She stared. ‘You’re a goddam fool.’
‘So are you, if I may say so. That gun goes off very easily.’
She looked down at it vaguely and before I could stop her she threw it away from her on to the paving stones. The jar as it hit the ground inevitably fired it. Flame streaked out of the barrel, and the bullet smashed through the whisky glass which stood on the ground beside her long chair, nine inches from her body.
It took her a second to realize what had happened, then she shuddered heavily and put her hands over her face. I walked across to fetch the gun, and put the safety on, and then perched on the bed facing her.
‘Games,’ she said in a shattered voice. ‘What do I have but games? Bridge and golf. All games.’
‘This too?’ I put the Luger back in the under-arm niche and buttoned the strap.
‘I just thought I’d make you sweat.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s a bloody good question. A bloody good question. All games. Life is all bloody games.’
‘And we’re all poor bloody losers,’ I agreed sardonically.
She put her hands down and looked at me. Her eyes were dry, but half her assurance had drained away.
‘It was only a game. I didn’t mean you any harm.’
She thought she was telling the truth, but I’d met too many of the tricks the unconscious mind gets up to. Perhaps because I’d saved her husband, or was looking for his horse, or merely represented some obscure form of male challenge, she’d had an undoubted urge to destroy me. And she was a very troubled lady in far more obvious ways than that.
‘Give me your drink,’ she said abruptly.
‘I’ll get you some more whisky,’ I said.
‘Yours will do,’ she insisted.
I gave her the glass, but one sip was enough. Dry ginger ale. On the rocks.
‘Do you cheat all along the line?’
‘Whenever it’s kinder, or safer, or gets better results.’
I walked away across the lawn and brought her back another glass. She took a moderate pull and put it down amid the ruins of the first one.
‘Stay to dinner,’ she said. She made it a casual suggestion rather than a warm invitation, and I answered her need, not her tone.
‘All right.’
She nodded briefly and flattened herself face down, to roast her back. I lay with one arm over my eyes to shield them from the direct sun, and thought about all the things she hadn’t asked, like how was Dave when I saw him and how bad was the broken thigh.
After a while she went back to floating.
‘Come on in,’ she called.
I shook my head.
‘Don’t be so prissy,’ she said. ‘I’m not a swooning virgin. If your legs are like that, the rest of you must be the same. Take that bloody shirt off and give yourself a break.’
It was indeed very hot, and the clear blue water looked good. I sighed, stood up, took the shirt off, and slid down into the pool. Its lukewarm antigravitational gentleness unlocked knots and tensions in my nerves and muscles that I hadn’t even realized were there, and I swam and floated tranquilly for nearly an hour. When finally I hauled myself out over the edge she was smoothing on another coating of oil. Her whisky glass was empty.
‘Is Dave in that state too?’ she asked, eyeing me.
‘Pretty much.’
She grimaced slightly and said nothing when I put my shirt back on.
The sun had begun to lose its height in the sky and shadows were fanning out from the trees. A golden sheen lay on the big cream colonial type house across the green lawn. The pool water stilled, and the quietness of the place crept subtly into all the senses.
‘It’s so beautiful here,’ I said. A banal enough phrase for the promise of peace.
She looked round casually. ‘I suppose it is. But we’re moving, of course.’
‘Moving?’
‘Yes. To California.’
‘Moving the stud? Horses, and everything?’
‘That’s right. Dave’s just bought a farm down near Santa Barbara, and we’re moving over there in the fall.’
‘I would have thought you were settled here for life. Wasn’t this Dave’s father’s place?’
‘Oh no. We moved here about ten years ago. The old farm was on the other side of Lexington, out on the Versailles Road.’
‘California is a long way,’ I commented. But she didn’t respond with a reason for the move, and after a pause I said, ‘If it wouldn’t be much trouble to you, I’d like very much to see the horses and stables you have here.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Business or pleasure?’
‘Both,’ I smiled.
She shrugged. ‘Help yourself. But get me another drink first.’
A pool-side icebox, I reflected, would save a lot of walking: but maybe she still needed the illusion that she didn’t drink in the afternoon. I fetched her a refill, changed into my clothes, and found her still face down in the bikini.
‘Say I sent you,’ she said.
Before I could move, however, Dave rang from England, and Eva brought a portable telephone out and plugged the long cord into a socket in the hut. Dave’s wife made three or four unanxious inquiries about her husband’s condition, and then said, ‘Yes, he’s here right now.’ She held out the receiver to me. ‘He wants to talk to you.’
‘Gene?’ His voice was as clear as if he’d been in Lexington, and much stronger than it had been the previous morning.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Look fella, Sim and I want you back here for a conference. Can you get a plane tomorrow?’
‘But the fare...’ I protested mildly.
‘To hell with the fare. You’ve got a return ticket.’
‘All right.’
‘You haven’t found the horse yet?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think you will?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
He sighed. ‘See you Thursday, then,’ and the line went dead.
The stables lay some distance away on the far side of the house. I walked round there and was shortly talking to the stud groom, Chub Lodovski, a large good-natured man with slow speech, a bird head, and great ham-like hands. He showed me round the whole setup with unlimited patience and an obvious pride in his job. The state of the place was his testimonial. The mares and foals ate peacefully in neatly railed paddocks reached by impeccable narrow drives with sharply cut grass edges. The stallions lived in a short row of six large airy box-stalls in a spacious barn, with a wooden railed exercise paddock in front, flanked by two high-walled mating compounds.
Only five of these stalls were occupied. The vacancy was for Chrysalis.
‘Is this where you kept Allyx?’ I asked.
‘That’s right. Second stall from the end. He was only in it four days.’
‘And where was the fire?’
He frowned. ‘It started in some straw one night, just about here.’ We were fairly central. ‘It wasn’t much. Mostly smoke.’
‘And you turned the horses out into the exercise paddock in front here?’
‘That’s right. Just as a precaution. But one of those doggone animals got scared and broke a rail on the far side, and the whole bunch got out across that stretch of grass on to that dirt road over there. We never did find Allyx. There hasn’t been sight nor sound of him since.’
We talked for a while about the search they’d made next morning, but, Lodovski said, the whole of Kentucky was plastered with horses, and no one thought much about it if they saw one loose, and although a reward had been offered, and the insurance people had swarmed around like bloodhounds, they’d never found him.
‘And now Chrysalis,’ I sighed sympathetically.
‘Sure. And they say lightning never strikes the same place twice!’
He was moderately upset that the stud looked like losing another major attraction, but it wasn’t his money that was involved, and besides that he was proud enough of the stallions remaining in residence. I asked him if he’d ever been to California.