimate green light and humbly thanked the fates that he saw me as an ally, not a villain.
He disconnected, handed the phone back to me and said, “Where do we find our interviewer?”
“Follow me.” I tried to make it sound light-hearted, but I was no great actor. Nash silently came with me down to the unsaddling enclosure, from where the runners of the just-run race had already departed.
“Do you know who you are looking for?” he asked, as I turned my head one way and another. “Can't you ask?”
“I don't need to,” I said, conscious, even if Nash ignored it, of everyone looking at him. “This television company travels with a race-caller, a paddock commentator who talks about the runners for the next race, and someone who interviews the winning jockeys and trainers afterwards, and it's him I'm looking for ... and I know him.”
“That's something.”
“And there he is,” I said, spotting him. “Coming?”
I slid then between the groups of people chatting in the railed area outside the weighing-room; slid where the groups parted like the Red Sea to clear a path for Nash. My acquaintance, the interviewer, began to say hello to me, saw who I was with and ended with his mouth open.
“Nash,” I introduced, “this is Greg Compass: Greg ... Nash Rourke.”
Greg came to his senses like any seasoned television performer should and with genuine welcome shook the hand that had fired a hundred harmless bullets.
“He's here to see the Lincoln,” I explained. “How about some inside information?”
“Gallico,” Greg suggested promptly. “He's bursting out of his skin, so they say.” He looked thoughtfully at Nash and without pressing him asked, “Do you mind if I say you're here? I expect Thomas told you I do the ghastly chat stuff for all the couch potatoes?”
“I did tell him, yes.”
“Thomas and I,” Greg explained, “used to ride against each other, when I was a jockey and we were young.”
“You're all so tall,” Nash exclaimed.
“Jump jockeys are mostly taller. Ex-jump jockeys get to be racing commentators or journalists, things like that. Live it first. Talk about it after.” He was comically self-deprecating, though in fact he'd been a top career jockey, not an amateur like me. He was forty, slender, striking, stylish. He took a breath. “Well...”
“You can certainly say I'm here,” Nash assured him.
“Great. Um ...” He hesitated.
“Ask him,” I said, half-smiling.
Greg
glanced at me and back to Nash. “I suppose ... I couldn't get you in front of my camera?”
Nash gave me a dry sideways look and in his best slay-them gravelly bass said-that he saw no reason why not.
“I did hear you were in Newmarket, making a film,” Greg said. “I suppose I can say so?”
“Sure. Thomas is directing it.”
“Yes. Word gets around.”
I pulled a folded Drumbeat page from my pocket and handed it to Greg.
“If you'll let him,” I said, “Nash would very briefly like to contradict what's written in that "Hot from the Stars" column.”
Greg read it through quickly, his expression darkening from simple curiosity to indignation.
“Difficult to sue,” he exclaimed. “It's all questions. Is it true?”
“It's true the film story is different from the book,” I said.
Nash assured him, “I didn't say those things and I don't think them. The film is going well. All I'd like to say, if you'll let me, is that one shouldn't believe newspapers.”
“Thomas?” Greg raised his eyebrows at me. “You're using me, aren't you?”
“Yes. But that column's assassinating me. If Nash can say on screen that it's not true, we can beam him to the money-men in Hollywood and hope to prevent them from taking the column seriously.”
He thought it over. He sighed. “All right, then, but very casual, OK? I'll put you both together in shot.”
“Innocence by association,” I said gratefully.
“Always a bright boy.” He looked at his watch. “How about after the Lincoln? An hour from now. After I've talked to the winning trainer and jockey and the owners, if they're here. We could slot it in at that point. I'll tell my producer. Thomas, you remember where the camera is? Come there after the Lincoln. And Thomas, you owe me.”
“Two seats for the premiere,” I said. “Without you, there may not be one.”
“Four seats.”
“A whole row,” I said.
“Done.” Greg looked at Nash. “What is this over-hyped buffoon of an ineffectual bullyboy really like as a director?”
“Worse,” Nash said.
