Citizen
The next month of Tipper’s life was shrouded in a dark cloud of misery. He couldn’t get his mother out of his mind. Why had he been denied the chance to say good-bye to her? Maybe if he had it wouldn’t have felt so bad. He surprised himself by wanting to talk to Sam incessantly about her. Sam was brilliant. He wasn’t embarrassed like Tipper thought he’d be. He asked Tipper all about her and Tipper told him. He loved telling him and he was so grateful to Sam for listening. His uncle and aunt just clammed up and carried on as if nothing had happened. But when Tipper was on his own a black cloud descended on him.
Tipper threw himself into the work on the stud. He had nothing else. He listened to Uncle Pat who taught him that the thoroughbred horse is a manmade creature, the result of three centuries of carefully selected breeding. With a set of rules worked out in the eighteenth century and never varied since. The racecourse rule demanded that all horses are proven racers, or at least the offspring of proven racers. The intercourse rule ensures that every mating is a true one, witnessed, recorded and verifiable. Artificial insemination is abominated in this world, unlike in cattle breeding. The thoroughbred stud is an establishment dedicated to natural procreation as nature intended.
Tipper loved working with the foals, which at this time of year meant getting them to walk properly on a leading rein. He chatted away to them about his Ma as he walked them up and down the sandy lanes and somehow felt his soul was restored in the process.
‘Just watch their front legs, son,’ Uncle Pat told him. ‘A foal’s not like a grown horse, who kicks behind. It’s the front legs that are most dangerous in a foal.’
Tipper looked at the youngster he was leading, as if to say, you wouldn’t want to hurt me, now would you? And it seemed he didn’t. Tipper was confident, comfortable in his handling of the foals, and they responded. Uncle Pat was impressed by his nephew’s natural instinct.
‘He’s got a gift with these foals,’ he informed Mr Power. ‘But he just doesn’t know it yet. He’ll be grand.’
Tipper’s favourite foal was a high-strung little filly with an unusual dark reddish, almost mahogany coloured coat. When he had time on his hands and no-one was about Tipper would take her into one of the barns, sliding shut the big door before turning her loose. Usually a foal at this stage of its development is nervous of anyone that doesn’t smell of its mother, and flighty to catch. Red had always been especially neurotic and Tipper set himself the task of making her biddable. He got down on his hands and knees, reckoning that foals were no different from children—intimidated by anyone that loomed over them. Little by little Red came nearer, smelling his hand, chewing his coat, and in that way the two of them got to know each other. Next he took a long rope and attached it to a halter loosely hanging round her nose and neck. If she wanted to back off, he let her, but he would then tease her in again, like an angler playing a fish, rubbing her neck before loosening the line once more. Gradually Tipper was mastering Red, but without ever imposing on her or making demands. Her education proceeded only as fast as she herself wanted.
Red remained fearful when out in the open, and that was almost her undoing one afternoon, when Tipper and Sam were left on their own in charge of the paddocks.
‘Lads, be sure to get the foals in if the rain comes,’ Uncle Pat had told them.
The storm came in suddenly on a southerly wind. The sun was still shining but the sky in the south was black. The wind stiffened, tossing straw and sacking around the yard. At the first almighty clap of thunder the boys rushed out carrying ropes to bring in the foals. As soon as they opened the gate and began calling, the herd walked obediently towards them. All of them, that is, except Red, who hung back. They decided to bring in the others and come back for Red. But as they unhooked the gate a second time, another thunderclap split the air and immediately the frightened foal took off, careering away from them towards the far end of the paddock, where she collided with a railing post. She staggered back and hopped unnaturally on three legs. The fourth was streaming blood.
‘Jesus, Sam, will you look at that?’ shouted Tipper. ‘There’s blood pouring out of her.’ The rain was now hosing down and they were getting soaked.
Sam yanked the gate shut behind him and the boys ran over to investigate. Red shied and tried to hop away as they approached. Tipper held Sam back.
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘She’s dead scared. She might hurt herself more.’
Sam looked terrified himself. He was wiping the rain off his face. The consequences if anything should happen to this valuable filly would be dire.
‘Christ on a bike, we’re in the shite!’ he said. ‘Is the leg broken or what?’
‘Hang on. Let me go to her myself.’
