‘Come on, then, girl. Come on.’
There was a soft warm whinny and movement somewhere out beyond sight. Then they came, slowly, enquiringly, moving towards this human voice. They ate the nuts held out to them and made no fuss when the two men took hold of their head-collars.
‘You go ahead,’ Martin Retsov said softly to Johnnie Duke. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
They went sweetly, the two great mares big with four-legged assets. Out of the gate and down the road to the transport. Easy as ever, thought Martin Retsov, once you knew what to take. Johnnie Duke led his mare into the trailer and fastened her there.
And that was when the nightmare began again. That was when the lights shone out, blinding Martin Retsov’s adjusted sight. That was when the man stepped out to confront him. The same man. The face from the dreams. The same callous face, dark clothes, high-rank insignia.
‘Martin Retsov,’ he was saying, ‘I arrest you...’
Martin Retsov was not listening. He was thinking wildly that it simply couldn’t be true. This particular client would never betray him. Never.
The police took the mare from his unresisting charge and put handcuffs round Martin Retsov’s wrists.
‘How did you get here?’ he asked blankly.
‘We’ve been looking for you for three years,’ said the policeman with smug satisfaction. ‘A few weeks ago we found you. But we had no conclusive evidence against you, so we’ve been keeping you in sight ever since.’
Johnnie Duke came out of the trailer, and Martin Retsov thought it was hard on the boy, being caught on his first job. The cold policeman walked over to him, looking pleased.
He brought out no handcuffs. He patted Johnnie on the shoulder.
‘Well done, Sergeant Duke,’ he said.
Carrot for a Chestnut
Out of the blue in 1970 I was invited by the prestigious American magazine Sports Illustrated to write a short story for them — length and subject matter to be my own choice. I hadn’t at that time ever attempted a short story but the result, Carrot for a Chestnut, must have seemed OK to their editors, because they invited me to stay in Lexington with the Sports Illustrated team assembled there to cover the 1972 Kentucky Derby. I was commissioned to write a Derby-day story for the Kentucky Derby issue the following year.
Chick stood and sweated with the carrot in his hand. His head seemed-to be floating and he couldn’t feel his feet on the ground, and the pulse thudded massively in his ear. A clammy green pain shivered in his gut.
Treachery was making him sick.
The time: fifty minutes before sunrise. The morning: cold. The raw swirling wind was clearing its throat for a fiercer blow, and a heavy layer of nimbo-stratus was fighting every inch of the way against the hint of light. In the neat box stalls round the stable-yard the dozing horses struck a random hoof against a wooden wall, rattled a tethering chain, sneezed the hay dust out of a moist black nostril.
Chick was late. Two hours late. He’d been told to give the carrot to the lanky chestnut at four o’clock in the morning, but at four o’clock in the morning it had been pouring with rain — hard, slanting rain that soaked a man to the skin in one minute flat, and Chick had reckoned it would be too difficult explaining away a soaking at four o’clock in the morning. Chick had reckoned it would be better to wait until the rain stopped, it couldn’t make any difference. Four o’clock, six o’clock, what the hell. Chick always knew better than anyone else.
Chick was a thin, disgruntled nineteen-year-old who always felt the world owed him more than he got. He had been a bad-tempered, argumentative child and an aggressively rebellious adolescent. The resulting snarling habit of mind was precisely what was now hindering his success as an adult. Not that Chick would have agreed, of course. Chick never agreed with anyone if he could help it. Always knew better, did Chick.
He was unprepared for the severity of the physical symptoms of fear. His usual attitude towards any form of authority was scorn (and authority had not so far actually belted him one across his sulky mouth). Horses had never scared him because he had been born to the saddle and had grown up mastering everything on four legs with contemptuous ease. He believed in his heart that no one could really ride better than he could. He was wrong.
He looked apprehensively over his shoulder, and the shifting pain in his stomach sharply intensified. He had a fierce urge to defecate. That simply couldn’t happen, he thought wildly. He’d heard about people’s bowels getting loose with fear. He hadn’t believed it. It couldn’t happen. Now, all of a sudden, he feared it could. He tightened all his muscles desperately, and the spasm slowly passed. It left fresh sweat standing out all over his skin and no saliva in his mouth.
The house was dark. Upstairs, behind the black open window with the pale curtain flapping in the spartan air, slept Arthur Morrison, trainer of the forty-three racehorses in the stables below. Morrison habitually slept lightly. His ears were sharper than half a dozen guard dogs’, his stable-hands said.
Chick forced himself to turn his head away, to walk in view of that window, to take the ten exposed steps down to the chestnut’s stall.
If the guv’nor woke up and saw him... Gawd, he thought furiously, he hadn’t expected it to be like this. Just a lousy walk down the yard to give a carrot to the gangly chestnut. Guilt and fear and treachery. They bypassed his sneering mind and erupted through his nerves instead.
He couldn’t see anything wrong with the carrot. It hadn’t been cut in half and hollowed out and packed with drugs and tied together again. He’d tried pulling the thick end out like a plug, and that hadn’t worked either. The carrot just looked like any old carrot, any old carrot you’d watch your Ma chop up to put in a stew. Any old carrot you’d give to any old horse. Not a very young, succulent carrot or a very aged carrot, knotted and woody. Just any old ordinary carrot.
But strangers didn’t proposition you to give any old carrot to one special horse in the middle of the night. They didn’t give you more than you earned in half a year when you said you’d do it. Any old carrot didn’t come wrapped carefully alone in a polythene bag inside an empty cheese-biscuit packet, given to you by a stranger in a car park after dark in a town six miles from the stables. You didn’t give any old carrot in the middle of the night to a chestnut who was due to start favourite in a high-class steeplechase eleven hours later.
Chick was getting dizzy with holding his breath by the time he’d completed the ten tiptoed steps to the chestnut’s stall. Trying not to cough, not to groan, not to let out the strangling tension in a sob, he curled his sweating fingers around the bolt and began the job of easing it out, inch by frightening inch, from its socket.
By day, he slammed the bolts open and shut with a smart practised flick. His body shook in the darkness with the strain of moving by fractions.
The bolt came free with the tiniest of grating noises, and the top half of the split door swung slowly outwards. No squeaks from the hinges, only the whisper of metal on metal. Chick drew in a long breath like a painful, trickling, smothered gasp and let it out between clamped teeth. His stomach lurched again, threateningly. He took another quick, appalled grip on himself and thrust his arm in a panic through the dark, open space.
Inside the stall, the chestnut was asleep, dozing on his feet. The changing swirl of air from the opening door moved the sensitive hairs around his muzzle and raised his mental state from semiconsciousness to inquisitiveness. He could smell the carrot. He could also smell the man: smell the fear in the man’s sweat.