“No,” she said. “I’m afraid he won’t be back here now until next month at the earliest. For the Delafield Cup, I expect. He’s usually here for that.”
So they knew Mr. Komarov. In fact, they seemed to know him quite well.
“So he doesn’t own this club, then?” I asked her, feigning surprise.
“Oh no,” she said. “But he does own most of the ponies. His pony man is here, if you’d like to see him?” I wasn’t sure whether I did, but, before I could stop her, she lifted a phone and pushed some buttons. “What did you say your name was?” she asked me.
I hadn’t, in fact, said anything about my name. “Mr. Buck,” I said, looking out at my car. I very nearly said Buick.
Someone answered at the other end. “Kurt,” said the woman. “I have a Mr. Buck here asking after Mr. Komarov. He wants to know when he will be coming back to the club. Can you help?” She listened for a moment and then said, “Hold on, I’ll ask him.” She looked up at me. “Kurt says to ask you how you know Mr. Komarov.”
“I don’t,” I said. “But I want to ask him about something that happened in England.”
She relayed the message and then listened briefly. “Where in England?” she asked me.
“Newmarket,” I said loudly.
She didn’t say anything but listened a while longer. “Fine, I’ll tell him.” She hung up. “Kurt is coming over to see you,” she said to me. “Kurt’s in charge of all Mr. Komarov’s ponies.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll wait for him outside.”
Why were the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end and signaling danger, danger? Perhaps it would be safer to get back in the car and leave immediately. Instead, I went for a stroll and walked through a horse passageway beneath the empty grandstand and out onto the polo pitch beyond.
It put the Guards Polo Club in the shade. While it was true that there wasn’t a Royal Box, the rest of the facilities for watching were outstanding, with covered stands and hundreds of padded armchairlike seats for maximum comfort. The playing area had been set up for what the man at the Guards Club had called arena polo, but it could obviously be converted into a larger field for the real thing by removal of the boundary boards. There was plenty enough of the well-tended grass for even the biggest polo pitch.
I was standing, looking at the grandstand, when a man called out to me.
“Mr. Buck?” he shouted as he came through the passageway. Kurt, I presumed, and he wasn’t alone. A second man was with him, and he made me feel decidedly uncomfortable. Whereas Kurt was small and jockeylike in stature, his sidekick was tall and wide. And he carried a five-foot-long polo mallet across his chest like a soldier might carry a gun. I was left in no doubt that it was there to intimidate. It worked. I was very intimidated. Why hadn’t I got in the car and gone away when I had had the opportunity?
I stood in the middle of the grass polo arena and my exit route was on the other side of the grandstand. I had no choice but to brazen it out.
“What do you want?” Kurt asked brusquely. No word of welcome. But there wouldn’t be. His body language said it all. I wasn’t welcome one little bit.
I smiled, tying to relax. “I understand,” I said cheerfully, “that you know Mr. Komarov. Is that right?”
“It might be,” he said. “Depends on who wants to know.”
“I was hoping Mr. Komarov might be able to help me identify something,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“It’s in my car,” I said. I set off quickly past him towards the passageway.
“What is it?” he asked again.
“I’ll show you,” I said over my shoulder without breaking step. He wasn’t to know that the item was, in fact, in my trouser pocket, but I had no intention of getting it out here. I thought I would be safer at the car, but that might only be illusory.
Kurt didn’t seem happy and snorted through his nose, but he followed, and, sadly, so did his shadow. I walked ahead of them, and while I didn’t actually run they would have had to in order to overtake me. The larger man was unfit, and by the time I reached my car he was some way back and blowing hard.
But I hadn’t driven all this way for nothing. I still wanted to find out what I had come here for in the first place. I opened the car door and reached inside as if I was finding something, but I was actually getting it out of my pocket. I turned around and held the shiny steel ball out to Kurt in my open palm, like giving a piece of sugar to a horse.
He was dumbstruck. He stared at the ball and then at my face, as if searching for words.
“Where the fuck did you get that?” he said. He made a grab for it, but I closed my hand and easily beat his grasp.
“Tell me what is it and I’ll tell you where I found it,” I said.
“You give me that back right now,” he said, winding himself into a rage.
“You can have it back if you tell me what it is,” I said, sounding like a teacher who has confiscated some type of electronic gadget from a miscreant schoolboy but doesn’t know what it is.
Without warning, the big guy swung the polo mallet and struck me on the forearm. He was partially behind me, and I didn’t see the mallet coming until the very last millisecond. I had no time to avoid it, but, thankfully, I had time to relax as he hit me. Otherwise, I think he would have broken my arm completely in two. As it was, it wasn’t great. The mallet caught me just above my right wrist. There was a sharp crack, and my arm went instantly numb. I dropped the shiny metal ball. It rolled away towards Kurt. As he stooped to pick it up, I dived into the car, slammed the door and pushed the central locking button.
My right arm wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get the key in the ignition, which was on the right side of the steering column. I spent valuable seconds trying and failing before leaning completely over to my right and getting the key into the slot using my left hand. I turned the key, started the car and threw the automatic gearshift into reverse with my left hand. The rear window of the Buick disintegrated behind me. I ignored it. I looked through the space where the glass had been and gunned the engine. The car leaped backwards towards the mallet-wielding maniac behind me. Surprisingly, he deftly sidestepped the car and swung the mallet again in my direction. The passenger’s door window shattered, showering me with tiny squares of glass. Kurt was at the driver’s door, banging on the window and hauling on the door handle, but he had no mallet and his fist was no match for the toughened glass.
I braked hard to a stop and shoved the gearshift back into drive with my elbow. But the mallet maniac hadn’t finished. As the car accelerated forward towards the gate and the highway, he took one last swing. The business end of the mallet came right through the laminated windshield in front of the passenger’s seat, and stuck there. I didn’t stop. I caught a glimpse of the look of panic on the man’s face as I shot off with the mallet head stuck firmly through the glass. He had his hand equally firmly stuck in the twisted leather loop on the handle end.
In the rearview mirror, I saw the loop pluck him off his feet. I heard him strike the side of the vehicle somewhere low down on the nearside rear door, but I wasn’t going to stop, not even if I had to drag him all the way back to Chicago. As it was, he somehow disentangled his hand and dropped away before I turned out onto Silvernail Road and sped away towards the relative safety of the thundering eighteen-wheelers on I-94, the polo mallet still sticking out sideways from the windshield.
After a mile or so, I pulled over to the shoulder and managed to extricate the mallet. The leather loop on the handle had broken. I hoped that the wrist that had so recently been in it would be broken as well. I threw it on the backseat and set off again, glad that I wouldn’t now have to explain to any highway patrol why I had a polo mallet stuck out of my windshield. The Buick was missing two windows completely, and had a two-inch-diameter hole plus multiple cracks in the windshield, but I could live with that. The fact that I was alive at all was what really mattered to me.