Sleeping Dogs

by Thomas Perry

  He remembered that Eddie Mastrewski would not sleep in a bed when he was working: he would rent a room, move the mattress to the floor and sleep there with a pistol beside him. Once he and Eddie had taken a motel room and slept in the car, and that night Eddie had been right. At three in the morning two men carrying shotguns had burst into the room. Until Eddie had started the car he could hear the two of them in the dark room blowing hole after hole in the twin beds—a blast, then a metallic slide and click, then another blast. Even as they pulled away, he could still hear the firing and see the muzzle flashes through the open doorway, lighting the walls and leaving a bright orange afterimage floating behind his eyes.

  As Schaeffer stepped onto the floor he heard a quiet clicking sound, and realized that someone was trying to turn the handle on the bedroom door. He walked toward it and listened.

  “Oh, damn.” It was the voice of The Honourable Meg. Then there was a small thump on the door. It was a steel fire door that he had bought from a restaurant-supply warehouse in London, so the sound of her fist on it carried no resonance. “Ouch. Damn it, Michael. I know you’re in there. Mrs. Satterthwaite said so. Get up and open this door.”

  “Just a minute,” he called. It was only at times like this, when he had been asleep and had wandered in the places that dreams constructed for him, that the name still sounded strange to him. He put on his bathrobe and moved to the side of the door. There was no telling who she might bring: members of the entourage of overbred young aristocrats she swept along with her, or the regimental band of the Thirty-Eleventh Welsh Borderers in full battle regalia. He opened the door and saw that she was alone. She wore a wide picture hat and a thin, sleeveless dress of yellow cotton. She had calculated today’s costume as striking, the bold and direct look of the big-eyed young girls in nineteenth-century paintings who had such oddly curly hair. Was that Turner? No, he was the one where the sky looked as if a nuclear war were being fought somewhere in the suburbs. It was somebody else. As soon as he opened the door, she snatched the hat off her head and marched into the room, already talking.

  “There’s not much time, so you’ll have to be quick about it. This place is ridiculous. You know that, don’t you? Of course you do, but you don’t care at all. It was a perfectly decent old house, and you’ve made it look as though Hitler had escaped and built a bunker in Arizona, then went even madder and moved it intact to Bath. How can anyone be expected to surprise you?”

  “I don’t like surprises. I like sleep.”

  She looked at him slyly. “It’s because you wake up with an erection, isn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It is. Don’t deny it. You’re afraid Mrs. Satterthwaite will walk in and set a tea tray on it and you’ll be discovered. Hurry up, now. Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Hurry up with what?”

  “We’re going to Brighton for the races, and the horses are only going to wait so long for the likes of you.”

  Schaeffer had only a vague notion of the whereabouts of Brighton. It was near the sea somewhere in the southeast. “Isn’t that a little far?”

  “No problem. Jimmy Pinchasen has offered to take us all in his Bentley, and he drives as though he’d signed a suicide pact. His family was really named Pinchausen, but they changed it when they came here with George the First because he was German too, so Jimmy has a genetic desire to drive the way they do on the autobahn.”

  He sat back down on the bed. “I don’t think so.”

  “If you don’t believe me, then ask him.”

  “I mean the other races.” He thought for a moment. “I’m not much of a gambler.” It was true. He never gambled, and yet he’d had terrible luck at it. After he had done his last job, he had gone to Las Vegas to collect. They had sent him to a casino to pretend to play blackjack, and he remembered the sight of the dealer’s perfect, paraffin-white fingers making face cards appear from the shoe in front of him. The dealer had been a mechanic they had brought in just to pay him with chips, so that he would go out into the darkness loaded down with money, his senses dulled by the warm, fat, stupid feeling that winners had.

  “We’ll talk about that in a few minutes, when you’re finished and can be expected to think clearly.”

  “Finished with what?”

  She tossed her hat and purse on the nearest chair. “With me, silly. I’m wearing only the kind of undergarments that the worst sort of woman wears to inflame the jaded desires of men like you. See?” She lifted her skirt, and showed him that she was wearing only a garter belt and stockings, then dropped the skirt again.

  He looked up into her eyes, but the flash of white thigh was fresh in his memory. “Well, you’ve got my attention.”

  “Come on, Michael. I sincerely hope this pleases you, because I’ve been thinking about it ever since I woke up this morning, and walking over here feeling secretly naked, and—well, it’s gotten me into rather a state. So, if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon forgo some of the preliminaries I’m entitled to in favor of immediate gratification.” She looked down at his bathrobe, which was beginning to slip open. “Thank God,” she said. “So would you.”

  Lying on the bed, he stared up at the glass-brick window. The sun was higher now, and there were squares that looked like small golden containers of sunlight. The Honourable Meg was in front of the mirror, slipping the yellow dress over her head. “Look sharp, old fellow,” she said. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

  “I thought you said we’d talk about it.”

  “Of course we will, while you’re getting ready. If you like, we can talk about it all the way to Brighton.” She glanced at him, then shook her head. “I agreed to go because I know you have only two emotions: curiosity and lack of curiosity. I thought you’d be curious about horses.”

