by Ian Fleming
Leiter left some money on the check and they went out and, while the Studillac throbbed along the winding road towards Troy, Bond settled himself down with Jimmy Cannon’s tough prose. As he read, the Saratoga of the Jersey Lily’s day vanished into the dusty, sweet past and the twentieth century looked out at him from the piece of newsprint and bared its teeth in a sneer.
The village of Saratoga Springs [he read beneath the photograph of an attractive young man with wide, straight eyes and a rather thin-lipped smile] was the Coney Island of the underworld until the Kefauvers put their show on the television. It frightened the hicks and chased the hoodlums to Las Vegas. But the mobs exercised dominion over Saratoga for a long time. It was a colony of the national gangs and they ran it with pistols and baseball bats.
Saratoga seceded from the union, as did the other gambling hamlets that placed their municipal governments in the custody of the racket corporations. It is still a place where the decent inheritors of old fortunes and famous names come to run their stables under racing conditions that are primitive and suggest a country fair meeting for quarter horses.
Before Saratoga closed down hitch-hikers were thrown into the can by a constabulary that banked its pay checks and lived off the tips of murderers and panderers. Impoverishment was a serious violation of the law in Saratoga. Drunks, who got loaded at the bars of dice joints, were also considered menaces when they tapped out.
But the killer was extended the liberty of the place as long as he paid off and held an interest in a local institution. It could be a house of prostitution or a backroom crap game where the busted could shoot two bits.
Professional curiosity compels me to read the literature of the scratch sheets. The racing journalists call back the tranquil years as though Saratoga was always a town of frivolous innocence. What a rotten burg it used to be.
It is possible that there are bust-out gaffs sneaking in farm-houses on back roads. Such action is insignificant and the player must be prepared to be knocked out as rapidly as the dealer can switch the dice. But the gambling casinos of Saratoga were never square and anyone who caught a hot hand was measured for a trimming.
The road houses ran through the night on the shores of the lake. The big entertainers shilled for the games which were not financed to be beaten. The stick men and the wheel turners were the nomadic hustlers who were paid by the day and travelled the gambling circuit from Newport, Ky., down to Miami in the winter and back up to Saratoga for August. Most of them were educated in Steubenville, O., where the penny-ante games were trade schools for the industry.
They were drifters and most of them had no talent for mussing up a welsher. They were clerks of the underworld and they packed up and left as soon as any heat was turned their way. Most of them have settled down in Las Vegas and Reno where their old bosses have taken charge with licences hanging on the walls.
Their employers were not gamblers in the tradition of old Col. E. R. Bradley who was a stately man of courteous deportment. But there are those who tell me that his gambling bazaar at Palm Beach would go along with a mark until his score piled up too high.
Then, according to those who have gone against Bradley’s games, mechanics took over and used any device that would keep the house solvent. It delights those who recollect Bradley when they read his canonization as a philanthropist whose hobby was giving the rich a little divertisement denied them by the state of Florida. But, compared to the lice who controlled Saratoga, Col. Bradley is entitled to all the praise he gets in the remembrances of the sentimentalists.
The track at Saratoga is a ramshackle pile of kindling wood and the climate is hot and humid. There are some, such as Al Vanderbilt and Jock Whitney, who are sportsmen in the obsolete sense of the identification. Horse-racing is their game and they are too good for it. So are such trainers as Bill Winfrey, who sent Native Dancer to the races. There are jockeys who would bust you in the nose if you propositioned them to pull a horse.
They enjoy Saratoga and they must be glad that the likes of Lucky Luciano are gone from the rube town that flourished because it allowed tough guys to fleece the drop-ins. The bookmakers were yegged as they left the track in the era of the hand-books. There was one called Kid Tatters who was relieved of $50,000 in the parking lot. The heist guys told him they intended to kidnap him if he didn’t come up with more.
Kid Tatters knew Lucky had a piece of most of the gambling spots and appealed to him to settle his trouble. Lucky said it was a simple matter. No one would bother the bookie if he did as he was told. Kid Tatters had a permit to book at the track and his reputation was clean, but there was only one way he could protect himself.
