by Dick Francis
Now, he thought. It is now, in the next half-minute, that I earn myself an extra ten thousand dollars; and after that, the rest.
He pulled down his goggles and gathered his reins and his whip. He had Pincer Movement on his right and Salad Bowl on his left, and when the stalls sprang open he went out between them in a rush, tipping his weight instantly forward over the withers and standing in the stirrups with his head almost as far forward as Crinkle Cut’s.
All along past the stands the first time he concentrated on staying in the centre of the main bunch, as unnoticeable as possible, and round the top bend he was still there, sitting quiet and doing nothing very much. But down the backstretch, lying about tenth in a field of twenty-six, he earned his mini-fortune.
No one except Piper Boles ever knew what really happened; only he knew that he’d shortened his left rein with a sharp turn of his wrist and squeezed Crinkle Cut’s ribs with his right foot. The fast galloping horse obeyed these directions, veered abruptly left, and crashed into the horse beside him.
The horse beside him was still Salad Bowl. Under the impact Salad Bowl cannoned into the horse on his own left, rocked back, stumbled, lost his footing entirely, and fell. The two horses on his tail fell over him.
Piper Boles didn’t look back. The swerve and collision had lost him several places which Crinkle Cut at the best of times would have been unable to make up. He rode the rest of the race strictly according to his instructions, finishing flat out in twelfth place.
Of the 140,000 spectators at Churchill Downs, only a handful had had a clear view of the disaster on the far side of the track. The buildings in the in-field, and the milling crowds filling all its furthest areas, had hidden the crash from nearly all standing at ground level and from most on the grandstands. Only the press, high up, had seen. They sent out urgent fact-finders and buzzed like a stirred-up beehive.
Fred Collyer, out on the balcony, watched the photographers running to immortalise the winner, Pincer Movement, and reflected sourly that none of them would have taken close-up pictures of the second favourite, Salad Bowl, down on the dirt. He watched the blanket of dark red roses being draped over the victor and the triumphal presentation of the trophies, and then went inside for the re-run of the race on television. They showed the Salad Bowl incident forwards, backwards and sideways, and then jerked it through slowly in a series of stills.
‘See that,’ said Clay Petrovitch, pointing at the screen over Fred Collyer’s shoulder, ‘it was Crinkle Cut caused it. You can see him crash into Salad Bowl… there!… Crinkle Cut, that’s the joker in the pack.’
Fred Collyer strolled over to his place, sat down, and stared at his keyboard. Crinkle Cut. He knew something about Crinkle Cut. He thought intensely for five minutes, but he couldn’t remember what he knew.
Details and quotes came up to the press room. All fallen jockeys shaken but unhurt, all horses ditto; stewards in a tizzy, making instant enquiries and re-running the patrol camera film over and over. Suspension for Piper Boles considered unlikely, as blind eye usually turned to rough riding in the Derby. Piper Boles had gone on record as saying ‘Crinkle Cut just suddenly swerved. I didn’t expect it, and couldn’t prevent him bumping Salad Bowl.’ Large numbers of people believed him.
Fred Collyer thought he might as well get a few pars down on paper: it would bring the first drink nearer, and boy how he needed that drink. With an ear open for fresher information he tapped out a blow-by-blow I-was-there account of an incident he had hardly seen. When he began to read it through, he saw that the first words he had written were ‘The diversion on Crinkle Cut stole the post-race scene…’
Diversion on Crinkle Cut? He hadn’t meant to write that… or not exactly. He frowned. And there were other words in his mind, just as stupid. He put his hands back on the keyboard and typed them out.
‘It’ll cost you… ten thousand in used notes… half before.’
He stared at what he had written. He had made it up, he must have. Or dreamed it. One or the other.
A dream. That was it. He remembered. He had had a dream about two men planning a fixed race, and one of them had been Marius Tollman, wheezing away about a diversion on Crinkle Cut.
Fred Collyer relaxed and smiled at the thought, but the next minute knew quite suddenly that it hadn’t been a dream at all. He had heard Marius Tollman and Piper Boles planning a diversion on Crinkle Cut, and he had forgotten because he’d been drunk. Well, he reassured himself uneasily, no harm done, he had remembered now, hadn’t he?
