Atom Bomb Angel

1

There were five men in the rear section of the railway carriage. Two read, one watched the scenery, one slept, one picked his nose. The train was travelling across Canada, from Vancouver to Montreal. It was fourteen and a half hours out of Winnipeg, and would be arriving in Montreal in just over twenty-four hours’ time. The intention was that by the time the train got to Montreal, one of the men in this section of the carriage would be dead. Me.

If any of the five had met before, they didn’t show it, and, as is often the way with strangers flung together in railway carriages, none had as yet acknowledged even the existence of any of the others. Without wishing to draw the attention of the rest, two of the men were particularly anxious to make each other’s acquaintance: myself and the man who had come to kill me.

I flicked, mechanically, through the pages of my book. It was by Lillian Beckwith, and was called The Hills is Lonely. I could have assured her it wasn’t just the hills: the hectares of December prairie that drifted endlessly past the window were lonely too. Almost as lonely as being in this railway compartment.

The other man who was reading put down his Time Life and stood up, unsteadily for a moment as the train swayed, then he made his way to the aisle, standing on my foot in the process.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘That’s what it’s there for,’ I replied.

He didn’t appear to know how to take it, so he left it. He stood indecisively in the doorway for a few moments, then slid the door shut behind him and disappeared into the next carriage. I caught the eye of the one picking his nose; he looked down, then shot me two furtive glances in rapid succession. On both glances he found I was still watching him; he looked down again and frowned, then tugged his finger out sharply, and began to study it with great intent, as if perhaps there was some problem with it that inserting it up his nose might have cured.

The one who was watching the scenery raised his fingers to his chin, and started to check the growth of stubble; after a few moments, apparently satisfied that his jaw and cheeks had not disappeared into an undergrowth of hair, he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes tightly for a few moments, then opened them wide and began to stare at the ceiling.

The one who slept was moving most of his head up and down in a slow rhythmic motion. The part that remained static was his lower jaw; as the upper part of his head lifted, his mouth opened, and as it lowered, it shut again. The effect reminded me of a rather gormless fish — the tall, thin type that hang around in the weeds in tropical fish tanks, waiting either to eat or be eaten, and not particularly caring which.

At the last station was a poster. It depicted a group of people in their seventies, in track suits, running through a field. The caption beneath said: ‘You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.’

Getting better. I wondered, at what? I was getting older, for sure, a damn sight too fast for my liking, but I certainly wasn’t getting any better — at anything — and that was a pity. Because right now I needed to be one whole lot better at a great many things if I was going to stay in this strange, tough, twisted temptress of a game that fatalists call ‘the luck of the draw’, clergymen call ‘the ways of the Lord’, and biologists call ‘life’.

Right now the key to life was contained in the briefcase that one of my four travelling companions had on the rack above his head. There were five briefcases on the racks. Two black Samsonites, two cheap leather ones of the type made in Hong Kong and sold through mail-order firms from glossy adverts in Sunday colour supplements, and one Gucci, the real thing, not a copy.

One of the Samsonites could be ruled out, since it was mine, which left me four cases to worry about. The content of one of these would tell me who it was that was here to kill me — and he didn’t have to open it up to show me. In fact, I was pretty damn sure he had no intention of opening that briefcase until long after this train had reached Montreal.

It would be highly unlikely for any man to carry a briefcase with him on a long train journey, and not to open that case at any time during that journey. On an hour-long commuter ride, most men click their cases open at least once; on a forty-hour journey, the man who did not open his briefcase would start to stand out like a sore thumb to anyone interested enough to take the trouble to notice. And I was plenty interested enough.

I put down my book and picked up my New York Sunday Times magazine and turned to the mammoth crossword. I pulled my gold Cross ball-point from my pocket, looked down towards the crossword, and tapped the top of the pen thoughtfully in my mouth. Gripping the pen in my teeth I looked up after some moments, then lowered my eyes back down towards the crossword. Fourteen across: Short Richard’s offspring divides nation with friendly underground railroad? Where the hell did I begin on that one? Normally I liked crosswords; in the long and boring hours of tailing someone, when it wasn’t possible to read a book in case one missed something, at least the clues of a crossword gave me something to chew on. But right now, I had plenty to chew on without this particular puzzle. I had a puzzle that was far more complex, and if I didn’t solve it fast, there was a pension-fund manager in England who was going to have one less pension to worry about. I squinted my eyes down towards the crossword, but it wasn’t the clues that were printed on the paper that were going to help me — it was the rotating digits in the dial that was concealed in the barrel of my pen.

After a few minutes my right leg went to sleep for the fifteenth time. I tried to move it and it hurt like hell, but not moving it hurt even more. I needed to go for a walk — if I was even capable of standing up. Apart from a brief trip to the washroom earlier, I hadn’t moved since boarding the train at Winnipeg last night. I had reclined my seat to go to sleep, and tilted it up again to eat the breakfast that appeared on a tray. I had a splitting headache, and my nose was running. The way I must have looked, I was worth gold nuggets to the advertising agency of any airline.

I memorized the exact positions of the briefcases, so that I could tell if any had been moved, and limped awkwardly down the aisle and through into the next carriage, a first-class sleeper. And then I saw her. She was in a compartment on her own, and she looked up for a brief moment as I passed. I caught her eye. She must have caught mine too, but she didn’t show anything on her face. She had red hair and glasses. Last time she had blonde hair and no glasses, and she wore different make-up. It was a shade over two years. Long enough for someone to change, but not long enough to forget. Had she forgotten, or was I just making a mistake? The man who had trodden on my foot was walking back down the corridor. Now was not the time to find out.