“Make me your partner,” Lucky informed him and the conversation was repeated for me by a man who was present. “No one would stick up a partner of Lucky’s.”
Kid Tatters thought of himself as an honourable guy in business sanctioned by the state, but he gave in and Lucky was his partner until he died. I asked a guy if Lucky put up any money or worked for his end of the bookmaker’s profit.
“All Lucky did was collect,” the fellow said “But in those days, Kid Tatters made himself a good bargain. He was never bothered again.”
It was a stinking town, but all gambling towns are.
Bond folded the cutting and put it in his pocket.
“It certainly sounds a long way from Lily Langtry,” he said after a pause.
“Sure,” said Leiter indifferently. “And Jimmy Cannon doesn’t let on he knows the big boys are back again, or their successors. But nowadays they’re owners, like our friends the Spangs, running their horses against the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts and the Woodwards, and now and again putting over a fast fix like Shy Smile. They aim to net fifty Grand on that job, and that’s better than knocking off a bookie for a few C’s. Sure, some of the names have changed around Saratoga. So’s the mud in the mud baths there.”
A big road sign loomed up on the right. It said:
STOP AT THE SAGAMORE.
AIR-CONDITIONED. SLUMBERITE BEDS. TELEVISION.
FIVE MILES TO SARATOGA SPRINGS,
AND THE SAGAMORE—FOR GRACIOUS LIVING
“That means we get our tooth glasses wrapped in individual paper bags and the lavatory seat sealed with a strip of sanitized paper,” commented Leiter sourly. “And don’t think you can steal those Slumberite beds. Motels used to lose one most weeks. Now they screw them down.”
Chapter 11
Shy Smile
The first thing that struck Bond about Saratoga was the green majesty of the elms, which gave the discreet avenues of Colonial-type clapboard houses some of the peace and serenity of a European watering place. And there were horses everywhere, being walked across the streets, with a policeman holding up the traffic, being coaxed out of horse-boxes around the sprawling groups of stables, cantering along the cinder borders of the roads, and being led to work on the exercise track alongside the race-course near the centre of the town. Stableboys and jockeys, white, negro and Mexican, hung about at the street corners and there was the whinny and the occasional trumpeting scream of horses in the air.
It was a mixture of Newmarket and Vichy, and it suddenly occurred to Bond that although he wasn’t in the least interested in horses, he rather liked the life that went with them.
Leiter dropped him at the Sagamore, which was on the edge of the town and only half a mile from the race-track, and went off about his business. They agreed to contact each other only at night or casually in the crowds at the races, but to pay a dawn visit to the exercise track if Shy Smile was being given a last workout at sunrise the next day. Leiter said he would know about this, and much more, after an evening around the stables and at The Tether, the all-night restaurant and bar that was the home of the racing underworld when they came up for the August meeting.
Bond checked himself in at the central office of the Sagamore, signed ‘James Bond, Hotel Astor, New York,’ before a hatchet-faced woman whose steel-rimmed eyes assumed that Bond, l
ike most of her other seekers after ‘gracious living,’ intended to steal the towels and possibly the sheets, paid thirty dollars for three days and was given a key to Room 49.
He carried his bag across the parched lawn, between the beds of Beauty Bush and forced gladioli, and let himself into the neat spare double room with the armchair, the bedside table, the Currier and Ives print, the chest of drawers and the brown plastic ash-tray that are standard motel equipment all over America. The lavatory and shower were immaculate and neatly designed and, as Leiter had prophesied, the tooth glasses were contained in paper bags ‘for your protection’ and the lavatory seat was barred by a strip of paper which said ‘sanitized.’
Bond took a shower and changed and walked down the road and had two Bourbon old-fashioneds and the Chicken Dinner at $2.80 in the air-conditioned eating house on the corner that was as typical of ‘the American way of life’ as the motel. Then he returned to his room and lay on his bed with the Saratogian, from which he learned that a certain T. Bell would be riding Shy Smile in The Perpetuities.
