Don’t do it!
For three years after his father died Martin Retsov abandoned his chosen profession. To be successful he needed a partner, and partners as skilled as his father were hard to find. Martin Retsov took stock of his bank book, listed his investments, and decided that with a little useful paid employment to fill the days he could cruise along comfortably in second gear, waiting for life to throw up a suitable replacement.
A day’s travel put him a welcome distance from the scene of his unhappier memories, although they themselves journeyed along with him, as inescapable as habit. Thoroughbred Foodstuffs Inc. gave him a month’s trial as a salesman and when the orders swelled everywhere in his wake, a permanent post. Martin Retsov relaxed behind the wheel of the company car and drifted easily around his new area, visiting stud farms and racing stables and persuading their managers that even if Thoroughbred Foodstuffs were no better than anyone else’s, at least they were no worse.
The customers of Thoroughbred Foodstuffs saw a big man in his late thirties with a rugged, slightly forbidding face and a way of narrowing his eyes to dark-lashed slits. The frank, open and sincere stock-in-trade expression of a salesman was nowhere to be seen, nor was there any obvious honey in his voice. The one factor which brought out the handshakes, the fountain pens and the cheque books was his formidable knowledge of horses. He could sum up a horse in a glance and make helpfully constructive suggestions in a throwaway fashion, never taking credit although it was due.
‘I expect you’ve tried remedial shoeing,’ he would say casually, or ‘Don’t you find vitamin B12 injections help build bone?’ Second time around he was greeted as a trusted friend.
He prospered.
All the same he was in trouble. There was no peace in his sleep. When he slept, he woke always from a nightmare, his heart thumping, his skin prickling with cold instant sweat. Always a dream variation on the same theme — the violent untimely death of his father. Sometimes he saw the face, dead but still talking, with blood gushing out of the mouth. Sometimes he saw the wheel, the great fat black sharp-treaded tyre biting into the soft bulging belly.
Sometimes he felt he was inside his father’s body, slipping and falling behind the loaded motor horsebox and having the life crushed out of him in one great unimaginable explosion of agony. Sometimes, but not so often, he saw the face of the other man who had been there, the callous man in the dark clothes, looking coldly down at his dying father and giving him no comfort, saying not a word.
Every morning Martin Retsov stood wearily under the shower, rinsing the stickiness from his body and wishing he could as easily sponge his subconscious mind. Every day, sliding into the car, he shed his night self and looked to the future. He saw foals born, watched them grow, traced their fortunes at auction and beyond. He could have told the trainers, better than they knew themselves, the breeding, history, career and fate of every horse he reached with Thoroughbred food.
After nearly three years he had made many acquaintances — he was not a man to make friends. He knew every horse over a wide stretch of country and hundreds that had been sold out of it. He was the most efficient salesman in his company. And even his nightmares were at last becoming rarer.
One evening in early spring he picked up Johnnie Duke. A hitchhiker, a tall thin fair-haired youth looking not much above twenty, wearing faded jeans and an old leather jacket and carrying a few extra clothes in a canvas hold-all. Martin Retsov, in an expansive mood, took him to be a college kid on vacation and agreed to drop him forty miles down the road in the next town.
‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ he asked, half puzzled, as the young man settled into the front seat beside him.
‘Shouldn’t think so.’
‘Well...’ He thought it over. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen you. Day or two ago. Where would that be?’
The young man took his time over answering. Then he said, ‘I hitch up and down this road pretty regular. Maybe you saw me thumbing.’
Martin Retsov nodded several times. ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s it.’ He relaxed in his seat, glad to have resolved the small mystery. He liked to be sure of things. ‘That’s where I’ve seen you. On the road. More than once.’
The young man nodded briefly and said he was glad Martin had stopped for him because he had a date with his girl.
‘I don’t often stop for hitchers,’ Martin Retsov said, and thought with amusement that three easy years must have softened him.
They drove amicably together for five miles and passed alongside the white railed paddocks of a prosperous stud farm. Martin Retsov cast a rapid assessing eye over the small groups of animals grazing the new spring grass but kept his thoughts unspoken.
It was Johnnie Duke who said, ‘It’s odd you never get a piebald thoroughbred.’
‘You know about horses?’ Martin Retsov asked, surprised.
‘Sure. I was raised with them.’
Martin Retsov asked him where, but the young man evasively said he’d had some trouble back home and left in a hurry, and he didn’t exactly want to talk about it. Martin Retsov smiled. He dropped Johnnie Duke in the next town and drove on towards his destination, and it was only when he stopped to fill up his tank that the remains of the smile vanished as smartly as investors in a depression.
Johnnie Duke had stolen his wallet. Retsov kept it in the inside pocket of his jacket, and his jacket, owing to the efficiency of the heater, had been lying on the back seat of the car. He remembered Johnnie Duke putting his hold-all on the floor behind the front seats, and he remembered him leaning over to pick it up. His rugged face hardened to something his customers had never seen, and the eyes slitted as narrow and glittery as ice chips. The sum of money he had lost was small compared to the affront to his self-respect.
For several days he drove round his area actively searching for Johnnie Duke, remembering details about him from their drive together. The hesitation when Martin had said he’d seen him before. The refusal to say where he’d come from. The slickness with which he’d spotted and extracted the wallet. Martin Retsov searched for him with a hard face but without success and finally, after two or three weeks, he accepted the fact that the young man had gone away to another district where irate victims in cars were not looking for him sharp-eyed.
Regularly once a month Martin Retsov called at the furthest stud farm in his area, and it was as he left there, early one evening, that he again saw Johnnie Duke. Standing by the roadside, lifting his thumb, hesitating perhaps when he saw Retsov’s car.
Martin drove up fast beside him, braked to a wheel-locked standstill, opened his door, and stood up smoothly outside it. For a big man he moved like oiled machinery, precise and efficient; and he held a gun. ‘Get in the car,’ he said.
Johnnie Duke looked at the barrel pointing straight at his stomach and turned pale. He swallowed, his larynx making a convulsive movement in his neck, and slowly did as he was told.
‘I’ll pay back the money,’ he said anxiously, as Martin Retsov slid onto the seat beside him. The gun was held loosely now, pointing at the floor, but both were aware that this could change.
‘I should hand you over to the police,’ Martin Retsov said.
The young man dumbly shook his head.
‘Or you could do a little job for me instead.’
The young man looked at Martin Retsov’s slitted eyes and visibly shivered.
‘Is this blackmail?’ he asked him.
‘I’ll pay you, if you’re any good.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Stealing horses,’ Martin Retsov said.
He made his plans as meticulously as in the old days with his father, untraceably buying a two-horse trailer and a car to pull it; and hiding them away in a city lock-up garage. He decided against the large type of motor horsebox he had used with his father, mostly because of the nightmares about those wheels. Besides, he was not sure if his new apprentice would be suitable for long-term planning. They would do one trial run — a test, Martin Retsov thought, before he offered a steady partnership for the future.