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.’