All I received was a few nods.
‘I’ve come from working the barns at Santa Anita,’ I went on, ‘in California.’
I received a couple more nods.
‘How about you?’ I asked, turning to the boy sitting right next to me. ‘Been here long?’
‘A while,’ he said nervously, glancing across at an older man.
‘Where do you come from?’ I asked him.
‘Why do you want to know?’ the older man said sharply. He was probably in his early forties, with slicked-back black hair and a matching goatee, and was clearly the group’s leader.
‘I’m only being conversational,’ I said.
‘Well, don’t be,’ the man said abruptly. ‘We don’t like people asking questions. Especially about who we are and where we come from. Too many of us are trying to forget.’
I could see that finding any of Adam Mitchell’s previous grooms was going to be difficult, if not impossible.
This was not the first time I’d come across those with such a sentiment.
I thought of them as victims of a ‘here-and-now’ syndrome – people that exist only for the here and now, without any consideration of their future, and without learning any lessons from their past.
Many habitual criminals have it. It is not that they enjoy going to jail, they just persistently ignore previous experience and mistakenly believe that it will not happen to them again this time. The notion that long prison sentences act as a deterrent against criminal behaviour simply does not apply to such people.
In many respects, steeplechase jockeys have exactly the same here-and-now mentality. History should have taught them that future mounts will fall and they will be seriously injured, but they live only for the here and now, for the thrill of the race, not contemplating for one second the inevitable agony of broken bones or dislocated shoulders. Once they do, it is time to retire.
I stood up and went outside to find a quiet corner to call Tony Andretti.
16
‘Equine viral arteritis,’ Tony said. ‘EVA.’
‘What is that?’
‘It’s a disease caused by a virus. The three horses at Churchill have tested positive for antibodies in their blood. There’s no doubt. It seems it is quite common in some breeds but less so in Thoroughbreds.’
I’d never heard of it
‘How did they get it?’ I asked.
‘Strictly speaking, according to one of the veterinarians I spoke to, EVA is contagious rather than infectious,’ Tony said. ‘It is a respiratory disease but horses have to have their noses in contact to pass it on, as the virus exists in their nasal discharges – snot to you and me – rather than in the air. But it can also be transmitted via any nasal droplets left on shared tack or feed bowls, anything that is moved from one animal to another, as long as it is done immediately.’
‘How long is the incubation period?’
‘Anywhere from three to fourteen days depending on the strain of the virus and the amount transmitted.’
‘That means that one of them couldn’t have given it to the other two because all three went down with it on the same day. So where did it come from initially?’
‘Maybe there was another horse with a mild case of the disease,’ Tony said. ‘It seems that some horses don’t show any clinical symptoms when infected but they still shed the virus and so can infect others.’
‘Can you find out when those three horses arrived at Churchill Downs and where they stayed when they were there? If you can, find it out for all the Derby runners. See if any were together in a Stakes Barn.’
‘I’ll contact the Churchill backside manager,’ Tony said. ‘He must have had a list of where each horse was housed to know where to detail the sheriff’s deputies.’
‘Also try to discover if there’s anything else that might be a common denominator for those three. Perhaps they flew to Louisville on the same flight or something.’
‘OK,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll get on to it. Oh yes, there’s one more thing. We’ve had the results back from the samples taken from Hayden Ryder’s horses after he was killed in the raid at Churchill. At least half of them were dosed to the eyeballs with the steroid stanozolol and had obviously been running with it in their system.’
‘That’ll be why he was trying to ship them out to Chattanooga.’
‘Stupid man,’ Tony said. ‘Hardly worth dying for.’
I agreed.
‘Anything else?’
‘Not that I can think of at the moment,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you again tomorrow, same time.’
‘I’ll be here.’
I went back into the recreation hall. Maria was now sitting on one of the young men’s laps holding court, and cousin Diego was almost beside himself with rage. Meanwhile, the baseball was in the bottom of the fifth inning, not that anyone was taking much notice any longer.
There was now a far more interesting game to watch – sexual electricity.
I left them to it.
One of my greatest frustrations at working undercover was that I’d had to leave my laptop and iPhone at Tony’s house – a groom working on minimum wage would never have such things – and I desperately wanted to do some Internet research on EVA.
I left Maria to her admirers and sat myself at one of the recreation-hall computer workstations, the one at the far end closest to the wall. I angled the screen such that prying eyes could not see what I was reading.
According to a veterinary website, equine viral arteritis had been first isolated as a separate disease in horses in Ohio in the 1950s, although it had been blighting horses around the world for centuries. It was easily confused with other equine respiratory diseases such as influenza or herpes, and could be confirmed only by the detection of EVA antibodies in blood.