Soon after ten, Felix Leiter knocked softly on the door and limped in. He smelled of liquor and cheap cigar smoke and looked pleased with himself.
“Made some progress,” he said. He hooked the armchair up to the foot of the bed on which Bond was lying. He sat down and took out a cigarette. “Means getting up damned early in the morning. Five o’clock. The word is they’ll be timing Shy Smile over four furlongs at 5.30. I’d like to see who’s around when they’re doing that. The owner’s given as Pissaro. One of the directors of the Tiara happens to be called that. He’s another one with a joke name. ‘Lame-brain’ Pissaro. Used to be in charge of their dope racket. Ran the stuff over the Mexican border and then broke it down and parcelled it out to middlemen on the coast. The FBI got on to him and he did a term in San Quentin. Then he came out and Spang gave him the job at the Tiara in exchange for the rap he’d carried. And now he’s a racehorse owner like the Vanderbilts. Nice going. I’ll be interested to see what sort of shape he’s in these days. He was almost a mainliner in the days he was dealing in coke. They gave him the cure in San Q, but it’s left him a bit soft in the head. Hence the ‘Lame-brain.’ Then there’s the jock, ‘Tingaling’ Bell. Good rider but not above this sort of caper if the money’s right and he’s in the clear. I want to have a word with Tingaling if I can get him alone. I’ve got a little proposition for him. The trainer’s another hoodlum—name of Budd, ‘Rosy’ Budd. They all sound pretty funny, these names. But you don’t want to be taken in by it. He’s from Kentucky, so he knows all about horses. He’s been in trouble all over the South, what they call a ‘little habitch’ as opposed to a ‘big habitch’—habitual criminal. Larceny, mugging, rape—nothing big. Enough to give him quite a bulky packet in police records. But for the last few years he’s been running straight, if you care to call it that, as trainer for Spang.”
Leiter flicked his cigarette accurately through the open window into a bed of gladioli. He got up and stretched. “Those are the actors in the order of their appearance,” he said. “Distinguished cast. Look forward to lighting a fire under them.”
Bond was mystified. “But why don’t you just turn them over to the Stewards? Who are your principals in all this? Who pays the bills?”
“Retained by the leading owners,” said Leiter. “They pay us a retainer and extra by results. And I wouldn’t get far with the Stewards. Wouldn’t be fair to put the stable-boy in the box. Be the death sentence for him. The veterinary has passed the horse, and the real Shy Smile was shot and burned months ago. No. I’ve got my own ideas, and they’re going to hurt the Spangled boys far more than a disbarment from the tracks. You’ll see. Anyway, five o’clock, and I’ll come and hammer on the door just in case.”
“Don’t worry,” said Bond. “I’ll be on the doorstep with my boots and my saddle while the coyotes are still baying the moon.”
Bond woke on time and there was a wonderful freshness in the air as he followed the limping figure of Leiter through the half light that filtered through the elms among the waking stables. In the east, the sky was pearly grey and iridescent, like a toy balloon filled with cigarette smoke, and among the shrubs the mocking birds were beginning their first song. Blue smoke rose straight up in the air from the fires in the camps behind the stables and there was a smell of coffee and wood-smoke and dew. There was the clank of pails and the other small noises of men and horses in the early morning and as they moved out from under the trees to the white wooden rail that bordered the track, a file of blanketed horses came by with a boy at each head, holding the leading rein right up close to the bit and talking with soft roughness to their charges. “Hey, lazybones, pick yo feet up. Giddap. You sho ain’t no Man-O-War dis mornin.’”
“They’ll be getting ready for the morning works,” said Leiter. “The gallops. This is the time the trainers hate most. When the owners come.”
They leant against the rail, thinking about the early morning, and about breakfast, and the sun suddenly caught the trees half a mile away on the other side of the track and brushed the topmost branches with pale gold, and in minutes the last shadows had gone and it was day.
