‘Practically none. How about you?’
His nostrils twisted. ‘If you mean, was it I who didn’t find the other two, then no, it wasn’t.’
I tried a smile: didn’t get one back.
He said: ‘Buttress Life had to pay up for Allyx three years ago. One million six hundred and forty-three thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine dollars, give or take a nickel. Showman, the first one, was insured with another company.’
‘Accident?’ I murmured. ‘Or design.’
He rubbed his left thumb over the top of the round-ended fingers, the first of a hundred times I saw that gesture.
‘Now that you’ve come, design. Before, I wasn’t sure.’
‘I’m officially on holiday,’ I protested. ‘I came only because Teller asked me. You should read no meaning into it.’
He gave me a level, half sardonic stare.
‘I checked you out,’ he said, flicking at the copy of the cable, which lay on his desk. ‘I wanted to know just what sort of limey busybody was being wished on to me.’
I didn’t say anything, and he made a clicking noise at the side of his mouth, expressive of understanding, resignation and acceptance, all in one.
‘A screener,’ he said. ‘How come Teller found you?’
‘How come you found me?’ I asked instead.
‘I mentioned your name in two places,’ he said complacently. ‘The FBI, and the CIA. And got a positive reaction from both. A couple of useful pals there filled me in. It seems you’re a major stumbling block in the way of the planting of spies in certain Government departments and places like biological warfare research laboratories; and you’ve passed on some useful warnings on that subject to our people at Fort Detrick. They say the other side have tried to deter you, a little roughly, once or twice.’ He sighed. ‘You have a clean bill with our boys. And how.’
‘And with you?’
‘They said you didn’t like limelight.’
‘It’s all yours.’
‘Just so as I stand in right with Buttress.’
My decisive nod satisfied him. If we found the horse, he was welcome to the handshakes.
‘Fill me in, then,’ I said. ‘How did Chrysalis get lost?’
Walt glanced at his watch and checked it against the electric clock on the wall. The little box-like office had no windows, as the single glass panel faced out on to the corridor; and although it was cool and comfortable enough, it was no place to talk if one didn’t have to.
‘Five after six,’ Walt said. ‘Do you have any other engagements?’
‘Know any good bars?’ I suggested.
‘A mind reader.’ He raised eyes to heaven. ‘There’s Dalaney’s a block up Broadway.’
We stepped out of the air-conditioning into the sweltering street, up 30 degrees in two paces. With the humidity running also at 98 per cent, walking as little as a hundred yards left one damp to the skin. I never minded it: New York in a heatwave was always preferable to New York in a snowstorm, or anywhere hot to anywhere cold, for that matter. Cold seeped farther than into the bones; numbed the mind, drained the will. If the depression deepened towards winter, defeat would come with the snow.
Dalaney’s was spilling out on to the pavement with a business convention let out of school. An oblong name tab sat on each neat Terylene lapel, a confident smile hid the anxiety behind every face; they stretched from the substantial group outside into the deep cool gloom of the bar. Pushing through them looked a problem; conversation in their company an impossibility.
‘How about your hotel? Where are you staying?’ Walt said.
‘The Biltmore.’
Walt’s eyebrows rose two clear inches.
‘Teller’s paying,’ I said. ‘He has an account there.’
‘What did you do then? Save his life?’
‘Six times,’ I agreed, matching his sarcasm.
‘He must really think,’ Walt said reflectively, ‘that you might get his horse back.’
‘We,’ I said.
‘Nope. You. There’s no trail. I’ve looked.’
A coloured cab driver in rolled-up shirt sleeves took us to the hotel, hot air blowing in gusts through the open window each time he accelerated. The city moved sluggishly under the brazen sun, and there was more rubbish than usual littering the streets.
‘This is a filthy town,’ said Walt, seeing it through my eyes. ‘Give me Chicago.’
‘Too cold,’ I said automatically. ‘Beautiful, but too cold. That freezing wind off the lake...’
‘Are you guys from Chicago?’ said the cab driver. ‘I was born there, in the Loop.’
We talked to him about that. I drifted away into the disorientated state of not caring a jot about the cab driver, or Walt, or Dave Teller, or Caroline, or anyone on earth. We went up to my room in the Biltmore and I dragged through the host motions of ringing down for a bottle of Scotch and ice and seeing to heat, light and ashtrays. Walt loosened his tie and took a first appreciative swallow.
‘You look pooped,’ he said.
‘Natural state.’
‘I guess it’s midnight already, to you.’
‘I guess.’
There was a considerable drinking pause. Then he said, shifting his sturdy body in the white leather chair, ‘Well, do you want to know about this horse, or don’t you?’
‘Sure.’ The boredom in my answer came over shockingly strong, even to me. He looked faintly startled and then speculative, but when he spoke it was strictly business.
‘They were taking him in a horse van from Kennedy Airport to Lexington, Kentucky. He’d spent the compulsory twenty-four hours immigration quarantine in the airport stable, along with six other horses which came over on the same flight. All normal at that time. They loaded Chrysalis and four others into the van, and drove westwards from New York on the Pennsylvania turnpike.’
‘Time?’ I asked.
‘Left Kennedy 4 PM Monday. Last Monday, that is. A week today. Estimated Lexington midday Tuesday. Seven hundred miles.’
‘Stops?’
‘Yeah,’ Walt said. ‘Stops. That’s where the trouble started.’ He swirled the clinking ice round in his glass. ‘They took their first meal stop at a diner near Allentown, about eighty-five miles from New York. There were four men in the van, two drivers and two grooms. Drivers in the cab, grooms in back with the cargo. At the first stop they took turns to eat, drivers first, grooms after. The drivers chivvied the grooms, and gave them too short a time to eat a good meal. There was an unfriendly argument.’
‘They all say so?’
‘Yeah. I’ve talked to all four, one at a time. They’re all trying their hardest to pin the blame on the others. They left the diner and went about two hundred miles to their night stop at Bedford. That was no better. Far from cooling off, they had begun to scuffle.
‘They turned off the turnpike on to the interstate highway — seventy — south of Pittsburg, and left that again at Zanesville, taking the south-west fork to Cincinatti. About fifty miles farther on they turned due south to cross the Ohio River into Kentucky, and go on through Paris and down the Paris Pike to Lexington.’
‘I’ll need to see it on a map,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘From Zanesville to Paris they took secondary routes, though all paved roads, of course. Right? Now it was in Ohio that the van was hi-jacked, and it was over the state border in Kentucky when it was found, which has caused a couple of arguments here and there.’
‘Hi-jacked! That’s the first I’ve heard of that.’
‘It was hi-jacked by mistake for a truckful of liquor which was about twenty miles behind it along the road. The vans looked alike, same colour, same size, and neither of them had any large identifying signs.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘By that time, Tuesday morning, the drivers and grooms were all eating at the same time, though at each end of the lunch counter. They left the horses unguarded for a full quarter hour, and during that time someone simply drove off with the whole works.’