Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

“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?”