Racing Justice

CONTENTS

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• Dakota Franklin WINS Best Action/Adventure at Best Independent EBook Awards

• Dakota Franklin's series RUTHLESS TO WIN has already won awards and enthusiastic reviews for fascinating characters and rivetting action. The four volumes already published in the series — LE MANS a novel, REQUIEM AT MONZA, TROUBLESHOOTER, NASCAR FIRST and QUEEN OF INDY — have all been international bestsellers.

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In a year which will change Simon Aron’s life forever, his friendship and loyalty will be tested by every woman he ever knew, and one will betray him.

Mallory, an old girlfriend with whom he raced a Cobra while they were at college, has been kidnapped by a brutal mobster in the pay of Fred Minster to keep her out of Le Mans, the top endurance race in the world. Minster has also stolen the winning designs of the Cartwright-Armitage car she is entered to drive.

Armitage is vengeful. So is their sponsor, the immensely rich Lydia Simpresi. They want to destroy Minster for setting a monster to rape and kill their princess. They want Simon, a lawyer disillusioned with the law, to be in charge of punishing Minster. A spectacular court case follows.

‘I want to destroy Minster utterly.’ Mallory said. ‘He ordered me tied to a bed by criminals. He ordered a film made of my degradation for his pleasure. And no steel pipe job. I want Minster to suffer for the rest of a very long life.’

Her voice was low, not hysterical at all. She meant every word, and in a year will still mean it.

Mallory is the only woman Simon ever failed as a lover: he will not fail her again. For her he will return to the law.

Only by betraying the fragile Mallory or the equally victimized Constance can Simon win instantly and certainly.

Casting cutting sidelights on the law, intellectual rights, Hollywood, Broadway, auto racing, free speech, money, Wall Street, yacht racing, power and sex, Simon has to manipulate everyone to win without going to jail himself, without breaking the law, without breaking his own code of conduct, without betraying any of his women, not even the opposition lawyer, Constance O’Flynn.

***

I thought the characters were great. I was swept along...a cracking good read.

— Joo's Book Reviews

I thoroughly enjoyed this book — in fact, I started reading it again straight after I'd finished it.

— L. Rumbold

A wonderful story full of action and remarkable detail.

— Boyd S Drew

RUTHLESS TO WIN

Series Editor: André Jute

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RACING JUSTICE

Dakota Franklin

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CoolMain Press

RACING JUSTICE

Copyright © 2013 Dakota Franklin.

The author has asserted her moral right.

First published by CoolMain Press 2013

This edition published at Smashwords 2014.

http://www.coolmainpress.com

info@coolmainpress.com

Series Editor: André Jute.

Associate Editor: Lynne Comery

Cover Photo: Peter de Jong/KIKO Software

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

RACING JUSTICE

Dakota Franklin

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"This isn’t just a thousand to one shot.

This is a professional blood sport.

It can happen to you.

And then it can happen to you again."

—from Harry Kleiner’s film Le Mans

The threads of justice

I retired from the law at the age of 31 not so much because I made my fortune and could afford retirement but because I was totally disillusioned with the lottery that the law has become in these United States.

Let’s dispose of the money motive immediately. My mother is the heiress to a sewing machine fortune and my trust funds will keep me and mine unto umpteen generations fed and housed and clothed in utmost luxury even if I do pro-bono work for the rest of my life.

Ironically, it was a manner of pro-bono job that made my fortune.

Out of college, after a year clerking for a State Supreme Court Justice, I hung out my shingle at No. 2 Wall Street and started practicing entertainment law, what firms without an address on Wall Street, call show business law. I should explain that I am umbilically connected to show business. I prospered by pure nepotism, aided marginally by a Harvard Law School diploma and, I like to think, by skill and charm.

I was in practice only a few weeks when my chief benefactor sent Bellissima Aranja to me. She has the face of an angel set upon an unfortunately stocky body. She is a Las Vegas songwriter; you’ve heard household names sing her ballads. And yes, that’s her real name, not something made up for show business.

It is one of those weird stories that happen only on the frontier, out in Nevada and California, terra incognito to us Easterners.

A married sister with children took Bella to Disneyland. Bella was so impressed by the exuberant enjoyment of the children that she designed an entire theme park. As a songwriter, Bella is in the business of writing down her ideas and then licensing them for performance by others, in return for a share of the income earned, called royalties.

