The James Bond Anthology

10 | STUDILLAC TO SARATOGA

James Bond spent most of Saturday in his air-conditioned room at the Astor, avoiding the heat, sleeping, and composing a hundred-group cable addressed to the Chairman, Universal Export, London. He used a simple transposition code based on the fact that it was the sixth day of the week and that the date was the fourth of the eighth month.

The report concluded that the diamond pipeline began somewhere near Jack Spang, in the shape of Rufus B. Saye, and ended with Seraffimo Spang, and that the main junction in the pipe was the office of Shady Tree from which, presumably, the stones were fed into the House of Diamonds for cutting and marketing.

Bond requested London to put a close tail on Rufus B. Saye, but he warned that an individual known as ‘A B C’ seemed to be in direct command of the actual smuggling on behalf of the Spangled Mob, and that Bond had no clue to this individual’s identity except that he appeared to be located in London. Presumably only this man would provide a lead back to the actual source of the smuggled diamonds somewhere on the continent of Africa.

Bond reported that his own intention was to continue working up the pipeline in the direction of Seraffimo Spang, using as an unconscious agent Tiffany Case, whose background he briefly reported.

Bond sent the cable ‘Collect’ via Western Union, had his fourth shower of the day and went to Voisin’s where he had two Vodka Martinis, Oeufs Benedict and strawberries. Over dinner he read the racing forecasts for the Saratoga meeting, from which he noted that the joint favourites for The Perpetuities Stakes were Mr C. V. Whitney’s ‘Come Again’ and Mr William Woodward Jnr’s ‘Pray Action’. ‘Shy Smile’ was not mentioned.

Then Bond walked back to his hotel and went to bed.

Punctually at nine on Sunday morning, a black Studebaker convertible drew up to the sidewalk where Bond was standing beside his suitcase.

When he had thrown his case on to the back seat and climbed in beside Leiter, Leiter reached up to the roof and pulled back a lever. Then he pressed a button on the dash, and, with a thin hydraulic whine, the canvas roof slowly raised itself up into the air and folded itself down and back into a recess between the rear seat and the boot. Then, manipulating the steering wheel gear-shift with easy movements of his steel hook, he took the car fast across Central Park.

‘It’s about two hundred miles,’ said Leiter when they were down on the Hudson River Parkway. ‘Almost due north up the Hudson. In New York State. Just south of the Adirondacks and not far short of the Canadian border. We’ll take the Taconic Parkway. There’s no hurry, so we’ll go easy. And I don’t want to get a ticket. There’s a fifty-mile speed limit in most of New York State, and the cops are fierce. But I can generally get away from them if I’m in a hurry. They don’t book you if they can’t catch you. Too ashamed to turn up in court and admit something is faster than their Indians.’

‘But I thought those Indians could do well over ninety,’ said Bond, thinking that his friend had become a bit of a show-off since the old days. ‘I didn’t know these Studebakers had it in them.’

There was a straight stretch of empty road in front of them. Leiter gave a brief glance in his driving mirror and suddenly rammed the gear lever into second and thrust his foot into the floor. Bond’s head jerked back on his shoulders, and he felt his spine being rammed into the back of the bucket seat. Incredulously, he glanced at the hooded speedometer. Eighty. With a clang Leiter’s hook hit the gear lever into top. The car went on gathering speed. Ninety, ninety-five, six, seven – and then there was a bridge and a converging road and Leiter’s foot was on the brake and the deep roar of the engine gave way to a steady thrumming as they settled down in the seventies and swept easily through the graded curves.

Leiter glanced sideways at Bond and grinned. ‘Nearly another thirty in hand,’ he said proudly. ‘Not long ago I paid five dollars and put her through the measured mile at Daytona. She clocked a hundred and twenty-seven and that beach surface isn’t any too hot.’

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Bond incredulously. ‘But what sort of a car is this anyway? Isn’t it a Studebaker?’

‘Studillac,’ said Leiter. ‘Studebaker with a Cadillac engine. Special transmission and brakes and rear axle. Conversion job. A small firm near New York turns them out. Only a few, but they’re a damn sight better sports car than those Corvettes and Thunderbirds. And you couldn’t have anything better than this body. Designed by that Frenchman, Raymond Loewy. Best designer in the world. But it’s a bit too advanced for the American market. Studebaker’s never got enough credit for this body. Too unconventional. Like the car? Bet I could give your old Bentley a licking.’ Leiter chuckled and reached in his left-hand pocket for a dime as they came to the Henry Hudson Bridge toll.

‘Until one of your wheels came off,’ said Bond caustically as they accelerated away again. ‘This sort of hot-rod job’s all right for kids who can’t afford a real motor car.’

