‘Three hundred. I looked at the map.’
He drank and rubbed his thumb over his fingers much faster than usual. Tired lines had appeared round his eyes.
I think it’s a futile waste of time,’ he said abruptly.
‘I’ve time to waste.’
‘And I haven’t.’
He put the glass down with a thump, reached into an inner pocket and brought out another white package which he tossed down in front of me.
‘These are your photographs.’
‘Thanks.’
The look he gave me was a long way from the smile of that morning. I wondered whether I would have let him go looking for answers if I’d known he was short on stamina, and decided I probably would. He hadn’t given up half way: only at the end.
Lynnie appeared in the bar doorway in her orange dress and the tired looking men there straightened their spines in a hurry. She wouldn’t come in. I eased Walt with me across the heavy carpet and introduced him to her in the hall outside. He made only a few perfunctory remarks and left in a short time with a glowering face and solid back.
‘Whatever’s bitten him?’ said Lynnie, looking after him.
‘He’s had a tiring day and he’s going home to his wife.’
She looked at me quickly, half laughing. ‘Do you always know what you’re saying?’
‘Frequently.’
She chuckled. ‘Anyway, you look a lot tireder than he does.’ We started to walk over to the desk to collect our keys.
‘That’s most encouraging.’
‘What shall we do this evening? Or do you want to sleep?’ She was unselfish enough to keep anxiety entirely out of her voice, but when I said we’d go wherever she wanted there was an extra bounce in her stride. She decided on a two hour taxi ride to everywhere in the city she’d ever heard of that she hadn’t managed to see that afternoon, followed by dinner in a second-floor glass-walled restaurant, looking down and across the lights of Broadway and Times Square. At eleven-thirty, when we got back to the Biltmore, she was still wide awake.
‘What a fabulous, fantastic day,’ she said in the lift.
‘Good.’
‘I’ll remember it as long as I live.’
I smiled at her enthusiasm. It was a thousand years since I’d been as happy as that, but sometimes I could still imagine how it felt. That evening it had been quite easy.
‘You are far from drizz,’ she said, contentedly grinning.
‘You’d be no great drag to be stuck in a lift with yourself.’
But the lift stopped unimaginatively at the eighth floor as scheduled and we walked along to our rooms. Her door was opposite mine.
I kissed her cheek. ‘Goodnight, little Lynnie.’
Her brown eyes smiled serenely back. ‘Goodnight, Gene. Sleep well.’
‘You too,’ I said. ‘Kentucky first stop in the morning.’
It took four more days to find the girl in the photograph, though maybe I could have done it in two if it hadn’t been for Lynnie. Privately aware that it wasn‘t necessary for me to do the job myself I dredged up a cast iron-sounding reason for having to accompany her to Lexington, and we flew down via Washington, which involved another quick taxi tour instead of a lengthy wait at the airport. Lynnie didn’t intend to miss a thing.
Eunice met us at Lexington airfield and drove us to Midway, and after a prawn and avocado lunch lent me her car to go on my errand. I greased Chrysalis’s ex-groom into going with me with twenty dollars of his employer’s money, and took him off to Sam Hengelman’s. The horse van, Sam said out of the corner of his mouth as he watched an old movie on a cyan-heavy colour set, was still in care of the police department. If I wanted to look at it, go talk to them.
At the police department a state trooper listened to what I had to say, said ‘Yeah,’ several times, consulted higher authority, and sorted out some keys. Higher authority turned out to be a good-looking detective in his twenties, and we all four repaired to the parking lot behind the police building, where the horse van stood in one corner.
Chrysalis’s lad pointed out the stall the stallion had inhabited, and the state trooper came up with a successful conclusion to the expedition: four long shining bay hairs.
‘From his mane,’ said the groom authoritatively.
The detective kept two for the State and sent off the other two special delivery to Walt at Buttress Life, and the groom and I drove back to Midway.
Eunice and Lynnie were both in the pool, and the rest of the day and night came close enough to my daydream on the plane, except that the sixteen hours’ sleep shrank to six, but even that was spectacular by recent standards.
When Lynnie said over large cups of breakfast coffee the next morning that she wished I wasn’t going, I very nearly didn’t. If I’d stayed, Buttress Life would have paid the insurance and a load of grief would never have happened. Yet if I could go back to that cross-roads moment again I know I would inevitably make the same decision. Once a hunter, always a hunter: the inner compulsion hadn’t loosened its grip: the quality they’d hauled me out of the Army for was too basic in my nature, and being what I was, what I am, slopping out of the chase was impossible. Keeble had known, I admitted wryly, that he had only to get me hooked.
‘I must go,’ I said, ‘if I’m to find the horse.’
‘Damn the horse,’ Lynnie said.
I laughed at her. ‘You’ve learnt quickly.’
‘I like Eunice,’ she said defensively. ‘She doesn’t shock me.’
I gathered from that that she certainly did, but that Lynnie would never admit it.
‘But you will come back here? Before you go home, I mean?’
‘I expect so,’ I said.
She fiddled with her coffee cup, looking down. ‘It’s only a week since I picked you up at your flat, last Sunday.’
‘And you’ve aged a year.’
She looked up quickly, startled. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘It was what you were thinking.’
‘I know,’ she said, puzzled, ‘but I don’t know how you do.’
‘Crystal set in the attic. Intermittent though, unfortunately.’
‘Just as well, if you ask me.’ There was a healthy mockery on her laughing face. ‘How would you like to be tuned in permanently to Eunice?’
Eunice herself trailed through the doorway at that moment wearing an electric blue wrapper and a manageable hangover. With both still in place, after two cups of coffee and a cigarette, she trundled Lynnie and me to the airport.
‘Goodbye, you son of a bitch,’ she said to me, as I stood beside her window. ‘I guess you can come back any time you want to.’
Lynnie glanced at her sharply, with sudden speculation: growing up in front of one’s eyes. I smiled goodbye to them both and walked away into the airport. From there I bus-stopped a thousand miles to Denver, and chartered a twin-engined Piper from a local firm for the last two hundred to Rock Springs. The pilot chewed his nails savagely beside me all the way as if he were a dedicated auto-cannibal, and I arrived feeling sick.
On the hot late Sunday afternoon the little desert town looked lifeless. Shimmering air rose endlessly over the dump of abandoned rusting motor cars, a Greyhound bus rolled past with passengers staring like fish through its green glass windows, and sprinklers on the richer front lawns kept the parching heat at bay. At the bus station I learnt that old man Hagstrom’s boy was the agent for Snail Express, but when I found old man Hagstrom, fanning himself in a rocker on the front porch of his small frame house, he said that his boy was out calling.
Hagstrom himself seemed to be glad to have company and told me to go inside and bring two beers out of the icebox. The icebox was in the living room, just through the screen door. It was a shambles of a room with sagging broken-spring chairs, dirty worn out rag rugs, a scattered assortment of cups, glasses, and bottles, all unwashed, and a vast new television. I took the beer out on to the porch, sat on the top step, and drank from the bottle, like my host.