First she tried to license her concept to Disney, who have their own concept and weren’t interested in branching out into radically new fields. The Vegas crowd was interested but Bella had seen them in action up close often enough to know them for dangerous partners.

‘You’d be surprised how often they pay their bills with a bullet,’ she told me.

Bella then made the big mistake of discussing her dream in Los Angeles, morally only a short step from Las Vegas. Hollywood is a place where other people’s intellectual property is so highly valued that great efforts are made to steal it.

Two film producers promptly went into the theme park business for themselves, using Bella’s blueprint to guide them to riches. They owed her nothing, they claimed, because they conceived the idea themselves—and each of the hundreds of correspondences of their theme park with Bella’s detailed plan was a separate unfortunate coincidence!

Because the corporate structure the thieves used to steal from Bella was incorporated in Georgia, the case was heard in Atlanta.

It was pretty much an open and shut case, or so I thought. Remember, I was green, separated from college only by a year of highly theoretical state supreme court clerking and a few weeks of congenial light practice.

I never even asked if the thieving movie producers were insured—until the insurers’ legal heavyweights landed their first uppercut. They nearly knocked us out with their first blow, then beat us up with impunity for years until I learned my business.

They did what lawyers do best, delay. The purpose of delay is to run the smaller party out of money and off the case.

Bella, who started out with more than enough money to pay for a quick open and shut case, ran out of money after a couple of years of big law firm delaying tactics.

‘That’s the last, Simon,’ she said, giving me a check. ‘I sold the copyrights to my hits for that money.’

I looked at the check and shuddered. My parents are recording artists too, in classical music. One of their most firmly held precepts is that you hang onto your rights forever because royalties never stop rolling in. Royalties and residuals are an artist’s pension.

It was a very big check—and it was far less than enough.

I gave the check back to her. ‘We are years from settlement.’

‘Are you giving up on me, Simon?’

‘No. There is a principle here worth fighting for. You invest that money for your old age. I want to make a new deal with you. No win, no fee. If we win, I’ll take my costs off the top of the settlement and half of what remains as my fee.’

‘That may be nothing. Or we could lose.’

‘Uh-huh. It seems to me a thing worth doing for its own sake. If we give up now, that is a license for the uncreative to steal from those with ideas.’

‘You’re that very dangerous man, Simon, a stubborn innocent.’

I grinned at her across my desk. ‘Deal?’

‘Done.’

By then my other clients were already gone. I concentrated solely on Bella’s war against thieving film producers and those wretched procedure-mongers, their insurers’ attorneys.

Last Tuesday, five years after I gave the check back to Bella, the whole thing came to a head. It started in the most undramatic way possible.

The case was finishing badly. It was not difficult to prove that the theme park the film producers built, now earning money hand over fist and about to be franchised to Miami, France and Japan, was a direct copy of Bella’s scheme. She routinely lodged an advance copy of her plan with the Writers’ Guild in the same way she lodged each song she composed before showing it to anyone.

A Guild executive showed the court and the jury the date-stamped package. When it was unsealed Bella’s plan could be compared attraction by attraction to the built facility.

The problem was proving that the thieves ever saw Bella’s plan. There was only her word that she handed it to them and discussed it at length beside the pool.

They denied ever seeing Bella’s plan or discussing it with her. They denied ever meeting her. I was unable to shake them in cross-examination. They simply perjured themselves.

Now we were down to their last witness who was also my last chance to turn the case around.

I regarded the jury. Twelve good men and women of sound common sense. They knew that in the real world coincidence does not stretch to as many correspondences as between the profitable theme park and Bella’s plan.

But would the judge instruct them to consider the statistical unlikelihood as evidence?

Would they be sophisticated enough to grasp that so much proved coincidence is far, far beyond happenstance and accident?

If they brought in a weak verdict, appeals would last forever. More, I now understood that I had so bungled the case that the roots of appeal, which must be based only on what happened in the lower court, would be poor.

I turned back to cross-examining the last witness they called. She had been the secretary to the two producers when the dirty deed was done. She was now the executive in charge of worldwide licensing of the facility, its attractions and characters, operating out of the local Atlanta office.

She was my last roll of the dice in an already lost case.

‘Ms Pinter, it’s a long way from being a secretary shared between two B-film producers to being chief franchising executive for a world-class theme park.’