No, he hadn’t. If Crinkle Cut was a diversion, what was he a diversion from? Perhaps if he waited a bit, he would find he knew that, too.
Blisters Schultz spent Fred Collyer’s money on two hot dogs, one mint julep, and five losing bets. On the winning side, he had harvested three more billfolds and a woman’s purse: total haul, a hundred and ninety-four bucks. Gloomily he decided to call it a day and not come back next year.
Marius Tollman lumbered busily from window to window of the pari-mutuel and the stewards asked to see the jockeys involved in the Salad Bowl pile-up.
The crowds, hot, tired and frayed at the edges, began to leave in the yellowing sunshine. The bands marched away. The stalls which sold souvenirs packed up their wares. Pincer Movement had his picture taken for the thousandth time and the runners for the tenth, last, and least interesting race of the day walked over from the barns.
Piper Boles was waiting outside the stewards’ room for a summons inside, but Marius Tollman used the highest class messengers, and the package he entrusted was safely delivered. Piper Boles, nodded, slipped it into his pocket, and gave the stewards a performance worthy of Hollywood.
Fred Collyer put his head in his hands, trying to remember. A drink, he thought, might help. Diversion. Crinkle Cut. Amberezzio.
He sat up sharply. Amberezzio. And what the hell did that mean? It has to be Amberezzio.
‘Clay,’ he said, leaning back over his chair, ‘do you know of a horse called Amberezzio?’
Clay Petrovitch shook his bald head. ‘Never heard of it.’
Fred Collyer called to several others through the hubbub, ‘Know of a horse called Amberezzio?’ And finally he got an answer. ‘Amberezzio isn’t a horse, he’s an apprentice.’
‘It has to be Amberezzio. He’s straight.’
Fred Collyer knocked his chair over as he stood up. They had already called one minute to post time on the last race.
‘Lend me a hundred bucks, there’s a pal,’ he said to Clay.
Clay, knowing about the lost wallet, amiably agreed and slowly began to bring out his money.
‘Hurry, for Chrissake,’ Fred Collyer said urgently.
‘OK, OK.’ He handed over the hundred dollars and turned back to his own work.
Fred Collyer grabbed his racecard and pushed through the post-Derby chatter to the pari-mutuel window further along the press floor. He flipped the pages… tenth race, Homeward Bound, claiming race, eight runners. His eye skimmed down the list, and found what he sought.
Phillip Amberezzio, riding a horse Fred Collyer had never heard of.
‘A hundred on the nose, number six,’ he said quickly, and received his ticket seconds before the window shut. Trembling slightly, he pushed back through the crowd, and out onto the balcony. He was the only pressman watching the race.
Those jocks did it beautifully, he thought in admiration. Artistic. You wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t known. They bunched him in and shepherded him along, and then at the perfect moment gave him a suddenly clear opening. Amberezzio won by half a length, with all the others waving their whips as if beating the last inch out of their mounts.
Fred Collyer laughed. That poor little so-and-so probably thought he was a hell of a fellow, bringing home a complete outsider with all the big boys baying at his heels.
He went back inside the press room and found everyone s attention directed towards Harbourne Cressie, who had brought with him the owner and jockey of Pincer Movement
. Fred Collyer dutifully took down enough quotes to cover the subject, but his mind was on the other story, the big one, the gift.
It would need careful handling, he thought. It would need the very best he could do, as he would have to be careful not to make direct accusations while leaving it perfectly clear that an investigation was necessary. His old instincts partially re-awoke. He was even excited. He would write his piece in the quiet and privacy of his own room in the motel. Couldn’t do it here on the racecourse, with every turfwriter in the world looking over his shoulder.
Down in the jockeys’ changing-room, Piper Boles quietly distributed the pari-mutuel tickets which Marius Tollman had delivered: three thousand dollars’ worth to each of the seven ‘unsuccessful’ riders in the tenth race, and ten thousand dollars’ worth to himself. Each jockey subsequently asked a wife or girlfriend to collect the winnings and several of these would have made easy prey to Blisters Schultz, had he not already started home.
