Warlight(19)
After that weekend, I wanted to keep helping The Darter with the dogs, but Rachel began spending more time with The Moth. I suspected she wanted to be more of an adult. But I’d be waiting for The Darter in my waterproof coat when he swung by in his car. He had barely concerned himself with me the first times we met at Ruvigny Gardens, when I was just some boy in a house he happened to be visiting. But I now discovered The Darter was an easy man to learn from. He cared less about you than The Moth did, but told you precisely what he needed you to do, as well as what about him was to be kept from others. “Breast your cards, Nathaniel,” he’d say, “always breast your cards.” What he needed, it turned out, was someone like me, a semi-reliable person to help him gather greyhounds two or three times a week from one of those silent European vessels, and so he persuaded me to leave my job at the restaurant and instead help him transport them in darkness on the mussel boat to various locations where a van would then spirit his living cargo further away.
We managed about twenty of those shy travellers on each boat ride. They sat shivering on deck during our journeys, which sometimes lasted as late as midnight, and were spooked easily by a loud noise or the searchlight of a launch suddenly alongside us. The Darter worried about what he called “preventative men,” and it meant I had to nuzzle my way into their midst under the blankets and calm them in the fetid dog air as the river police slid by. “They’re after more serious things,” The Darter announced, justifying his low-level criminality.
It became clear that what we were delivering had in fact no guarantee of financial success. There was no assurance about these animals as racing dogs, no knowledge whether they were fast or slow. All that was valuable about them was that they provided “the unknown element” and, as the public was uncertain about their worth, it guaranteed reckless betting—bets made by strangers relying on looks as opposed to authentic bloodlines that could recommend them or reveal them as worthless. A reckless bet meant active money. You put pound notes on a dog with no past because of a seemingly knowing glance from the leashed creature or the line of its thigh, or the overheard whisperings of others you hoped might know but in truth did not. The dogs we had were wastrels with no recorded past, either kidnapped from a chateau or saved from a meat factory to be given a second chance. They were as anonymous as roosters.
On the moonless night river I calmed them by simply raising my teenage head in a gesture of strictness whenever they attempted to bark. I felt I was quieting an orchestra, and it had the charm and pleasure of first power. The Darter stood at the wheelhouse guiding us through the night, humming “But Not for Me.” It always sounded like a sigh the way he sang it to himself, his mind elsewhere, barely conscious of the lyrics in his mouth. Besides, I knew the sadness of that song in no way reflected his intricately dovetailed relationships with women. I knew this from having to provide alibis for him or deliver false messages from a public phone box that would excuse his absence some evenings. Women could never be certain of his exact hours of work, let alone what the work actually was.
Those days and nights, as I began to enter the shadowy timetable of The Darter’s life, I found myself within a confabulist pattern that drew together barge smugglers, veterinarians, forgers, and dog tracks in the Home Counties. Bribed veterinarians provided distemper shots to these aliens. Sometimes we needed temporary boarding kennels. Forgers typed up canine birth certificates to provide evidence of owners in Gloucestershire and Dorset, where the dogs had supposedly been whelped—dogs that had never heard a word of English till now.
That first magical summer of my life we smuggled more than forty-five dogs a week at the height of the racing season, collecting the gun-shy creatures from a dock near Limehouse onto the mussel boat, and riding the river in darkness into the heart of London towards Lower Thames Street. Then we travelled back downriver the way we had come, and those late-night river returns, the boat now empty of dogs, were the only moments The Darter was free of his complicated schedules and there would be no interruptions. I was curious now about The Darter’s universe. And during those nights he talked openly about himself and the complexities of dog racing, and he occasionally questioned me. “You met Walter when you were very young? Isn’t that so?” he asked me once. And when I looked at him, startled, he withdrew the sentence like a too-forward hand on a thigh. “Ahh, I see,” he said.
When I asked him how he had met Olive Lawrence, I prefaced it by admitting to him that I liked her. “Oh, I noted that,” he said. This was a surprise, for The Darter had always appeared unaware of and unconcerned with my responses.
“So, how did you meet her?”
He pointed to the cloudless sky. “I needed advice, and she is this specialist…a geographer, an eth-nog-ra-pher.” He dragged the word out as she had done. “Who knew there were people like that? Who still read weather by the kind of moon it might be, or by the form of a cloud? Anyway, she was useful for something I was involved with, and I like women smarter than me. Mind you, she is…well, she surprises you. Those ankles! I didn’t think she’d walk out with me. She’s Mayfair, you know what I mean? She likes the lipstick, the silk. She’s a barrister’s daughter, but I don’t think the dad’s going to help me out if I’m in trouble. Anyway, she was going on about lenticular clouds and anvil clouds and how to read a blue sky. Though it was the ankles I was leaning towards. She’s got that greyhound line I appreciate, but you can never win, not with her. You can get hold of only a corner of her life. I mean, where is she now? Not a word from her. But still, that night with the goat, you know, I think she liked it. She wouldn’t admit it, of course, but it was like signing a peace treaty during our dinner. Quite a dame…but not for me.” I loved it when The Darter spoke this way, as if I were an equal who might understand those unstable subtleties in women. Besides, hearing another version of the goat incident was a further layering in the world that I was entering. I felt I was a caterpillar changing colour, precariously balanced, moving from one species of leaf to another.