Trouble Follows Me

6

TWO days later, on Saturday morning, Mary and I left Chicago on the Grand Canyon Limited. The best we could get on such short notice, even with a certain amount of priority, were parlor-car seats from Chicago to Kansas City, and berths from Kansas City on. When we boarded the train in the Chicago station we found that our parlor-car reservations entitled us to two seats in the club car.

The train was not due to leave for half an hour, but the club car was crowded. The air was hot and heavy with the undesired physical intimacy of wartime train journeys. People occupied their seats in attitudes of defiance, as if daring you to displace them. Mary and I found our seats, which were unoccupied, and sat down to wait for Kansas City and the semi-privacy of a compartment ten hours away.

The uneasy postures of everyone in the car, the atmosphere of suspended tension as if life had stopped and wouldn’t start again till the train moved, the shabby upholstery and worn carpet, reminded me of an unsuccessful dentist’s waiting-room. I said to Mary:

“In a minute a nurse is going to poke her head in the door and tell us that Dr. Snell is ready for the next patient.”

She smiled a little fixedly without turning her head.

I tried again: “I’ve often wondered why so many people go away on a train for their honeymoon. They know they’ll have neither comfort nor privacy. The honeymoon is one of the three or four most critical periods in life, but away they go to spend it in a box on wheels.”

“At least we’re not on a honeymoon,” she said. “I don’t see anybody else that is, either.”

She went on studying the other passengers, temporarily more interested in them than in my attempts at conversation. Our seats were at the rear end of the car, next to the bar. That was strategic. Across from us was a middle-aged woman in a grey fur coat which might have been chinchilla but probably wasn’t. There was a girl beside her, eighteen if she was a day, dark and pretty and bright-looking. Every man in the car had already paid her the tribute of a once-over followed by another once-over.

The girl’s eyes were soft and dark, but they weren’t shy. She was returning the once-overs. “Don’t stare, dear,” said the woman in the almost chinchilla coat. Evidently the relationship was that of mother and daughter.

My first impression had been that the mother was comfortably middle-aged and content to be out of the running. When she took off her coat I had my doubts. She wore a dress ten years too young for her, her bosom was carefully disciplined and exalted, and her waist was corseted to the point of exquisite extinction. The sort of woman, I thought, who is eager to be mistaken for her daughter’s older sister and never is. I found out later that her name was Mrs. Tessinger and her daughter’s name was Rita.

Rita’s interest in her fellow mortals refused to be slapped down. She was watching with the innocent arrogance of the late female teens a man of thirty or so who was sprawled in a seat on my side halfway down the car.

His face was long and sulky, blue-black where it had just been shaved. His eyes were small and black, set close together as if in competition. From his parsimonious temples receded a stiff brush of hair as black and coarse as the tail of a black horse. He wore a blue serge suit with an air of having been born in one. He made me think of a brunette Uriah Heep. It took me a long time to learn his name, but when I did I never forgot it.

“I wonder what he’s grousing about,” Rita Tessinger said, as if he were ungrateful for the privilege of breathing the same air which she breathed with such pleasant undulations of her diaphragm.

“Don’t make personal comments, dear,” said Mrs. Tessinger, like a record prepared by Emily Post.

“What other kind of comments are there?”

“We could talk about the weather,” the woman on the other side of Rita said in tones of husky amusement. “Hellish, isn’t it? Those lake winds shrivel the flesh on my bones. Me for the sunny South.”

“I love the South,” said Rita, to indicate that she’d been there. “But I love Chicago too. It’s so exhilarating.”

“It’s a big city, that’s one thing you can say for it. But I can get fed up with a big city.”

She spoke as if she had seen a good many big cities. I wondered in what capacity. She was a sharp-nosed woman in her fifties with an overpainted weatherbeaten face, but with something of an air which even her taste in clothes couldn’t completely destroy. She wore a wool suit of robin’s egg blue, and a flame-colored blouse which matched the color of her highly decorated cheeks. Beneath the mascara camouflage her eyes were old, bland and shrewd. When her hands moved, a small travelling museum of junk jewelry clinked on her arms. Her hands moved constantly, shaking in a steady tremor of senile ecstasy. Yet she had an air. She looked like a woman who had been through a great deal and come out with money, or with power in some other form.

