Nightwork (25 page)

Coombs, a booted, ruddy-faced, sly-looking, tiny old man with a gravelly outdoor voice, had pointed out our horse to us. He looked like every other brownish horse to me, with wild rolling eyes and what seemed to me dangerously thin legs. “He’s coming along nicely, the colt, nicely,” Coombs said. Then we all had to duck behind some trees as one of the other horses started running backward toward us, almost as fast as if it had been going forward. “They’re a little nervy these cold mornings,” Coombs said indulgently. “That one’s only a wee two-year-old filly. Playful at that age.

The exercise boy finally got the creature under control and we could come out from behind the trees. “How are the splints, Jack?” Fabian asked. The connoisseur of paintings and sculpture who had led me around the Louvre and who had discoursed on Manet to the critic the night before was gone now, replaced by a knowing horseman, expert on the fine points and obscure ailments of the equine race.

“Ah, I wouldn’t worry, man,” Coombs said. “He’s coming along something splendid.”

“When will he be ready to run?” I said, the first words I had uttered since I had been introduced to the trainer. “I mean in a regular race?”

“Ah, man,” Coombs wagged his head ambiguously. “Ah, man, that’s another question altogether, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to push the colt, now, would ye? You can see he’s not totally hardened yet, can ye not?” He had the damndest Irish-English way of talking for a man whose family had lived in France since the Empress Josephine.

“He does look as though another couple of weeks of work wouldn’t do him any harm,” Fabian said.

“He still seems to be favoring his off foreleg a bit,” Lily said.

“Ah, ye noticed, ma’am.” Coombs beamed at her. “It’s more psychological than anything else, you understand. After the firing.”

“Yes,” Lily said. “I’ve seen it before.”

“Ah, and a pleasure it is not to be having to hold the hand of an anxious owner.” Coombs beamed more widely.

“Could you give us an estimate?” I asked stubbornly, remembering the six thousand dollars invested in Rêve de Minuit. “Two weeks, three weeks, a month?”

“Ah, man,” Coombs said, head wagging again, “I don’t like to be pinned down. It’s not my way to raise an owner’s hopes and then have to disappoint the good man.”

“Still, you could make a guess,” I persisted.

Coombs looked at me steadily, his little gray eyes, set in a thousand wrinkles, suddenly winter-cold. “Ay, I could guess. But I won’t.
He’ll
tell me when he’s ready to run.” He smiled jovially, the ice in his eyes melting instantaneously. “Well, we’ve seen enough for the morning, wouldn’t ye say? Now let’s go and have a bit of breakfast. Ma’am …” Gallantly, he offered Lily his arm and led the way out of the forest with her.

“You’ve got to be careful with these fellows, Douglas,” Fabian said in a low voice as we followed along a path through the woods. “They can be touchy. He’s one of the best in the business. We’re lucky to have him. You’ve got to let these old boys make the pace themselves.”

“It’s our horse, isn’t it? Our six thousand bucks?”

“I wouldn’t talk like that where he could hear you, old man. Ah, it’s going to be a lovely day.” We were out of the forest by now and the sun was breaking through the mist, shining on the coats of the horses that were ambling in slow strings back toward the barns. “Doesn’t this lift your heart?” Fabian said, throwing his arms wide in an expansive gesture. “This ancient, glorious countryside in the fresh sunshine, these beautiful, delicate animals …”

“Delicate is the word,” I said ungraciously.

“I am full of confidence,” Fabian said firmly. “What’s more, I will make a prediction. Before we’re through, we’ll make our mark on the sport. And not with only one six-thousand-dollar reject. Wait until you come to Chantilly and see twenty horses working out and know they’re all yours. Wait until you’re sitting in an owner’s box at Longchamps and see your colors parade by before a race. …Wait until …”

“I’ll wait,” I said sourly. “Happily.” But although I carefully kept from showing it, I, too, felt the attraction of the place and the horses and the canny old trainer. I couldn’t go along with Fabian’s manic optimism, but I felt the power of his dream.

