Triple Crown (31 page)

He smiled at me.

Bastard, I thought.

Capitalism was alive and well, and living at Belmont Park.

For many people, and Bert was clearly among them, making a bit of extra money on the side was more important than making friends, even if the first actively hindered the second.

I’d done my utmost to be sociable towards him in the past but, far from being a friend, Bert Squab was now my sworn enemy.

Could I last until supper with no food?

I’d have to. I was damned if I was going to give anything extra to this obstinate oaf for food that was already there and paid for. And I knew for sure that any cash I handed over would go
straight into his own pocket.

‘I’ll have to have words with my guv’nor,’ I said, turning away and walking towards the exit.

I hadn’t really said it as a threat, but I had quite expected Bert to soften and apologise, and then call me back to eat, but he didn’t.

It was only food, I told myself. Some people in the world regularly go without food for days on end. I could surely manage it for another four hours.

I went back to Raworth’s barn and hung around there, keeping my eyes and ears open for any unusual activity.

The storm of the morning had completely cleared away and the sun was now shining brightly in a near cloudless sky. I sat down on an upturned bucket at the end of the barn and watched as the
puddles outside slowly evaporated away and the thick mud turned back into dry earth.

What should I do?

Tony had said that I had nerves of steel but it didn’t feel like it at the moment.

What was the worst thing that could happen?

Even if Raworth were to get away scot-free for infecting his rivals
and
the FACSA mole remained undiscovered, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as I knew it.

Sending in the Nassau County Police with a search warrant might secure the first objective but would, pretty much, rule out the second, at least for now, and that’s the one I wanted the
more of the two.

So much more.

That was the reason I had been living like this for these three long weeks, busting my arse by day, sleeping in a lookalike prison cell with a flatulent Mexican by night, and sharing a bathroom,
not only with the other eight human occupants of the building but also, it seemed, with half the cockroach population of North America.

I surprised myself by how badly I wanted to catch this mole.

In fact, I decided that I’d stop at nothing to get him.

I stood up and walked a little distance from the barn to call Tony.

‘Send an email to your predecessor friend telling him that you may have a lead on one of Adam Mitchell’s former grooms who, you understand, knows how Mitchell was tipped off about
the raid last October and is prepared to talk about it. Make a joke of the fact that you have found out partly by accident because it appears that the groom in question now looks after a horse that
tested positive for cobalt at Pimlico on Preakness Day. But don’t tell him the name of the horse is Debenture. We don’t want to make it too obvious.’

‘Don’t you look after Debenture?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It could be dangerous.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I can’t see any other way of getting our mole to show himself, and certainly not by this coming Friday. He may not buy it, of course. It is rather
like waving a scarlet cape at a bull. Maybe he will charge, or maybe he won’t. But surely it is worth a try.’

And as the matador, would I get gored by his horns, or could I deliver
la estocada
, the final coup de grâce?

‘I thought male moles were called boars, not bulls,’ Tony said.

I ignored him.

I stayed close to Raworth’s barn right through until evening stables, waiting and watching, but nothing happened.

The horses spent the time in their stalls, alternately snoozing in the afternoon heat or munching from their haynets.

I wondered what dried grass tasted of, and how hungry a man would have to be to try it. I had certainly seen news items on the television where starving people had tried to sustain themselves by
eating boiled leaves.

Thankfully, I wasn’t yet at that stage, although a dull ache of hunger had settled into the pit of my stomach and I was really looking forward to my supper.

At about three-thirty I stood up and stretched my legs, walking round the shedrow to stay in the shade. I could hear canned laughter from the office where Keith was again watching a comedy show
on the TV.

I didn’t really want to have to chat to him so I avoided going past the open office door and retraced my steps down to the other end of the barn.

I tried the feed-store door.

It was locked. Of course it was locked.

The feed store was always kept locked except when Charlie Hern or Keith were actually issuing the horse nuts from the feed bins.

And the drug store within would also surely be locked, quite likely with frozen EVA-contaminated semen in the cryogenic flask hidden away in its bottom corner.

How I could have done with my lock picks to check.

