Bonecrack - Страница 30

'You would be dead now,' he said. 'And I want to kill you.' He thrust his head forward on his short neck, the strong nose standing out like a beak and the black eyes as dangerous as napalm. 'But my son- my son says he will hate me for ever if I kill you- And for that I want to kill you more than I have ever wanted to kill anyone-'

He took another step and rested the silencer against my thin wool sweater shirt, with my heart thumping away only a couple of inches below it. I was afraid he would risk it, afraid he would calculate that Alessandro would in time get over the loss of his racing career, afraid he would believe that things would somehow go back and be the same as on the day his son casually said, 'I want to ride Archangel in the Derby.'

I was afraid.

But Enso didn't pull the trigger. He said, as if the one followed inexorably from the other, as I suppose in a way it did, 'So I will not kill you- but I will make you do what I say. I cannot afford for you not to do what I say. I am going to make you-'

I didn't ask how. Some questions are so silly they are better unsaid. I could feel the sweat prickling out on my body and I was sure he could read the apprehension on my face: and he had done nothing at all yet, nothing but threaten.

'Alessandro will ride Archangel,' he said. 'The day after tomorrow. In the Two Thousand Guineas.'

His face was close enough for me to see the blackheads in the unhealthy putty skin.

I said nothing. He wasn't asking for a promise. He was telling me.

He took a pace backwards and nodded his head at Carlo. Carlo picked up the hold-all and produced from it a truncheon very like the one I had removed from him in Buckram's box.

Promazine first?

No promazine.

They didn't mess around making things easy, as they had for the horses. Carlo simply walked straight up to me, lifted his right arm with truncheon attached, and brought it down with as much force as he could manage. He seemed to be taking a pride in his work. He concentrated on getting the direction just right. And it wasn't any of the fearsome things like my twisted elbow that he hit, but my collar-bone.

Not too bad, I thought confusedly in the first two seconds of numbness, and anyway steeplechase jockeys broke their collar-bones any bloody day of the week, and didn't make a fuss of it- but the difference between a racing fall and Carlo's effort lay in the torque and tension all the way up my arm. They acted like one of Archimedes' precious levers and pulled the ends of my collar-bone apart. When sensation returned with ferocity, I could feel the tendons in my neck tighten into strings and stand out taut with the effort of keeping my mouth shut.

I saw on Enso's face a grey look of suffering: narrow eyes, clamped lips, anxious, contracted muscles, lines showing along his forehead and round his eyes: and realised with extraordinary shock that what I saw on his face was a mirror of my own.

When his jaw relaxed a fraction I knew it was because mine had. When his eyes opened a little and some of the overall tension slackened, it was because the worst had passed with me.

It wasn't sympathy, though, on his part. Imagination, rather. He was putting himself in my place, to savour what he'd caused. Pity he couldn't do it more thoroughly. I'd break a bone for him any time he asked.

He nodded sharply several times, a message of satisfaction. There was still a heavy unabated anger in his manner and no guarantee that he had finished his evening's work. But he looked regretfully at the pistol, unscrewed the silencer, and handed both bits to Cal, who stowed them away under the raincoat.

Enso stepped close to me. Very close. He ran his finger down my cheek and rubbed the sweat from it against his thumb.

'Alessandro will ride Archangel in the Guineas,' he said. 'Because if he doesn't, I will break your other arm. Just like this.'

I didn't say anything. Couldn't, really.

Carlo unfastened the strap from my right wrist and put it with the truncheon in the hold-all, and they all three turned their backs on me and walked away across the field and through the wood to the waiting Mercedes.

It took a long inch-by-inch time to get my right hand round to my left, to undo the other strap. After that I sat on the ground with my back against one of the posts, to wait until things got better.

They didn't seem to, much.

I looked at my watch. Eight o'clock. Time for dinner, down at the Forbury Inn. Enso probably had his fat knees under the table, tucking in with a good appetite.

In theory it had seemed reasonable that the most conclusive way to defeat him had been to steal his son away. In practice, as I gingerly hugged to my chest my severely sore left arm, I doubted if Alessandro's soul was worth the trouble. Arrogant, treacherous, spoilt little bastard- but with guts and determination and talent. A mini battlefield, torn apart by loyalty to his father and the lure of success on his own. A pawn, pushed around in a power struggle. But this pawn was all- and whoever captured the pawn, won the game.