Mary caught me watching her and, with the impersonal cattiness of women, whispered: “Isn’t that hat a fright?” It was. It was large and haphazardly plumed. The whole woman was a fright. But the man next to her didn’t seem to think so. He looked sideways at her frequently with naïve interest.

At first glance, his interest in such a woman was the most noticeable thing about him. His plump, uncertain joviality, his carefully cut and thinning hair, his healthy shoulders becoming infiltrated by fat, his thick silk ankles crossed in front of him, his severely pressed and already crumpling grey pin-stripe suit, and his expensive and passionate tie announced: I am a successful American business man. His hands were large and hard-looking, indicating that he had once worked with them. He wore a handsome ruby ring, indicating that he would never work with them again.

The train trembled and came to life, jerked two or three times and began to move, and the successful American business man took his cue.

“It’s great to get under way, isn’t it?” he said to the object of his interest. “I thought we were never going to get going.”

“Me either,” she replied. “California here I come.”

“You live in California, do you?”

“More or less. Mostly more. Do you?”

“No, I can’t say I do. I have business interests there, take me down there two or three times a year. But I’ve never been able to stay long enough to get sick of it.”

“What business are you in?”

“Well, I have investments in various types of enterprise. Oil, for one thing. As a matter of fact, oil is getting to interest me more and more.”

He talked about the oil business.

Without a man to talk to, Rita estimated me, was challenged by Mary’s glance, dropped her eyes demurely, soon became restless again. She tapped a small neat foot on the rug, and puffs of dust rose up like smoke from little distant explosions.

“Don’t fidget,” said Mrs. Tessinger, without raising her fine eyes from Mademoiselle.

The morning wore on, and no one appeared to man the bar. The suburbs of Chicago fled backwards into merciful oblivion. The quick, monotonous rhythm of the train’s movement worked into my consciousness and beat there like a tiny extra heart. I began to get the feel of travelling, the slow excitement of escape.

After Bessie Land’s death every Detroit scene had a thin margin of nightmare, every Detroit building had a sub-basement of horror. I had told myself that I was going south to look for Hector Land, but I knew I was also running away from a city which had turned ugly in my eyes, and a problem that had become too tough.

One thing alleviated my feeling that I was evading responsibility, the fact that the FBI was working on the case. Hefler had attended the inquest on Friday, and had told me enough to assure me that it wouldn’t end there. He already had investigators at work on Black Israel, and while they were gathering their facts it was just as well to let Bessie Land remain officially a suicide.

I tried to convince my conscience that I had done and was doing what I could. Still, my sense of relief told me that I was running away. But it was soon borne in upon me that my running was as effectual as that of a squirrel in a wheel or a whippet on an endless oval. Wherever I went the rats had tunnelled under the streets. I thought I was taking a trip for the hell of it, but I found out that I was being taken for a long ride.

The first call for lunch brought me out of my thoughts. “I haven’t been a very brilliant companion recently,” I said to Mary.

“So what? I like you when you don’t talk, maybe even better.”

“I want to be loved for my eloquence alone.”

“No man ever was. Come on, we’d better get in line before it gets too long.”

Standing in line behind her I blew on the back of her neck and said: “Anyway, the things I want to say to you couldn’t be said with people looking on.”

She responded with the least pressure of her shoulder against my chest. The morning, which had seemed rather dismal, became a success, and the thought of the fun we were going to have on the trip went to my head like wine. The hangover from a wine jag is the worst there is.

An old lady directly in front of Mary turned around to look at her and, finding her appearance sympathetic, said: “Isn’t this an outrage, making us stand in line for lunch like this? I declare, if I had known it was going to be like this, I’d never have left Grand Rapids!”

“There are a lot of troops moving these days,” Mary said.