If speculating in gold and risking huge sums on lunatic pornographic films written by an Iranian and starring a nymphomaniac Midwestern student of comparative literature at the Sorbonne could result in thirty mornings a year like this one, I would follow Fabian gratefully. Finally, the money I had stolen had achieved a concrete good. I breathed deeply of the sharp country air before I went into breakfast at a long table in the Coombses’ dining room, where the shelves and walls were reassuringly covered with cups and plaques the stable had won through the years. The old man poured each of us a generous shot of Calvados before we sat down at the long table with his plump and rosy wife and eight or nine jockeys and exercise boys and girls. The aroma of coffee and bacon in the room was mixed with the smell of tack and boots. It was a simpler and heartier world than I had imagined still existed anywhere on the surface of the earth, and when Coombs winked at me across the table and said, “
He’ll
tell me when he wants to run, man,” I winked back at him and raised my mug of coffee to the old trainer in return.

“I
THINK IT IS TIME WE
thought of Italy,” Fabian said. “What do you think of Italy, dear?”

“I like it,” Lily said.

We were sitting in a restaurant called the Chateau Madrid, high up on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. The lights of Nice and the coastal settlements far below us twinkled in the lavender evening air. We were waiting for our dinner and drinking champagne. We had also drunk a considerable amount of champagne on the Train Bleu down from Paris the night before. I was beginning to develop a taste for Moët & Chandon. Old man Coombs had been with us on the train and most of the afternoon. After more than two weeks of workouts, Rêve de Minuit had finally told the trainer he was ready to run. And run he had. He had come in first by a neck that afternoon in the fourth race at Cagnes, the track outside Nice, where they had a winter meeting. The purse had been a hundred thousand francs, about twenty thousand dollars. Jack Coombs had lived up to his reputation for picking appropriate races. Unfortunately, he had had to fly back to Paris immediately after the race, so we were denied the pleasure of his company at dinner. I was curious to see just how many bottles of champagne, interspersed with shots of cognac, the old man could down in one full day.

We had also bet five thousand francs on the nose of Rêve de Minuit, at six to one. “For sentiment’s sake,” Fabian had said, as we went to the window. In New York I had been gambling for my life with every two-dollar bet. Obviously, as a guiding principle, sentiment was more profitable than survival at a racetrack.

When we had gone back to our hotel in Nice to change our clothes for dinner, Fabian had called Paris and Kentucky. From Paris he had learned that
The Sleeping Prince
had finished shooting that evening and that, after a showing of the incomplete rough cut the night before, representatives of distributors in West Germany and Japan had already put in substantial bids. “More than enough,” Fabian told me with some satisfaction, “to cover our investment. And with the rest of the world still to go. Nadine is ecstatic. She is even contemplating starting on a
clean
picture.” As an afterthought, he mentioned to me that the price of gold had gone up five points that day.

His friend in Kentucky had been impressed with the news of Rêve de Minuit’s victory, but wanted to consult a partner before making a firm offer. He would call back later, at the restaurant.

The champagne, the view, the triumph of the afternoon, the price of gold, the news from Nadine, the prospect of a splendid meal, the company of Lily Abbott, sitting between us in all her beauty, made me feel an enormous friendliness toward the entire world, with an especial warmth toward the man who had stolen my bag at the Zurich airport. Enemies and allies, I was discovering, as in the case of the German and Japanese movie people, were interchangeable entities.

If Rêve de Minuit hadn’t won, I suppose I would have been ready to toss Fabian over the cliff into the sea a thousand feet below. But the horse had won and I looked across the table fondly at the handsome, moustached face.

“Did you mention a possible price to Kentucky?” I asked.

“I said in the neighborhood of fifty,” Fabian said.

“Fifty what?”

“Thousand dollars.” He sounded annoyed.

“Don’t you think that’s a little steep for a six-thousand-dollar horse?” I asked. “We don’t want to scare him off.”

“Actually, Douglas,” Fabian sipped appreciatively at his glass, “he’s not a six-thousand-dollar horse. I have a little confession to make. I paid fifteen thousand for him.”

“But you told me …”

“I know I told you. I just thought at the time that it might be wiser to lead you along gently. If you doubt me, I can show you the bill of sale.”

“I no longer doubt you,” I said. It was almost true.

“How about the fifteen thousand for the picture? Were you leading me along gently on that, too?”

“On my honor, old man.” He raised his glass. “To Rêve de Minuit.” We all clinked glasses happily. I had grown attached to the animal in the time that it took him to come from dead last at the turn, and then go on to lead the pack in the final three strides, and I told Fabian I hated to see him go.