Tipper stepped quietly up to Red, praying that she wouldn’t jink away from him. The injury was in the lower part of the off foreleg, which was pumping bright red blood at an alarming rate.
‘Come on Red, we got to get you in,’ he murmured, slowly putting out his hand and threading a rope through the ring in her head collar. He gave her drenched neck a pat. Then he crept backwards, exerting the slightest pressure on the rope.
‘Come on, Red. Come on, littlun,’ he urged.
Slowly, the injured creature hobbled with him towards the gate. They got her into the barn and knelt to look closely at the leg.
‘It’s a big gash she’s got, right down to the tendon,’ said Sam knowledgably, pulling a cleanish tea towel he’d found somewhere about out of his pocket. ‘It bleeds worse there than anywhere.’
‘Jesus. What’ll we do?’ Tipper asked frantically. This was their fault. They would really be for it.
‘We better get the bloody vet to stitch her up. And in the meantime we got to get this towel wrapped around, or she’ll bleed to death.’
The storm was in full spate now, hammering rain on the barn roof. Red rolled her eyes, hating the sound.
‘She’s spooked by this bloody weather,’ said Sam. ‘How’ll we get near enough and not get kicked?’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Tipper, peeling off his waterlogged coat. ‘Hold her head for me.’
He started by rubbing her wet forehead, quietly talking to her all the time. Then he let his hand slip down her neck, then on down the leg towards the gash. Red started to snatch up the leg and Tipper patiently went back to her forehead and repeated the routine until she accepted his touch on the leg. Finally he was able to wrap the towel tightly around the wound, cinching it tight with some twine to make it act as a tourniquet. The blood stopped pouring out.
The vet was an hour coming.
‘Well done, lads,’ he said, as he bent to clean the wound with antiseptic. ‘She’d be dead by now if you’d not got that dressing on her. No easy job, that. Which one of you managed it?’
‘We both did,’ said Tipper.
‘Tipper did,’ corrected Sam. ‘I just kept hold of her head.’
The vet looked up, peering over his glasses at Tipper with new interest.
‘Tipper? Aren’t you the boy from the city—Pat’s nephew? Well, judging by what I’ve seen today, you could make a career for yourself, if you want one. You did well, d’you know that?’
Tipper cradled Red’s head and rubbed behind her ears while the vet put in the stitches. Suddenly he felt fantastically good. No teacher or authority figure of any kind had ever said such a thing to him. He had lived fourteen years without hearing a word of praise, not from anyone except his Ma. He was proud. She’d have been proud too…
‘Now for Christ’s sake,’ said the vet as he packed up his bag. ‘Will you both go and put some dry clothes on? Or it won’t be this foal that might not see the morning.’
It had been only a couple of months after Tipper’s Ma died that Uncle Pat dropped another bombshell on him.
‘I’ve been talking to a pal of mine. Joe Kerly. He’s Head Lad at Thaddeus Doyle’s place on the Curragh. He says to me they’ll take you on for your apprenticeship.’
Tipper’s mouth fell open. This news had come out of nowhere. The Curragh was a couple of hours’ drive from the stud. But it could have been on another continent as far as Tipper was concerned. And he wouldn’t know anyone there. The whole prospect frightened him.
‘Jesus, Uncle Pat. Why can’t I stay on here? I like it here.’
Uncle Pat shook his head lugubriously.
‘No way in the world, son. Sorry. Mr Power says we’re overstaffed already. And anyway’—he winked conspiratorially—‘Doyle’s a top trainer; he’s a lot of good horses. And you never know. He might make a jockey out of you. You’ve a great way with the young horses, I don’t mind telling you. I had me doubts to start with but you’ve done grand.’
4
Retired General Stanislav Shalakov, the soldier-son of peasants, ideally preferred an entourage of real men; men who could be relied on to fall on a live grenade, or shove a bayonet deep into a Chechen belly. So he would not, under normal circumstances, have associated with an opportunist civilian like Nico. In his eyes—well-practiced at the game of assessing human character—the younger man’s sunglasses and doorknocker beard failed to conceal manifest weaknesses: the effete belo-emigrant background and the ingratiating cupidity. But while Shalakov had uncounted billions of roubles at his disposal, his yacht had only recently embarked on the seaways of western-style opulence. He knew instinctively how a Nico Nikolayev could be useful to him.
