by Jane Smiley
And then, about two weeks before the Barretts’ two-year-olds-in-training sale, Buddy got a call from an old acquaintance of his, Sir Michael Ordway. Sir Michael’s plummy accent always used to get Buddy’s goat, but now he was in such a state of confusion that its very familiarity was reassuring, and he couldn’t quite believe how pleased he was to hear from the horse agent. Sir Michael was most pleased to be speaking to Buddy, too, and this gave Buddy the sense that perhaps you could even say that they were friends. Maybe they’d always been friends, and Buddy simply hadn’t noticed? Anyway, Sir Michael got right down to business. “Buddy, lad,” he said. “Remember that mare Pure Money? She produced Pure Profit and that filly that went to Argentina, Pacifier?”
Buddy remembered all three of them quite well, as who did not? But Sir Michael was fussy in his way of talking, like all Brits.
“You know she’s got a two-year-old by Land of Magic. You remember him?”
Land of Magic had beaten Buddy’s big horse, Magnesium, three times that year. It had been a mini-version of one of those famous rivalries. It had burned Buddy up, to be frank.
“He’s hip number ten at the Barretts’ sale.”
“What did they pay for him as a yearling?”
“Four hundred twenty-five thousand.”
“How’s he training?”
“Superbly.”
“Who’s training him?”
“Dagoberto Gomez.”
“I bet I saw that colt at Keeneland. Nice colt.”
“He’s a speed horse. A California sort of horse.”
“You think?”
“He belongs to me now, and I have a potential owner in mind.”
Buddy’s interest perked up. Sir Michael hadn’t included him in one of his scams for a couple of years. “Does he own any horses at the moment?”
“A computer-software company, a cellular-phone company, several hotels in Canada, a minor-league baseball team, and the wife has several clothing companies with factories in China, but horses, no.”
“Age?” said Buddy.
“Forty-eight.”
“You the seller’s agent?”
“Indeed.”
“Who’s the buyer’s agent?”
“Dermot Callaghan.” One of Sir Michael’s very oldest cronies.
“Where does the guy live?”
“La Jolla. San Jose. Lake Tahoe. I believe he has a house on Kauai. You understand.” Yes, Buddy understood. The golden apples were waiting. The golden-apple tree only needed a good shaking.
“Wife?”
“Hates all animals until they’ve been skinned, tanned, and made into garments, furniture, and bed coverlets. Third wife. A bit of a young thing, don’t you know. But they’re thinking of going into horse racing in a big way. My wife met them at a party. They allowed as how they do everything in a big way. A point of pride for them. She told them I knew several reliable West Coast trainers.” Sir Michael’s wife, Lady Ordway, went to a lot of parties. Although she was a lady, she never minded talking to anyone with scads and scads of discretionary income.
“Well, I’m here,” said Buddy.
“Very good,” said Sir Michael.
Buddy set down the phone and looked straight ahead, at the wall, remembering his conscience for the first time since hearing Sir Michael’s voice. No writing appeared there, though, nor did any qualms appear in his conscience. Jesus was keeping his mouth shut on this one.
Sure enough, the next morning, while Buddy was reading the faxes from Golden Gate about how his horses worked that morning, the phone rang, and a loud voice introduced itself as Jason Clark Kingston. You couldn’t pick up a paper in California without seeing the name of Jason Clark Kingston, and the picture, too. He was a heavy, dough-faced sort of fellow. Whining about regulatory agencies was his stock-in-trade, publicity-wise. “Mr. Kingston!” said Buddy. “It’s an honor to be speaking with you.”
“I hear you’re a good horse-trainer.”
“I do have a lot of horses in training and a lot of experience.”
“Are you any good?”
“My win per—”
“Are you any good?”
Once again, Buddy consulted the wall in front of him and his heart within. Quiet as a summer day.
“I like to win, Mr. Kingston, and I don’t do anything I don’t like.”
“You ever won the Kentucky Derby?”
“No, but I’ve won the Preakness and I’ve won two Breeders’ Cup races—a sprint and a mile. You know, Breeders’ Cup day is the pre-eminent horse-racing day. Not so specialized as, say, the Triple Crown. And the Classic is worth at least four million dollars this year. And I’ve won every major race in California, some of them more than once.”