Evening stables started at four o’clock under the close eye of Charlie Hern. With the departure from the barn of Paddleboat, I had been allocated another of the equine residents, a
four-year-old gelding called Highlighter who was housed in Stall 15, close to the office and well away from my other three and, somewhat inconveniently, sandwiched between two horses cared for by
Diego.

I had done my best all day to avoid him, but now I found myself right on his doorstep, even sharing a water tap at that end of the barn.

I left Highlighter right to the end in the hope that Diego would have given up waiting and gone to supper.

No such luck.

He came into Stall 15 after I had done the mucking out and just as I had finished brushing Highlighter’s coat to a nice shine. But he wasn’t intent, this time, on physical violence.
Maybe that was because I was bigger than him, and he wasn’t accompanied by his back-up team. So, instead, he simply threw a full bucket of muddy water all over Highlighter’s back.

So juvenile, I thought.

Charlie Hern was already on his tour of inspection around the other side of the barn, and he certainly wouldn’t have been pleased to find one of the horses caked in mud. I didn’t
have long enough to take Highlighter outside to the wash point, so I did my best to scrape the mud off his coat and out of his mane, brushing each vigorously with a stiff dandy brush. But, in spite
of my efforts, the horse was still not looking very good by the time Charlie arrived.

‘Come on, Paddy,’ Charlie said, clearly irritated. ‘Get a move on. You know better than to present a horse to me in this state.’

‘Sorry, Mr Hern,’ I said meekly. ‘I’ll make sure he’s right before I go.’

‘Damn right you will,’ Charlie responded.

He felt down over the animal’s legs and tut-tutted under his breath, but not so quietly that I wouldn’t hear. Then he moved on to the next stall as I went back to my brushing.

‘Damn you, Diego, damn you,’ I repeated over and over in time with my brush strokes as I repaired his damage.

Consequently, I was the last in line as Charlie issued the correct quantity of concentrated feed for each horse.

‘Have you cleaned up Highlighter?’ he asked as he poured the feed into bowl 15.

‘Almost, sir,’ I said. ‘I just need to finish him off.’

‘Be sure you do,’ Charlie said sternly. ‘And check he eats up his supper.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, taking the bowl of feed and making my way back towards Stall 15.

I could do with eating up my supper as well.

I was still brushing out Highlighter’s mane and tail when I heard George Raworth arrive. He came into the barn shouting loudly for Charlie Hern, who was still down in the
feed store.

They went into the office.

‘Keith,’ I heard George say, ‘go and make sure all the staff have gone to supper and then go yourself, will you? I need to talk to Charlie alone.’ I could hear him
clearly through the wooden partitions between the office and the stall I was in.

‘OK, boss,’ Keith replied. ‘I think they’ve left already.’

‘Have a look anyway,’ George said.

I slipped out of the stall but, instead of leaving, I quickly climbed the ladder up to the bedding store and hid myself, lying down silently between the straw bales stacked above the office with
my ear to the floor.

I glimpsed the top of Keith’s head as he made a complete circuit of the barn beneath me, without once looking up.

‘All clear,’ I heard Keith say as he went back to the office.

‘Right,’ George said. ‘You get going too.’

‘OK, boss,’ Keith said. ‘How long do you want?’

‘Give us a good half an hour,’ George said. ‘Come back after your meal.’

I heard the office door close and there was a pause, presumably for Keith to walk away.

‘Check, will you?’ I heard George ask.

I heard the office door open, then it closed again.

‘He’s gone,’ Charlie said. ‘Now what’s this about?’

‘I’ve had a call on my home phone from someone demanding money,’ George said, hissing it hardly louder than a whisper. But I could still hear him clearly.

‘What for?’ Charlie asked.

‘He told me I had a horse fail a dope test at Pimlico and ten thousand dollars in cash would make it all go away.’

‘Which horse?’ Charlie said.

‘He didn’t say but it has to be that damn nag Debenture for cobalt. Nothing else has had anything. Why did we ever think it was a good idea? The damn animal is useless and we should
have recognised that.’

