I can get him back for you, Joe Dale tell her.
Don't get in that dark window automobile with that gangster, you know he has hurt people, Medicine Ed try to say into her, but she ain't listening. The more she know she ought not to go near that car the color of night, the closer she drift. The door shut behind her with a soft chunk like a ice box and she gone. Behind them purple windows Medicine Ed can't see nothing. The midnight blue Sedan de Ville crush over thin-ice puddles and round the corner. Behind Barn L, then Barn J, he catch the Cadillac rolling slow towards the front gate. Medicine Ed light out for the pay phone back of the track kitchen, fast as his stick leg can wamble.
NOT GOOD, EDWARD. Not good. When was this?
Only just now.
This is not good news, Two-Tie said. This ain't good news at all, because D'Ambrisi goes over there himself this afternoon to pick up the horse, as soon as he organizes a van. It won't take him long because I happen to know that D'Ambrisi is hot to get out from under that horse any way he can. I hear he has talked to certain important people out of town and he don't want Pelter no more. He don't want his name on those foaling papers even one more night. Have you seen him yet?
I ain't seen him.
Well, you will. The horse is coming back to Hansel and the girl. And to you, Edward.
Medicine Ed was silent.
Naturally Joe Dale won't like it when he finds out he has to get off that horse. You sure they went to his farm?
That's what he say.
Did Joe Dale have his boys with him?
Wasn't nobody in the car but Joe Dale. And her.
Thank you, Edward.
Two-Tie reached in back of his twenty-volume set of The Book of Knowledge for his Browning 9mm, and called down at the Ritzy Lunch for Roy, of Roy's Taxicab. He went to the back window and fumbled with the rod of the dusty venetian blind; his small fat hand was trembling. He hadn't touched a gun in eighteen months, since he'd backed off making the circuit of race meetings. He had never carried a gun in town. It was starting to rain. Already when Roy pulled his cab around a mound of brown paper boxes into Two-Tie's alley, the boxes were slumping and the rain lay on the dirty ice of the parking lot in glowing gray sheets. He got down his umbrella. Elizabeth went to the door and, refusing to make way for him, eyeballed the door knob insistently. Not today, Elizabeth. Go lay down. She didn't move. O for god's sake. All right. Come on, he said, knowing it was a bad idea. Obviously, if anything happened to him, Elizabeth had no future. The fact was, neither of them had much future, even if they never ran into trouble like this. It was also true that two hours in Roy's backseat in the cold left Elizabeth lame behind for a week. When they crossed the Powhatan Point bridge she was still looking around at her bony tush and turning clumsy circles back there, trying to get comfortable.
TWO DAYS AFTER she lost Pelter, two days after you claimed back The Mahdi, you noticed she wasn't there and you went looking for her. In fact she had been remote and somewhat morose ever since you came back from the city with the money. Now that you had The Mahdi back, you could afford to be generous. It was time to tell her that, beside her, the women of the caravanseries were as the dust that blows across the highway. She meant more than any rapacious blonde you met on the road who offered you a loose thousand or two and her husband's bed for a night. She, your twin, had your soul in her keeping, pinned at her waist in her little rose sachet.
When she didn't show up in the trailer at noon you went looking for her. But she wasn't straightening the tack room or mucking a stall or hauling water or walking some fractious horse, she was nowhere. You looked in the track kitchen. Lately she had been flirting there after the morning works with that little blacksmith Kidstuff, a bona fide cowboy from Louisiana, former rodeo clown, red brown, probably half Indian, who drank a bit. You liked her to flirt, and more than to flirt-to tempt herself with these good fellows. You liked the general ripple of nerves when you dangled her in front of them, and the surge of muscle when you reeled her back. But she wasn't in the track kitchen, though Kidstuff was there, sprawled in an orange dinette chair in his cowboy boots, with a toothpick traveling up and down his very white teeth.
You went back to Barn Z to look in Pelter's empty stall. Maybe she was curled up in there again under a cocoon of horse blankets. It was high time-now that you had The Mahdi back-to intrude on her innocence, to pet away her girlish grief, to prick her dark and deep and wake her to you-to remind her where the bottom really was, how steep and perilous, and to pull her steel-tipped boots on for her. For you two still had a long way to go.
And that's why you recoiled in disgust to find him waiting for you there-that nothing D'Ambrisi-because of who he wasn't as much as who he was. The runt who claimed Pelter was slouching in front of Pelter's old stall like some some cowardly low-rent demon, in bad even with his master Asmodeus, literally quaking in his tasseled Italian loafers.
You gotta help me, he pipes up.
Idling in the dirt road next to Barn Z was that burnt-out pony-girl's, what's-her-name's, incredibly rusted Valiant, shlepping her even more decrepit one-horse trailer. Penny. Penny was famous because she would do anything for drugs, or even, you happened to know, for the right person, without drugs. But Penny wasn't behind the wheel. What do you want, Breezy?
D'Ambrisi's nostrils quivered. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at Pelter's empty stall. I know the word is out not to claim that horse, he stammered. I swear to god I never wanted the horse. Joe Dale made me take him. Joe Dale put up the bread.
You shook your head, in distaste as much as disbelief. What's this all about? Why would Joe Dale want that horse? What do you want from me-you want me to take him back? I'll check him over and if he's okay, sure, I'll take him back.
You moved toward the trailer, which was patched with great hardened gobs of something that looked like chewing gum, and smeared an unpleasant pink.
No, that ain't it. The horse ain't here, D'Ambrisi whined. What Joe Dale wants the horse for, I swear I don't know. He's down Joe Dale's farm-ya see?
No I don't see.
What it is-I got a phone call from Baltimore today-you colly? Arnie Posner, personally, gives me down the road. I ain't thinking of the big picture. I gotta listen to people what are bigger than me, what can take care of certain things for me, and has done so in the past-like Two-Tie. Which is true, he almost sobbed, Two-Tie's been good to me. But what can I do if Joe Dale tangles me up in this thing? Joe Dale's bigger than me too.
So what do you want from me?
Posner says give back the horse. Fine by me, I says, only I ain't going down there on the farm by myself and tell Joe Dale. Either Biggy'll tear my ears off or Posner fixes it so I can't show my face at any track east of Cleveland. What am I supposed to do?
He was really crying now and you turned your face away in disgust. You happened to glance down the thin strip of grass behind the barn. And that way you saw, for once, Medicine Ed approach, catch sight of you, and start to fade off again between the shedrows.
Hey, Ed. He stopped. Where is she? you snapped. You were getting just a glimmer now of what was going on. What's it all about? Where's Maggie?
She gone. Left outa here half a hour ago.
What do you mean she left? The Grand Prix has a flat and I've got the truck. How did she leave?
She get in that blue silver-top Cadillac with Joe Dale Bigg.
You seized a shank, gave D'Ambrisi a rough shove towards the dented, pink-smeared horse trailer, and followed him into the road.
SHE KNEW SHE SHOULDN'T get in his car, but it was like Joe Dale Bigg exuded some kind of sticky stuff and she got caught in it and couldn't stop. She didn't even like his plump pale face, the satisfied smile on the rather beautiful Roman lips, and the blueblack growth of beard over his jowls that had the look of pepper on white cheese. She could see the dotted lines around everything he was trying to do, but she overestimated herself, let herself listen and then he was pulling her in. And next she knew, she was sinking into the silvery leather front seat of the Sedan de Ville. All right, he had mob connections and a sadistic streak but he wasn't going to kill her, was he? She heard the power locks suck in on all four sides of the Cadillac, ka-chunk. She remembered that nobody could see her through these blue-tinted windows. No one knew she was here.