At five o’clock they came across with the results.
‘This is the best we can do,’ Miss Britt said doubtfully. ‘There are well over three thousand stallions at stud in the States, you see. You asked us to sort out any whose fees had risen steadily over the past eight or nine years... there are two hundred and nine of them.’ She put a closely typed list in front of me.
‘Next, you wanted the names of any stallions who had been conspicuously more successful at stud than one would have expected from their own breeding. There are two hundred and eighty two of those.’ She gave me a second sheet.
‘Next, you wanted to know if any of this year’s two-year-olds had proved conspicuously better at racing than one would normally have expected from their breeding. There are twenty-nine of those.’ She added the third list.
‘And lastly, the people who could be called Bark... thirty-two of them. From the Bar K Ranch to Barry Kyle.’
‘You’ve done wonders,’ I said sincerely. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that any one farm is concerned on all four lists?’
‘Most of the stallions on the first list are the same as those on the second. That stands to reason. But none of the sires of the exceptional two-year-olds are on either of the first two lists. And none of the two-year-olds were bred by any of the Barks.’ Both of them looked downcast at such negative results after all their work.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘We’ll try another way tomorrow.’
Miss Britt snorted, which I interpreted as agreement. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ she said, nodding. Mr Harris seemed to doubt that this particular Rome could be built at all with the materials available, but he turned up uncomplaining at nine the following morning, and they both dived in again, on new permutations.
By noon the first two lists had been reduced to twenty. We all adjourned for a sandwich. At two the searching began again. At three ten Miss Britt gasped sharply and her eyes went wide. She scribbled quickly on a fresh piece of paper, considered the result with her head on one side, and then looked across to me.
‘Well...’ she said. ‘Well...’ The words wouldn’t come.
‘You’ve found them,’ I said.
She nodded, only half believing it.
‘Cross-checking them all by where they raced, their years of purchase, their markings and their approximate ages, as you asked... we came up with twelve possibles which appeared on the first two lists. And one of the sires of the two-year-olds fits your requirements and comes from the same farm as one of the first twelve. Er... do you follow me?’
‘On your heels,’ I said, smiling.
Mr Harris and I both joined her and looked over her shoulder at what she had written.
‘Moviemaker, aged fourteen years; present stud fee ten thousand dollars.
‘Centigrade, aged twelve years; this year’s stud fee fifteen hundred dollars, fee next year twenty-five hundred.
‘Both standing at Orpheus Farm, Los Caillos.
‘The property of Culham James Offen.’
Moviemaker and Centigrade: Showman and Allyx. As clear as a frosty sky.
Stallions were normally booked for thirty to forty mares each breeding season. Forty mares at ten thousand dollars a throw meant four hundred thousand dollars every year, give or take a live foal or two. Moviemaker had cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at public auction ten years ago, according to Miss Britt’s researches. Since then Offen had been paid somewhere near two-and-a-half million dollars in stud fees.
Centigrade had been bought for a hundred thousand dollars at Keneland sales. At twenty-five hundred a time he would earn that hundred thousand next year alone. And nothing was more likely than that he too would rise to a much higher fee.
‘Culham James Offen is so well regarded,’ Miss Britt said in consternation. ‘I simply can’t believe it. He’s accepted as one of the top rank breeders.’
‘The only thing is, of course,’ said Mr Harris, regretfully, ‘that there’s no connection with the name Bark.’
Miss Britt looked at me and her smile shone out sweet and triumphant.
‘But there is, isn’t there? Mr Harris, you’re no musician. Haven’t you ever heard of Orpheus in the Underworld... by Offenbach?’
Chapter Twelve
Walt said ‘For God’s sake’ four times and admitted Buttress Life might be willing to send him from coast to coast if Allyx were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
‘Los Caillos is a short distance north-east of Los Angeles,’ I said. ‘I thought of staying a bit farther north, on the coast.’
‘If you like.’
‘Come to The Vacationer, Grand Beach, Santa Barbara, then. I’ll meet you there tomorrow.’
He repeated the address. ‘Who’s paying?’ he said.
‘Buttress Life and Dave Teller can fight it out between them. I’ll put the motel on Teller’s expenses. Can you wring the fare out of your office?’
‘I guess so.’ His sigh came wearily over the wire. ‘My wife and kids aren’t going to like it. I was fixing to take them on a picnic this Sunday.’
‘Postpone it a week,’ I suggested.
‘It’s been postponed twice already, on your account.’
‘Oh.’
After a short pause, he said, ‘Around six, tomorrow, local time. That do?’
‘That would do very well.’
‘See you,’ he said briefly, and put down his receiver with a crash. I returned the Teller instrument more kindly to its cradle and surveyed the green and tomato room.
Nothing to do.
Mixed a drink with precision, and drank it. Wandered down to the pool, thought about a swim in the dusk, and couldn’t be bothered to undress. Went back to the house, and ate a dinner cooked and served by Eva, who chattered so long in her pleasure at having someone to speak to in her own language that I heartily regretted I’d ever used it. Wished desperately she would stop and go away, and when at last she did, that was no good either.
Tried to read and turned six pages without taking in a word. Wandered restlessly again into the black velvet deep green garden, and sat in one of the chairs by the pool, looking at darkness inside and out. Unreasonable, I thought drearily, that I shouldn’t have recovered normally from losing Caroline, that I didn’t value the freedom other men envied, that I couldn’t be content with all I had: cruel that depression was no respecter of status or achievement and struck so deep that no worldly success could alleviate it.
Great fame, universal honour, droves of personal friends had demonstrably failed to save a whole string of geniuses from its clutches, and every year it bagged its thousands from unimportant people like me who would never see their name in print or lights, and didn’t necessarily want to. Probably depression was an illness as definite as jaundice, and one day they would inoculate babies against it. I supposed I could count myself lucky not to have had it in its acute form, where its grey-black octopus tentacles reached out and sucked into every corner of the spirit until quite quickly life became literally unbearable, and the high jump suddenly presented itself with blinding clarity as the only logical, the only possible relief.
I wouldn’t come to that day, if I could help it. I would not.
The Vacationer was right down on the beach, with the sound of the bright blue Pacific creeping in a murmur under the transistors, the air-conditioning, the civilized chatter, the squalling of children, and the revving of cars. There were no ocean rooms left. Walt and I, next door to each other, overlooked the parking lot.
Eunice and Lynnie were out when I arrived and still out when Walt checked in at six, but they were back when I went down with him for a drink before dinner. I had left a note at the desk for Eunice, but I hadn’t told Walt she would be there. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her sitting with Lynnie, and turned on me a narrow-eyed composite glance of dislike and anger. If I’d told him she was to be with us, he wouldn’t have come: he knew that I knew it. He was entitled to his rage.