‘I should say so!’ She is a few years over forty, shapely and attractive, if artificial-looking, with false eyelashes, hair and skin out of a bottle, possibly already beyond her first cut and tuck job. She is also very pleased with herself.

I made a mental note and changed the subject. ‘Can you point out Bellissima Aranja to me please?’

None of the time-wasting objections I was so used to from the other side. They were convinced it was over. They had won. The senior partners of the insurers’ attorneys, Wex Shackleton and Irving Birnbaum, flew in from New York. Yesterday they gave a press conference and this morning they sat in court to gloat over the kill.

‘At your table, in the burgundy jacket and white blouse.’

‘And you first knew her how?’

‘She came to the office in LA.’

‘How often?’

‘Three or four times.’

‘This was directly after your employers held a press conference announcing that they were opening the theme park?’

Even this did not elicit an objection for leading the witness.

‘Yes.’

Their witnesses were all superbly well drilled.

‘What did she want?’

‘I covered that. She wanted to speak to Mr. Atcliffe or Mr. Coral.’

I let the backchat pass, adding it to my mental notes.

‘Did she succeed?’

‘No. They refused to see her.’

‘You had your instructions?’

‘Yes.’

I changed tack. ‘When did you get your present important job?’

‘Seven years ago, on December first.’

‘Do you remember the day the writ for this suit was served on your employers?’

‘Yes. It was seven days before.’

‘Precisely?’

‘Precisely. I have a good memory.’

Again I did not pursue it. ‘From secretary in a tiny office to senior executive in a giant corporation—in one giant step. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?’

She regarded me coldly. ‘If you are suggesting, Mr. Aron, that I earned promotion on my back, you’re mistaken.’

‘I apologize for that mistaken conclusion.’

There was now the faintest flush on her cheeks. ‘Then what the hell did you mean?’

I smiled pleasantly at her. Let her come to her own conclusion.

‘What were your instructions regarding Ms. Aranja?’

‘Not to let her in.’

‘In what precise words were these instructions delivered?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Just now you told the court you have a good memory.’

She stared sullenly at me. ‘I told you. To keep her out.’

‘And when were these instructions delivered?’

‘The day before—’ And there she stopped herself.

I let the silence drag on for several beats before asking gently, ‘The day before—’

She was silent, glaring defiance at me.

‘Ms. Pinter, are you aware of the penalties for perjury?’

‘Your Honor, this is outrageous!’ Constance O’Flynn, the leader of the insurers’ phalanx of high-priced suits, was on her feet. ‘First, sexual innuendo with a perfunctory apology. Now, this harassment of the witness!’

Judge Judith Halloran is a white haired woman only a suicidal attorney will mistake for a little old lady. She said, ‘Hmm. You’re right. The apology was double-edged. But the witness must answer.’

‘Perhaps it will help if I rephrase the question, Your Honor?’

‘Proceed.’

‘Were you instructed, Ms. Pinter, not to let Ms. Aranja enter, the day before she first appeared?’

By now Ms. Pinter was red in the face. I turned my head to make eye-contact with the jury.

The silence dragged on.

Wex Shackleton rose to his feet. ‘Your Honor, an objection rests here for both relevance and procedure. This seems to us way beyond matters touched on in direct. Ms. Pinter is after all our witness.’

‘I have that in mind, sir,’ the judge said evenly. ‘Overruled.’

The man would have to be crazy to rise again after such a loaded put-down.

I see Shackleton often on Broadway. He employs a publicist who has fixed him in the minds of the less discriminating as ‘America’s celebrity attorney’. Permitting—cherishing—that polished ambiguity between an attorney for celebrities and the attorney as a celebrity in his own right is the true reflection of his personality.

‘Your Honor—’

‘Sit down! You have no standing in my court, sir.’

Wex Shackleton is not used to being addressed like an errant schoolboy. Irving Birnbaum, the unpublicized brains of the operation, pulled at his sleeve. Wex sat, purple in the face.

‘You must answer the question,’ the judge said to the witness.

Silence. Ms. Pinter, probably realizing that the gig was up, looked into her lap.

‘Ms. Pinter, I will hold you in contempt if you don’t answer the question,’ the judge said. ‘I can jail you for such contempt until you decide to answer the question.’

Ms. Pinter jerked her head up and glared at me. ‘Yes, damn you, they told me the day before!’ she admitted through clenched teeth. ‘See what you can make of that!’

