Sleeping Dogs (3 page)

“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 into 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. B
ALDWIN
, T
URF
A
CCOUNTANT.
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.

Baldwin’s grin caused the two men with him to follow his gaze to see what was causing the commotion. They saw the beautiful girl get out of the Bentley and listened to Baldwin’s appraisal: “I’d give five hundred pounds.”

“For one of her earrings,” said Mack Talarese. “That’s a Rolls she just got out of.” His name was Mario, but nobody called him that anymore except his relatives. One of them was his uncle, Tony Talarese, whom he called Uncle Antonio with the greatest humility and a hint of gratitude. Uncle Antonio lived in New Jersey, but he had managed to get young Mario a chance to make his bones as a soldier for the Carpaccio brothers, two entrepreneurs who were trying to establish a business in England. Someday, Uncle Antonio hoped, his nephew would wear Savile Row suits and carry a briefcase into a two-hundred-year-old building, where he would manipulate the computers and fax machines Antonio thought of as the instruments of power, buying and selling and controlling the immense flow of cash that would be coming from America. The money would be translated into investments of incalculable value and unassailable strength. But first Mario would need a few years to make himself into the man who could do it. He needed the experience that would make him different from the other men in tailor-made suits in the old, gleaming offices. He had to know without faltering what he would do when a man tried to avoid him on the day his loan was due, what he would do when one of his hookers withheld a portion of her earnings, what he would do when a rival appeared to be surpassing him. He had to know that when the time came he would not hesitate to act with force and certainty. He had to know where all that money came from.

Now Mario saw something that struck him as the greatest good luck. The man who had emerged from the
Rolls-Royce
looked familiar. Mario couldn’t remember his name, but at home they would sure as hell remember. He was the hired specialist who had gone crazy years ago and whacked all those guys. He had killed even Mr. Castiglione, who must have been eighty at the time, living like a withered emperor in a fortress on a man-made oasis outside Las Vegas. Mario considered how to use his good luck. He could call his uncle Antonio on the telephone and tell him what he had seen. But then his uncle would be the one who would get the credit; he would put a couple of men on a plane. If Mario could just handle this himself, take a careful grasp of the good luck so that it wouldn’t slip through his fingers, he could take years off his apprenticeship. Somebody would hear about it and elevate him to a place of respect that was rare for a man of his years, and free him from dependence on the meager patronage of his conservative uncle.