Brisbane, late spring in early November, 1986
I HAD SCAMMED Bub Applebee’s school principal into stopping her being bullied by tricking him into believing I knew about the most embarrassing moment in his life. My most embarrassing moment was when I had to stare straight into the face of the chief steward of racing, with a bloody great copper standing off his right shoulder. The steward was asking the questions.
‘You wouldn’t know anything about this Brisbane Handicap fiasco, would you Hill?’
Would I ever? Kidnapping, deprivation of liberty, extortion, supplying illicit drugs . . . I was looking down the barrel of a minimum of fifteen large at the tender age of twenty-one. I would be lucky to be outside the nick for New Year’s Eve 1999.
‘No, Boss, I don’t know anything about it,’ I said meekly, staring into the face of the chief steward, Mr Joe Boss.
Mr Boss waved the copper out of the tiny office, saying he would call him when he was needed. As the copper shut the door, Boss stood up and leaned forward, spreading his fingers like two fans onto the table. He made a great effort to give me a look of utmost sincerity.
‘I’m sorry about what happened to your mate, Clarence. Is it true he rang up the Canterbury stewards and abused them for ten minutes for moving the barrier stalls five metres after a sudden downpour?’ Boss asked.
It didn’t seem important any more, but I wanted to give Mick Clarence due credit.
‘It’s true, Boss.
‘How old was Clarence when this happened?’ Boss asked.
‘I guess he was about seventeen at the time.’
‘What, was he crazy or something?
‘Mick wasn’t crazy,’ I said evenly. The chief steward let me go on. ‘Well, maybe he was just a bit crazy, but he was a mathematical genius. After he gave the stewards a prolonged blast, he redid his sums with the barrier moved five metres, and it came out that his horse would get done by a nose rather than winning by a head.’
Boss looked at me in disbelief across his desk. ‘You’re only a baby, Hill. What the fuck are you mixing with these lunatics for? What do you think’s going to happen to you?’
‘I haven’t done anything, Boss. Is this about that mad Russian?’
___o0o___
EVEN IF YOU have a history of punting, you won’t know the Russian I’m taking about, because this horse trainer changed his name to sound as Pommy as you could get. I’ll call him Bill Smith. Most of the racing crowd probably noticed that Smith talked funny, but your average gambler is neither an Einstein nor a Socrates, and the other trainers, owners and jockeys were never too curious about unusual speech patterns. Smith could not get rid of the last traces of his Russian accent, no matter how hard he practised in front of his children.
Bill Smith was a battling horse trainer, best known as the father-in-law of one of Brisbane’s top jockeys. I was on nodding terms with him at early-morning track work, and struck up a conversation when I saw him down at the wharfies’ club – properly known as the Waterside Workers’ Club, though only its management and a few cabbies would recognise it by that moniker.
It turned out that Smith had worked on the wharves in the early fifties, having jumped a Russian cargo ship and successfully applied for political asylum. A short thin fellow, he had great strength beyond his size, and he knew his way around loading and unloading cargo. His smattering of English, gained from travelling around the world, along with his winning smile, landed him the wharfie job.
One night, we were sharing a bottle of vodka in his two-bedroom weatherboard house in the Brisbane trackside suburb of Hendra. He raised his two children here, after his wife scarpered. Bill did not hold a grudge against her. She had wisely predicted that he would not be a great provider, after throwing in his wharfie job to follow his love of training horses.
‘Must be the Cossack in you,’ I joked. He had recently confided in me his background story. He kept his Russian heritage private from most people. As soon he had the hang of the new lingo, he had changed his name to a very English moniker, which I have changed again to Bill Smith.
‘I don’t want you thinking I am ashamed of being Russian, Steele. Anyone who says I ran away from communism is a liar.’
‘I’m not the KGB, Bill. I’m not judging you on why you chucked in the old country.’
‘I didn’t run from communism. I ran to communism. The Australian wharves where I worked were full of Bolsheviks. Most of them had turned that way after their experiences in the Australian or British defence forces during World War II.’