I sighed, and slowly, wincing, got back on my feet. No one except me was going to get me home and bandaged up.

I walked. It was less than a mile. But far enough.

The elderly doctor was fortunately at home when I telephoned.

'What do you mean, you fell off a horse and broke your collar-bone?' he demanded. 'At this hour? I thought all horses had to be off the Heath by four.'

'Look,' I said wearily. 'I've broken my collar-bone. Would you come and deal with it?'

'Mm,' he grunted. 'All right.'

He came within half an hour, equipped with what looked like a couple of rubber quoits. Clavicle rings, he said, as he proceeded to push one up each of my shoulders and tie them together behind my back.

'Bloody uncomfortable,' I said.

'Well, if you will fall off horses

His heavy eyes assessed his handiwork with impassive professionalism. Tying up broken collar-bones in Newmarket was as regular as dispensing coughdrops.

'Take some codeine,' he said. 'Got any?'

'I don't know.'

He clicked his tongue and produced a packet from his bag. 'Two every four hours.'

'Thank you. Very much.'

'That's all right,' he said, nodding. He shut his bag and flipped the clips.

'Have a drink?' I suggested, as he helped me into my shirt.

'Thought you'd never ask,' he said smiling, and dealt with a large whisky as familiarly as with his bandages. I kept him company, and the spirit helped the codeine along considerably.

'As a matter of interest,' I said as he reached the second half of his glassful, 'What illnesses cause sterility?'

'Eh?' He looked surprised, but answered straightforwardly. 'Only two, really. Mumps and venereal disease. But mumps very rarely causes complete sterility. Usually affects one testicle only, if it affects any at all. Syphilis is the only sure sterility one. But with modern treatment, it doesn't progress that far.'

'Would you tell me more about it?'

'Hypothetical?' he asked. 'I mean, you don't think you yourself may be infected? Because if so-'

'Absolutely not,' I interrupted. 'Strictly hypothetical.'

'Good-' He drank efficiently. 'Well.

Sometimes people contract both syphilis and gonorrhoea at once. Say they get treated and cured of gonorrhoea, but the syphilis goes unsuspected- Right? Now syphilis is a progressive disease, but it can lie quiet for years, doing its slow damage more or less unknown to its host. Sterility could occur a few years after infection. One couldn't say exactly how many years, it varies enormously. But, before the sterility occurs, any number of infected children could be conceived. Mostly, they are stillborn. Some live, but there's almost always something wrong with them.'

Alessandro had said his father had been ill after he was born, which seemed to put him in the clear. But venereal disease would account for Enso's wife's extreme bitterness, and the violent break up of the marriage.

'Henry VIII,' the doctor said, as if it followed naturally on.

'What?' I said.

'Henry VIII,' he repeated patiently. 'He had syphilis. Katherine of Aragon had about a dozen stillborn children and her one surviving child, Mary, was barren. His sickly son Edward died young. Don't know about Elizabeth, not enough data.' He polished off the last drop in his glass.

I pointed to the bottle. 'Would you mind helping yourself?'

He got to his feet and refilled my glass, too. 'He went about blaming his poor wives for not producing sons, when it was his fault all the time. And that extreme fanaticism about having a son- and cutting off heads right and left to get one- that's typical obsessive syphilitic behaviour.'

'How do you mean?'

The pepper king,' he said, as if that explained all.

'What had he got to do with pepper, for heaven's sake?'

'Not Henry VIII,' he said impatiently. 'The pepper king was someone else- Look, in the medical text books, in the chapter on the advanced complications which can arise from syphilis, there's this bit about the pepper king. He was a chap who had megalomania in an interim stage of G.P.I., and he got this obsession about pepper. He set out to corner all the pepper in the world and make himself into a tycoon, and because of his compulsive fanaticism, he managed it.'

I sorted my way through the maze. 'Are you saying that at a further stage than sterility, our hypothetical syphilitic gent can convince himself that he can move mountains?'

'Not only convince himself,' he agreed, nodding. 'But actually do it. There is literally no one more likely to move mountains than your megalomaniac syphilitic. Not that it lasts for ever, of course. Twenty years, perhaps, in that stage, once it's developed.'