Marius Tollman’s money had shortened the odds on Amberezzio, but he was still returned at twelve to one. Marius Tollman wheezed and puffed from pay-out window to pay-out window, collecting his winnings bit by bit. He hadn’t room for all the cash in the underarm pockets and finally stowed some casually in more accessible spots. Too bad about Blisters Schultz.
Fred Collyer collected a fistful of winnings and repaid the hundred to Clay Petrovitch.
‘If you had a hot tip, you might have passed it on,’ grumbled Petrovitch, thinking of all the expenses old Fred would undoubtedly claim for his free rides to the racecourse.
‘It wasn’t a tip, just a hunch.’ He couldn’t tell Clay what the hunch was, as he wrote for a rival paper. ‘I’ll buy you a drink on the way home.’
‘I should damn well think so.’
Fred Collyer immediately regretted his offer, which had been instinctive. He remembered that he had not intended to drink until after he had written. Still, perhaps one… And he did need a drink very badly. It seemed a century since his last, on Wednesday night.
They left together, walking out with the remains of the crowd. The racecourse looked battered and bedraggled at the end of the day: the scarlet petals of the tulips lay on the ground, leaving rows of naked pistils sticking forlornly up, and the bright rugs of grass were dusty grey and covered with litter. Fred Collyer thought only of the dough in his pocket and the story in his head, and both of them gave him a nice warm glow.
A drink to celebrate, he thought. Buy Clay a thank-you drink, and maybe perhaps just one more to celebrate. It wasn’t often, after all, that things fell his way so miraculously.
They stopped for the drink. The first double swept through Fred Collyer’s veins like fire through a parched forest. The second made him feel great.
‘Time to go,’ he said to Clay. ‘I’ve got my piece to write.’
‘Just one more,’ Clay said. ‘This one’s on me.’
‘Better not.’ He felt virtuous.
‘Oh, come on,’ Clay said, and ordered. With the faintest of misgivings Fred Collyer sank his third: but couldn’t he still out-write every racing man in the business? Of course he could.
They left after the third. Fred Collyer bought a litre of bourbon for later, when he had finished his story. Back in his own room he took just the merest swig from it before he sat down to write.
The words wouldn’t come. He deleted six attempts and poured some bourbon into a tooth glass.
Marius Tollman, Crinkle Cut, Piper Boles, Amberezzio… It wasn’t all that simple.
He took a drink. He didn’t seem to be able to help it.
The Sports Editor would give him a raise for a story like this, or at least there would be no more quibbling about expenses.
He took a drink.
Piper Boles had earned himself ten thousand bucks for crashing into Salad Bowl. Now how the hell did you write that without being sued for libel?
He took a drink.
The jockeys in the tenth race had conspired together to let the only straight one among them win. How in hell could you say that?
He took a drink.
The stewards and the press had had all their attention channelled towards the crash in the Derby and had virtually ignored the tenth race. The tenth race had been fixed. The stewards wouldn’t thank him for pointing it out.
He took another drink. And another. And more.
His deadline for telephoning his story to the office was ten o’clock the following morning. When that hour struck he was asleep and snoring, fully dressed, on his bed. The empty bourbon bottle lay on the floor beside him, and his winnings, which he had tried to count, lay scattered over his chest.
SPRING FEVER
Women’s Own magazine unexpectedly asked me for a suitable story. (Five thousand words, please.)
They would leave the actual content to me, they said, but they would prefer a story geared to their women readers.
Spring Fever, which I very much enjoyed writing, was the result.
Looking back, Mrs Angela Hart could identify the exact instant in which she fell irrationally in love with her jockey.
Angela Hart, plump, motherly, and fifty-two, watched the twenty-four-year-old man walk into the parade ring at Cheltenham races in her gleaming pink and white colours, and she thought: ‘How young he is, how fit, how lean… how brave.’
He crossed the bright turf to join her for the usual few minutes of chit-chat before taking her horse away to its two-mile scurry over hurdles, and she looked at the way the weather-tanned flesh lay taut over the cheekbones and agreed automatically that yes, the spring sunshine was lovely, and that yes, the drier going should suit her Billyboy better than the rain of the past few weeks.
