Triple Crown (16 page)

‘What difference does that make?’

‘To start with, it means I may have more chance of getting to Pimlico, but mostly I’m curious as to whether his other two will actually be trying to beat Fire Point, or will they
only be there to spoil the chances of the other runners.’

‘You’re a cynic.’ Tony had laughed.

‘Maybe I am. But I believe there is something very fishy about the way those three competitors conveniently all fell ill on the very morning of the Derby.’

‘The track veterinarian didn’t think so,’ Tony had said. ‘He said that it was not uncommon for horses to go off their food and run a fever, especially when being moved
around. But, I grant you, it looks a bit suspicious for those three to have fallen ill on that particular day.’

I’d read the vet’s interim report. Not that I’d really understood much of it. It had all been a bit too scientific for me and it didn’t answer the most important
question, which was what was wrong with the horses. One of his paragraphs had stuck in my mind:
Antigenic drift of antigenically heterologous viruses may reduce the degree and duration of
protection conferred by previous infection or vaccination.

The phrase ‘blinding with science’ came to mind. At least I could understand the last bit.

‘Does he think it may have been a new strain of equine influenza?’

‘He doesn’t know yet,’ Tony had replied. ‘Apparently he has to wait for the horses to produce antibodies and then test for those, rather than for the virus itself. It
takes a few days.’

But, if it was equine influenza, one of the most infectious diseases around, why hadn’t it infected more of the horses? What was so special about those three? Other than, of course, they
were three of the most fancied runners in the Kentucky Derby.

I thought that fact alone was sufficiently suspicious for me to go to work in Raworth’s stable, in order to find out.

My roommate returned from wherever he’d been at about ten minutes to four as I was still lying on my bed. He rushed into our room, grabbed some boots from his locker and
was pulling them on before he even noticed me.

He was a short man that I took to be in his fifties. He looked up at me.

‘
Hola,
’ he said, totally unfazed to find another man in his bedroom. ‘
Mi nombre es Rafael Diaz. Y tu?
’

‘Paddy,’ I replied. ‘Paddy Murphy. From Ireland.’

‘
Mexicano,
’ Rafael said, pointing a finger at his chest. ‘
Vine aquí hace diez años.
’

I shook my head. ‘No
Español
.’

He had exhausted my Spanish by asking my name.

He smiled broadly, exposing the few teeth that still remained in his head, which themselves appeared to be in need of some urgent dental treatment.

‘Mexican,’ he said in heavily accented English. ‘I came to here ten years.’

I climbed down from my bunk and shook his hand. He grinned some more. ‘We go work. No late. Mr Keith say boss come.’

‘Yes,’ I said, looking at the watch on my wrist.

It was five minutes to four.

Don’t be late
, Keith had said.

Rafael and I rushed along from the accommodation block to the barn.

‘Come on, you two,’ Charlie Hern shouted at us. ‘Hurry up and get in position.’

We quickly lined up with seven others, including Keith who stood on the end. It reminded me slightly of the FACSA special agent parade at the National Guard facility on the morning of the Hayden
Ryder raid.

But that is where the similarity ended.

The FACSA team had been a crack outfit while this motley crew appeared anything but. Instead of a smart uniform, the nine of us wore a variety of T-shirts, jeans and assorted footwear ranging
from Rafael’s ankle-high jodhpur boots to my off-white trainers.

George Raworth appeared from the office in which I had been interviewed earlier, and walked over to where we were paraded. He was casually dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt, in contrast to
the last time I’d seen him wearing a suit and tie on the giant TV screen at Churchill Downs as he’d led Fire Point into the Derby winner’s circle.

During my stay with Tony and Harriet, I had used the Internet to do some research on Mr George S. Raworth.

He had been born near El Paso in western Texas where his great-great-grandfather had established a longhorn cattle ranch in the 1890s, just as soon as the railroad had arrived to transport the
stock to markets in the north.

The 100,000-acre ranch was now run by two of George’s cousins, primarily producing beef for the California market, but also raising American Quarter Horses, a strong muscular breed with a
compact body, favoured as cowboys’ working horses, and named for their prowess as the fastest equine breed over a quarter of a mile from a standing start.

