suspended animation, sitting comfortably in his folding chair with the gentle sun warming him. He really was a remarkable man. He had apparently had less formal education than the average saddle horse, but lots of Americans gave this impression, and ever since he had settled whatever business he’d had in America, he had seemed different. For one thing, he had become studious. He had been so willing to read books that nobody else actually read that she had been tempted to give him something like the
At one time she would have done this, but she had changed too since the business with the Bulgarians. She always called it this when she thought about it because that was the only lie he had given her. They had never spoken about it since. He had simply shown up at her door one day, about ten pounds thinner and looking exhausted, and said, “You’re not married or anything, are you?” She had thrown herself at him and hugged him so hard that she had probably squeezed the breath right out of him, but of course he would never have let her know. That was how it had happened. She had made a huge, irreversible decision without actually deciding anything.
While Michael was away, Margaret had bought American newspapers and tried to figure out what he was really doing. There had even been a few nasty days when she had wondered if she had already read about his death. After all, there was no reason to imagine that she knew his real name. He might have had one of those names that were in the papers—Fratelli, Talarese, Vico and so on. There had been a surprising number of them in the month that he was gone. But that gangster business had just been Meg’s penchant for making up ridiculous stories, and she had turned it on herself because she hadn’t had anyone to tell the stories to. Gwendolyn’s detestable aunt would have said it was her punishment on earth for being a liar, to be followed in due course by more severe and exquisite punishments in the afterlife.
In any event, Margaret could see that it was over. It wasn’t unheard of, after all. There were all those men who went off to wars and saw and did unspeakable things, and then after a year or two they were perfectly fine—or at least they appeared to be. She looked at Schaeffer and felt good about the decision she had not made. It was possible he was going to be one of those tough men who surprised you by being doting fathers. To look at him now, you could imagine that he was a professor, or even an artist. He never fidgeted or moved, and there was nothing in his face to register any change in the music. Only his eyes were in motion, gliding from one person in the audience to another, then upward to the top of the city walls where the walkway was, then over to the gardens and the Minster, then back to the attentive group of tourists and local gentry seated in the folding chairs on the lawn.
Jack Hamp walked along the thick carpet of grass and looked out over the fence across the track. It was an odd little place. With the short season here, all the horses had returned to their paddocks for the winter. Today you could as easily imagine that this was the site of the Santa Maria County Fair as a place where people laid down serious money on horses.
The desk sergeant had said that B. Baldwin’s betting booth had stood sixty meters to the left of the stands, ten meters back from the rail. That would be about here. Hamp turned and looked at the grandstand, then beyond it toward the road. From this spot you couldn’t even see the top of the walnut tree where the Bentley with the bodies in it had been parked. So it wasn’t a question of an enterprising bookmaker noticing a couple of rich young men and deciding that it would be safe to get together a crew to kill them for their walking-around money. The victims hadn’t even gotten close enough to the track for Baldwin to see them; there had been no betting slips in their pockets, no turf on their shoes.
So if anybody had picked them out, it had to be Lucchi or young Talarese. It was odd that the nephew of a New York underboss would be reduced to starting his career as a street thief, or even as a bookie who happened to see a couple of easy marks. What good could the family imagine that his experience as a British bookie would do him in New York? There was no possibility of useful contacts in the barns or on the street; there wasn’t even the same monetary system.
Hamp decided to ask the Brighton police about the stolen-car market in England. He couldn’t imagine that anybody might have hoped to sell a hot Bentley in a country that wasn’t more than four hundred miles from end to end, but it was something you had to ask about before eliminating it. For all he knew, Talarese might have been serving an apprenticeship in pinching Rolls-Royces and using the Mafia’s channels to sell them in Asia or someplace.
But he had an instinct about this. He was fairly confident that when he had done all the footwork and checked out every angle, what he was going to end up with was essentially the same story. The two Limeys had only been unexpected witnesses. Talarese had been out here one fine day at the Brighton racetrack, doing whatever he was supposed to be doing, when he had happened to see a man who, among all the people milling around at this track, he and only he could possibly have recognized. Then with the sun making the bright silks on the horses and jockeys glow, and the birds singing—they were sure as hell singing today, so they probably had been then too—he had started feeling lucky.
