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"Well, Matt, it's about time I found you. You come recommended.”

As he spoke, he waved his baseball cap as if it were an instrument for conducting an orchestra.

“You can be ‘Our Man in Bolivia’. You know, like 'Our Man in Havana'. We'll need you as our point man. You know racing. You know Spanish. You know Bolivia."

His words hit the surface like shoveled coal. It was a deep voice, but too gravelly to make the talk-show host circuit. The green shine in his eyes was magnified in the dim light. He had dark, bushy hair, with an occasional silver strand functioning like steel reinforcement. I could tell his thick cigar was a Cohiba because he left the yellow wrap-around label on it, near the tip, as if to broadcast, I smoke this illegal cigar, and what do you intend to do about it? I noticed the NO SMOKING sign on a corkboard behind the bar. Slim acted as if he’d been granted immunity from the law, and no one around him dared to challenge. He let the fire die out naturally and then stashed the half-smoked Lancero in a silver container.

This was pre-Google time, and I wondered how he could have learned about me. Had I been from a traditional culture, I would have balked at doing business with the blunt Panama Slim. But I needed a raise in my income, and what better path to financial independence than racing! Playing a piano gig at Thelonius Bar on Calle 20 de Octubre in La Paz netted me a couple of dollars an hour. Bolivian Times paid me a Bolivian-level salary for writing music reviews and covering international soccer games. Even if I'd landed a straight job in Bolivia, the salary would not cover for an American lifestyle. I had a wife who was into volunteerism. In exchange for her work, they paid our rent, and that was it.

On the way from the Andes to Saratoga I had experienced the illusion of being a free man. Now I was clinging to Kling and tethered to Panama Slim.

For Panama Slim everything is literal. "Point man" meant that there were ten points on the contract between Slim's West Hollywood real estate company and the Santa Cruz group, headed by Manuel Arce. All I had to do was get Arce's signature on the ten points.

I ordered eggplant parmesana. Panama Slim intervened.

"Hell, Matt, this place is famous for its fish. You can't order eggplant, can you?"

And then, turning to the waiter:

"Give this man the best fish dish on your menu."

I had asked for red wine.

"You can't have a red with fish. Give us a bottle of your best white wine."

Panama Slim felt that he could buy me out by giving me what I didn't want to have. He hadn't flunked his business psychology course because he'd successfully intimidated the professor.

Slim was frank, Slim was even naive. It may have been the effect of the whiskeys he'd downed at the bar.

He had grown up in the Canal Zone of Panama, an enclave known for its racism. He never forgave Carter for handing the canal over to Panama. It was "our canal", he said. "We built it."

The fish was good, the wine was surprisingly full and pungent, and I decided to dig in, enjoy the meal, ask for the best chocolate dessert on the menu, sip a rich Italian espresso, and then tell Panama Slim that I could not take the gig.

I certainly wanted to see a race track in Bolivia, but I had made it a point during my life to avoid working for people I would not like to see in my living room. I understood the business potential. In effect, they were outsourcing racing. Running a race track is a labor-intensive activity. Racing was one of the last labor-intensive businesses to remain in the USA. As it is, the industry would not survive without the importation of Mexican and Central American labor.

Slim also held the offshore card. The Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce had influence. It was a combination of wild-west and modern capitalism. They could wrangle tax breaks and even get offshore benefits written into the law. Not far from the Bolivian lowlands there were thriving racing industries in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. Bolivia was at the center of a triangle formed by those three countries.

A race track in Bolivia, with all its potential spinoffs, with a local monopoly, and integrated with Argentina, Brazil, and Chile was a mortal lock. The land itself figured to quadruple in value once the track was up and standing magnificently in the tropics.

Still, I had decided to turn down Panama Slim's offer after I’d downed the tiramisu.

He preempted me. He made an offer I couldn't turn down.

"You're the point man. We're offering you $10,000 per point. The contract has ten points. Get Arce's signature on the ten points and you make one hundred thou. Slim was literal. He left nothing to the imagination.

Seizing a moment of strength, he turned the tables and made it seem as if I were an applicant instead of a consultant in demand.

"We gotta know that you don't discriminate," he said.

Panama Slim had suggested, between the lines, that he felt some cultures were superior to others. Now he was telling me he opposed discrimination.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"I mean, this Arce fellow is not a nice guy. I mean that I hope you have nothing against people who are not nice guys."

I had the urge to tell him that if I ate dinner with him, then he had all the evidence he needed that I could work with people who were not nice guys. Slim had once evicted a tenant with no court order, his two hired hands taking out the Ikea desk and dumping it on the Santa Monica sidewalk, where its bolts were loosened with the thud. The tenant was a young poet. The tenant could have called the cops. Slim would have been arrested. The kid saw the tattooed biceps of Slim’s two assistants. His idol Bukowski would have put up some resistance, but the tenant decided that it was in his interest to let bygones be bygones.

Once again, Slim preempted me.

"I know you think that I'm not a kindly person, but this is business. Nice guys are the people who give you tips when you play the piano. We're offering much more than tips. After you meet Arce, you'll appreciate me as the nice guy."

Slim flashed a contract at me. I scanned for the ten points and verified the hundred thousand. I signed. We shook hands. Or rather, his squared claw hand crushed my piano fingers. I wheeled over to the Saratoga half-mile harness track for the late races, locking the bike on a rail fence in the parking lot. I found my buddy Stan Grabowski, former harness driver, masters in American literature, soccer coach, nice guy.

