At 12.30 they stopped for lunch at ‘The Chicken in the Basket’, a log-built ‘Frontier-style’ road-house with standard equipment – a tall counter covered with the best-known proprietary brands of chocolates and candies, cigarettes, cigars, magazines and paperbacks, a juke box blazing with chromium and coloured lights that looked like something out of science fiction, a dozen or more polished pine tables in the centre of the raftered room and as many low booths along the walls, a menu featuring fried chicken and ‘fresh mountain trout’, which had spent months in some distant deep-freeze, and a variety of short-order dishes, and a couple of waitresses who couldn’t care less.
But the scrambled eggs and sausages and hot buttered rye toast and the Millers Highlife beer came quickly and were good, and so was the iced coffee that followed it, and with their second glass they got away from ‘shop’ and their private lives and got on to Saratoga.
‘Eleven months of the year,’ explained Leiter, ‘the place is just dead. People drift up to take the waters and the mud baths for their troubles, rheumatism and such like, and it’s like any other off-season spa anywhere in the world. Everybody’s in bed by nine, and the only signs of life in the daytime are when two old gentlemen in panama hats get to arguing about the surrender of Burgoyne at Schuylerville just down the road, or about whether the marble floor of the old Union Hotel was black or white. And then for one month – August – the place goes hog-wild. It’s probably the smartest race-meeting in America, and the place crawls with Vanderbilts and Whitneys. The rooming houses all multiply their prices by ten and the race track committee lick the old grandstand up with paint and somehow find some swans for the pond in the centre of the track and anchor the old Indian canoe in the middle of the pond and turn up the fountain. Nobody can remember where the canoe came from, and an American racing writer who tried to find out got as far as that it was something to do with an Indian legend. He said that when he heard that he didn’t bother any more. He said that when he was in fourth grade, he could tell a better lie than any Indian legend he ever heard.’
Bond laughed. ‘What else?’ he said.
‘You ought to know about it yourself,’ said Leiter. ‘Used to be a great place for the English – the belted ones, that is. The Jersey Lily used to be around there a lot, your Lily Langtry. About the time ‘Novelty’ beat ‘Iron Mask’ in the Hopeful Stakes. But it’s changed a bit since the Mauve Decade. Here,’ he pulled a cutting out of his pocket. ‘This’ll bring you up to date. Cut it out of the
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.