It was a day like many another. Two racehorses having satisfactorily replaced the late and moderately lamented Edward Hart in Angela’s affections, she contentedly spent her time in going to jump meetings to see her darlings run, in clipping out mentions of them from the racing pages of newspapers and in telephoning her trainer, Clement Scott, to enquire after their health.
She was a woman of kindness and good humour, but suffered from a dangerous belief that everyone was basically as well-intentioned as herself. Like children who pat tigers, she expected a purr of appreciation in return for her offered friendship, not to have her arm bitten off.
Derek Roberts, jockey, saw Mrs Angela Hart prosaically as the middle-aged owner of Billyboy and Hamlet, a woman to whom he spoke habitually with a politeness born from needing the fees he was paid for riding her horses. His job, he reckoned, involved pleasing the customers before and after each race as much as doing his best for them in the event, and as he had long years ago discovered that most owners were pathetically pleased when a jockey praised their horses, he had slid almost without cynicism into a way of conveying optimism even when not believing a word of it.
When he walked into the parade ring at Cheltenham, looking for Mrs Hart and spotting her across the grass in her green tweed coat and brown fur hat, he was thinking that as Billyboy hadn’t much chance in today’s company he’d better prepare the old duck for the coming disappointment and at the same time insure himself against being blamed for it.
‘Lovely day,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘Real spring sunshine.’
‘Lovely.’ After a short silence, when she said nothing more, he tried again.
‘Much better for Billyboy, now all that rain’s drying out.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’
She wasn’t as talkative as usual, he thought. Not the normal excited chatter. He watched Billyboy plod round the ring and said encouragingly, ‘He should run well today… though the opposition’s pretty hot, of course.’
Mrs Hart, looking slightly vague, merely nodded. Derek Roberts, shrugging his mental shoulders, gave her a practised, half-genuine smile and reckoned (mistakenly) that if she had something on her mind, and didn’t want to talk, it was nothing to do with him.
A step away from them, also with his eyes on the
horse, stood Billyboy’s trainer, Clement Scott. Strong, approaching sixty, a charmer all his life, he had achieved success more through personality than any deep skill with horses. He wore good clothes. He could talk.
Underneath the attractive skin there was a coldness which was apparent to his self-effacing wife, and to his grown and married children, and eventually to anyone who knew him well. He was good company, but lacked compassion. All bonhomie on top: ruthlessly self-seeking below.
Clement Scott was old in the ways of jockeys and owners, and professionally he thought highly of the pair before him: of Derek, because he kept the owners happy and rode well enough besides, and of Angela because her first interest was in the horses themselves and not in the prize money they might fail to win.
Motherly sentimental ladies, in his opinion, were the least critical and most forgiving of owners, and he put up gladly with their gushing telephone calls because they also tended to pay his bills on receipt. Towards Angela, nicely endowed with a house on the edge of Wentworth golf course, he behaved with the avuncular roguishness that had kept many a widow faithful to his stable in spite of persistent rumours that he would probably cheat them if given half a chance.
Angela, like many another lady, didn’t believe the rumours. Clement, dear naughty Clement, who made owning a racehorse such satisfying fun, would never in any case cheat her.
Angela stood beside Clement on the stands to watch the race, and felt an extra dimension of anxiety; not simply, as always, for the safe return of darling Billyboy, but also, acutely, for the man on his back. Such risks he takes, she thought, watching him through her binoculars. Before that day she had thought only of whether he’d judged the pace right, or taken an available opening, or ridden a vigorous finish. During that race her response to him crossed conclusively from objectivity to emotion, a change which at the time she only dimly perceived.
Derek Roberts, by dint of not resting the horse when it was beaten, urged Billyboy forwards into fourth place close to the winning post, knowing that Angela would like fourth better than fifth or sixth or seventh. Clement Scott smiled to himself as he watched. Fourth or seventh, the horse had won no prize money, but that lad Derek, with his good looks and his crafty ways, he certainly knew how to keep the owners sweet.