George had started his adult life training the young Quarter Horses from the family ranch, racing them at the Lone Star racetrack near Dallas, before graduating to the more lucrative
Thoroughbred circuit.

Initial successes had marked him as a new golden-boy of American racing but his reputation had been tarnished over the years by several cases involving the misuse of medications, especially
steroids.

He was now in his mid-fifties but looked somewhat older, with a head of prematurely white hair and facial skin ravaged both by teenage acne and by too many of his former years having been spent
in the harsh Texas sunshine.

He walked along the line of his staff and stopped in front of me.

‘And who are you?’ he asked in a voice that didn’t have as much drawl as I’d been expecting.

‘I’m Paddy, sir,’ I replied in my best Cork accent. ‘I has only started today.’

‘Well, Paddy,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the most successful training barn in the United States. Did you see the Derby on Saturday?’

‘Indeed I did, sir,’ I said, ‘On TV.’ I smiled broadly at him.

He smiled back and moved on down the line.

Satisfied by the inspection of his staff, he faced us.

‘Well done all,’ he said. ‘Now for the Preakness and then the Triple Crown.’

George turned and went back into the office.

Charlie Hern scowled at the line. ‘Go on then, the lot of you, get to work. Paddy, you go with Maria. She’ll show you what’s where. You’ll do four horses to start with
until we see how you go. Maria, show him Stalls One to Four.’

Maria was the only female in the line-up. Slim and young, she was wearing a skimpy, olive-green T-shirt above tight denim jeans with mock-designer holes in the knees. She was beautiful, with
high cheekbones under a bronze skin, and she clearly knew how to display her body to maximum advantage, but she didn’t seem too pleased to be asked to look after the new boy.

‘I should not be treated like common hot-walker,’ she said with a slight Spanish accent, tossing her thick dark hair from side to side in displeasure. ‘I am
not
hot-walker, I should be groom.’

She was certainly hot, at least to my eye.

I very quickly slipped into the routine of George Raworth’s barn.

Other than Keith, the barn foreman, there were seven full-time staff, including Maria, plus a yard boy who was clearly the oldest of us all, using his ever-present broom more as a support than
for actual sweeping.

Maria showed me where the stable equipment was stored.

‘Have you been here long?’ I asked her, trying to be friendly.

‘I came here January as hot-walker,’ she said haughtily, still unhappy, ‘but I should be groom by now. I have done my study.’

A hot-walker was someone employed simply to lead the horses around as they cooled after exercise. It was the lowest rung on the horse-care ladder.

‘But I am still treated by boss as mere hot-walker.’ She sighed and drew herself up to her full height, posing and pouting with obvious irritation. Her facial expression reminded me
of a flamenco dancer.

I berated myself slightly for fantasising about Maria cavorting around a dance floor in high heels. I was not here to chase the female stable staff.

‘Is being a hot-walker all that bad?’

‘I want better,’ she said. ‘How come you are groom already when I be here much longer?’ She turned and walked off, gyrating her hips in an overly belligerent manner. I
found it rather sexy, and she knew it.

I sighed and went to work.

I cleared the soiled bedding in stalls one to four and replenished the straw for the equine residents, placing the waste into the huge grey metal skips that were earmarked for the purpose at
either end of the barn.

I was quite surprised to see that straw was in widespread use, the preference in the UK having moved towards wood pellets, shavings or shredded newspaper.

As Keith had told me earlier, the barn had thirty-two stalls – two blocks of sixteen built back-to-back down the centre – with a wide covered walkway called a shedrow that ran right
around the building inside the exterior walls.

The stalls, like the rest of the building, were constructed from wood and they opened onto the shedrow so that the horses were able to look out over half-doors.

At each corner of the barn was an exit with a sliding door. During the day the doors were left open with only a single bar across the gap to prevent any loose horses from escaping.

