by Dick Francis
“Oh yes, all right. I’ve seen Ted do it often. He and Ruth are always swapping programs that way. I’ve got the tapes here beside me. I made Ted tell me where to find them. I’ll go and get the recorder now, if you’ll hang on, and then I’ll play them to you straight away.”
I had called her from the office because of the message recorder already fitted to that telephone, and when she returned I recorded the precious programs on Luke’s supply of fresh unused tapes, which might not have been of prime computer standard but were all the same a better bet, I reckoned, than trying to record new machine language on top of old.
Cassie came into the office and listened to the scratchy whining noises running on and on and on.
“Horrible,” she said: but to me, sweet music. A ransom to the future. Passport to a peaceful world. In a sudden uprush of optimism entirely at variance with the gloom of my drive home from Leicester, I convinced myself that this time, now that we had the genuine article, our troubles would come to an end. The solution was still, as it had always been, to make Angelo rich, and at last it could be done.
“I’ll give these tapes to Angelo,” I said, “and we’ll go away from the cottage for just a while . . . a few weeks . . . just until he’s won enough not to want his revenge. And we’ll be free of him at last, thank God.”
“Where shall we go?”
“Not far. Decide tomorrow.”
When three tapes were full and the noises fell quiet, I switched off the recording part of the machine and spoke again to Jane.
“I’m very grateful,” I said. “More than I can say.”
“My dear William, I’m so sorry . . .”
“Don’t be,” I said. “You’ve saved my life.” Quite literally, probably, I thought. “Everything,” I said, “will be all right.”
One shouldn’t say such things. One really shouldn’t.
20
Cassie came with me in the early morning to see the horses work on the Heath, shivering a little in boots, trousers and padded husky jacket, but glad, she said, to be alive in the free air and the wide spaces. Her breath, like mine, like that of all of the horses, spurted out in lung-shaped plumes of condensing vapor, chilled and gone in a second and quickly renewed, cold transformed to heat within the miracle of bodies.
We had already in a preliminary fashion left the cottage, having packed clothes and necessaries and stowed the suitcases in my car. I had also brought along a briefcase containing the precious tapes and a lot of Luke’s paperwork and had rerouted my telephone calls by a message on the answering system, and it remained only to make a quick return trip to pick up the day’s mail and arrange for future postal deliveries to be left at the pub.
We hadn’t actually decided where we would sleep that night or for the nights to come, but we did between us have a great many friends who might be cajoled, and if the traditional open-house generosity of the racing world failed us, we could for a while afford a hotel. I felt freer and more light-hearted than I had for weeks.
Sim was positively welcoming on the gallops, and Mort asked us to breakfast. We shivered gratefully into his house and warmed up with him on toast and coffee while he slit open his letters with a paperknife and made comments on what he was at the same time reading in the Sporting Life. Mort never did one thing at a time if he could do three.
“I’ve rerouted my telephone messages to you,” I told him. “Do you mind?”
“Have you? No, of course not. Why?”
“The cottage,” I said, “is at the moment uninhabitable.”
“Decorators?” He sounded sympathetic and it seemed simplest to say yes.
“There won’t be many calls,” I promised. “Just Luke’s business.”
“Sure,” he said. He sucked in a boiled egg in two scoops of a spoon. “More coffee?”
“How are the yearlings settling?” I asked.
“Come and see them. Come this afternoon; we’ll be lunging them in the paddock.”
“What’s lunging?” Cassie said.
Mort gave her a fast, forgiving smile and snapped his fingers a few times. “Letting them run around in a big circle on the end of a long rein. Gives them exercise. No one rides them yet. They’ve never been saddled. Too young.”
“I’d like that,” Cassie said, looking thoughtfully at the cast and clearly wondering about the timing.
“Where are you staying?” Mort asked me. “Where can I find you?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said.
“Really? What about here? There’s a bed here, if you like.” He crunched his teeth across half a piece of toast and ate it in one gulp. “You could answer your own phone calls. Makes sense.”
