Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski Page B

proposed a sum.
    “That’s about three times as much as I can afford, Mr. Costeiro,” Fabian said.
    “I know you write books about horsemanship and appear on television talk shows; you can’t be a poor man, Señor Fabian,” Costeiro said.
    “In this country, writing books and appearing on television are vanity sports. I make my living on a horse.”
    Costeiro’s eyes softened as they rested on Alexandra. Then, as if the sight spurred him, he turned back to Fabian.
    “How about this: If I lose, you take the full sum. If you lose, I take one-third. Agreed?” He waited, full of force, eager.
    Alexandra cocked her head, observing Fabian. No expression betrayed her thoughts.
    “Agreed,” Fabian said.
    “Tomorrow morning, then.” Costeiro sat back pensively. “Nine o’clock in the practice field closest to Brook Forest and the Hunter Paces trails. No spectators—just my grooms, don’t you think?”
    “Gentlemen, gentlemen.” Alexandra broke her silence vivaciously. “Since I arranged this game, do I get my agent’s cut?”
    “You’ll get your cut from me,” Costeiro said, all smiles.
    He looked at his watch. Alexandra interpreted the signal and stood up languidly. Both men rose with her.
    “Can’t I even watch the game?” she asked, pouting, draped against Costeiro’s shoulder.
    Costeiro embraced her amorously. “Of course you can. But only if Señor Fabian doesn’t mind your being there.”
    “Fabian is my friend. He wouldn’t lift his finger against me. Would you, Fabian?”
    Fabian raised the ring finger of his left hand. Since the severing,the wound had healed, but the finger remained slightly crooked. “For you, Alexandra—not even a finger,” he said with mock courtesy.
    He watched Alexandra and Costeiro cross the room, then slowly left the club and returned to his VanHome. He climbed the stairs to the alcove and slid the dome open to the night sky. As he shed his party clothes, he contemplated the easy guile with which Alexandra had arranged this match. What was she hoping for? In the coming game, Costeiro would have advantages over Fabian: he was younger and stronger, with superbly schooled Argentinean ponies at his command. What if, to unleash Costeiro, Alexandra had told him that she and Fabian were once lovers? Wrapping himself in a warm blanket, still unknowing, he lay down to unquiet sleep.
    The sun woke him at dawn, moist air cool on his face. Shivering, he looked out through the open dome. Aimless patches of fog roamed the woods, then slipped away, baring a grove of elms. Rising from the thick carpet of underbrush, the trees stood bare, inexplicably stripped of their foliage.
    He slipped coming down the steps from the alcove, bruising his shoulder against the door. An accident, he wondered, or was he losing his coordination under stress? In a game, a blur, a smudge, a single break in the chain of coordination might bring him to earth.
    He knew that his own apprehension and fear were hazards that might, at any moment before or during his fight with Costeiro, bend him to the humiliation of gagging, vomit or the wrenching flood and waste of the body.
    As a precaution, he began his preparations for the match by quickly forcing his stomach and bowels to rid themselves of food and waste, a cleansing evacuation without pain or any other unpleasant side effects. He had learned to do this during his travels in countries where the practice of voiding one’s stomach, intestines and bladder was done at will, a recourse when people wished to pleasure themselves at table without distraction or where a failure or reluctance to continue partaking of the largesse of one’s host would be construed as an insult.
    Fabian then turned on a tape recorder, raising the volume until it consumed the space around him with random songs andmelodies he had recorded from his VanHome radio, the music reminding him of an evening with a lover, an afternoon of ease among friends, a day of writing, the whiling away