‘It should have been clear of his system before that race,’ Charlie said. ‘I was told he’d pee it all out in only a day or two.’

‘Well he obviously didn’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Charlie said. ‘I looked up the Maryland sanctions for cobalt before I even suggested it. They’re pathetic – a slap on the wrist and a
five-hundred-buck fine, nowhere near ten grand. Just ride it out.’

‘So what do we do about tomorrow?’ George said.

‘In what way?’

‘Debenture is due to run in the last race. We’d better scratch him.’

‘No,’ Charlie said quickly. ‘That’s ideal. It’s been over a week since he ran at Pimlico. The cobalt will have surely gone from his system by now. Let’s
insist they do another test on him. He’ll be clear. That would help our case.’

‘It is not really the damn cobalt I’m worried about, it’s the other stuff.’ George was sounding agitated.

‘Relax,’ Charlie said. ‘No one can possibly know about that.’

How wrong he was.

‘But what if NYRA do a search?’

‘They won’t. The positive was not even on their watch and no one would do a search for a single positive for cobalt. Others have been done for far more than that, and they’ve
laughed it off. It wasn’t as if we used much of the stuff anyway.’

Well done, Charlie, I thought. Keep talking George out of moving the flask.

‘Look,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll get rid of what’s left of the cobalt, just in case. But relax. All will be fine.

No it won’t, I reflected.

My hungry stomach rumbled loudly.

I held my breath. Had they heard? It had seemed very loud to me. I went on lying as still as I could, silently berating my noisy stomach, without actually telling it that it was now unlikely to
get any supper as well.

‘What time was the call?’ Charlie asked beneath me, seemingly unruffled. Even if he had heard a noise, he would likely have thought it was one of the horses.

‘About four o’clock.’

‘What did you say?’ Charlie asked.

‘I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about.’

‘And?’ Charlie prompted. ‘What did he say to that?’

‘He told me to think hard and he’d call me again in the morning.’

‘And did he tell you how you were meant to pay him?’

‘He said to get the cash together and take it with me to the track tomorrow. He’d find me there.’

‘What, here at Belmont?’ Charlie said.

‘Yes. Here. During racing.’

‘I reckon it’s some smart-assed lab technician after a fast buck,’ Charlie said. ‘He’s probably acquired a bit of information and is trying to make some easy dough
on the back of it. He almost certainly couldn’t make the Maryland charge go away, anyway. What are you going to do then? Complain that your ten-grand bribe to some mystery man didn’t
work? You’d get laughed at. Ignore him.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ George said. ‘But do you think we should dispose of the other stuff, just in case?’

‘No. We might need it. There’s a piece in today’s
Racing Form
that says Amphibious has recovered from his fall in the Santa Anita Derby and will run in the Belmont
Stakes. It seems his trainer has been mouthing off that Fire Point is not good enough to be a Triple Crown winner and he intends to make sure he isn’t. We’ve come this far, George, and
I don’t intend to give it all up now.’

‘OK. But maybe we should move it.’

‘Where to?’ Charlie said. ‘Do you really want your wife and kids asking what’s in the funny tank in the garage? And I can’t keep it. Not with Sophie sniffing round
everything. Like I told you before, it is safer locked away here.’

George Raworth might have been the trainer, the big boss, while Charlie Hern was only his assistant but, in this venture, Charlie was definitely in charge. Everything about their conversation
indicated so.

‘If he calls you again in the morning, which I doubt, you tell him to take a hike, we’re not paying.’

‘What if he’s not a lab technician but someone important? It might be worth ten grand to us not to have him create any trouble. After all, look at the prize we’re
after.’

I assumed he meant the five-million-dollar bonus to the trainer of a Triple Crown winner.

‘But who’s to say he won’t then come back for more,’ Charlie said.

‘We might need to take that chance.’

‘OK, string him along a bit,’ Charlie said. ‘But don’t pay him anything unless you talk to me first. Got it?’

‘Yes,’ George replied. ‘I’d better get back home in case he calls again. I don’t want the kids answering, especially as George Junior now sounds exactly like me on
the telephone.’