“Well,” I said. “For a night or two . . . very grateful.”
“Settled then.” He grinned cheerfully at Cassie. “My daughter will be pleased. Got no wife, you know. She scarpered. Miranda gets bored, that’s my daughter. Sixteen, needs a girl’s company. Stay for a week. How long do you need?”
“We don’t know,” Cassie said.
He nodded briskly. “Take things as they come. Very sensible.” He casually picked up the paperknife and began cleaning his nails with it, reminding me irresistibly of Jonathan, who throughout my childhood had done his with the point of a rifle bullet.
“I thought I’d go to Ireland at the weekend,” I said, “and try to make peace with Donavan.”
Mort gave me a blinding grin. “I hear you’re a turd and an ignorant bastard, and should be dragged six times round the Curragh by your heels. At the least.”
The telephone standing on the table by his elbow rang only once, sharply, before Mort was shouting “Hullo?” down the receiver. “Oh,” he said, “hullo, Luke.” He made signaling messages to me with his eyebrows. “Yes, he’s here right now, having breakfast.” He handed over the receiver, saying, “Luke rang your number first, he says.”
“William,” Luke said, sounding relaxed and undemanding. “How are the new yearlings?”
“Fine. No bad reports.”
“Thought I’d come over to see them. See what you’ve gotten me. I feel like a trip. Listen, fella, do me a favor, make me some reservations at the Bedford Arms for two nights, fourteenth and fifteenth October?”
“Right,” I said.
“Best to Cassie,” he said. “Bring her to dinner at the Bedford on the fourteenth, OK? I’d sure like to meet her. And, fella . . . I’ll be going on to Dublin. You aiming to go to the Ballsbridge Sales?”
“Yeah, I thought to. Ralph Finnigan died. They’re selling all his string.”
Luke sounded appreciative. “What would you pick, fella? What’s the best?”
“Oxidize.” Two years old, well-bred, fast, a prospect for next June’s Derby and bound to be expensive.
Luke gave a sort of rumbling grunt. “You’d send it to Donavan?”
“I sure would.”
The grunt became a chuckle. “See you, fella, on the fourteenth.”
There was a click and he was gone. Mort said, “Is he coming?” and I nodded and told him when. “Most years he comes in October,” Mort said.
He asked if we’d like to see the second lot exercise, but I was anxious to be finished at the cottage so Cassie and I drove the six miles back to the village and stopped first at the pub. Mine host, who had been invisible earlier, was now outside in his shirtsleeves sweeping dead leaves off his doorstep.
“Aren’t you cold?” Cassie said.
Bananas, perspiring in contrast to us in our huskies, said he had been shifting beer barrels in his cellar.
We explained about going away for a while, and why.
“Come inside,” he said, finishing the leaves. “Like some coffee?”
We drank some with him in the bar, but without the ice cream and brandy he stirred into his own. “Sure,” he said amiably. “I’ll take in your mail. Also papers, milk, whatever you like. Anything else?”
“How absolutely extravagantly generous are you feeling?” Cassie said.
&
nbsp; He gave her a sideways squint over his frothy mugful. “Spill it,” he said.
“My little yellow car is booked in today for service and a road test, and I just wondered—”
“If I’d drive it along to that big garage for you?”
“William will bring you back,” she said persuasively.
“For you, Cassie, anything,” he said. “Straight away.”
“Plaster off this afternoon,” she said happily, and I looked at her clear gray eyes and thought that I loved her so much it was ridiculous. Don’t ever leave me, I thought. Stay around forever. It would be lonely now without you. It would be agony.
We all went in my car along to the cottage, and I left it out in the road because of Cassie wanting Bananas to back her little yellow peril out of the garage onto the driveway. She and he walked toward the garage doors to open them, and I, half watching them, went across to unlock the front door and retrieve the letters which would have fallen on the mat just inside.
The cottage lay so quiet and still that our precautions seemed unnecessary, like crowd barriers on the moon.
