The Grave Maurice (38 page)

Jury smiled, for he also knew what the others knew: it had been a huge relief to Vivian, who apparently was unable to call the wedding off herself; she needed all the help she could get. He said, “Vivian, if that sort of trivial stuff could set him off, be glad you found out in time.”

“Here, here,” cried Trueblood. “But next time, come clean, you know, tell the chap right up front about what he'd be taking on.”

Vivian hit him with a pillow from the window seat.

Jury said, “Why don't you people stop messing about in other people's lives?”

Diane made a little moue of distaste. “I really don't think that showing up the real intentions of a prospective mate is ‘messing about.' I'd certainly want to know. It's rather
amusing,
don't—Oh, good!” Diane, who had a clear view of the window, dropped the count like a hot potato and pointed. “Look! Theo's coming across.” She said it as if the High Street were the Styx.

Theo Wrenn Browne, ever taken with the demands of fashion (yet never looking it), was wearing a green tweed suit that would have sent Hugo Boss back to sackcloth and ashes. Theo was also sporting a stubble of beard, deliberately unshaven. However, Theo, never quite able to meet the demands of masculinity, took two days to grow a day-old stubble. His suit jacket was buttoned only at the top button, his whole ensemble screaming
Last year! Last year!

Diane, who would kill herself before putting a well-shod foot in last year's doorway, always enjoyed Theo's sartorial death throes, and said, as he stood by their table, “What a nice suit. It must be difficult to find just that shade of green. Aubergine, is it?”

Theo squinted and looked warily round at them much as the Cincinnati Kid might have scoured a table full of high rollers in some saloon. Unfortunately, he hadn't the Kid's savoir faire, and merely looked petulant, standing with his glass of beer, waiting for an invitation to sit down. Ordinarily, that got him nowhere, but today it did because they wanted to hear about Bramwell.

Trueblood pulled a chair round from another table and patted it. “Sit down, sit down and tell us about your new assistant.”

Theo sat, gingerly. “Well, he's not that, is he? More a stock boy, I'd say. It takes training, doesn't it?” Browne turned his inborn irritation upon Trueblood. “
Too bad
you lost out there; I expect Freddie prefers books to antiques.”

Freddie?
Well, Melrose guessed he had to have a first name.

Theo went on: “Or the two of you just didn't hit it off.”

His smile was vaguely vicious; Theo just didn't know who or what to train his anger on, so he kept it up in the air like a spinning plate.

“Or perhaps you're paying him more than I would.”

It was plain Theo wondered if he was paying him
much
more.

“I will say that I admire your largesse—” said Trueblood.

Theo's smile was held in suspension as he couldn't be sure what was coming.

“—in not holding that time in the nick against him.” Trueblood lit a cigarette and waved out the match.

“ ‘In the nick'?”

Poor Theo could never run a bluff—too bad, seeing he was sitting across from the fellow who had invented bluffery.

“Oh? He didn't tell you?” Trueblood's eyebrows sought the headier heights of his slowly receding hairline. “I guess he thought it would tell against him. Yes, Freddie is what his gang called him.”

“Gang? Are you really saying Freddie was with a criminal gang?”

Melrose gave Trueblood's shin a smart rap. If he carried on in this way, Melrose might have to put up with Freddie the Hermit again. Theo Wrenn Browne would fire him; Theo, he was sure, could fire people twenty-four hours a day. “Stop exaggerating. I didn't have a bit of trouble in that way.”

“Of course you didn't. He never went
inside
the house; he was confined to his hermitage, wasn't he?” Trueblood shifted his attention to Theo again. “What did he tell you his last job was?”

“Book reviewer for the Sidbury paper.”

Diane nearly choked and Vivian patted her back. Diane said, “There isn't any book reviewer on that paper. Nobody can read past fifth form, including me.” Diane was always generous with her criticism.

“Freelance is what he said. Only the occasional review, which is why I didn't see it, he said.”