Bill told me he had jumped ship in Perth more on an impulse than anything else. He even had a notion that he might catch up with the ship in Melbourne. But he met the proverbial man in the proverbial pub, and this bloke was a public servant who said Bill might as well try his luck for asylum. I asked the Russian if he had had any State secrets to trade. He replied that he had devised a few before he applied, but the Foreign Affairs diplomats demanded nothing along those lines. ‘They almost wet themselves, Steele, having a real-life defector standing in their office. You got to remember, this is Cold War time and anti-communism is like the flu spreading through Australia.’
Bill was glad he didn’t have to divulge the secrets he had made up, written down and rehearsed. His false espionage concerned matters of which he knew little. He did know that the diplomats would catch him out with the simplest of questions. Instead, they just asked him about his childhood and where he grew up. They could not hear enough about post-war food shortages in Russia. Bill found that strange. ‘After the war, you must have had shortages here. Later, my wharfie mates told me about the rationing, and women being made to work on farms and in factories during the war to try to keep up production. Australia, Britain, Russia, I don’t know we were much different. But to the diplomats, Australia had to be better. That’s when I decided anyone who wanted it enough could be rich in this country.’
He glanced around his tiny kitchen, with its old stove and small fridge, and the wooden table covered with discoloured and peeling linoleum. Bill smirked and I involuntarily repeated the gesture, as if I was catching a yawn. Then a laugh swelled into a roar as it erupted from his throat. We were both exploding in laughter, with him hitting the table and me slapping a knee to calm ourselves down.
When we finally got ourselves under control, I said: ‘You’re not a bad bloke, Comrade Zhivago.’
He returned the compliment. ‘You are a top bloke, Magic Pudding.’
‘Hang on – “Magic Pudding”?’
‘Yes, Magic Pudding. What is wrong with that? It is an Aussie children’s book I used to read to Felicity and Robert when they were toddlers.’
‘Magic Pudding. Magic Pudding; I guess it’s awlright as a nickname, Bill. In fact, it’s growing on me all the time. Let’s just keep it between ourselves, but.’
We managed to do that, to my everlasting gratitude. I don’t think I could have handled that moniker from anyone else.
Bill’s daughter Felicity, or “Flick” as most knew her, who grew up on the Magic Pudding yarn, was a pretty blonde. She married one of Brisbane’s most successful hoops, a man who we will call Gregory Sailor. He was always near the top of the win tally for any given year, and won a couple of recent Brisbane jockeys’ premierships. You cop that trophy for winning the most races in a season, running for twelve months from August 1.
Sailor’s riding off the track was causing problems. There were rumours that he was making an impression on the hay with a teenage stable girl. The more outraged rumourmongers would tut-tut, ‘He’s supposed to be a Catholic.’
This surprised me. I always thought that Catholic men could do anything they felt the urge for, so long as they were riddled with guilt afterwards. The most outraged of all was a senior police officer who was on the take from SP bookies in a big way. This copper, one of the many Micks on the force, would shake his head in disgust: ‘Bloody Howdy Sailor, and he calls himself a Catholic.’
The nickname “Howdy” for Sailor was inevitable, I suppose.
Felicity “Flick” Smith was twenty-three years old, eleven years younger than her husband. The consensus of the racetrack moral compass was that Howdy should be happy with his young wife at home, and not go seeking pleasure with even younger stable girls. When Flick Sailor fell pregnant, the crooked copper grew more indignant. Ironically, the copper was the head of a racing syndicate and Sailor rode all three of their horses. Indignation never reached the point where the police officer asked his trainer to replace the jockey. An observer can make of that, as we used to say, what they will.
Bill Smith was distraught when he came up to me in the Feed Bin early one morning. ‘Is it true what they are saying about bloody Gregory and that young slut?’
I might have been sleep-deprived, but I was savvy enough not to buy into that one. ‘No one tells me anything, Bill, and that’s the way I like it.’
He had been around horses for too long, because he snorted in frustration.
‘You keep your ears open, Steele, and you tell me everything. You know the slut I am talking about, don’t you?’
I raised my out-turned palms in a gesture of complete ignorance.
Smith raged on. ‘Gregory has always had a big head. This is a problem that comes with success. I would not have let Felicity marry him, except that he has money to provide for her and I haven’t. If I could have trained ten more winners a season over the past few years, he would never have got past the front door.’