“All these guys say you’re great.”
“Which guys are those, sir?”
“Let’s see. I wrote it down. Sir Michael. Callaghan, the Irishman. This guy in Kentucky, Beaufort Hall. Barry Kennedy. Guy in New York, Moishe Kellerman. And this other guy, Martin Norman.”
“That’s a strong list, sir.” A strong list of Sir Michael’s dearest pals. With himself, that would be seven, but for a phone reference most of them would be getting 1 percent at the most. That was how it had worked in the past. “Are you a horse-lover, sir?”
“I could be.”
“You have some experience with horses, I trust?”
“No, I don’t. That’s why I need reliable advice. You know, I’ll tell you something right up front. I don’t know shit about horses, but I want to go into racing in a big way.”
“Why is that, sir? Racing is dying, you know. You might be better off investing in some other sport.” Buddy knew that Jesus knew he was being very truthful.
“Thank you for your candor, Crawford. I’ll respond in kind. I had a dream, a recurrent dream. I had it three times. A horse galloped onto my front lawn here and whinnied up at me, and I went down and it came to me and put its head next to mine. I woke up happy as I’ve ever been. You know what?”
“What, sir?”
“Well, I made my money in software design for cellular-phone systems, and my first idea about that came to me in just the same way. The same dream, three times. I was born in Skokie, Illinois, and now I am worth seven hundred million dollars, so I pay attention to dreams.”
“Thank you for telling me that story, sir. Did you mention that to Sir Michael?”
“He was quite interested in that story, and told me he’d had a similar experience.”
“No doubt,” said Buddy, no doubt that Sir Michael’s desire for a growing intimacy with seven hundred million dollars was a profound one. “Why don’t you come out to the track and I’ll show you around. We’ll look at a few horses and have lunch.” Jesus surely had no problem with a man being friendly and helpful.
In fact, Jason Clark Kingston and his wife, Andrea Melanie Kingston, came out to the track four days in a row. Kingston himself was a big, awkward guy with enormous feet, maybe size fifteen or sixteen, even though he himself couldn’t have been more than six two. The wife was indeed young. Buddy felt a little sorry for them until they opened their mouths. They had been married for three years. The first year they had bought several houses and had them done up. One was a tear-down of some five thousand square feet that was now a Spanish Colonial of some twenty-three thousand square feet. The second year of their marriage, they had collected enough art to fill all the houses. Europeans were in one house, American primitives were in another house, Oriental things were in a third house, and the fourth house was twentieth-century eclectic. “It looks like junk to me,” said Andrea Melanie, “lots of spiky things all over most of it, but we don’t go to that house much anyway. It’s for when people ask us to host fund-raisers and so we let these organizations use it, and give cocktail parties and dinner parties there, and get a lot of donations.”
Buddy said—delicately, he thought—“There must be a tax deduction in there.”
“Oh, sure,” said Jason. “And whenever ther
e’s some sort of Republican shindig in our neck of the woods, they do, you know, five-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners there. It’s a good deal all around.”
“I’m sure it is,” said Buddy.
“Last year, we got into a bunch of things. Jason bought some antique cars, and I bought some Italian furniture. Museum-quality, it was. We bought an island in the Caribbean. Jason tried to buy the Cleveland Indians? You know them?”
“Yes,” said Buddy.
“He was going to move them to La Jolla. Everyone thought it was a joke. I’ll tell you something, and I tell you this just because you’re so nice. When you get to a certain level, you can’t get rid of it fast enough, and it’s hard to get rid of. I never thought I would say that, but it’s true. I wake up nights about it.”
“In what sense?” said Buddy.
“You can disperse it,” said Jason irritably, “in the way you want, or you can let the government disperse it for you. If you don’t do the one, you will be forced to do the other. Gets my goat, I’ll tell you.”
“I’m a Republican myself.”
After four days with the Kingstons, Buddy got a day off. He called Sir Michael. Sir Michael said, “You met them, then?”
“Yup.”
“You listened to their hopes and dreams?”
