Longshot Read Free

listening, his eyes on his other client, who had remained settled in his chair as if there for the day. It seemed to me that Ronnie was stifling exasperation under a façade of aplomb, a surprising configuration when what he usually showed was unflagging effortless bonhomie.
    “Tremayne,” he was saying jovially to his guest, “this is John Kendall, a brilliant young author.”
    As Ronnie regularly described all his authors as brilliant, even with plentiful evidence to the contrary, I remained unembarrassed.
    Tremayne was equally unimpressed. Tremayne, sixtyish, gray-haired, big and self-assured, was clearly not pleased at the interruption.
    “We haven’t finished our business,” he said ungraciously.
    “Time for a glass of wine,” Ronnie suggested, ignoring the complaint. “For you, Tremayne?”
    “Gin and tonic.”
    “Ah . . . I meant, white wine or red?”
    After a pause Tremayne said with a show of annoyed resignation, “Red, then.”
    “Tremayne Vickers,” Ronnie said to me noncommittally, completing the introduction. “Red do you, John?”
    “Great.”
    Ronnie bustled about, moving heaps of books and papers, clearing spaces, producing glasses, bottle and corkscrew and presently pouring with concentration.
    “To trade,” he said with a smile, handing me a glass. “To success,” he said to Vickers.
    “Success! What success? All these writers are too big for their boots.”
    Ronnie glanced involuntarily at my own boots, which were big enough for anyone.
    “It’s no use you telling me I’m not offering a decent fee,” Tremayne told him. “They ought to be glad of the work.” He eyed me briefly and asked me without tact, “What do you earn in a year?”
    I smiled as blandly as Ronnie and didn’t answer.
    “How much do you know about racing?” he demanded.
    “Horse racing?” I asked.
    “Of course horse racing.”
    “Well,” I said. “Not a lot.”
    “Tremayne,” Ronnie protested, “John isn’t your sort of writer.”
    “A writer’s a writer. Anyone can do it. You tell me I’ve been wrong looking for a big name. Very well then, find me a smaller name. You said your friend here is brilliant. So how about him ?”
    “Ah,” Ronnie said cautiously. “Brilliant is just . . . ah ... a figure of speech. He’s inquisitive, capable and impulsive.”
    I smiled at my agent with amusement.
    “So he’s not brilliant?” Tremayne asked ironically, and to me he said, “What have you written, then?”
    I answered obligingly, “Six travel guides and a novel.”
    “Travel guides? What sort of travel guides?”
    “How to live in the jungle. Or in the Arctic. Or in deserts. That sort of thing.”
    “For people who like difficult holidays,” Ronnie said, with all the indulgent irony of those devoted to comfort. “John used to work for a travel agency which specializes in sending the intrepid out to be stretched.”
    “Oh.” Tremayne looked at his wine without enthusiasm and after a while said testily, “There must be someone who’d leap at the job.”
    I said, more to make conversation than out of urgent curiosity, “What is it that you want written?”
    Ronnie made a gesture that seemed to say “Don’t ask,” but Tremayne answered straightforwardly.
    “An account of my life.”
    I blinked. Ronnie’s eyebrows rose and fell.
    Tremayne said, “You’d think those race-writing johnnies would be falling over themselves for the honor, but they’ve all turned me down.” He sounded aggrieved. “Four of them.”
    He recited their names, and such was their eminence that even I, who seldom paid much attention to racing, had heard of them all. I glanced at Ronnie, who showed resignation.
    “There must be others,” I said mildly.
    “There’s some I wouldn’t let set foot through my door.” The truculence in Tremayne’s voice was one of the reasons, I reflected, why he was having trouble. I lost interest in him, and Ronnie, seeing it, cheered up several notches and suggested