Good God! thought Jury. This Bramwell ought to be working for M1.

“A stock boy,” said Vivian, “is quite a demotion from book reviewer.”

“Maybe, but I told him first he'd got to learn the ropes.”

“And is he a hard worker?” asked Trueblood. “I passed by your shop earlier and saw him sitting in that easy chair by the window, reading.”

This earned Trueblood another crack on the shin from Melrose.

It was clear Theo did not like this news, but had to defend Freddie—meaning, defend his own choice—and he said, “Well, when you're dealing in lit're'ture all day, it's awful hard not to keep from sampling it.”

“Yes, except he was reading a racing form. Likes a flutter now and then, does he?”

Theo gripped his empty glass and went remarkably red. “I'm sure you're mistaken. Probably what he was reading was an inventory sheet.”

“If your inventory lists Pieces of Eight in the sixth at Doncaster, yes, it could be.” Trueblood deflected yet another attack under the table.

Theo, as he always did when he was losing (which was always), tried to go on the attack. Smarmily, he said, “Speaking of racing—just how's that horse of yours, Mr. Plant? ‘That nag' as Freddie calls him.”

“Aggrieved? Oh, he's doing well on his gallops. I'm considering the 2000 Guineas for him. Yes, I'm sure you'll see Aggrieved given short odds.”

“He'll wire the field,” said Diane, blowing smoke in more ways than one.

“What was that horse—Shergar? Is that his name?—kidnapped by the IRA and held for ransom? No one paid it. The horse disappeared.”

Jury thought of Nell.

Diane dipped into what appeared to be a bottomless well of racing lore. “This horse in the States named Spectacular Bid was so outstanding, he was one of the very few horses ever to do a walkover.” They all looked blank. “A ‘walk-over. ' That's when there are no other entries in a race because no trainer thinks his horse can beat you. The horse gallops round an otherwise empty track.”

Jury had to admit he liked that image. A horse galloping on an empty course and people in the stands cheering.

“Diane,” said Melrose, “when did you turn into a bottomless well of racing arcana? I've never known you to hold forth at such length.”

“One of my fans—if you can call them that, the gullible creatures—asked me—meaning the stars—who I liked in the seventh at Newmarket for the next day. He read off the list. I just picked the name I fancied most. Well, the damned horse won and this idiot is always pestering me for more tips. I did it again. Actually, I began to wonder if I had the gift. There are people who can do that sort of thing on a regular basis—”

“They're called bookies.”

“—and it just got me interested in the whole thing. I read a book.”

News that was met with the perturbation of a stock market crash.

“Anyway, going back to Spectacular Bid. There's a nice little story about him. His jockey was talking to a reporter who asked him if he was to die and come back, would he like to come back on Spectacular Bid? The jockey said, ‘No, I'd like to come back
as
Spectacular Bid.' ”

They laughed. Jury, too, and then he stopped laughing. His mind had been tripped by what she'd said. He sat, the drink in his hand undrunk, thinking.
But how could they be sure it would work?
Jury asked himself. Answer:
They couldn't.
He sat there in a slump, thinking, trying to work out what could have happened. He looked all around as if the vacuum might assist him in discovering what he wanted. He said, “Do you get
Le Monde
around here?”

They all stared at him with round eyes as if no one had ever made such a frivolous request.

Theo, obviously thinking he was one up in the culture department, said, “I've been considering getting some of the European papers in, you know, for those who wish to keep up on things.”

“Such as who?” said Diane, who returned to the subject of racing. “The one I
really
liked most was that other American horse, Go for Wand.”

Trueblood raised a polished eyebrow. “Gopher what?”

“Not ‘gopher,' ‘Go
for
.' Two words. Go for Wand.”

Trust Diane to rake over the course of American racing and come up with a name none of them had either heard of or could even sort a meaning from.

Melrose said, “That's an odd name. Are you making it up?”