No need to handicap. I could play my preferred harness race system, the CCC:

(1)  Class. Horse must show at least a thousand dollar earnings per race (easily scanned from the performance box at the upper right hand side of the past performances), for this year’s and last year’s races combined, with all the other horses in the field earning less than a thou per race. You can play as many as two qualifying horses in a field. (If there are three or more earnings qualifiers in a field, pass the race. At tracks with higher purses, you can use $2,000 per race as the cut-off point. Exclude horses going off at above 19-1.)

      (2) Competitiveness. Horse must have more wins than places or shows.

      (3) Current form. Horse must show at least one win or two places in its last four races. No layoff horses.

All the information is available in the performance box at the upper right hand corner of the past performances. I’d once tested the system for a whole summer at the Quebec City harness oval, and it came out with an 18% profit. It had also proved profitable at Rosecroft for earlier runs.

In the fifth race, I had two qualifiers, the 4 and the 8, the latter marooned on the outside. The 4-horse was 9-2 and the 8 was 6-1. I played them both to win and boxed them in the exacta. Stan’s a better harness handicapper than I am, but he’ll back my horses out of pure friendship. This time he convinced me to play the trifecta sandwich, in case my horses finished first and third in the exacta.

All the inside horses left sluggishly, allowing the 8 horse to glide into a perfect racing spot. He caught the leader, my 4-horse, who dropped back to third at the wire. We both collected on the 8 horse in the win hole, and the tri came back at 160-1.

Stan’s solidarity and exuberant optimism restored my confidence in the human race. We cashed another one later on the card. Two hits were all we needed for a rewarding evening.

On the way to Stan’s car, the glorious night humidity hung in stark contrast to arid La Paz. I craved to bottle the warmth and take it back to La Paz. Stan offered to park my bicycle on the rack on top of his old Buick (a battered version of Panama Slim’s inflated batmobile) and drive me home. But the pine-cone mountain aromas of summer in Upstate New York were too splendid to resist. I decided to wheel home. My headlight was working and I had a flashing red tail light. I rode back over Route 9 to Ada's house, wondering how I could have moved to a place above the tree line.

The Saratoga meeting had its ups and downs. After having successfully excluded ten of Nick Kling's top picks, I excluded an eleventh one, and that horse won and paid $22.00. In the later days of the meet, my exclusions became more refined. Nick's return on investment was plus 5 percent. I was up 9 percent.

I met with Panama Slim several times at the race track. He gave me a portfolio of papers, a list of talking points, and further instructions. I picked out a few faint traces of humanity in his gravelly voice, but he was still Panama Slim.

On the last day of the meet, with a profit assured, I decided to press the Nick Kling button to the limit. I decided to raise my bet on one of Kling's picks. Looking back at my records, Kling horses that "figured" less in the pass performances were the ones that paid more. A Kling pick that got hammered by the bettors was far less interesting, even if it won.

On this card, Kling had picked a Michael Dickenson horse that was coming back after a 15-month layoff. River Reader had once been a top turf horse but horseplayers know that any horse that takes a lengthy vacation has a physical impairment. The logic is clear. Such horses need to work themselves back into form.

This was before Michael Dickenson was recognized as the great horseman he is. He had a small stable and few "experts" realized that his turf horses were making money for the players who backed them regularly. Kling's logic was contrarian. The fact that such an accomplished trainer like Dickenson had laid the horse off for so long meant that patience and loving care had nurtured the horse back into form. Had Dickenson been using this race as a mere "prep", why would he have shipped River Reader up to Saratoga on the last day of the meet?

In fact, River Reader had regular workouts spaced every five days and, more important, his record on the main Saratoga turf course was two wins in three starts. Yet, thanks to the layoff, he was 12-1.

The race was a mile and three eighths. River Reader stayed along the rail in the early going, in midpack of the 11-horse field. By the time they entered the final turn, you could see that River Reader could hardly contain his pent up energy, but had nowhere to go.

The unresolved polemic among turf race followers is whether it's better for a rider to wait for room at the rail and therefore save ground, or take the horse wide on the turn in order to profit from the horse's willingness to accelerate. Gomez usually waits along the rail. Three fourths of the time, he finds an opening. In the remaining 25 percent of the races, he gets blocked and constrained and finds room too late to out-gallop the closers on the outside.

Gomez waited and waited. Then, the tiring leader drifted out, as often happens, and the gifted rider rolled his RR over the inside track. River Reader drew off in the final yards. Following the race, Gomez noted that "the Red Sea opened for me" but in fact, it had been a skillful ride for a deserving trainer.

My Saratoga meet was over. Thanks to Nick Kling, I had won some money. But not nearly enough to even consider saying "no" to Panama Slim.

After the races, I invited Nick to Mangino's. I ordered eggplant parmesana and drank red wine. I congratulated Nick on once more ending a meet with a flat-bet profit, and it was now possible to explain my Klinging, Nick-picking betting strategy. Nick was happy to hear about it, but fatigued. The meet had taken everything out of him, and his bosses at the Troy Record did not understand enough about racing to appreciate his feat.

On the River Reader pick he explained that he had chosen the horse based on a pattern match. He'd remembered that at the previous Saratoga meet, in the waning days, Dickenson had won with a turf horse going a mile and three eighths following a 13-month layoff. Today we call this decision making "thin slicing". Nick had extracted one slice of important information from a complex loaf of factors and had decided that this was the deciding factor of the race. This was a neat balance between objective science and pure inspiration.

There are players who win a pick 6 or two or triumph in an intense horse betting tournament, and then coast on the glory until they burn out. But few are able to sustain the intellectual passion. Nick Kling is one of the few.

While Nick Kling accomplished miracles, Panama Slim made money. Nick Kling retreated to his farm house to write poetry. Panama Slim went back to the bar for another whiskey, signing up yet another soldier for his worldwide enterprise.

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