by Dick Francis
“I dare say not,” Taff said with obstinacy. “But you can take it from me that no bookie on the racecourse will in future give that arrogant so-and-so much more than evens, even if what he’s backing is lame on three legs, carrying two stone overweight and ridden by my old dad.”
“At evens he wouldn’t win over all,” I said.
“So who’s crying? We’re not in the loving-kindness business, you know.”
“Fleece the mugs?”
“You got it.”
He began paying out other successful punters with the rapidity of long practice, but it was seldom that he would go home from a racetrack with less cash than he’d brought. Few bookmakers were gamblers at heart and only the good mathematicians survived.
I drifted away from him and drank some champagne with the similarly fizzing Mort and a little later helped Sim to saddle the filly, who made it another hooray-for-Houston day by a short head. Sim took it more calmly than Mort, but with a satisfaction at least as deep, and he seemed to be admitting and acknowledging at last that I was not an ignorant bossy upstart but a well-meaning colleague and that all Luke’s successes worked for our joint good. I wasn’t sure how or why his attitude had changed. I knew only that a month earlier a friendly drink together in a racecourse bar to celebrate a Houston winner would have been unthinkable.
Thinking more of Mort and Sim and the horses than of the still-active specter of Angelo, I drove from Doncaster to collect Cassie, and from there to a late dinner with Bananas. He too, it appeared, had backed Genotti, more than doubling my own winnings.
“I had a hundred on,” he said.
“I didn’t know you ever bet.”
“On the quiet, now and then. Hearing all I do, how could I not?”
“So what did you hear about Genotti?”
He looked at me pityingly. “Every time you’ve seen that colt work on the gallops you’ve come back like a kid with tickets to the Cup Final.”
“More to the point,” Cassie said, “if you’d used Liam O’Rorke’s system, would it have come up with Genotti?”
“Ah.” I read Bananas’ new menu and wondered what he meant by Prisoner Chicken. Said casually, “Angelo Gilbert backed him.”
What?”
I explained about Angelo, the bookmakers, and stupidity in general.
“He’s blown it,” Cassie said, not without satisfaction.
I nodded. “Into fragments.”
Bananas looked at me thoughtfully. “What’s it going to do for the dear man’s temper?”
“It’s not William’s fault,” Cassie said.
“That trifle didn’t stop him before.”
Cassie looked frowningly alarmed. “What’s Prisoner Chicken?” I said.
Bananas smirked. “Breast of chicken marinated in lemon juice and baked under matchstick-thin bars of herb pastry.”
“It sounds dry,” I said with jaundice.
“Bread and water are optional extras.”
Cassie laughed, and Angelo retreated a little. We ate the Prisoner Chicken, which was predictably a delight of juice and flavor and reminded us not at all of its inspiration.
“I’m going to Ireland tomorrow,” I said to Cassie. “Like to come?”
“Ireland? There and back?”
I nodded. “To see a man about a horse.”
“What else?”
So we spent some of my winnings on her fare, and went down south of Wexford to see the colt all the world wanted: and half the world, it seemed, was there on the same errand, standing around an untidy stable yard with blank faces all carefully not expressing identical inner thoughts.
Cassie watched as the beautifully coupled brown yearling skittered around under the calming hands of the stud groom and unprofessionally pronounced him “sweet.”
“A money machine on the hoof,” I said. “Look at the greed in all those shuttered faces.”
“They just seem uninterested to me.”
“Enthusiasm puts the price up.”
One or two of the bored-looking onlookers advanced to run exploratory hands down the straight young bones, stepping back with poker-playing noncommittal eyes, the whole procedure hushed as if in church.
“Aren’t you going to feel its legs?” Cassie asked.
“Might as well.”
I took my turn in the ritual and found, like everyone else, that the young limbs were cool and firm with tendons like fiddle strings in all the right places. There was also a good strong neck, a well-shaped quarter and most importantly a good depth of chest. Quite apart from his pedigree, which resounded with Classic winners, one couldn’t, I thought, even imagine a better looking animal: all of which meant that the bidding at the sale on Wednesday would rise faster than Bananas Frisby.