Oh, I intend to, I thought, keeping my face calm.

‘That was the day before Ms. Aranja first came to your office?’

‘Yes.’ Sullenly.

‘The same day as the announcement of the impending theme park.’

‘Yes! You know all that!’

‘Just trying to be clear. Who told you?’

‘Mr. Atcliffe.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Nine o’clock in the morning, immediately I came in.’

‘Six hours before the press conference at three pm?’

‘So you can do arithmetic.’

I ignored that, too. Someone had told her I was an easy mark. No longer. ‘May the record please show that the witness replied affirmatively?’

The judge nodded to the stenographer. ‘Proceed, Mr. Aron.’

‘Was Mr. Coral present when Mr. Atcliffe instructed you about Ms. Aranja?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did Mr. Atcliffe say?’

‘I don’t remember. That he didn’t want to speak to her.’

‘Did he say why? Before you answer, I remind you once more of the penalties for perjury.’

‘Let me handle perjury and contempt,’ the judge said as Constance O’Flynn shot to her feet again, waving the attorney back in her seat. ‘Do you hear me, Mr Aron?’ she added emphatically to me.

‘Yes, Your Honor.’

‘The witness will answer the question.’

Without the judge’s instruction, I doubt Ms. Pinter would have answered. But she misread the judge’s reprimand to the attorneys as a threat to herself. It spewed out like vomit.

‘Yes, damn you, he said that if that woman had to share, there would be no gold mine for them and no bonus for me!’

I didn’t pause to let that sink in, nor ask a question to reinforce the point.

‘And you used that knowledge, after the writs were served, to collect a much bigger bonus than your associates in theft intended to give you, to wit, your fancy job with the big salary and bigger perks?’

Constance O’Flynn shot to her feet but it was too late.

‘I deserved it for the risk I ran!’ Ms. Pinter snapped at me.

I stepped back and turned as if to my table to pick up a note. I saw the seven-figure partners’ expensively draped backs as they ducked out, leaving Constance O’Flynn and another associate in charge, together with the usual half-dozen bill-inflating flunkies. They knew it was over.

The O’Flynn, as I thought of her, again half-rose in her seat to attempt to have the admission stricken, then decided against it.

The judge raised an eyebrow at her. The O’Flynn shook her head. Probably smart, I thought. An objection would merely reinforce to the jury what a monumental admission Ms. Pinter made.

On the other hand they could later, on appeal, try to argue that the judge should have stopped the witness answering until an objection was heard.

‘Your Honor, perhaps the record might show that you gestured to counsel for the defendants, who declined to bring forward any objection.’

‘Indeed, Mr. Aron. You learn.’ She left the words ‘at last’ hanging in the air.

The O’Flynn glared blankly at me, enraged at the worm turning.

I picked up a sheet of paper at random and spent fifteen seconds studying it. Then I turned to the jury and made eye-contact with each of them individually while I said casually, ‘And what risk was that?’

‘You just told me! Perjury. Jail.’

I turned to face Ms. Pinter. ‘But you didn’t perjure yourself. You came to court and did your duty as a citizen by telling the truth.’

‘Oh.’

The O’Flynn asked for a recess. The judge decided to break for lunch.

I sat on at my table, studying The O’Flynn as the court cleared.

‘Is it over?’ Bella asked softly near my ear.

I turned to her. ‘No. We have to wait for the verdict. Depending on the amount of the judgment, they will appeal and attempt to drag it out.’

I turned to The O’Flynn, who said, ‘Let’s do lunch.’

‘I eat with friends as a social occasion. If you want to do business, I have an office a couple of blocks away.’

She regarded me coolly. She probably burned to call me names but she has admirable restraint.

She wrote on her pad, tore off the sheet, folded it over and handed it to me.

I opened the sheet, read ‘$10m’, closed it and offered it to Bella.

Bella didn’t take the paper. She just looked into my eyes. I shook my head fractionally. She smiled.

I turned back to The O’Flynn. ‘Offer rejected. See you after lunch when I shall ask the judge to recall Atcliffe and Coral.’

‘Be smart,’ The O’Flynn said directly to Bella.

‘Don’t address my client again, Counselor. The Georgia Bar Council salivates to burn an overpriced New York blow-in.’

Her cheeks reddened at the public reprimand and the threat. But her voice was still level. ‘What do you want?’

