The Lincoln made short work of the Jericho Turnpike at that hour of the morning, and the Polo Lounge was still open when I got back to the hotel. I saw Hugo behind the bar, hunched over the spigots like some hairy troll in a cage, and I decided to do my nightcaps by myself upstairs in the suite. Hugo lunged at me as I passed too near the railing, but I ducked and ran to the elevator. I was afraid of him.
I was weak and trembling by the time I got out of the elevator, and the hall was empty, as always. I hurried inside and quickly chained both doors, then I fell on the couch and passed out in a double-helix position for many hours.
It rained all day on Saturday, and I dropped off the polo circuit to hunker down in the suite and get involved in the football games on TV. I turned off the phones and refused to answer the door. Harriman left a message around midnight, saying he would meet me at the box before game time. The message was oddly disjointed, but I chalked it up to fatigue. I knew he had many dark things on his mind—and besides, he didn’t like football. Fuck him, I thought. He’s crazy. The big game was tomorrow, and I was getting very cranked up.
V
I could already see the lead: Outlined against a gray September sky, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode again. In the Book of Revelation they were Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death . . . But these were only aliases: On that frantic afternoon in the dim gray smog of Long Island, they were called Memo, Carlos, Tiger, and Doug.
A crowd of five thousand or so had gathered to witness the championship match. We arrived early, but not early enough. The turf had turned to mush, and limos were spinning their wheels in the muddy road to the VIP entrance. Drunken gate-crashers were fighting with the police at the gate.
“Get away from here, you scum!” shouted one of the off-duty cops. “If you’re looking for trouble, we’ll give it to you!” He smacked one of the drunkards with a huge flashlight, and the others fell back. I aimed the big Lincoln through the opening, spinning the wheels in low gear and sending up rooster tails of mud on the crowd around the gate.
“Keep driving,” said Tobias. “Don’t slow down.”
There was a lot of screaming behind us, and I heard whistles blowing. I turned on the windshield wipers and eased into a spot between the Gracida brothers’ horse trailers. The match was about to start. I noticed Carlos standing alone in the rain, staring blankly out at the playing field, where a marching band was strutting around on the sod.
I approached him calmly and wished him good luck. “Don’t worry,” I said cheerfully. “We can’t lose. It’s in the bag. It’s arranged.”
“What?” he snapped. “What are you talking about?”
He seemed nervous, so I pulled out my wallet and gave him a $100 bill. “Take this for luck,” I said. “This is a wonderful day for the home-boys, eh? Yes, sir, we are champions.”
He nodded and walked to where his horse was waiting. Bugles sounded, and a roar went up from the crowd. The magic moment had come. Players galloped onto the field and held their mallets aloft like warriors charging to battle.
There were no empty seats on this day. The grandstands on both sides overflowed with the jetset cream of international polo society. The tournament had been going on for three weeks in Greenwich, as well as on Long Island, and many shocks had occurred. Most of the favorites had been eliminated: the Black Bears from Switzerland were gone, and so were the heavily favored human peacocks from Ellerston White, the fraudulent pride of Australia. The whole aristocracy of American polo had been eliminated: Pegasus, Revlon, and even the glamorous white-hat front-runners from Calumet Farm, in Kentucky. The black hats had prevailed in both brackets, but only one would survive this savage final test. The only gang that stood between my homeboys and victory was what Harriman called “those arrogant criminal swine from White Birch.”
Harriman had a flair for embellishment, but his cynical, bile-fueled sentiments were widely shared by pillars of the polo establishment. Many of the oldest and most powerfully inbred families in America were mortified by the spectacle of what they called “two gangs of jailbirds” going mallet to mallet in public for the top prize in U.S. polo. “Who are these people?” one asked. “Where did they come from? We don’t even know their families.”
“That’s because they’re all curs,” a woman from Palm Beach replied. “It’s like having to turn your home over to a pack of colored people.”
I was shocked by some of these outbursts, but Harriman said I was ignorant. “These are extremely wealthy people,” he said. “Intolerance is a virtue among them, and extreme intolerance is godlike.”