Diane sighed. “Of course not. It's a name that was taken from an old Jamaican superstition that when one was accosted by a strange spirit who could cast spells, one had to go home for a wand to ward off the evil spirit.”

Melrose sat back, brow furrowed in question.

“It's the truth. You know I don't have the imagination to make up something like that.”

“No, I don't. You manage once a week to make up the solar system.”

Diane ignored that. “She was good in mud—”

“So is Momaday, but I wouldn't give odds on him.”

“—she nearly met Secretariat's record on the one course. She was only two-fifths of a second off Secretariat's time. Imagine, not just a second but a
split
second can mean the difference between winning and losing.” Diane sighed. “How exhausting. Anyway, her last race was the Breeders' Cup. Right near the end she stumbled in the backstretch, threw her jockey and shattered her leg, went down, got up and kept on going. With a shattered leg,
she kept on going.
She collapsed in the home stretch. They had to put her down then and there. I've never been one to admire determination—it's so tiring—but can you imagine? To keep at the gallop with a broken leg? It's something to know that in this life of travail and tears—and, fortunately, vodka”—she raised her glass—“some things never give up.”

Jury thought of Nell. “And some people.” He raised his glass. “Here's to your mare.”

“Go for Wand had that field wired,” said Diane, sadly. “She had it wired.”

V
ernon walked into his office at eight a.m. the next morning to find Bobby and Daphne already in theirs. He could hear them even before he passed by the door of their eerily dark room. They were fighting about something; they always were. They never agreed about stocks, bonds, IPOs, hedge funds, the Dow, NASDAQ—anything. It was almost like a deeply sworn feud that provided, together with a basic exchange of knowledge, their principal entertainment.

Divesting himself of coat and laptop, Vernon went back to the dark doorway. The only light came from five computer screens. Light pulsed, shadows moved. Vernon thought of Plato's cave. (It came as a surprise to people that Vernon had taken a first at Oxford in philosophy.) The cold bluish light of their separate screens washed over their faces, Bobby's and Daph's, as if submerging them. Three other computers tuned to different networks, different sources of financial information were lined up on a long table where they could view them when they needed to. It had long been a marvel to Vernon that they could share these cramped quarters and not go crazy. Perhaps the nature of the work was already so crazy that they could factor in their own without noticing.

“I want you to look into this bunch”—he tossed Nell's folder on Bobby's desk—“see what's going on with this drug. And with its stock offerings.”

Bobby tore himself away from his screen. You could almost hear the rip. Even as he talked, he kept peeking at it. “Wyeth? That American pharmaceutical company? It's Wyeth-Ayerst Labs—yeah, that's the one that put out that diet drug called fen phen the FDA is pulling off the market. Bad, bad news that thing was.”

“Anyway, I have a friend with a passion for horses and this company makes this drug”—Vernon nodded toward the folder. “They get it from the urine of pregnant mares. Premarin, it's called.”

Daphne made a face. “Horse urine?”

“I'm sure the horses share your opinion. Unfortunately, they have nothing to say in the matter.”

Daphne swiveled her chair around. “Wait a minute; I've heard of that. It's for menopausal women. Some sort of estrogen, a hormone-replacement drug?”

“Good for you,” said Vernon. “Especially considering you're only twenty-five.”

Bobby leaned forward, frowning. “But that must take a hell of a lot of horses.”

“Oh, it does.” Vernon described the way the urine was collected.

“God,” said Daphne, “that
is
horrible.”

“Wait. I haven't even told you the downside. Most of the foals are shipped off to slaughterhouses. A few are kept to replace the mares that die.”

“God,”
she said again. “Do the women taking this stuff know this?”

“I doubt it. If they knew, most would find some other drug. And there are perfectly good ones out there that do the job and without the questionable side effects.”

Bobby cocked his head. “Sounds like you've been researching this.”

“I have. So what I want you to look for is some way of making life less than pleasant for this pharmaceutical company. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

Eyes on screens, they both waved him away in friendly fashion.