“I did.”
“You think their needs can be satisfied?”
“Absolutely.”
“The horse is getting to the sale three days before. Your interest in the horse will run you $125,000.”
“Fine.”
“You can pay me after the sale.” The trick was simple. The four coconspirators would reimburse Sir Michael the half-million he had perhaps paid for the horse, then split the difference between the half-million and whatever Kingston ended up paying. If that were two million, say, Buddy would make $375,000 on his $125,000 “fee.”
“Sounds good.”
“There will be two underbidders. One of them is Farouk.”
“Got ya. Say,” said Buddy, confidingly, “do you get the sense with some people that they are really and truly asking for it?”
Sir Michael cleared his throat. “You know, laddie,” he said, “here’s something I’ve often thought about my compatriots as opposed to yours. Perhaps it’s because we all went to school together and have known one another since God was young, but there’s one thing an Englishman never forgets.”
“What’s that, Sir Michael?”
“That everyone he is acquainted with is asking for it in one way or another.”
That was the last he heard from Sir Michael. He would not, of course, appear at the sale. Now that the little scheme was in place and his part in it was set in stone, Buddy expected to hear from his conscience, or from Jesus. A sign would have been a good thing—a flaming bush, waters parting, a horse speaking in tongues. Even just a sense of guilt, since Buddy knew the technical word for their little plan was “fraud.” But there was silence. Here his conscience had been goading and nagging and prodding him for weeks, had been raucous around all sorts of things since Jesus grabbed him by the scruff of the neck—how long ago was it, six weeks, six lifetimes? nothing like personal transformation to slow down the passage of time—and yet all was clear and smooth now. Perhaps Jesus didn’t care about money? Perhaps Jesus didn’t care about Jason and Andrea Melanie? Perhaps Jesus was like the SEC, which, Buddy knew, had declined to regulate the Thoroughbred industry on the grounds that those investing at the high end had more money than the government with which to buy legal counsel? At any rate, Jesus was deep undercover, and so, when the horse arrived, Buddy went out to Pomona to see it in a state of pure disinterest.
The sales agency in which Sir Michael had yet another crony was one of the flashiest, and so they had a big setup in a good spot, near the front, with a thirty-two-inch TV/VCR right there for watching the tapes of the two-year-olds’ works. Each horse had a sign, painted with green-and-gold lettering, giving the animal’s date of birth and breeding. Buddy peeped in at a few. Two-year-olds in training were always beautifully prepped, and looked as though they were ready to run this very afternoon if only they could bum a ride to the track. The works, of a furlong, took place in the morning, and the numbers were posted. The horse, Epic Steam his name was, had already done his, a lightning 10.3 seconds. People would be talking about that. He went up to Marv, the manager of the agency, and said, “Hey. What’s news?”
“Hey, Buddy.”
“Got anything nice?”
“Got everything nice, Buddy, you know that. Hell, last year we had Darling Corey. You saw what she did.”
“We all saw what she did.”
“Nice filly. I thought so at the time. So—how they hanging?”
“Better than ever,” said Buddy. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the girls open the stall door for hip number ten. It took the colt a moment to come out, a long moment, but then, when he came out, he just kept on coming. It wasn’t only Buddy who was staring. Everyone around turned to look. He was big and shining and all but black and, well, mysterious. He looked like a Cadillac with a Mafia don inside. They brought him out into the courtyard and stood him up. Every single person standing around stepped back, whether they were in the way or not.
“You ever see Land of Magic?” said Marv.
“Saw a hell of a lot too much of him, if you’ll remember.”
“You remember the way he looked, out over your head, as if you weren’t even there? Like he was catching the eye of the person in the last row of seats in the stands? Look at this colt. He’s got the same look.”
“Land of Magic was a son of a bitch and still is, I hear.”
“Ah, this colt’s not bad to work with. You just keep your eyes open like with any two-year-old. He’s a mite touchy about that left ear, but that’s all.”
The colt whinnied all of a sudden and arched his neck. Buddy saw that another horse had been taken out of its stall down the shedrow. Marv said, “A tad studdish.”