The doors were slid shut at night but not locked. The wooden structures, together with large quantities of straw and hay, meant that fire was always uppermost in people’s minds and large
signs with ‘No Smoking/Prohibido Fumar’ hung from the rafters every twenty feet or so along the shedrow.

The barns at Belmont were fitted with sprinkler systems but, nevertheless, locked exit doors would hamper the evacuation of the horses if the worst was to happen, as had occurred in 1986 when
forty-five top Thoroughbreds, collectively worth several million dollars, had all died one night when fire destroyed barn 48 on the eastern edge of the site.

George Raworth, accompanied by Charlie Hern, made a tour of his stable, stopping at each stall to inspect the occupant and discuss progress. We grooms had to remove the
bandages from the horse’s legs and stand, holding the animal’s head, while both George and Charlie ran a hand down the back of each equine limb, feeling for unwanted heat in the tendon
or ligaments.

Like many others, the Raworth’s horses all wore leg bandages as a matter of course, not because they were injured but to add support and to hold cotton pads that prevented nicks and
bruises caused by kicking into themselves. The bandages were also used to hold medications and liniments in place, often used after racing to ease any slight sprains.

‘Everything OK, Paddy?’ Charlie asked as he and George came into Stall 1 where I had a firm grip of the headcollar of a four-year-old gelding called Paddleboat.

‘Fine, sir, thank you,’ I replied.

‘Which part of Ireland are you from?’ George asked.

‘From the south, sir,’ I said. ‘County Cork.’

‘My mother’s father was Irish.’

I hadn’t spotted that in any of my research.

‘He came from a bit further north. From Thurles in County Tipperary.’

‘I know it,’ I said. ‘I went to the racecourse there as a kid.’

‘I’ve never been able to get there myself,’ George said. ‘Maybe one day.’

I breathed a small silent sigh of relief. I hadn’t been there either.

I stood and listened as the two men turned their attention to Paddleboat.

‘He ran Thursday in a seven-eighths-mile, fifteen-grand claimer,’ Charlie said. ‘Finished sixth of eight. Never in with a chance and not claimed.’

‘Is he on Clen?’ George asked.

‘Has been,’ Charlie replied. ‘Came off it to go to the track.’

‘Put him back on it. Up the dose.’

Charlie wrote something down in a notebook.

‘If he shows no improvement soon,’ George went on, ‘we’ll have to get rid of him – maybe in an even lower claimer. Ship him down to Philly Park if
necessary.’

Unlike in the UK, claiming races made up the bulk of contests at US racetracks. Before the start, any horse in the race could be claimed by a new owner for a fixed amount as determined by the
race conditions. Title in the horse was transferred as the starting gates opened, although the former owner was entitled to any purse-money earned in that particular race.

It would clearly not be sensible to run a really good horse in a race in which the claim figure was very low. The horse would be sure to be claimed by a new owner and, even if it won the purse,
the original owner would lose a valuable animal for a fraction of its true worth.

However, if a horse was valued around the claim figure then, if it were claimed, the original owner would recover his initial investment, plus he has the chance of picking up a substantial purse
on top if it won the race.

In this way, racetracks used claiming races to encourage horses of roughly equal value, and hence of a comparable standard, to race against one another. This made the racing more competitive and
thus boosted the ‘handle’, the total sum of money wagered by the public. The handle was what ultimately determined the tracks’ income, which was what they really only cared about.
Each day’s programme would have claiming races with a range of claim amounts and horses were entered accordingly.

Claiming races were popular with some owners but usually less so with the trainers, as they had little idea if a horse that was in their care in the morning would be residing in someone
else’s barn come evening.

Not that all horses were entered in claimers. The top-class ones, those that contested the major stakes races, never had their ownership so easily changed, but for the journeyman horses, those
that made up the majority of the backside population at Belmont Park, they lived a merry-go-round life in the barns, being repeatedly claimed by new owners and sent to different trainers.

Paddleboat was clearly not going to remain in Raworth’s barn for much longer. If a new owner didn’t claim him soon, I feared he’d be off to the knacker. However, I was much
more interested in what drugs George was planning to give him in the interim.