I hadn’t been keeping records, but I doubted if Bill was averaging ten winners a year, so training ten more would have been a Herculean feat. He was a good horseman, but he couldn’t muster the gift of the gab when talking to owners. They didn’t understand his corny jokes, and he refused to tell them they had another Phar Lap in their stable when he knew the pony was pretty ordinary. Both the trainer and owners knew any neddy that showed promise would be taken from Bill faster than you could say, ‘Sydney, here we come.’
I saw Bill a few times over the next two months, and I was unable to provide him with any more information on his son-in-law’s possible infidelity. He came up to me as I was leaving track work one Thursday morning, and seemed pretty hot under the collar.
‘You get around a lot, Steele,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You should be able to find an untraceable drug for me.’
I told him that doping a horse was not my style, and the risks of being caught made it an extremely dicey proposition. I added that Bill should disdain that kind of caper too. But he had an excuse.
‘I know you have only met Felicity a few times, but you are the only one who can help her, Steele. She has been kidnapped. I have to win the Brisbane Handicap with Who Loves Yer Baby for her to remain unharmed.’
This news, exciting as well as dangerous and sinister, had my full attention. I asked Bill if he knew who had kidnapped his daughter.
‘Yes, I do,’ he replied, looking earnestly at me. ‘I did.’
I gave a half-hearted laugh, and told the Russian that his warped sense of humour still held surprises.
‘I am not joking. I kidnapped Felicity, and I told Gregory if he wants to see her and his unborn child alive, he has to ride Who Loves Yer Baby in the Brisbane Handicap on Saturday week.’
I looked into Bill Smith’s eyes, and saw that he was actually telling the truth.
‘Buddha, mate, you love Flick. Sailor must know you wouldn’t harm her.’
Bill made no comment. He refused to expand on his tale, no matter how much I coaxed him. He looked tired and anxious, nervously rubbing the top of one hand with the bottom of the other. I wondered why he was telling me all this – surely, he didn’t really want me to get drugs for him. He spoke slowly and appeared calm enough, though every so often his nerves would show through.
‘There is nothing to worry about, Steele. Mecklam thinks that Gregory is going to ride his horse, All The Favours, in the Brisbane Handicap. I told Greg to let him go on thinking that, right up to the last moment when the jockeys have to be declared. A couple of weeks back, I heard Mecklam tell his trainer to set his horse for the race, and that’s when I got this great idea. I think Mecklam will have a big go at the bookies, and we will have top odds about Baby.’
I was wishing I could swap places with Smith, so he could hear all this drivel he was spruiking. Jim Mecklam was a high-flying corporate lawyer and racehorse owner, who could do serious financial damage to Smith just for stealing Sailor off his horse. Anyway, Mecklam could obtain a more than competent replacement for Gregory Sailor if he planned to win the Brisbane Handicap and pull off the plunge, which is what we call an extravagant punting adventure.
Word around the traps was that the lawyer was spending a bundle on the dozen or so racehorses he had in work at any one time, with trainers in Brisbane, Toowoomba and the Gold Coast. Sure, Mecklam made a bundle from the legal game, but it was said, with enough authority to convince most, that he had fallen way behind in his weekly training bills. He obviously planned to give his debts a decent haircut by winning the Brisbane Handicap.
Bill Smith should have been asking me how we could obtain a packet of dough to put on Mecklam’s All The Favours. That would piss the lawyer right off – snapping up the best odds before he hopped in with his cash. Instead, we were supposed to wreck Mecklam’s party by doping another horse, without the stewards finding out, at the same time compounding Smith’s crime of kidnapping Felicity with the continued deprivation of her liberty, and adding fraud, and extortion of jockey Gregory Sailor to the mix. This was the great idea that tin-pot trainer Bill Smith had considered so carefully. There was clearly nothing to worry about.
A racehorse with the stable name Baby was to set us on the path to riches. When Mecklam, Sailor and the stewards found out how they had all been duped, they would have a good laugh about it and wish Bill and me all the best for the future. Some people say I am easily led, but there was no way I was throwing my life away on this ridiculous scheme.
___o0o___
‘I’M EASILY LED,’ I told Mick Clarence, when he wanted to know why I was after undetectable drugs to dope a racehorse.
Mick didn’t much fancy the idea. ‘If you’re that hard up, I can probably spot you five hundred, maybe more.’