Shalakov’s power base in the Red Army had been neither a fighting division nor a highprofile piece of window-dressing such as the cosmonaut programme. Unglamorously, but far more profitably, Shalakov had been head of the Catering Corps.
In terms of manpower, the Red Army had been probably the largest organization in the world and Shalakov’s position gave him extraordinary hidden leverage. Only the most foolhardy of his fellow generals ever crossed him, and they quickly discovered their mistake. The time would come, on campaign or exercise, when the food supply chain inexplicably broke down. On the Chinese border fifty troops starved to death after their rations failed to come through. In Kandahar food poisoning decimated a battalion. Shalakov had ways of making sure such disasters were not laid at his door; instead they invariably caused the general in the field to be summoned to Moscow and stripped of his rank.
With the coming of Gorbachev, then Yeltsin and Putin, Shalakov eased into a political role. Having ridden out the storms that wrecked the Soviet empire, he began to construct a private conglomerate of his own, bringing to the task the same ruthlessness he’d employed as a soldier. He oversaw the privatization of the army’s vast network of ranches and farms, meat-packing plants and fish canneries, orchards and wheat prairies, making sure the pick of them ended up in his personal ownership; and for a fraction of their true worth. The resulting conglomerate’s sheer size and strategic importance gave Shalakov behind-the-scenes influence. The Minister of Agriculture was his personal nominee. He dined once a week with the Minister of Finance and the head of the Bank of Moscow. He out-drank Boris Yeltsin and spent holidays at the Black Sea dacha of ‘Vovochka’ Putin.
Yet increasingly he understood that the state needed Shalakov more than Shalakov needed the state. And so his acquisitive eyes turned abroad, to the hot spots of the world. Shalakov had decided to go international.
Nico found out that it wasn’t so easy to get inside Shalakov’s camp. But he kept appearing here and there and never missed a chance to pay his respects to the Russian general whenever possible. He sidled up to Shalakov’s blackjack table in London. He effected an introduction to a Grand Prix driver in Monte Carlo. But he was struggling to get on the pay roll. Until, a good two years after Nico had sidled up to his table in the Voile Rouge, Shalakov invited him for drinks aboard his yacht, Rosebud. Bought during the 2009 financial crash from a hedgefund owner, she was a substantial vessel, with eight staterooms and a crew of thirty. As usual Shalakov made an oblique approach to the subject he wanted to discuss.
‘Do you know how many stud farms the Red Army had for horse breeding?’
Nico, who thought cavalry had gone out with the Charge of the Light Brigade, shrugged.
‘I didn’t know they had any. It’s all tanks and humvees now, isn’t it?’
Shalakov gave Nico a look of sarcastic pity.
‘You don’t know the Red Army doctrine of horse warfare. I was taught this as a cadet in Budenyi Cavalry Academy in Moscow. Never mind the mechanized age, cavalry units are still an important independent arm of war and can be deployed in many ways.’
He began counting the ways on his fingers.
‘They can be used for reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance and patrols, but they are essentially raiders. They can attack at speed, silently and with minimum preparation. They can operate at night, cross narrow mountain passes and swim rivers.’
He spat over the side into the silky-smooth water of the marina.
‘Horses. We should have made more use of them in Afghanistan.’
‘So how many studs were there?’
‘At their peak, during the Great Patriotic War, there were forty-seven. Half that number by my own time, and most of those were then sold off by Yeltsin. They were geographically separated right across the Soviet Union, so that we got a spread of animals biologically suited to different kinds of terrain. In the cavalry we did much research into this.’
‘I didn’t know you were a cavalry man.’
‘Not for many years. But I always kept a few horses. And I bought six of the stud farms from the government. The best ones, of course. Now we are creating a new hippodrome in Moscow. One day it will be the greatest centre in the world for racing horses.’
Nico was used to this kind of talk. With Shalakov everything he touched would one day be the greatest, the priciest, the ultimate in grandeur.
‘That would be something, General,’ he agreed.
Shalakov motioned for the steward to refill Nico’s champagne flute and followed up by asking, almost casually,
‘You know this market well? I mean the racehorse market, here in the west?’
