I also assured her that I was doing all the things she asked, even though privately I thought that getting enough sleep might be a problem. Maria had already told me we had to be at work at 4.30 a.m. now that May was here.
It seemed that George Raworth liked the horses to go out for their exercise before the heat of the day became too great. I couldn’t think why. All the racing at Belmont in summer was in the afternoon when the mercury was at its highest. Surely part of the training should be to get the horses accustomed to running fast when it was hot.
But it had been made very clear to me by Charlie Hern that my place as a groom was not to question anything — it was only to do exactly as I was told.
Sleep on the top bunk did not come easily, not least because of my flatulent roommate lying below.
I had returned from the recreation hall at eight-fifteen, as it was getting dark, to find that someone had been tampering with my belongings.
My holdall had been still there on my bed, where I’d left it and, as far as I could tell, nothing had been taken, but I was certain someone had been through it. I had purposely left the zips in a particular position so that I’d be able to tell, and there was no doubt they had been moved. They weren’t even close to where I’d left them.
I smiled to myself.
If I’d been working here and someone new turned up out of the blue, I’d have had a look through their stuff too. But that was probably because I was naturally curious.
I emptied the contents of the canvas bag onto my bed.
All my usual smart clothes, including my Armani suit and my silk ties, were safely hanging in the guest-room closet in Tony Andretti’s home, along with my polished black-leather shoes, my smart leather toilet bag, my Raymond Weil wristwatch and my suitcase.
I had spent some of Monday afternoon at a discount store at the Fair Oaks mall in Fairfax, buying five ten-dollar T-shirts, two pairs of bargain jeans, plus other sundry items like underwear and a patterned green nylon sweater that I wouldn’t ordinarily be seen dead in. I also picked up some discounted sneakers, a pair of faux-leather black loafers, a plastic wash bag, a cheap digital watch with an imitation crocodile strap, and a blue baseball cap with the interlinked LA logo of the Los Angeles Dodgers on the front from a sportswear shop.
I then amused Tony by rubbing the lot of them in the dirt in his backyard and scuffing the shoes against the brick wall of his garage. Next, the dirty clothes all went into his washer, together with the sneakers and the baseball cap, for a couple of cycles without any detergent or softener.
My new clothes hadn’t been particularly fashionable to start with but, afterwards, they looked just as I had wanted — drab and rather shabby, with the white underwear now a delicate shade of grey.
I stacked everything in my locker.
At the bottom of my holdall, underneath all the clothes, I had meticulously placed two pieces of folder paper with one of them sticking out from the other by precisely the width of my thumb.
The pieces were still there but now they were folded together in line. Someone had definitely been peeping.
Not that the papers were secret or anything. They weren’t. In fact, I had left them there in order for them to be looked at.
One was a handwritten letter, supposedly from my old Irish mother back in County Cork but actually penned by Harriet Andretti, telling me how much she missed me and expressing hope that I might come home very soon. The second was a letter on IRS-headed notepaper, addressed to me at the Santa Anita racetrack, advising me that I was being charged a penalty for late filing of my income tax return the previous April.
Neither was true or particularly important. I had only added them to my kit to augment my story of having previously been an Irish groom working at Santa Anita. And one never knew when an official-looking letter from a government agency might come in useful as a form of ID, even if it had been created on my laptop and run off on Tony’s desktop printer.
I climbed up onto my bed and, presently, Rafael returned. He was clearly one of the boys that went out to a bar or indulged in some illicit drinking on the backside. He reeked of alcohol and was so inebriated he could hardly find his bed in a room that was only eight feet long by six wide.
He said nothing to me, as if he hadn’t noticed I was there, and eventually he tripped over the wooden chair in the corner, crawled onto his bunk, still half-clothed, and went to sleep.
I had travelled to America in an attempt to learn the identity of a mole in the FACSA racing section. I wondered how the hell I had come to the point where I was lying in the dark trying to ignore a drunken Mexican, farting beneath me?
17
Other than making calls and sending texts, my non-smart phone had one other function that was useful — it had an alarm, and it went off under my pillow at four o’clock in the morning.
The sky was still pitch-black but there was plenty of illumination coming into the room from the electric security lights that constantly lit up the whole barn area. The wafer-thin curtains didn’t stretch across the full width of the window and were obviously there more for decoration than to provide greater privacy or darkness.
I swung myself down to the floor from my top bunk.
The occupant of the lower was still out for the count and snoring gently. I was tempted to leave him sleeping — if he was late and got fired, I’d not have to put up with the flatulence. However, my good nature prevailed and I tried to rouse him by shaking his shoulder, but to little effect.
In the end I rolled him off the mattress onto the floor and forced him to sit up but, even then, I wasn’t quite sure if he was conscious in the normal sense of the word. I left him there and went down the corridor to the bathroom.
I was, therefore, quite surprised to find Rafael not only upright but dressed and ready for work when I returned, even if his eyes were rather bloodshot.
‘Lo siento,’ he said. ‘Bebido demasiado.’
I smiled at him. I knew siento meant sorry and that was enough. I didn’t expect him to be able to speak English with a hangover.
‘No late,’ I said, tapping my watch.
‘OK.’ He smiled back with his mostly toothless grin.
We went out together to the barn.
Charlie Hern was there ahead of us and he was barking out orders to the other grooms.
‘Paddy,’ he shouted at me.
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.
‘All four of yours go out today in stall order. Paddleboat first at five-thirty. Have him ready.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said again. ‘Sure will.’
I turned and calmly walked away, but I was far from composed inside. I thought I’d done my homework about what being a groom involved but, quite suddenly, I felt I was in the deep end, and wearing lead boots.
I went in search of Maria and found her in the tack room.
‘Where are the saddles?’ I asked, looking around at walls draped only with bridles on numbered hooks. There were a few metal saddle racks but all but one were empty.
‘Exercise riders bring their own, stupid,’ Maria said. ‘Where you been?’
Stupid was the right word. I had really only spent any time at racing stables in England and, even then, only as a visitor or as an integrity inspector. The stable lads there not only looked after the horses’ needs in terms of bedding, feed and water, they generally rode them out to the gallops each morning as well. Hence the stable tack room had racks full of saddles, one for each of the lads plus a few spares.
But it was getting increasingly difficult to find good stable lads who could not only ride well, but were of the right size and weight. It wasn’t only jockeys like Jimmy Robinson for whom maintaining riding weight was a problem.