‘In actual damages I shall ask the jury for every penny in profit earned since the theme parks opened, multiplied by, say, twelve to discount the capital value of such an exceptional earnings capacity. Then I shall suggest to them that punitive damages upwards of one hundred times that number may be suitable to deter thieves like your clients from plying their trade.’

I thought I handled that well. I flicked an imaginary piece of lint off the shoulder of my Gieves & Hawkes pinstripe. The trust fund dresses me well even if, as an attorney until about five minutes ago, I was an incompetent bankrupt.

When I turned casually to The O’Flynn she still stared at me in utter horror. She was speechless—and rightly so. In her place I too would be struck dumb.

‘Billions,’ I said uncompromisingly though it was quite clear to me that she could do simple arithmetic, that she studied the profit-and-loss and balance sheets at least as carefully as I did. The O’Flynn is so well prepared, I sometimes wondered where she finds the time to be beautiful as well.

‘Mr. Aron,’ she said at last, ‘please give me a number to put to my clients.’

‘I'm not at all certain that we won't press criminal charges. Ask your clients how long they think they will last on a chain gang. You do know that Georgia still has prison farms, don’t you?’

The O’Flynn blew out her breath. She will be very beautiful if she ever smiles. She is a shortish, full-bodied girl with a mass of curled, swinging red hair, given to tall boots, swirling skirts and long tapered jackets to make her look taller. At least she doesn’t affect the sterile power-dress of the other yuppies.

‘My client doesn’t want to be lumbered with operating or reselling a bunch of theme parks.’ I offered, generously under the circumstances. ‘Ask your clients how much they have in their bank accounts. Don’t let them lie to you. My client is of a mind to leave this case run its course to their utter public destruction. They can borrow that much again.’

She offered me her pad. I wrote a number.

‘That’s what you want?’ she asked after half a minute of awed silence, her eye still riveted to the number.

‘No. That’s what they have. We want twice that much.’

At last she lost her composure. ‘You’re mad,’ she said flatly.

‘I call it principled,’ I said comfortably, sliding easily into my new role as a attorney so successful that he can afford moral standards. ‘Put it to your clients. You’ll be surprised how much they will pay not to kiss studio butts to make nickel-and-dime movies.’

‘Those two are not my clients. My client is their insurance company.’

‘Whatever. Your client made the mistake of insuring crooks, then compounded it by sending you to court to defend their perjuries. We don’t care whose money we take.’

I rose and offered my arm to Bella, ending the conversation, not that The O’Flynn, mouth wordlessly open in horror at the brutal accusation, seemed likely to continue it.

That was the end of the drama though the curtain took a while falling.

That afternoon I copper-bottomed Ms. Pinter’s testimony to running interference from The O’Flynn. She also tried to shake Ms. Pinter on the redirect. That was a lost cause for them. The judge actually turned her chair towards Ms Pinter who took it as a hint that one more lie would land her in jail.

I assumed The O’Flynn’s bosses were making their excuses and banging heads to persuade wishful thinkers that it was past time to fess up and pay up.

The next morning I recalled Mr. Coral to the stand and persuaded him to contradict his earlier testimony with five or six different stories, none of which explained away La Pinter’s damning testimony.

He also came up with the dilly: ‘Well, we took some of Aranja’s ideas out of her plan. That makes it ours.’

Three members of the jury laughed aloud and the judge offered no sterner reprimand than a fleeting glance.

I was just starting to enjoy myself helping Mr. Coral fall over his own feet when Mr. Atcliffe, whom I announced I would deconstruct in the afternoon, decided to settle before he too, convicted himself of perjury.

The O’Flynn asked for a recess. ‘About high time too,’ the judge said, leaving the jury in no doubt about who she thought was guilty.

They settled out of court for 1.8 billion dollars, the largest intellectual rights settlement in the history of American civil jurisprudence.

Attorneys are still making a good thing, and will for many years, out of the fight between the insurers and the ex-movie producers over how the payment to Bella should be split between them.

Judgment on judgment

So now I am the most famous attorney in America—and totally disillusioned with the law.

Think about it. Bella had her property stolen. It took her seven years to be recompensed and she almost received nothing. I was on the very last witness for the other side, minutes away from closing and losing the case.

If I’d had a dull day Bella would not have received justice.

My cross examination of Ms. Pinter is now said to be a classic, endlessly analyzed as a ‘sinuous dance through the field of lies’ (Harvard Law Review), ‘baiting the key liar until she spewed up the truth’ (TIME Magazine).