As if they had been waiting for the sign, three men appeared from among the trees away to the left, and one of them was leading a big chestnut with a blaze face and four white stockings.
“Don’t look at them,” said Leiter softly. “Turn your back on the track and watch that file of horses coming up. That old bent man with them is ‘Sunny Jim’ Fitzsimmons, greatest trainer in America. And those are the Woodward horses. Most of them will be winners this meeting. Just look casual and I’ll keep an eye on our friends. Wouldn’t do to seem too interested. Now let’s see, there’s a stable-boy leading Shy Smile and that’s Budd all right and my old friend Lame-brain in a beautiful lavender shirt. Always a dresser. Nice-looking horse. Powerful shoulders. They’ve taken the blanket off him and he doesn’t like the cold. Bucking around like mad with the stable-boy hanging on. Sure hope he doesn’t kick Mr Pissaro in the face. Now Budd’s got him and he’s quietened down. Budd’s given the boy a leg up. Leading him on to the track. Now he’s cantering slowly up the far side of the track to one of the furlong posts. The hoodlums have got their watches out, they’re looking round. They’ve spotted us. Just look casual, James. Once the horse gets going they won’t be interested in us. Yeah. You can turn round now. Shy Smile’s on the far side of the track and they’ve got their glasses on her to be ready for the off. And it will be four furlongs. Pissaro’s just by the fifth post.”
Bond turned and looked along the rail to his left at the two stocky intent figures with the sun glinting on their glasses and on the watches in their hands and, although he didn’t believe in these people, the dusk seemed to seep out around them from under the golden elms.
“He’s off.” Far away Bond could see a flying brown horse rounding the top end of the track and turning into the long stretch towards them. At that distance, not a sound came to them, but quickly there was a soft drumming on the tan track that grew until, with a swift thunder of hooves, the horse rounded the bend in front of them, right up against the far rails, and hurtled on the last furlong towards the watching men.
A tingle of excitement ran down Bond’s spine as the chestnut flashed by, its teeth bared and its eyes wild with the effort, its gleaming quarters pounding and the breath snorting out of its wide nostrils, the boy on its back arched like a cat in the stirrups, his face low down and almost touching the horse’s neck. And then they had gone in a spray of sound and upflung earth and Bond’s eyes moved to the two watching men, now crouching, and he saw the two arms jerk downwards as they jammed down the stops on their watches.
Leiter touched him on the arm and they moved casually away and back under the trees towards the car.
“Moving dam’ well,” commented Leiter. “Better than the real Shy Smile ever did. No idea what the time was, but he was certainly burning up the track. If he can do that for a mi
le and a quarter he’ll get home. And he’ll have an allowance of six pounds seeing as how he hasn’t won a race this year. And that’ll give him an extra edge. Now let’s go and have the hell of a breakfast. It’s given me an appetite seeing these crooks so early in the morning.” And then he added softly, almost to himself, “And then I’m going to see how much Master Bell will take to ride foul and get himself disqualified.”
After breakfast, and after hearing some more of Leiter’s plans, Bond idled away the morning and then had lunch at the track and watched the indifferent racing that Leiter had warned him he would see on the first afternoon of the meeting.
But it was a beautiful day and Bond enjoyed absorbing the Saratoga idiom, the mixture of Brooklyn and Kentucky in the milling crowds, the elegance of the owners and their friends in the tree-shaded paddock, the efficient mechanics of the parimutuel and the big board with its flashing lights recording the odds and the money invested, the trouble-free starts through the tractor-drawn starting-gate, the toy lake with its six swans and the anchored canoe and, everywhere, that extra exotic touch of the Negroes who, except as jockeys, are so much a part of American racing.
The organization looked better than in England. There seemed less chance of crookedness where so much crookedness had been insured against, but, back of it all, Bond knew that the illegal wire services were relaying the results of each race throughout the States, cutting the tote odds to a maximum of 20-8-4, twentys for a win, eights for first or second, and fours for a place, and that millions of dollars every year were going straight into the pockets of gangsters to whom racing was just another source of revenue like prostitution or drugs.