Angelo is unpredictable, I told myself. Unstable as Mount St. Helens. One might as well expect reasonable behavior from an earthquake, even if one does ultimately wish him to prosper.
REMEMBER TIGERS.
There was a small banging noise out by the garage. Nothing alarming. I paid little attention.
Six envelopes lay on the mat. I bent down, picked them up, shuffled through them. Three bills for Luke, a tax notice for the cottage, an advertisement for books and a letter to Cassie from her mother in Sydney. Ordinary mundane letters, not worth dying for.
I gave one final glance around the pretty sitting room, seeing the red-checked frills on the curtains and the corn dollies moving gently in the breeze through the door. It wouldn’t be so long, I thought, before we were back.
The kitchen door stood open, the light from the kitchen window lying in a reflecting gleam on the white paint: and across the gleam a shadow moved.
Bananas and Cassie, I thought automatically, coming in through the kitchen door. But they couldn’t. It was locked.
There was hardly time even for alarm, even for primeval instinct, even for rising hair. The silencer of a pistol came first into the room, a dark silhouette against the white paint, and then Angelo, dressed in black, balloon-high with triumph, towering with malice, looking like the devil.
There was no point in speech. I knew conclusively that he was going to shoot me, that I was looking at my own death. There was about him such intention of action, such a surrender to recklessness, such an intoxication of destructiveness, that nothing and no one could have talked him out of it.
With a thought so light-fast that it wasn’t even conscious I reached out to the baseball bat which still lay on the windowsill. Grasped its handle end with the dexterity of desperation and swung toward Angelo in one continuous movement from twisting foot through legs, trunk, arm and hand to bat, bringing the weight of the wood down toward the hand which held the pistol with the whole force of my body.
Angelo fired straight at my chest from six feet away. I felt a jerking thud and nothing else and wasn’t even astonished, and it didn’t deflect my swing even a fraction. A split second later the bat crunched down onto Angelo’s wrist and hand and broke them as thoroughly as he’d broken Cassie’s arm.
I reeled from the force of that impact and spun across the room, and Angelo dropped the gun on the carpet and hugged his right arm to his body, yelling one huge shout at the pain of it and doubling over and running awkwardly out of the front door and down the path to the road.
I watched him through the window. I stood in a curious sort of inactivity, knowing that there was a future to come that had not yet arrived, a consequence not yet felt but inexorable, the fact of a bullet through my flesh.
I thought: Angelo has finally bagged his Derry. Angelo has taken his promised revenge. Angelo knows his shot hit me straight on target. Angelo will be convinced that he has done right, even if it costs him a lifetime in prison. In Angelo, despite his smashed wrist, despite his prospects, there would be at that moment an overpowering, screaming, unencompassable delirium of joy.
The battle was over, and the war. Angelo would be satisfied that in every physical, visible way, he had won.
Bananas and Cassie came running through the front door and looked enormously relieved to see me standing there, leaning a little against a cupboard but apparently unhurt.
“That was Angelo!” Cassie said.
“Yeah.”
Bananas looked at the baseball bat which lay on the floor and said, “You bashed him.”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Cassie said with satisfaction. “His turn for the dreaded plaster.”
Bananas saw Angelo’s gun and leaned forward to pick it up.
“Don’t touch it,” I said.
He looked up inquiringly, still half-bent.
“Fingerprints,” I said. “Jail him for life.”
“But—”
“He shot me,” I said.
I saw the disbelief on their faces begin to turn to anxiety.
“Where?” Cassie said.
I made a fluttery movement with my left hand toward my chest. My right arm felt heavy and without strength, and I thought unemotionally that it was because some of the muscles needed to lift it were torn.
“Shall I get an ambulance?” Bananas asked.
“Yes.”
They didn’t understand, I thought, how bad it was. They couldn’t see any damage, and I was concerned mostly about how to tell them without frightening Cassie to death.