  He stared at the ceiling. It wasn’t as though he were about to walk into one of the gambling clubs in London with a beautiful woman on his arm and two or three loud, half-drunk young Englishmen drawing attention to themselves. Brighton probably wasn’t the sort of place he had to be wary of. And he’d seen Pinchasen’s Bentley. It looked quiet and conservative, almost absurdly so, with slightly tinted windows in the back seat. He could tell from the wall of light that the sun already had warmed the earth and dried the dew on the grass. He sat up, walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Like everything else in the house that was intended to perform a function, he’d had it installed. It had Swiss fixtures and Italian tiles and French porcelain, and looked as though it had been assembled in a coop in Manhattan. As soon as he felt the hot water on his skin, he admitted that he already had a high opinion of the day. The decision was behind him; he was going to please Meg. After ten years the surviving capos in the United States wouldn’t be thinking about doing each other favors by spotting people like him in remote places. Instead they would be worrying about some DA hauling in their children’s baby-sitters as witnesses to convict them of conspiracy. He could afford to relax a little.

  “Do you go back to the States often?” Peter Filching asked it as though he were stating a fond wish. They could feel the car accelerating relentlessly as the long straight stretch of road seemed to be getting used up.

  “No,” Schaeffer answered, then sensed that he needed to elaborate or become the subject of conversation at a future dinner, where an American who was dull-witted and reticent wouldn’t be particularly surprising, so that Peter would have to add entertaining details. He glanced at the windshield and felt the same sensation he often felt in airplanes: would the vehicle lift up in time, or hurtle into the woods at the end of the runway? “Years ago, there was an advertising campaign built around the slogan ‘See America First.’ So I did. I’d planned to see the rest of the world second, but now Jimmy’s driving, and I’m glad I didn’t pay for any tickets in advance.”

  Jimmy Pinchasen’s pointed jaw dropped and he bared his long white teeth to bray, “Haw.” There was a moment of pronounced deceleration as the big sedan drifted int
o the turn at the end of the road, and all the passengers braced themselves to keep from sliding into one another.

  “Too bad,” said Peter Filching as he shrugged to elbow his way off the door, where the centrifugal force had plastered him. “I’ve heard you can now pick up bargains there on certain things that used to be expensive.”

  Meg let out a groan. “Michael doesn’t want to buy you cocaine, Peter.” She squeezed his arm. “It’s passé in America now anyway.”

  “Is it?” Peter’s jaw tightened. If he hadn’t been forced into exile in a place like Bath for the past two years, he would know these things. But the disasters he had suffered at the hands of the Frenchwoman he had met in Cap Ferrat had been impossible to hide from his father. In a year he had exhausted the careful husbandry of generations of Filchings who had made themselves blind fiddling over ledgers in the East India Company headquarters in Calcutta and then had patiently awaited the rewards of compound interest in the family stronghold outside Bath. And that was the worst of his luck, to be born in a place that had glittered with celebrity and social lightning a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Jimmy Pinchasen executed a sedate approximation of a power shift to bring the old Bentley out of the turn. The beautifully meshed gears survived the experiment and the car rumbled to reach its former cruising speed, and soon there were hedgerows slipping past the window again in an exciting blur of green.

  Jimmy glanced in the mirror to catch a glimpse of Meg and her middle-aged American in the back seat. The Honourable Margaret Holroyd certainly wasn’t interested in the man’s money, if he had any. The thought intruded on Jimmy’s complacent consciousness that perhaps the fellow was some kind of sexual athlete. Those fellows—Indian mystics and Jamaican ska singers and South American Marxist poets—all seemed to flock to the south of England to debauch high-born young Englishwomen. It seemed as though every few weeks he was hearing that the daughter of the Twelfth Earl of Something was temporarily not being invited to things because she was having it on with a Masai warrior with great beaded gewgaws hanging from his ears. Jimmy glanced in the mirror again. This time he slouched to the left so that he could see himself in the foreground. He studied his beloved and familiar head, the shape of the nose and chin and the complicated molding of the noble brow, and above it the thin blond hair. When it was time for marriage, they would have to come to men like him, the Last Englishman on Earth.

  Jimmy was distracted when they all felt the subtle change in the air and the sudden drop in temperature signifying that the ocean was near. “Are we there?” asked Schaeffer.

  “No,” said The Honourable Meg. “This is just Southampton. Now we hurtle along the M27, then careen onto the A27 to Brighton. By the time we get there you’ll feel as though you’d ridden a horse yourself.”

  “Are you a horseman, Michael?” Peter Filching’s voice carried some dim hope.