It’s nonsense, of course.

Ms. Pinter and everyone else lied in every deposition in disclosure. In court, with the clock striking and the pumpkin coach at the door, I unsettled her with a lucky shot about her instant rise to executivedom. Then the judge put in the boot for me.

Ms. Pinter was more concerned to prove her sexual virtue than that she didn’t conspire to defraud Bella.

Justice for Bella hung by that slender thread of happenstance, serendipity, timing, and the synergy between them.

That is not how justice should work.

On the other hand, I do not know how we can even begin to reform a legal system so encrusted with excrescences that one out of every 258 people in our nation needs to be an attorney.

Bella became a star on the talk shows. Hey, so did Ms. Pinter, insisting ever more stridently that she did not earn promotion on her back! The talking heads on the chat shows were too stupid to point out that she gained wealth by perjury, blackmail, becoming an accomplice to grand theft, and conspiracy to defraud Bella.

Bella said, ‘That poor woman! Shame she wouldn't know a good orgasm if it bit her on the ass. She could use a few.’ I wished her luck.

I gave interviews to a few serious papers but refused to do talk shows and other fluff. Soon I realized that what interested people is not the principle of the law being for sale but only how much money I made out of the case, as if my entire being could be numerically described in nine digits.

After a few days I fled to Europe before the avalanche of letters begging or demanding, sometimes with menace, a piece of my 900 million dollar payoff. The other opportunists forming a disorderly line to cut themselves a piece of me were merely better dressed and better spoken.

In London I dined with the family of my late wife, Ruth, who died in childbirth after we were married only two years. My notoriety preceded me to England but the British know how to manage these things.

‘The Telegraph carried a long article on you,’ Ruth’s father said. ‘I imagine most of it was inaccurate and the rest overblown.’

‘I should think so,’ I said gratefully—and probably slanderously since The Telegraph is by far the most reliable of the British papers.

He is a banker. Ruthie told me that when his bank made tens of millions in a dotcom flotation, he said, ‘That was quite satisfactory.’

‘I recognized you in their description though. The last American moralist. You’re not amused?’ he asked through his chuckles, pouring port into my glass.

‘Morality is no longer a suitable pursuit for an American. Everything is relative. The thieves I sought to punish are celebrities for having paid the largest fine in human history.’

I watched him shudder. The English upper classes are wonderfully well educated and very quick.

I went alone to Ruth’s grave. My in-laws are better Jews than I can ever be—I learned the only Jewish prayers I know after Ruthie died—but they make no public displays of grief. They really are more British than the British. I cried when we buried Ruthie and the stillborn child. Perhaps they fear I will again cry in public.

I followed the British Touring Car Championship from racetrack to racetrack. It is what Ruthie and I did on our honeymoon because my hobby was photographing race cars. I planned to stay in Europe through the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.

Le Mans is where I took my vacation every year before Bella’s case consumed all my time. You guessed it. Ruthie and I went there too on our honeymoon.

In London I stayed at Brown’s, an old-fashioned hotel in Mayfair. I went to Ruthie’s grave every day, shows in the West End during the week and to the races over the weekend.

I was, I admitted to myself, hiding out in Europe until it was safe to go home and resume my unobtrusive existence. There was also a growing realization that I stunted my emotional growth by immersing myself so totally in work after Ruthie died. It was clear that the work was at least in part a displacement activity. I would know when it was time to go home: when I no longer felt the need to visit Ruth’s grave every day that I was in London.

On my way out to drive to Knockhill in Scotland for a BTCC race, I stopped dead in the foyer when in came a handsome couple. And not because he was Richard Cranborne, the cellist.

‘Mallory,’ I said to the striking gray-eyed blonde woman with him as she stopped to stare at me.

‘Simon!’ She hesitated a moment, glanced at Richard Cranborne, then stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the mouth.

I concluded that their relationship was new, as yet insecure, possibly intense. I felt only the smallest stab of jealousy, then briefly a bigger stab of envy, before I was flooded with joy that things turned out all right for her.

‘Simon gave me my first drive when we were students, then gave me my first racing car.’

He assessed me anew.

‘It was no big deal. Mallory was a faster driver than me, so she won the ride. And it wasn’t exactly a Le Mans car, just an old Cobra.’