Buddy could easily interpret all of these remarks. The horse was an ornery son of a crazy sire and the only sensible way to handle him was to geld him.
Best not to show too much of an interest. “What else have you got?”
“Nice Deputy Minister. Dam’s out of Mount Livermore. Nice Twining out of a Nureyev mare. First crop. Looks good, you ask me. Couple of Salt Lakes. They’re hot this year.”
And so on and so forth. Buddy spent the afternoon looking at tapes, looking at two-year-olds. Buying half a dozen for his various owners would be no trouble at all.
Hip number ten would come up the first night, so Buddy made sure that the Kingstons’ chauffeur-driven Lexus 470 picked him up in plenty of time. When they stopped at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena to pick up the Kingstons, Andrea Melanie was quite bubbly about the car. She said, “Don’t you like it? We just got it today. We didn’t have any sport-utility vehicles, can you believe it? Sometimes you just overlook some things, and then you are so surprised when you realize it. I thought maybe there was a Suburban or something like that at one of the houses, but I called around, and no! I just laughed. Anyway, we saw that there were a lot of sport-utility vehicles at the racetrack, and I said to Jason, Well, if we’re going to do it, we have to look like we’re going to do it, so we bought this right off the floor. We hardly ever buy any car right off the floor, but this one happened to be fully loaded, so why not? You can always take it back later and have stuff added if you want.”
Buddy looked around the interior of the Lexus. “Fully loaded” was a nice phrase, and Buddy himself had always been ineluctably drawn to any upscale vehicle that was fully loaded, but now he suspected that Jesus would soon require him to drive something like a Dodge Caravan. He said, “What would you add?,” just to hear them say it, whatever it was.
Jason said, heavily, “Every car in our fleet has a cellular computer-modem link and a laptop computer available to the passenger seat and both rear seats.”
“A minibar,” said Andrea Melanie,
“with a refrigerator.”
“Ceiling-mounted mini-TV,” said Jason.
“Jason has his shows,” said Andrea Melanie fondly.
“A burl-and-brass box—”
Andrea Melanie leaned over and whispered in Buddy’s ear, “For sexual equipment, you know. Isn’t that silly?” She laughed and cast Jason a coquettish glance. Then she whispered to Buddy, “We like a lot of spontaneity.”
“You know,” he said, “I came out to look at this horse yesterday, and I think you’ll like the spontaneous quality that he has. Everyone notices it about him.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Andrea Melanie. “I hope we get him. I love him already!”
Buddy always thought it was interesting that when you took a new owner to an auction they seemed to think that dropping a vast sum of money on a horse was a privilege. He said, “Well, Mrs. Kingston, this is a good way to get into the game. The horse is trained and ready to run. You don’t have to wait the way you do with a yearling, and you don’t run the risks that you do with breeding.” This was entirely true, thank you, Jesus.
“You make up your mind and there you are,” said Jason. “I like that. You know what I say? I say, always act on impulse, because your impulse is always right. My business is full of guys who used to act on impulse and now they don’t. They used to be interesting and fun and now they aren’t. They used to run their own companies, and now some guy from Coca-Cola does it for them. That’s death, if you ask me.” He sighed. His wife looked at him sympathetically.
The auction went like clockwork in one sense. Buddy came in and showed the Kingstons his reserved seats. He introduced them to a few benign and trustworthy souls—no other trainers, for sure, but a vet he knew, a couple of breeders, a couple of consignors, a guy who wrote for The Blood-Horse. Then they went out to the paddock area and stood among the other patrons looking at the horses waiting to come in. The buyers and their agents stood about in their usual groups. The Brits and the Irish had on their Barbour jackets and their wool caps. The few Aussies had on their big hats. Cowboy hats and boots abounded—this was southern California, after all, and anyway, on the first night of the sale, all the top trainers who’d started out in quarterhorses were much in evidence. Buddy had on a suit. According to Jesus, a nice charcoal-gray suit was the most appropriate attire in any circumstances, and one of the side benefits of finding Jesus had been the resolution of a lifetime of sartorial indecision. While they were standing there, Callaghan came up to them, and Andrea Melanie said, “Oh! Dermot! there you are! This is Buddy.”