We flew thoughtfully back to England and I sent a Telex to Luke.
BIDDING FOR THE HANSEL COLT WILL BE ASTRONOMICAL. I’VE SEEN HIM. HE IS WITHOUT FAULT. HOW HIGH DO YOU WANT ME TO GO?
To which, during the night, I received a reply.
IT’S YOUR JOB, FELLA. YOU DECIDE.
Ouch, I thought. Where is the ceiling? How high is disaster?
Newmarket filled up again for the new week of sales, the most important program of yearling sales of the whole season. Everyone in racing with money to spend brought determination and dreams, and the four-legged babies came in horseboxes from just up the road, from Kent and the Cotswolds, from Devon and Scotland, from across the Irish Sea.
The Hansel colt from Wexford was due to be sold at the prime time of seven-thirty on the Wednesday evening, and by seven the high-rising banks of seats of the sale ring were invisible under a sea of bodies, Cassie somewhere among them. Down near the floor in the pen reserved for probable bidders Donavan was breathing heavily at my elbow as he had been all afternoon, determinedly sober and all the gloomier for it.
“Now you get that little colt, now, you get him for me.” If he’d said it once he’d said it a hundred times, as if repetition of desire could somehow make the purchase certain.
They brought the colt into the ring in the sudden hush of a host of lungs holding back their breath all at once, and the light gleamed on the walking gem, and he did in truth look like a prince who could sire a dynasty.
The bidding for him started not in thousands but in tens of thousands, leaping in seconds to the quarter million and racing away beyond. I waited until the first pause and raised the price by a giant twenty-five thousand, to be immediately capped by a decisive nod from an agent along to my right. I raised another twenty-five and lost it as quickly, and another, and another: and I could go on nodding, I thought, until my head fell off. Nothing easier in the world than spending someone else’s money as fast as zeros running through the meter on a petrol pump.
At eight hundred thousand guineas I just stopped. The auctioneer looked at me inquiringly. I didn’t blink. “Against you, sir,” he said.
“Go on,” said Donavan, thinking I’d merely overlooked that it was my turn. “Go on, go on.”
I shook my head. Donavan turned and literally punched me on the arm in an agony of fear that my dithering would lose him the colt. “Go on, it’s you. Bid, you bugger, bid.”
“Any more, sir?” the auctioneer said.
I again shook my head. Donavan kicked my leg. The auctioneer looked around the silent sale ring. “All done, then?” he said. And after a lifetime’s pause his gavel came down sharply, the clap of opportunity gone forever. “Sold to Mr. O’Flaherty. Next lot, please.”
Under the buzz of comment that followed the supercolt out of the ring, Donavan thrust a furious purple face toward mine and yelled uninhibitedly, “You buggering bastard. Do you know who bought that colt?”
“Yes I do.”
“I’ll kill you, so I will.”
Shades of Angelo . . .
“There’s no reason,” I said, “why Luke should pay for your feud with Mick O’Flaherty.”
“That colt will win the Derby.”
I shook my head. “You’r
e afraid it will.”
“I’ll write to Luke, so I will. I’ll tell him it’s you who’s afraid. Bloody English. I’d kill the lot of you.”
He stalked away with rage pouring visibly from every pore, and I watched him with regret because I would indeed have liked to buy him his little fellow and seen him croon over him to make him a champion.
“Why did you stop?” Cassie asked, taking my arm.
“Does it worry you?”
She blinked. “You know what they’re saying?”
“That I didn’t have the nerve to go on?”
“It was just that I heard—”
I smiled lopsidedly. “My first big battle, and I retreated. Something like that?”
“Something.”
“O’Flaherty and Donavan hate each other so much it curdles their judgment. I meant to go as far as seven hundred and fifty thousand guineas and I thought I’d get the colt, I really did, because that’s an extremely high price for any yearling. I went one bid higher still, but it wasn’t enough. O’Flaherty was standing behind his agent prodding him in the back to make him carry on. I could see him. O’Flaherty was absolutely determined to buy the colt. To spite Donavan, I think. It isn’t sense to go on bidding against someone compelled by raw emotion . . . so I stopped.”