“I’m afraid you have the instincts of a bankrupt, my friend,” Fabian had said. “You are not yet sufficiently rich to love horses enough to hold onto them. The same, I may say, goes for ladies.” He looked meaningfully at Lily. There had been a noticeable tension between them in Paris. He had had three or four business conferences too many at odd hours with Nadine Bonheur. For myself, I had carefully avoided going to the studio where the movie was being shot and had not seen any of the people involved in it again. The busy signal on the telephone still tolled its message to me.

“What we’ll do,” Fabian was saying, “is buy a car. Do you have any objection to Jaguars?”

Neither Lily nor I had any objection to Jaguars.

“A Mercedes might be too flashy,” he said. “We do not wish to appear
nouveau riche
. Anyway, I like to do what I can for the poor old Brits.”

“Hear, hear,” Lily said.

The waiter came with the caviar. “Just lemon, please,” Fabian said, waving away the platter with chopped hard-boiled eggs and onion on it. “Let us not dilute the pleasure.”

The waiter spooned mounds of grayish pearls on our plates. This was only the fourth time in my life that I had tasted caviar. I remembered the other three times clearly.

“We will fly to Zurich,” Fabian said. “I have a little business to do in that fair city. We’ll pick up the car there. I think the only honest automobile dealers in the world can be found in Switzerland. Besides, there’s a first-class hotel there I’d like Douglas to see.

Baby, I thought, if they could see good old Miles Fabian back in Lowell, Massachusetts, now. Or if Drusack could see me. Then I was sorry I had thought of Drusack. Fabian had not yet asked me how I had come to be carrying seventy thousand dollars in my suitcase and I hadn’t told him. Actually, there were many things we had to talk about. In Paris Fabian had spent most of his time around the movie set. Watching the shop, as he put it, while I wandered around sight-seeing, sinking blissfully into the city. When we were together, Lily was almost always present and neither of us, I was sure, wanted her to hear about the details of our partnership, as I now thought of it. As for her, if she considered it odd that her lover of one night in Florence had turned up promptly in another country as the close friend and associate of her lover of some years, she gave no sign. As I was to find out, as long as she was fed and admired and taken to interesting places, she asked no questions. She had an aristocratic disregard for the machinery behind events. She was the sort of woman you could never imagine in a kitchen or an office.

“I would like to bring up a delicate subject,” Fabian said, expertly loading a portion of caviar on his toast, not losing a single egg. “It is a question of numbers. Three to be exact.” He looked first at Lily, then at me. “Do you get my drift?”

“No,” I said.

Lily said nothing.

“It is the wrong number for traveling,” Fabian went on. “It can lead to division, subterfuge, jealousy, tragedy.”

“I see what you mean,” I said, feeling a hot flush begin at my collar.

“I suppose you agree, Douglas, that Lily here is a beautiful woman.”

I nodded.

“And Douglas is a most attractive young man,” Fabian said, his tone paternal and kindly. “And will become more so as he becomes accustomed to wealth and after we supply him with a fresh wardrobe, which I intend to do as soon as we reach Rome.”

“Yes,” Lily said. She looked demurely down at her plate.

“We must face the truth. I am an older man. I hope nobody is going to contradict me.”

Nobody contradicted him.

“The chances of mischief are plain.” Fabian helped himself to more caviar. “If there is a lady you have in mind as a fit traveling companion, Douglas, why don’t you get in touch with her?”

The image of Pat came immediately to my mind, in a wave of tenderness, mingled with regret. I had rarely even thought of her during the years at the St. Augustine. The protective, icy numbness that had come over me that last day in Vermont was melting fast in the company of Lily and Fabian. I had to recognize that, like it or not, I was once again exposed to old emotions, old loyalties, to the memories of distant pleasure. But even if Pat were free, I couldn’t imagine her accepting my relationship with Fabian, whatever it was or turned out to be, or his blatantly high style of living. The girl who donated a portion of her small salary as a schoolteacher to the refugees of Biafra could hardly be expected to approve of the man sitting at the table spooning up caviar. Or of me, for that matter. Evelyn Coates was a more likely candidate for our little group and would be an interesting match for both Lily and Fabian, but who knew which Evelyn Coates would turn up—the surprisingly gentle woman of that last Sunday night in my hotel room or the abrasive Washington operator and businesslike rapist I had met at the Hales’ cocktail party? I also had to consider the possibility that one way or another, Fabian and I might eventually be exposed. It would hardly do her career as a government lawyer any good if one day she was publicly branded as the consort of a pair of thieves.