We were more than teammates. Actually, we were excellent teammates. It was as lovers, very briefly, that we were a clumsy disaster. We were just one of those couples who did nothing right together. She was a virgin. I thought I knew what I was doing since I was a few years older.

It turned out that I had the mechanics right but the motive force wrong.

I gave Mallory the car, the spares and the tools partly out of gratitude that she didn’t humiliate me with my fumbling shortcomings, partly out of guilt that I didn’t do better by her. Ruth, when I told her about this, was vastly impressed with Mallory’s maturity and flattered me by concluding that I scraped by, just.

‘Simon Aron. Richard Cranborne.’

‘I know. I have his disks. My father admires his work. How do you do, Richard?’

‘Shimon Aron’s son?’ His handshake warmed appreciably. ‘That’s more than he ever told me! Come take tea with us.’

‘I must be off to Scotland in no more than ten minutes.’ My time was my own but I didn’t want to be a drag on young lovers. I hoped to be a young lover again myself and would expect old friends to be sensitive to my need to spend time with my beloved.

We were seated. We ordered tea and cake.

‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ Mallory asked.

‘Married. Widowed. Attorney. Hanging out here until the publicity blows over back home so I can return and find a new profession.’

Their blank faces told me they did not know anything at all about my notoriety. Aargh! Stupid to mention it then. But now their rising eyebrows told me I could not leave it hanging.

‘Mmm. I achieved a huge settlement in an intellectual rights case. I was hounded by the media, doubtful good causes, sensation seekers, assorted matchmakers, so I came to hide out here. I’m disillusioned with the law, so I’m going into something new.’

‘Ah!’ Richard said. ‘A comfortable hidey-hole, is Brown’s.’ I have often seen my father, a conductor who sometimes makes controversial choices even late in life, express the same reflex sympathy for those hounded by the media.

‘The last time we spoke, you intended to make a career of fast cars,’ I said to Mallory.

I should perhaps explain that Mallory is her last name. But she doesn’t like her first name, Daphne, so everyone always called her Mallory.

‘I did,’ she said. ‘I work for Armitage Cartwright.’

Though I knew even when Mallory was a sophomore engineering student at MIT that one day she would do great things, I was impressed. Armitage Cartwright Racing Limited is one of the dominant firms in grand prix racing—more championships over thirty years than I can say offhand, and their sports cars have won the last four Le Mans. Mallory must be what, twenty-eight? Clearly, if she can take a Thursday afternoon off to take tea with Richard, she is no junior flunky.

‘I’m impressed by your friend,’ I said dryly to Richard.

He grinned at me as he decided I was not a threat.

I rose. ‘In New York you can find me through my parents. If you’re passing through, call me. We’ll do something together,’ I said to both of them. ‘I’m so happy for you, Mallory. Ciao.’

And I was out of there before her shining happiness made me cry in public for my loneliness.

Isn’t that always the way, that the event which changes your life is an insignificant happenstance or a coincidence you consider mildly notable for an entirely unconnected reason?

This chance meeting would change my life though it would take a while for the mechanism to clarify itself.

Tennis

After the races I toured Scotland for ten days, and spent another couple of days tearing up empty Northumbrian lanes in my rented BMW for the simple thrill of speed. Then I dropped by Oxford to say hello to the judge I clerked for. He filled his sabbatical year by giving a series of lectures while he researched the roots of common law.

By the time I returned to Brown’s two weeks had elapsed. My parents, my twin sister and my two remaining close friends could find me on my cell phone. My other friends dropped away when I took too long to recover from Ruthie’s death and then immersed myself totally in Bella’s case, so I expected no one else to call me. In consequence I never checked Brown’s for messages.

Mallory had called.

I returned her call from the front desk. Her office shunted me onto her cell. ‘Simon here. I was touring.’

‘Can you come to tennis on Saturday?’ Behind her an engine roared and I heard a man’s voice say, ‘We’re ready.’ Without waiting for my reply Mallory was gone, saying to someone else, ‘Give him Adam’s address, Jacko.’

A young man’s voice gave me an address in Woking in the south of England. I expected to speak to Mallory again but the voice said goodbye and hung up.

Well, they sounded busy. I envied them. I was bored with idleness already. My father, who was poor when he was young, in a rare confidence told me of his surprise when he discovered how hard the rich work.

I’ve been comfortable all my life so I wouldn’t know; I’ve always applied myself because that is the example my