“But what if he does win the Derby?”
“About ten thousand thoroughbred colts were born last year in the British Isles alone. Then there’s France and America too. One colt from that huge crop will win the Derby the year after next, when he’s three. The odds are against it being this one.”
“You’re so cool.”
“No,” I said truthfully. “Bruised and disgruntled.”
We drove home and I sent the Telex to Luke.
REGRET UNDERBIDDER AT EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND POUNDS EXCLUDING TAX FOR HANSEL COLT. DONAVAN’S DEADLY RIVAL MICK O’FLAHERTY SUCCESSFUL AT EIGHT HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX THOUSAND TWO FIFTY. DONAVAN FURIOUS, SACK ME IF YOU LIKE. REGARDS, WILLIAM.
The return message came within an hour.
IF THE COLT WINS THE DERBY YOU OWE ME TEN MILLION POUNDS. OTHERWISE YOU ARE STILL EMPLOYED. BEST TO CASSIE.
“Thank God for that,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
Two busy days later I dropped her at work and drove on southwestward to Berkshire to visit Luke’s other trainers during the morning and to go on to see three of their horses race at Newbury in the afternoon; and there again on the racecourse was Angelo.
This time he saw me immediately before I had time to dodge; he came charging across a patch of grass, took roughly hold of my lapel, and told me the betting system didn’t work.
“You sold me a pup. You’ll be sorry.” He looked quickly around as if hoping to find us both on deserted moorland, but as there was only concrete, well populated, he smothered his obvious wish to slaughter me there and then. He was physically tougher, I thought. Less pale, less puffy; the effects of long imprisonment giving way to a healthy tan and tighter muscles, the bull-like quality of the body intensifying. The black eyes . . . cold as ever. I looked at his re-emerging malevolence and didn’t like it a bit.
I pulled his hand off my lapel and dropped it. “There’s nothing wrong with the system,” I said. “It’s not my fault you’ve been trampling all over it like a herd of elephants.”
His voice came back in the familiar bass register. “If I’m still losing by five tomorrow I’ll know you’ve conned me. And I’ll come after you. That’s a promise.”
He turned away abruptly and strode off toward the stands, and in a while I went in search of Taff among the bookmakers.
“The latest on Angelo Gilbert?” He looked down at me from his raised position on an inverted beer crate. “He’s nuts.”
“Are you still offering him rotten odds?”
“Look you, Mr. Derry, I’m too busy to talk now.” He was indeed surrounded by eager customers holding out cash. “If you want to know, buy me a pint after the last race.”
“Right,” I said. “It’s a deal.” And at the end of the afternoon he came with me into the crowded bar and shouted the unexpected news into my attentive ear.
“That man Angelo’s gone haywire. He won big money at York, like I told you, and a fair amount at Doncaster, but before York it seems he lost a packet at Epsom and last Monday he kissed goodbye to a fortune at Goodwood, and today he’s plunged on two horses who finished out of sight. So we’re all back to giving him regular odds. Old Lancer—he works for Joe Glickstein—Honest Joe—you must have seen his stands at all the tracks?” I nodded. “Well, Old Lancer, he took a thousand in readies this afternoon off that Angelo on Pocket Handbook, what couldn’t win if it started yesterday. I mean, the man’s a screwball. He’s no more playing Liam O’Rorke’s system than I’m a bleeding fairy.”
I watched him drink his beer, feeling great dismay that Angelo couldn’t manage the system even to the extent of letting it find him the right horses. He had to be guessing some of the answers to the multifarious questions instead of looking them up accurately in the form books: skipping the hard work out of laziness and still trusting the scores which the computer returned. But a computer couldn’t advise him, couldn’t tell him that omitting an answer here and an answer there would upset all those delicately balanced weightings and inevitably distort the all-important win factors.
Angelo was dumb, dim, stupid.
Angelo would think it was my fault.