You could spot me a lot more, I thought. Mick Clarence was only eighteen, but the mathematical genius was winning thousands every month on the horses. Trust me, most punters who think they can win big on the horses soon come down to earth, if they don’t hit the water by taking a last dive from a tall bridge. But Clarence was different.
Mick was studying pure maths at university. His high school senior results had been good enough for him to do medicine or law, to perform operations on bodies and/or wallets. He had no interest in those lucrative professions as he already had a prosperous business, crunching racing statistics and coming up with long-priced winners. I found Clarence’s short life story inspiring. What really made me warm to it was the fact that, as far as anyone knew, Mick had never been to a racetrack in his life. He did all of his analysis and punting from his one-bedroom Spring Hill unit which he had bought for cash after three months of success on the punt.
A friend of a friend of Mick’s had taken me to see the maths genius, one Saturday morning on our way to the races. Mick and I hit it off straight away, as we shared similar sophisticated leisure activities. I would visit him to discuss gambling and rock music. Mick’s place was like a clearing house for gossip, borne and refined by many visitors. You could meet some colourful characters in his little unit, always kept obsessively tidy, apart from bulging ashtrays. Two computers constantly hummed away.
When he had known me for a while, Mick told me that he had one of those tragic phobias that can nearly destroy people’s lives. I forget the technical term, but his was the one where public places and crowds terrified you.
If Mick had to choose a phobia that would make life the most difficult for a punter and a student, he would have picked that one. But he was so brainy that he could get away with going to only a handful of maths lectures. At those, he would sit way up at the back, away from most of the other students. He had a medical certificate, signed by the eminent Doctor Hill, exempting him from the bulk of his classes. Yes, it was I who signed the certificates. I couldn’t recommend Mick another reliable doctor, and a crowded medical waiting room was no place for someone with my patient’s condition.
Stories of Mick Clarence’s punting prowess were gold for impressing peers in my circle of young gamblers. I decided that if anyone could steer me towards some good dope, it was Mick.
He had other ideas though. ‘Go-fast drugs are notoriously unreliable, Steele. They might not work. They might be detected in tests. Punters and stewards might notice the obvious effects on the horse. Why not arrange for a go-slow on Mecklam’s horse? So much simpler and more elegant.’
Mick quickly warmed to the notion of using the antithesis of a go-fast: ‘You don’t need to take a test on Einstein to train greyhounds, but those trainers have delicious ways to get a dog beaten. Don’t feed the greyhound for a couple of days, then fill it up with water before a race to keep its weight within the permitted range. That can’t fail. Or put a rubber band around the testicles of a male dog, and swiftly remove it at the catching pens after the race. Now, that’s gambling poetry-in-action to achieve a defeat. Let’s not be obsessed with winning all the time, Steele. Losers can be winners.’
I saw his point, though I wasn’t really interested in a career in go-fasts or go-slows. It would take the fun out of winning, when you could skite about how clever you were in predicting the future. Yet, for reasons still unclear to me, I was committed to helping Bill Smith. And Mick Clarence was the only person I could think of who might be able to help me do it. I told him the whole story, and he summed it up before he would give an opinion.
‘So, Bill Smith thinks his son-in-law Gregory Sailor did the dirty on his pregnant wife. To have revenge against the jockey for commonplace adultery, Smith kidnaps his daughter and is now threatening her life, as well as his unborn grandchild’s. Added to this bizarre act, the trainer also seems to want to stuff the plans of hotshot lawyer Jim Mecklam, by having a doped-up nag ridden by Mecklam’s regular hoop Sailor win the Brisbane Handicap.’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ I agreed.
Mick Clarence declared correct weight: ‘Bill Smith is as mad as a cut snake. It is our duty to help him with his demented plan, rescue the fair damsel, become moderately rich and take a holiday on Mexican beaches with the proceeds. I take that back – you have the Mexican holiday, Steele, and send me a postcard. The rest of it, we do together.’
This was quite a change from the Mick of ten minutes earlier, who hadn’t wanted a bar of doping a horse. His enthusiasm made me slightly less uneasy, but I reckoned Mick just wanted to see if he could come out a winner backing the biggest roughie of his career.
Mick asked me what I planned to do if he couldn’t help me.
