I collected three cups of water from the cooler in the corner and put them on a table.
I could tell that Diego didn’t like me doing him any favours. He moved away, without his cup of water, and sat at a different table, on his own.
Maria sighed. ‘Diego very difficult today. He not stop telling me to be good girl all way from Belmont. I very tired of him.’
‘Join me down the back,’ I said.
What was I saying? Was I mad?
‘Good,’ Maria said, and gave me one of her flashing smiles. ‘I do that.’
In the end, it didn’t work out quite as we had planned.
When Diego saw Maria climbing in with the horses, he immediately went in there with her.
Fine, I thought, I’ll ride up front in the cab.
Keith also went into the trailer to be near to Fire Point.
I had spent much of the last two hours staring at Diego’s bag, stacked as it was in the trailer along with Maria’s, Keith’s and mine. I had even been through it while Keith had been asleep, without finding anything incriminating. At one point I had seriously thought of throwing it out of a window to pay him back for kicking me but I had managed to resist the temptation, not least because it may have caused an accident.
Diego might not be so considerate with mine, so I picked up my canvas holdall from the trailer and took it with me to the driver’s cab, chucking it onto the spare seat.
We set off again.
‘God, I’m glad to get rid of those other two,’ said the driver. ‘They’ve not stopped jabbering at each other in Spanish since we left Belmont Park. It has nearly driven me nuts.’
I wished he wouldn’t mention nuts.
Mine still ached dreadfully.
22
We stopped again briefly just outside Baltimore in order to team up with four motorcycles and two squad cars from the city police department, who traditionally escort the Kentucky Derby winner the last few miles to Pimlico Race Course for the Preakness.
It was not so much about ensuring the horse’s safe arrival as getting the event shown on the local TV news channels.
Marketing the race was the key.
It was hoped that in excess of 130,000 spectators would cram into the racecourse on Saturday to watch the big race, and that that one day would bankroll the track for the rest of the year.
With only twenty-eight racing days per year, compared to eighty or more at each of Churchill Downs and Belmont Park, Pimlico had become rather the poor relation of the Triple Crown venues. But it had a proud history, being the first of the three tracks to open in 1870.
The first running of the Preakness Stakes predated the inaugural Kentucky Derby by two years, with the first Belmont Stakes held at Belmont Park being some thirty years after that.
Several TV crews filmed our arrival and there was quite a crowd waiting, as the horse transport pulled up close to the Stakes Barn, which was situated behind the grandstand in a corner of the racecourse site. I did my best to keep out of camera shot, especially face-on. I had no wish to be recognised, not least by any of the FACSA team who might happen to see the transmission. After all, Baltimore was only some forty miles from the FACSA offices in Arlington.
I had been cultivating my beard now for almost two weeks and the growth was reasonably substantial, but it was always the eyes that would give me away. Consequently, I pulled the grubby LA Dodgers baseball cap lower, so the peak cast a deep shadow over my eyes in the afternoon sunshine.
The media lost interest as soon as Fire Point had walked the thirty yards from the trailer to Stall 40 in the Preakness Barn, the traditional Pimlico home of the Kentucky Derby winner.
Above and to the right of the door was a plaque showing the sixteen previous winners of the Preakness who had been accommodated in that particular stall, including the great sire Northern Dancer and Triple Crown champions Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Affirmed.
In truth, it was rather a basic space about twelve feet square with off-white walls and a dirt floor, no different from any of the other stalls in the barn. But traditions are traditions, even if some Derby-winning trainers have recently flouted the convention because they think that Stall 40 is too noisy.
Fire Point didn’t seem to mind, circling a couple of times to investigate his new environment before sticking his head out through the doorway to watch what else was going on.
Keith, Diego, Maria and I then unloaded all the kit plus the other four horses, putting them in their allocated stalls which were not all together, as the barn with Stall 40 was reserved only for those horses due to run in the Preakness itself.
Debenture and Ladybird were in the next barn along and I was told by Keith that I would be looking after them both, a situation that suited me fine as I thought it would keep me away from Diego, at least while we were working.
However, there would be no respite from him at night.
The grooms’ accommodation was up an outside staircase above the horses. As Keith had said, we had two rooms allocated, a small single for Maria, and another only a fraction larger for Keith, Diego and me, the metal bedsteads so close together that they would be considered inappropriate in an episode of I Love Lucy.
I bagged the bed in the corner furthest from the door and, fortunately, Keith took the middle one. The communal bathroom was three doors along the open-air balcony, and was shared with two other rooms, eight people in total.
George Raworth arrived in the white Jeep Cherokee about an hour after us. He parked his vehicle in a space next to the barns and then proceeded to conduct a tour of inspection of his horses to check they had settled into their temporary homes. While he was busy with Fire Point, I took the opportunity to have a quick look through the windows of the Jeep. The white cryogenic flask was there, still standing upright behind the passenger seat. But what was it for?
I went in search of George in the Preakness Barn.
With only five days to go before the big event, security at the barn was already pretty tight with a uniformed guard posted at either end.
‘ID?’ one asked as he blocked my path.
I showed him the groom’s pass hanging round my neck. He scrutinised the photo carefully before letting me through.
Ten horses were expected to contest the big race, making it about an average-sized field for recent times. Final declarations would be on Wednesday afternoon, ahead of the draw for starting-gate positions, and all bar one of the ten were already in residence.
Even so, only about half of the barn was actually in use, with many empty spaces. The Raworth three were housed in stalls together down one end with Fire Point in the middle.
The fact that a single trainer had three horses in the field was unusual, but not unique. Nick Zito, Hall of Fame inductee who had worked his way up from hot-walker to become a racing legend, had three runners in the 2005 Preakness. They had finished fourth, sixth and tenth.
Could George Raworth’s trio do any better?
Life at Pimlico settled down into a routine, although I could hardly describe the Raworth team as cheerful.
I had realised pretty quickly that the lot of a groom was not a particularly happy one.
For me, the total lack of privacy was the worst aspect, with nowhere to call your own to relax in peace — share a bedroom, share a bathroom, communal feeding and, at Pimlico, not even a recreation hall with computers to act as a distraction.
It was depressing.
On top of that, Diego was acting like a petulant child and I was getting pretty fed up with it.
First he emptied my holdall all over the floor of our bedroom before throwing the bag itself onto the roof. Then, at evening stables, he came round to the barn where I was working merely to tip a bucket of wet manure into a stall I had just finished cleaning. As a parting gesture, he then pulled the hay out of Debenture’s freshly filled haynet and threw it down into some muddy water.