“They say his father’s getting tired of it,” Taff said.
“Who?”
“That Angelo person’s father. Old Harry Gilbert. Made a packet out of bingo halls, they say, before he got struck.”
“Er, struck?”
Taff brought a lined brown outdoor face out of the beer mug. “Struck down with arthritis, I think it is. He can’t hardly walk, anyway. Comes to the races sometimes in a wheelchair, and it’s him what has the cash.”
Enlightened I thought back to the previous week at Doncaster, seeing in memory Angelo giving a racecard to an elderly chairbound man. Angelo’s father—still indulgent, still supportive, still paying for his deadly middle-aged son.
I thanked Taff for his information. “What’s this Angelo to you?” he said.
“A longtime no friend of my brother’s.”
He made an accepting motion with his head, looked at his watch and finished his beer at a gulp, saying he’d left his clerk looking after the day’s takings and he’d be happier having his mitts on them himself. “We’ve all had a good day,” he said cheerfully, “with those two odds-on favorites getting stuffed.”
I drove homeward and collected Cassie, who was waiting at the hospital after what they had called a progress assessment.
“Plaster off next week,” she complained. “I wanted it off this afternoon, but they wouldn’t.”
The plaster by then was itching badly, the “REMEMBER TIGERS” was fading, Cassie was insisting that her arm felt mended and impatience had definitely set in.
We again went to the sales: I seemed to have spent half a lifetime around that sale ring, and Luke now owned twenty-eight yearlings he had not yet seen. I had signed checks on his behalf for nearly two million pounds and was tending to dream about it at night. There was only the Saturday morning left now, an undistinguished program according to the catalogue, the winding-down after the long excitements of the week. I went early by habit and with only short premeditation bought very cheaply the first lot of the day, an undistinguished-looking liver chestnut colt whose bloodlines were sounder to the inspection than his spindly legs. One couldn’t have foretold on that misty autumn morning that this was the prince who would sire a dynasty, but that in the end was what happened. My mind, as I signed for him and arranged for him to be sent along the road to Mort’s stable, was more immediately on the conversation I’d had with Jonathan on the telephone the evening before.
“I want to talk to Angelo’s father,” I said. “Do you remember where he lived?”
“Of course I do. Welwy
n Garden City. If you give me a minute I’ll find the street and the number.” There was a pause while he searched. “Here we are. Seventeen, Pemberton Close. He may have moved, of course, and don’t forget, William, he won’t be in the least pleasant. I heard he was threatening all sorts of dire revenges against me after Angelo was convicted, but I didn’t hang around long enough for him to get going.”
“Angelo seems to depend on him for cash,” I said.
“That figures.”
“Angelo’s making a right balls-up of the betting system. He’s losing his father’s money and he’s blaming me for it, and stoking up again toward volcanic eruption with me as the designated target for the lava flow.”
“He’s an absolute pest.”
“He sure is. How does one rid oneself of a monster that won’t go away? Don’t answer that. Engineering Angelo back into jail permanently is all I can think of, and even then I would need to do it so that he didn’t know who’d done it; and would it even on the whole be fair?”
“Provocation? Put a crime in his way and invite him to commit it?”
“As you say.”
“No, it wouldn’t exactly be fair.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t think so,” I said.
“Nothing much short of murder would put him back inside for the whole of his life. Anything less and he’d be out breathing fire again, as you said before. And however could you line up a living victim?”
“Mm,” I said. “It’s impossible. I still think the only lasting solution is to make Angelo prosper, so I’ll see if I can persuade his old dad to that effect.”
“His old dad is an old rattlesnake, don’t forget.”
“His old dad is in a wheelchair.”
“Is he?” Jonathan seemed surprised. “All the same—remember that rattlesnakes don’t have legs.”
I reckoned that on that Saturday afternoon Angelo would still be blundering around the bookies on Newbury racecourse and that his father might have stayed at home, so it was then that I drove to Welwyn Garden City, leaving Cassie wandering around the cottage with a duster and an unaccustomedly domestic expression.