  Schaeffer didn’t like to remember the horse. He had been trapped in the barn at Carlo Balacontano’s house outside Saratoga. He had found himself beside a huge beast, all taut muscles, distrust and outrage because a smaller, two-legged animal had slipped into its stall. The big white eyes had rolled in their sockets, and the long face had swung around, the nostrils frantically twitching and sucking in deep breaths as it prepared to hammer him against the wall of the stall with its iron-clad hooves. He had opened the gate, clambered onto the big animal’s back, cut the rope and clung to it as it shot out of the warm building and across the pasture over the thin blanket of snow, then flew over a fence. The pair of them had been combined into a single mass of terror and energy, his own fear of being shot by Bala’s soldiers merging with the beast’s fear of everything and everybody, and his fear of being thrown to the frozen ground from this height and speed working to spur the horse’s fear that it couldn’t run fast enough to free itself of the vile creature clutching its back and mane. Then, unaccountably, the horse had come to a stop at the second fence, some dim and cloudy memory reminding it that on the other side was the road, which it feared more than the night, the cold or the intruder on its back. He had slid off and muttered, “Thanks for the ride, you big, stupid bastard,” and slipped through the fence into the darkness while Bala’s men were still fishtailing their big Cadillacs down the icy driveway to intercept his nonexistent car on the road. Months later, when he was already in England, he had read that one of Carl Bala’s horses had won a big race in Florida. He had always thought it might be this one. It had been granted brief fame not because it won the race but because by then it was the property of the Internal Revenue Service. They had attached Bala’s visible assets during the murder trial, but by then it had been too late for even the IRS to reclaim the entry fee, so they’d had to let the horse run.

  “Not me,” Schaeffer said. “I haven’t been on a horse since the pony rides when I was a kid. How about you?”

  The car sped along the highway, floating past other vehicles as though they were laboring against a thicker medium, like water. “We don’t keep horses anymore,” said Peter regretfully.

  The conversation became intermittent and tentative, as conversations involving Michael Schaeffer often were. There were always questions that required answers about his life before Bath, or that might reveal something about his education, income or past acquaintances. Schaeffer was quick and responsive, but his mind always seemed to be full of observations about the present. He never introduced the past except as a way of prompting someone to talk and thus divert attention away from Michael Schaeffer.

  Meg sidled into the void as they reached the outskirts of Brighton. “Michael needs a Baedeker tour. He’s never been to Brighton before.” The two men in the front seat were silent. “All right, then,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”

  They cruised slowly past the Royal Pavilion. Its vaguely Arabic spires and domes made Schaeffer think of Disneyland, but Meg supplied the commentary. “The Prince Regent built this as a playhouse where he could get away from it all.”

  “Which prince?” asked Michael. He had accepted his responsibility to feign interest.

  “Later he was George the Fourth. But all his friends built houses here too, and that was the start of the carnival mess you see around you. What you can’t see is in the palace—the reason why Peter and I have always been so close, like brother and sister, almost.”

  “We have?” said Peter Filching. “I wasn’t aware.”

  “You know. The mock Oriental bed in the red bedroom.” To Michael she said, “Most of the place was refurnished in Regency furniture from the Royal Collection. But that bed was bought by the National Trust from my father only ten years ago. It used to be in the family digs in Yorkshire, but it was moved to Bath during some massive housecleaning a couple of generations ago. I was conceived on it, and I’ve always suspected Peter was, too. My father probably felt guilty …”

  “Nonsense,” Peter protested.

  Jimmy Pinchasen coughed and cleared his throat. “I think I’ll drive up and let you two out right at the track. Peter and I will put the Bentley where they won’t crash a lorry full of horse fodder into it, and then catch up.” He pulled the big car over into a crowd of pedestrians, letting them grab each other and sidestep to avoid the gleaming machine’s inexorable progress into their midst. Once out of danger, they glared into the dark windows impotently.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Meg. “I’m a very good walker and I wore sensible shoes.”

  “I insist,” said Jimmy. He glanced at the silent Filching. “I really do.”

  Meg opened the door and stepped out onto the grass. “Come on, Michael. We’ll go tell the horses what we want them to do.”

  Schaeffer got out of the car and stood beside her as the vehicle resumed its deadly progress through the crowd. “Your story offended him.”

  “Peter? Don’t worry. As soon as he’s served his time as the Monk of Bath and his father frees his trust fund, he’ll return to Babylon and tell the story himself, after altering it to his taste. I�
�ve always done this to him.”

  “I wonder if anyone will believe it.”

  “He doesn’t have the conviction I have, but they might,” she said. He noticed that she was assessing him as though she were trying to decide how far she could push him. “I taught him to lie when we were children, just in case I wanted him later as a lover.”

  Beside the grandstand, several small wooden structures had been erected that were not much more than desks with awnings. They looked as though they had been clapped together in haste, but the apparent age of the wood argued that they had been assembled on the grass for the races and carted off each season for generations. The awning over one of them bore a printed sign that read B. BALDWIN, TURF ACCOUNTANT. When the Bentley had knifed its way into the crowd, Mr. Baldwin had grinned and displayed the peculiar arrangement of his teeth, which were straight and even, but had small, regular spaces between them as though they had once belonged to a much smaller person. In fact, they had: Mr. Baldwin, a man in his forties whose face had already acquired a permanent, wizened squint, still had his baby teeth. The others had never grown in to displace them, and when he’d had his jaw X-rayed, he had learned that he was the victim of a minor genetic disorder. One theory expressed by the scientific minds around the betting circuit was that he was so greedy he couldn’t bear to give up anything he had. But another theory that gained more popular credence was that Baldwin was like a shark, growing row after row of sharp little teeth, each row moving forward to replace the last as he wore them out on the victims of his voracity.