‘Not much idea at all, really,’ I admitted. ‘I have about a week until the race. I guess I would do what I intend doing anyway: find where Bill has hidden Flick, and release her. Smith’s really flipping out at the moment. While you’d think he’d be the last person to hurt his own family, you’d just never know.’
If I did find and free Flick Smith, Mick asked, would that be the end to our doping scam?
‘I doubt it, Mick. Bill would go totally apeshit if freeing Flick brought down the whole house of cards. I reckon there’s more to this than Sailor spreading the loving around like stable manure. It’s the final insult to Smith’s whole life. He gives up a secure job on the wharves for the risky business of training. His missus leaves him with two kids to bring up on his own. He thinks he did right by marrying Flick off to a top jockey, and then the jock turns out to be full of himself, with no room for anyone else. To cap it off, Bill finds out about a wealthy lawyer scheming some dodgy deal to win the Brisbane Handicap because he can’t live within his income of thousands of dollars a week.’
Mick shrugged his left shoulder and made a weird face. ‘What can I say? Adults are fucked, eh?’
This pronouncement made me pause and look more closely at Clarence. People tended to forget that Mick was a teenager; this kid who made so much money, and was so self-controlled, you treated him as a sage. He didn’t speak like a teenager. Rather, he spoke in racecourse slang, picked up from numerous visitors chasing race tips. Such visitors were only allowed to enter Mick’s Spring Hill cave one at a time or in pairs.
Mick was skinny, of average height, and, despite his introverted medical condition, dressed in a colourful nouveau-hippie kind of way. A huge, framed poster of Jimi Hendrix covered a third of one wall of his small lounge room. Across two other walls were vertical shelves with hundreds of record albums standing on them. A round glass-topped table in the middle of the room held up stacks of racing and music magazines. It was semi-circled by electronic equipment: two telephones on a round table, a television and a hi-fi set, which included a turntable, radio and cassette recorder. On a rectangular table beside the hi-fi were what looked like two portable televisions sitting on oversized videocassette recorders.
These were Mick’s personal computers, which he used to analyse the form of racehorses. I had always pictured computers as great big metal cabinets, housed in government departments, corporations and universities. I had never understood how they worked, or what you did with them. What made the computers in front of us ‘personal’ I had no idea, and I didn’t ask, for fear Mick might try to show me what he did with them. They looked slightly menacing to me, the sort of complicated machine a stiff might spend his days labouring at.
The only other objects in the room were two ashtrays, brimming with cigarette butts, sitting on a round cane table beside Mick’s armchair.
I was almost four years older than Mick, a lifetime at that age. Yet, his one-in-a-million ability to comprehend statistics gave him authority way beyond what I could ever muster. I sometimes wondered if his gift hid a curse. For all his nous, Mick could still state the bleeding obvious.
‘Of course, our biggest problem is if we get caught.’
But he was just warming up for some more optimistic contemplation. ‘You know, that might be our one and only problem. Our lawyer friend Mecklam doesn’t need to know our part in the rort. When Flick Sailor is up and well, she and hubby Gregory will be keeping quiet about the sordid family secret of kidnapping and blackmail. That leaves the racing stewards. Unless they can trace the go-fast we administer, they’ll be pissed off at us, but won’t be able to prove a thing. Racing stewards are always pissed off at someone.
‘You should have heard what they called me after I rang them to complain about moving the barrier stalls at Canterbury. Kept asking how I had their unlisted phone number, known to only a handful of people. I pointed out to them I was obviously in that handful, and that it could turn into a streetful if they kept playing around with the barrier stalls. I don’t know if they spent any time or money trying to track me down. I do know from the sounds coming down the phone line, for ten minutes or more, I was their most hated man.
‘The point is, Steele, the stewards will soon find another evildoer to take the pressure off us.’
So what magic drug did Mick have in store?
‘I’ll need a few days to think it through. I hate to admit it, but I don’t have a contact to provide a list of drugs they test for. I’ll see if I can find one, or else we’ll need to think laterally on this one. If you can locate Felicity Smith over the weekend, well and good. Even so, I’ll see you back here on Monday at 1.30. We’ll have a late lunch of Chinese, followed by cogitation in prime thinking time.’