So this was the reason Shalakov had invited Nico today: he had a new project in mind.
‘Oh yes,’ said Nico blithely. ‘I know it inside out.’
He sipped thoughtfully from his glass. It was not strictly true, but since he regularly attended the cream of Europe’s race meetings—Deauville, Ascot, the Curragh—he knew people who’d be only too willing to feed him the inside track on classic breeding, bloodstock sales and top trainers.
‘And are you contemplating a particularly large investment, General?’
‘I never do anything by halves. And, as you well know, I deal only in the finest.’
By the time Nico went ashore he had agreed to make enquiries about how Shalakov could acquire and manage a string of the best racehorses in Western Europe.
5
Uncle Pat had been right about Doyle’s yard: it was a fair operation, with a staff of fifty or more. But that made it all the harder for Tipper. Now he didn’t even have Sam to talk to. He didn’t know anyone or anything in this new world. He was back to square one. He didn’t even have Red to look forward to every morning. Hardly a day went by when he wasn’t bollocked for doing something wrong.
For the first two years he was just one of twenty indentured slaves, sixteen-year-olds kicked out of their beds at four-thirty every morning, seven days a week, riding work, mucking-out, grooming, and feeding. If they weren’t required at the races they would get a few hours to themselves in the afternoon; and then it was back to mucking out at evening stables. One afternoon a fortnight was all they got off.
A little of Tipper’s riding ability was noted on the gallops, and as time passed he even got a few rides on no-hopers at country race meetings. But he was so withdrawn. The black cloud that had descended on him after his Ma died hadn’t entirely lifted. He was painfully unsure of himself and made scant impression. He hated sharing a room with three other boys. He was always having the mickey ripped out of him, and hadn’t yet learned how to rip it back. In bed at night he lay under the sheets wishing he could be back at the stud coaxing Red.
Tipper’s loneliness was all the more intense because he’d begun thinking about girls. His were hopeless fantasies, alternating between the sexual and the impossibly romantic. None of the girls in the village would ever talk to Tipper, let alone dream of going out with him. He earned a pittance in wages, and for a year he looked like a tramp, not being possessed of a single good garment to wear. He spent the first twelve months saving for just one thing—a cheap suit to go to the races in, or the pub, or maybe even a club. Until then he had only the clobber he worked in, and that stank because, when it rained, the wet muck-sacks he carried across the yard leaked all over him. No girl would let him near, even if he’d had the courage to go up and ask for a date.
Tipper had been slaving at Doyle’s for two years when, during the winter off-season, word got around the yard that an interesting new two-year-old filly with a pedigree like royalty was coming to them. She’d had a disastrous start to her career on the oval US dirt-tracks and been picked up cheap in New York by Rupert Robinson, a pal of Doyle’s. Robinson, the youngest son of a hereditary English peer, thought of himself as a society playboy. Though he liked a gamble, he usually lost; a trend which his more astute friends thought unlikely to be reversed by this new acquisition.
‘She’s got the temper of an alley-cat,’ said her handler to Doyle when the fractious filly arrived in the yard. ‘She doesn’t like you anywhere close and she’d scratch your face to ribbons if she had claws.’
Watching from a distance, Tipper said nothing. But at lunchtime, as soon as the yard was quiet, he went to her stable, stood in front of the halfdoor and whispered her name: not the name chalked on the board by the door, Stella Maris, but his name for her. For Tipper had known her from the moment she’d jinked and propped her way down the ramp of the transporter.
‘Red!’ he whispered. ‘It’s me. Remember me?’
The filly’s first reaction was to lay her ears flat and try to bite his head. He dodged the attempt and, sliding the bolt open, slipped inside the stable. At once Red turned her back on him and let fly with one of her hind legs. She was anticipating a smack. So that was the trouble, Tipper thought. Some twat had been thrashing her, thinking it would bring her to hand. Naturally, it had had the opposite effect.
Quietly reciting her name over and over, he stooped and lowered himself until he was kneeling. Slowly, very slowly, he began inching towards Red, uttering calming words in a light singsong. Praying that she wouldn’t lash out again. If she did, and caught him on the head, she could kill him. But because he had crouched down he didn’t pose a threat to her. By the time he was a couple of yards from her he saw, maybe, a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. He slowly turned away and moved towards the door of the box. The straw behind him rustled. Then he felt the filly’s nose gently exploring his back, and he knew it had happened. She’d remembered him.
