“Ma’mselle will give it all, Kee, you can deposit that in the bank. If she don’t win, it just isn’t in the cards. This lady puts her heart in the pot when she enters the gate.”
Jenny softly stroked the filly’s long nose. “Like velvet,” she said with a look of wonderment.
“Tell you what, Al Jack. If she wins today, she’s yours,” Keegan said.
“What you say, Mistah Kee!”
“She’s yours. I never saw anybody love a horse as much as you love that one.”
“No, no way, suh,” Al Jack, shaking his head. He wasn’t chuckling. “Why, hell, ami, I couldn’t pay her feed bill.”
“I’ll cover you for the season, you pay me back with your purses. You can winter her on the farm in Kentucky and I’ll take her first foal when she retires.”
Al jack broke down, laughing, tears bursting out of his eyes. “Why, I don’t rightly know what to say.”
Keegan smiled at him. “You’ve already said it, friend,” he said, patting the trainer on the shoulder. Al jack turned to the horse.
“Hear that, ma’mselle? You must win today. If you never won a race before or since, you got to go straight today. You hear what I say, lady?”
“That was one helluva thing to do, Kee,” Rudman said as they headed back toward the parking area.
“Yes,” Jenny said. “It was beautiful.”
“I wouldn’t own the horse if it wasn’t for him,” Keegan said, waving off their praise and opening the morning paper. “He picked her. He made her a winner. You got to be involved if you’re in the racing game and Al Jack lives for it. It’s just a hobby with me. Anyway, I wanted to share my luck.”
“What luck?” Jenny asked.
“Being here with you,” Keegan said with a broad grin, then he saw Rudman’s photograph in the paper. “Hey, you made page two with a photo,” Keegan said, showing them the story announcing Rudman’s appointment as Berlin bureau chief.
It was a perfectly adequate sketch, recounting the usual biographical data, most of which Keegan already knew. Rudman was from Middleton, Ohio. His father owned a clothing store and had for thirty years, his mother was a housewife. No brothers or sisters. He had a journalism degree from Columbia University and was in Europe on a graduation trip when America entered the war. Keegan learned two new things about Rudman from the article; he had written his first dispatch for the Herald Tribune on speculation, having hitched a ride into combat with the Rainbow Division of the U.S. Army and covering their first encounter with the Germans during the Aisne-Marne drive, coverage that was good enough to earn him a correspondent’s job at the age of twenty-three. He had also done some wrestling in college.
Keegan looked Rudman up and down. “You don’t look like a wrestler to me,” he said.
“Oh? And just what’s a wrestler supposed to look like?”
“You know, thick neck, a chest like Mae West, shoulders like an elephant, that kind of thing.”
Rudman nodded slowly. “Uh huh. With a dumb look on his face? You left that out.”
“Yeah, that too. I mean, you’re no skin and bones but you don’t look like any wrestler.”
“That’s a very prejudiced attitude,” Rudman said rather loftily.”
“What do you mean, prejudiced?”
“To you all wrestlers are the same.. They all have thick necks, their chests are popping through their shirts and they have a collective IQ of four. That’s a prejudice. Not an important one but a prejudice just the same.”
“You’re a real trick,” said Keegan. “I don’t know anybody else who could turn a discussion of wrestling into a lecture on bigotry.”
“Also they left out that I play a mean ukulele.”
“Thanks for warning us.”
“Well, anyway, it’s great, Bert,” Keegan said. “Think about it, here we are at the big social event of the Paris season. It’s almost mandatory to show up if you have any social standing at all and here we are with a famous person.”
“Right,” Rudman said, half embarrassed. He tapped Jenny’s arm. “Now that gent over there in the double-breasted tweed suit and the thick mustache studying the form? He’s famous. That’s H. G. Wells, a very important writer.”
“I know who H. G. Wells is, silly. We do read in Germany, you know. Look at those two SS in their uniforms. That makes me sick.”
Two German SS officers in their formal black uniforms were stalking the crowd, dope sheets in hand. They stopped to talk to a well-dressed couple.
“That tall one?” Rudman said bitterly. “That’s Reinhard von Meister. Believe it or not, he’s a bloody Rhodes scholar.”
He nodded toward the taller of the two, a captain, who was lean to the point of being emaciated, with intimidating, vulture-like features and blue eyes so pale they were almost cobalt, all of which seemed appropriate with the uniform.
“He’s the military attaché to the German ambassador here. Actually he’s nothing but a damn Spion and everybody knows it.”
“Who’s the old fud with the young ‘wife talking to him?” Keegan asked, nodding toward a couple on the far side of the paddock.
“She’s not his wife, she’s his daughter. That’s Colin Willoughby, Sir Colin Willoughby, used to ‘write a society gossip column for the Manchester Guardian called ‘Will o’ the Wisp.’”
Sir Colin Willoughby was a somewhat stuffy Britisher, trim, handsome in a dull sort of way, his mustache trimmed and waxed, his fingers manicured. He held himself painfully erect, his posture military, his attitude full of arched-eyebrow superiority. He was elegantly dressed in the blue double-breasted suit and red tie that seemed to be the uniform of proper Englishmen that spring and his silver hair was trimmed perfectly.
His daughter, Lady Penelope Traynor the widow, was equally as stunning. Her posture painfully correct, her features classic from the perfect, straight nose and pale-blue eyes to petulant mouth, she was almost a gendered reflection of her father. Like him, she had a cool, tailored, untouchable air that detracted from her natural beauty. Only her red hair, which was longer than the fashion and tied in the back with a bright, red bow, was a concession to femininity.
“So that’s old ‘Will o’ the Wisp,’ “ Keegan said. “I’ve been reading his trash for years.”
“He’s given up trash. He’s become a political soothsayer. ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ is now ‘The Willow Report.’ Old Willoughby’s been through it. His wife died two years ago and the daughter’s husband was killed last year.”
“I remember that,” said Keegan. “He got killed at the Cleveland air races.”
“Right. Tony Traynor, he was an ace in the war, knocked down twelve or thirteen kites. She’s Willoughby’s assistant now, goes everywhere with him.”
“And he’s covering politics at Longchamp race track?”
Rudman shrugged. “Maybe they’re on holiday like me.”
“Maybe she’s your type,” Keegan said. “Why don’t you give her a fling.”
“Not that one. She’s all iceberg,” said Bert.
“Well, you know what they say, only the tip shows,” Keegan said with a wink. “Eighty percent is under the surface.”
“Believe me, this one is ice to the core,” Rudman said.
“The ultimate English snob. Come on, I’ll introduce you. Let’s see if he acknowledges my appointment.”
Rudman led Keegan through the crowd toward them.
“Bonjour, Sir Colin, good to see you again,” he said.
“Well, Rudman, good to see you. Been a while,” Willoughby said with a condescending smile.
“These are my friends, Jennifer Gould and Francis Keegan,” Rudman said. “Sir Colin Willoughby and his daughter, Lady Penelope Traynor.”
“A pleasure,” Keegan said, shaking Willoughby’s hand. Lady Traynor regarded Keegan with aloof contempt, as she might regard a train porter or restaurant waitress. At another time, Keegan might have been attracted by her aura of inaccessibility but now it annoyed him, as did Sir Colin. As in Bert Rudman’s case, events had altered Willoughby’s career, elevating him from a kind of society gossip to a political observer. But whereas Rudman dealt with the reality of Hitler, Willoughby pontificated, his rampant editorializing devoid of even a semblance of objectivity.