Most infected horses, even those badly affected with the associated hives, conjunctivitis and swelling of the legs, made complete clinical recoveries in three to four weeks without any specific treatment other than rest.
I learned that, apart from the snotty discharge route, it could also be sexually transmitted from stallion to mare.
What’s more, the virus was able to remain permanently active in equine sperm, totally unaffected by the animal’s natural immune system. It seemed that this was because testicles, both equine and human, are strange organs in immunological terms insofar that they generate proteins that are not present at birth. Nature has had to develop a mechanism to prevent the body’s own immune system from reacting against these alien substances when puberty comes around.
And the same process that prevents the immune system from attacking sperm tissue also means that it can’t kill off any virus that settles in the testicles. Consequently, stallions that become infected continue to shed EVA virus in their ejaculate for the rest of their lives, whilst otherwise being entirely healthy.
The owner I had seen weeping behind the media tent at Churchill Downs was about to have a fresh reason to cry. His hoped-for future stud-fee gold mine had struck iron pyrite – fool’s gold.
Even if the three infected colts recovered sufficiently quickly from the disease itself to become champion racehorses, they would never be permitted to stand at stud for fear of infecting the mares they covered, often resulting in barren seasons or miscarriages.
I also discovered that a vaccine existed against EVA but it was not widely used in the United States or Europe unless there had been a specific outbreak.
The vaccine worked, as did most vaccines, by introducing a quantity of dead virus, which couldn’t infect the horse but nevertheless stimulated the production of antibodies in the blood. These antibodies would remain in the system and immediately kill off any live virus that might subsequently appear, so preventing infection.
Because the illness was relatively rare in Thoroughbreds and generally short-lived without any lasting complications, the racehorse population was not routinely vaccinated.
The only animals for which infection was a serious matter were
stallions or sexually mature colts destined to be such. But there was an added problem. If vaccinated, a routine blood test of a colt would confirm EVA antibodies and it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove that those antibodies were as a result of the vaccine rather than due to the live virus.
Would you then take the chance of breeding the stallion with your best mare?
Hence colts were also not normally vaccinated as a matter of course. It was only given to valuable stallions, when it could be categorically proven by every single test available that they were free of the virus prior to vaccination.
So where did that leave the seventeen other colts that had made it to the starting gate in Louisville the previous Saturday and, in particular, the winner? Any colt that won the Kentucky Derby would be expected to retire to a lucrative career at stud after his racing days were over.
It was now almost five days since the three horses had become ill. With an incubation period of up to two weeks, there were still another nervous nine illness-free days to go before it could be safe to assume that Fire Point and the others had not also contracted the disease.
I clicked off the website and erased the web history. I am sure that some computer whiz kid would have been able to find out precisely what I’d been browsing, and there would definitely be a record on the server, but no one here would casually be able to look.
Next I checked my emails.
Among the usual junk were several messages from work colleagues in London, most of which I was able to ignore.
But there was one from Nigel Green that caught my eye.
He reported that Jimmy Robinson, the jockey nicked for buying banned diuretics in the A34 lay-by, had since been sacked as stable jockey for a top Newmarket establishment. He may not have done anything against the law of the land but British racing valued its integrity.
‘Be warned though,’ Nigel wrote, ‘there’s a strong rumour he’s off to ride for a trainer called Sidney Austin in New York.’
Nigel was one of the very few people at the horseracing authority who knew where I was, and why. Most of the others believed I was on extended unpaid leave, visiting friends in the Far East and Australia.
I scanned again through the list of emails.
There was nothing from Henrietta.
I hadn’t really expected there to be and, strangely, I wasn’t sure if I was happy or sad by the omission.
However, there was one from Faye.
She said that her new course of chemotherapy had started and it was making her tired but, as always, she was positive about the outcome and didn’t complain – although, God knows, she had enough to complain about.
As usual, she was more concerned with me than herself, asking how I was doing and reminding me that I was to (a) get enough sleep, (b) eat healthily and (c) launder my clothes regularly.
I smiled. She couldn’t help herself. Faye had taken over the maternal role when I was eight and she’d been twenty, when our dear mother had died from cancer.
Here we were, twenty-five years later, and nothing had changed.
I wrote back sending her all my love and wishing her success with the treatment. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be too emotional about it, so I wasn’t. I knew she could just about hold everything together provided everyone else was not wailing and whining on her behalf. We all had to be strong individually and collectively.
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 M
exican, 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.
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