They wrangled cheerfully over the respective merits of English and American sports cars until they came to the Westchester County toll and then, fifteen minutes later, they were out on the Taconic Parkway that snaked away northwards through a hundred miles of meadows and woodlands, and Bond settled back and silently enjoyed one of the most beautifully landscaped highways in the world, and wondered idly what the girl was doing and how, after Saratoga, he was to get to her again.

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 Post this morning. This Jimmy Cannon is their sports columnist. Good writer. Knows what he’s talking about. Read it in the car. We ought to be moving.’

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.

It is possible that there are bust-out gaffs sneaking in farmhouses on back roads. Such action is insignificant and the player must be prepared to be knocked out as rapidly as the dealer can switch the dice. But the gambling casinos of Saratoga were never square and anyone who caught a hot hand was measured for a trimming.

The road houses ran through the night on the shores of the lake. The big entertainers shilled for the games which were not financed to be beaten. The stick men and the wheel turners were the nomadic hustlers who were paid by the day and travelled the gambling circuit from Newport, Ky., down to Miami in the winter and back up to Saratoga for August. Most of them were educated in Steubenville, O., where the penny-ante games were trade schools for the industry.

They were drifters and most of them had no talent for mussing up a welsher. They were clerks of the underworld and they packed up and left as soon as any heat was turned their way. Most of them have settled down in Las Vegas and Reno where their old bosses have taken charge with licences hanging on the walls.

Their employers were not gamblers in the tradition of old Col. E. R. Bradley who was a stately man of courteous deportment. But there are those who tell me that his gambling bazaar at Palm Beach would go along with a mark until his score piled up too high.

Then, according to those who have gone against Bradley’s games, mechanics took over and used any device that would keep the house solvent. It delights those who recollect Bradley when they read his canonization as a philanthropist whose hobby was giving the rich a little divertissement denied them by the state of Florida. But, compared to the lice who controlled Saratoga, Col. Bradley is entitled to all the praise he gets in the remembrances of the sentimentalists.

The track at Saratoga is a ramshackle pile of kindling wood and the climate is hot and humid. There are some, such as Al Vanderbilt and Jock Whitney, who are sportsmen in the obsolete sense of the identification. Horse-racing is their game and they are too good for it. So are such trainers as Bill Winfrey, who sent ‘Native Dancer’ to the races. There are jockeys who would bust you in the nose if you propositioned them to pull a horse.

They enjoy Saratoga and they must be glad that the likes of Lucky Luciano are gone from the rube town that flourished because it allowed tough guys to fleece the drop-ins. The bookmakers were yegged as they left the track in the era of the hand-books. There was one called Kid Tatters who was relieved of $50,000 in the parking lot. The heist guys told him they intended to kidnap him if he didn’t come up with more.

Kid Tatters knew Lucky had a piece of most of the gambling spots and appealed to him to settle his trouble. Lucky said it was a simple matter. No one would bother the bookie if he did as he was told. Kid Tatters had a permit to book at the track and his reputation was clean, but there was only one way he could protect himself.

‘Make me your partner,’ Lucky informed him and the conversation was repeated for me by a man who was present. ‘No one would stick up a partner of Lucky’s.’

Kid Tatters thought of himself as an honourable guy in business sanctioned by the state, but he gave in and Lucky was his partner until he died. I asked a guy if Lucky put up any money or worked for his end of the bookmaker’s profit.

‘All Lucky did was collect,’ the fellow said. ‘But in those days, Kid Tatters made himself a good bargain. He was never bothered again.’

It was a stinking town, but all gambling towns are.

Bond folded the cutting and put it in his pocket.

‘It certainly sounds a long way from Lily Langtry,’ he said after a pause.

‘Sure,’ said Leiter indifferently. ‘And Jimmy Cannon doesn’t let on he knows the big boys are back again, or their successors. But nowadays they’re owners, like our friends the Spangs, running their horses against the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts and the Woodwards, and now and again putting over a fast fix like “Shy Smile”. They aim to net fifty Grand on that job, and that’s better than knocking off a bookie for a few C’s. Sure, some of the names have changed around Saratoga. So’s the mud in the mud baths there.’

A big road sign loomed up on the right. It said:

STOP AT THE SAGAMORE.

AIR-CONDITIONED. SLUMBERITE BEDS TELEVISION.

FIVE MILES TO SARATOGA SPRINGS, AND THE SAGAMORE

– FOR GRACIOUS LIVING

‘That means we get our tooth glasses wrapped in individual paper bags and the lavatory seat sealed with a strip of sanitized paper,’ commented Leiter sourly. ‘And don’t think you can steal those Slumberite beds. Motels used to lose one most weeks. Now they screw them down.’