Five minutes later Tipper was standing at her head, rubbing her ears; for the first time since he’d arrived at Doyle’s, he began to feel hope. In fact it was stronger than that. He felt a tinge of excitement.
Tipper was straight onto the phone to Sam at lunchtime.
‘Sam. You’re not going to believe this. You won’t guess who walked into the yard this morning. You won’t believe it!’
‘Okay I’ll go for Lester Piggott. Or maybe Shergar. I know. Lester Piggott riding Shergar.’
‘Fock off Sam. It was Red. You remember Red?’
‘No. Can’t say I do. Some mare we met in the pub?’
‘Sam, stop messing with me. Red. You know the filly that we had on the stud. Who cut her leg. She’s here at Doyle’s. She’s called Stella Maris now.’
‘No way. That can’t be right. She went to America for Christ sake.’
‘Well she’s back Sam, and she hasn’t changed. She’s not easy, but by Christ is she a good sort.’
‘Please, Mr Kerly,’ he said a couple of days later to the Head Lad. ‘Let me ride the new filly’s work. I know her. I looked after her when she was a foal at Fethard. She was always a bit nervous, like, but we got on famously. Ask my uncle. You seen that scar on her leg? I was there when she got that, see?’
In his anxiety to get through to Kerly he was gabbling. He took a breath and went on more slowly.
‘I saved her life, the vet said, with a tourniquet. She’s a bit difficult all right, but I can quieten her. I can handle her.’
Stella Maris may have exasperated her American owners, but her genes wore diamond tiaras, and Doyle and her new owner, the Hon. Rupert Robinson, hoped that, by returning to the wide galloping turf tracks of home, and with the correct handling, she might soon be worth her weight in jewellery. So Kerly’s eyes widened in disbelief at Tipper’s request to take responsibility for this potential turf princess. He fired a gob of spit at the ground and told him straight.
‘Give it up, Tipper. Jesus this is a valuable filly. She’s got a hell of a pedigree. Now don’t be bothering me.’
Kerly soon learned how wrong he was. The new filly was so unbiddable she wouldn’t even walk out into the yard. When a lad went into her stable she’d sulk in the back of it and then lash out at him in self-defence. For a week Tipper looked on in mounting frustration, until he could bear it no longer. One morning, without dwelling on the consequences, he skipped breakfast and went down to the stable block. He let himself into Red’s box, hurriedly tacked her up and took her out for a hack.
Half an hour later they came trotting in again under perfect control. Joe Kerly was at the gate waiting. Tipper got the bollocking of his life, but he’d proved the point. Red became his ride every day.
6
Nico began his research in London. England was the cradle of the thoroughbred horse, and English racing retained just the right mixture of glamour, snobbery, chicanery and big money to satisfy a man like Shalakov. He stepped from a cab in Wardour Street and strolled through to Berwick Street market. Pushing his way through the throng of shoppers and market traders, Nico selected a number on his phone and, when it was answered, spoke briefly. It was only a short walk from here to his destination, a large basement club with a thick carpet and a dozen different ways of losing money, ranging from one-arm bandits to roulette and blackjack. Flitting between the tables were leggy hostesses in smart burgundy uniforms. The place was pretty empty bar a few excitable Chinese swarming round a roulette table like bees round a hive. A sallow-faced Arab sat expressionless near the roulette wheel, looking glumly at the table.
This dive was called the Piranha Club.
Nico was greeted at the bar by a figure known to his circle as the Duke. Aged somewhere in his fifties, the Duke looked innocuous enough. He had the slack, tapering body of a taxi driver, with fish-like hands, slightly grey skin and thinning straw coloured hair. A pair of large gold-framed bi-focals lived on the tip of his nose giving him a slightly studious look. But the benign appearance, as Nico knew, was seriously deceptive. Not only did the Duke own the Piranha Club, he was one of the largest private bookmakers in London.
‘All right, Nico my son? It’s been a while.’
‘Delighted to see you again, Duke.’
It was pretty well five years since Nico had first met the Duke. He’d needed to buy some marching powder for a client and had been sent in the Duke’s direction.