It wasn’t that at that point it felt so terrible . . . but I still knew in a detached fashion that it soon would be. There was an internal disintegration going on like the earth shifting, like foundations slipping away. Accelerating, but still slow.
I said, “Ring Cambridge hospital.”
It all sounded so calm.
I slid down, without meaning to, to my knees, and saw the anxiety on their faces turn to horror.
“You’re really hurt,” Cassie said with spurting alarm.
“It’s, er, er . . .” I couldn’t think what to say.
She was suddenly beside me, kneeling, finding with terrified scarlet fingers that the entry wound that didn’t show through the front of my padded husky jacket led to a bigger bleeding exit at the back.
“Oh, my God,” she said in stunned absolute shock.
Bananas strode over for a look and I could see from both their faces that they did know now. There was no longer any need to seek the words.
He turned grim-faced away and picked up the telephone, riffling urgently through the directory and dialing the number.
“Yes,” he was saying. “Yes, it’s an emergency. A man’s been shot. Yes, I did say shot. Through the chest. Yes, he’s alive. Yes, he’s conscious. No, the bullet can’t be in him.” He gave the address of the cottage and brief directions. “Look, stop asking damn fool questions. Tell them to shift their arse. Yes, it does look bloody serious, for God’s sake stop wasting time. My name? Christ Almighty, John Frisby.” He crashed the receiver down in anger and said, “They want to know if we’ve reported it to the police. What the hell does it matter?”
I couldn’t be bothered to tell him that all gunshot wounds had to be reported. Breathing, in fact, was becoming more difficult. Only words that needed to be reported were worth the effort.
“That pistol,” I said. “Don’t put it . . . in a plastic bag. Condensation . . . destroys . . . the prints.”
Bananas looked surprised and I thought that he didn’t realize I was telling him because quite soon I might not be able to. I was beginning to feel most dreadfully ill, with clamminess creeping over my skin and breaking into a sweat on my forehead. I gave a smallish cough and wiped a red streak from my mouth onto the back of my hand. An enveloping wave of weakness washed through me, and I found myself sagging fairly comprehensively against the cupb
oard and then half lying on the floor.
“Oh, William,” Cassie said. “Oh, no.”
If I’d ever doubted she loved me, I had my answer. No one could have acted or feigned the extremity of despair in her voice and in her body.
“Don’t . . . worry,” I said. I tried a smile. I don’t suppose it came off. I coughed again, with worse results.
I was trying to breathe, I thought, through a lake. A lake progressively filling, fed by many springs. It was happening faster now. Much faster. Too fast. I wasn’t ready. Who was ever ready?
I could hear Bananas saying something urgent, but I didn’t know quite what. My wits started drifting. Existence was ceasing to be external. I’m dying, I thought, I really am. Dying too fast.
My eyes were shut and then open again. The daylight looked odd. Too bright. I could see Cassie’s face wet with tears.
I tried to say, “Don’t cry,” but I couldn’t get the breath. Breathing was becoming a sticky near-impossibility.
Bananas was still talking, but distantly.
There was a feeling of everything turning to liquid, of my body dissolving, of a deep subterranean river overflowing its banks and carrying me away.
Dim final astringent thought . . . I’m drowning, God damn it, in my own blood.
21
Cassie’s face was the next thing I saw, but not for more than a day, and it was no longer weeping but asleep and serene. She was sitting by a bed with me in it, surrounded by white things and glass and chromium and a lot of lights. Intensive care, and all that.
I woke by stages over several hours to the pain I hadn’t felt from the shot, and to tubes carrying liquids into and away from my log of clay and to voices telling me over and over that I was lucky to be there; that I had died and was alive.
I thanked them all, and meant it.
Thanked Bananas, who had apparently picked me up and put me in my own car and driven me at about a hundred miles an hour to Cambridge because it was quicker than waiting for the ambulance.
Thanked two surgeons who it seemed had worked all day and then again half the night to stanch and tidy the wreckage of my right lung and stop blood dripping out of the drainage as fast as the transfusions flowed into my arm.