“Well, you would think the government would make some arrangement for people that pay their way.” The old lady noticed my uniform and became silent. Mary looked back at me with a quick smile.

“It used to be a real pleasure to eat on a diner,” the man behind me said. “Now I eat what I can get and call myself lucky. After all, there’s a war on. Isn’t that right, sir?”

It was the fat man in the oil business. I turned to acknowledge the question and saw that the woman in the flame-colored blouse was with him. Perhaps he was a faster worker than he looked.

The line slowly moved up to the diner, and we ended up at a table for four, with Mary and me on one side, and the oil man and his companion on the other.

“My name’s Anderson,” he said, reaching across the table to constrict my hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Ensign.”

“Drake is the name. This is Miss Thompson.”

“And this is Miss Green,” Anderson said.

Miss Green displayed teeth which were a little too good to be true, and said in a light bantering way: “So you two aren’t on your honeymoon, after all. The way you looked at each other I thought maybe you were on your honeymoon.”

Mary blushed and said, “We’re just friends.”

“Oh, well, you’re young yet,” Miss Green said surprisingly. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

“It’s us older folk that have to gather us rosebuds while we may,” Anderson said. “Isn’t that right?”

Miss Green laughed without meaning and lit a carmine-tipped cigarette with an automatic lighter. The tremor of her hand made the flame flicker steadily like a candle in a light draft. Something intangible about her reminded me of hospitals, and I wondered if she had a serious disease.

“I suppose you’re on leave, eh, Mr. Drake?” Anderson said. “I envy you young men the experiences you’re having in this man’s war.”

“Yes. I was in the South Pacific for a year.” I looked at him more closely. He wasn’t so old. In his middle forties, perhaps. But it was hard to tell about a face like that, plump and pleasant with unintelligently boyish blue eyes.

“That’s one of the things I like about a train journey,” Miss Green said. “You’re always meeting new people, and I never get tired of meeting new people.”

“Neither do I,” Mary said, with a shade of irony in her tone. “Trains, ships, street-cars and buses are great places for meeting new people.”

“Also funicular railways and houseboats,” I said.

Miss Green wasn’t so dull as she’d seemed at first. She let out a laugh which ended in a fit of coughing. Between gasps she said, “Don’t forget the subway.”

“One of the finest things about America is the way Americans make friends so easily,” Mr. Anderson said. “Some of the most interesting contacts I ever made are people I met on trains, people I never saw before and will never see again. How about that, Mr. Drake?”

“Yes,” I said.

We had a mediocre lunch enlivened by a good deal of such conversation. When we made our way back to the club car Mr. Anderson and Miss Green were still with us. He seemed to have taken a liking to me, and I learned with a sinking heart that he was going all the way to Los Angeles.

He made up for his conversation, however, by announcing that he possessed a bottle of Scotch. He proposed to break it out in order to cement our transcontinental friendship. From a creaking new rawhide bag he produced a quart of Teacher’s Highland Cream. The steward had appeared in the bar and gave us setups, and we had a round of highballs.

“Now this is something like,” said Mr. Anderson. “How about it?”

I told him that this was something like.

Mr. Anderson said a few well-chosen words on the immense future of the oil business.

The man next to him leaned forward with his elbow on his knee in a respectfully listening attitude, as if he had been waiting for a long time for a chance to hear about the future of the oil business, and this was it. He was a sandy-haired little man with the ambiguous face of a clown or a character-actor. His features contradicted each other. A bold forehead and a timid chin, the coarse battered saddlenose of a pug and a delicate emotional mouth. His eyes were blue and completely empty, ready to contain anything.

They seemed especially ready to contain Rita Tessinger, who was the real reason for his leaning forward. He hadn’t caught her eye yet, but he would. Every now and then he permitted his gaze to wander from Rita to the bottle of Scotch, which Anderson had set down beside his chair.

On the second round Anderson offered him a highball. He drank it quickly and expressionlessly, uttering a soft sigh when it was gone.

“You’re a pal,” he said. “I’ve got some bourbon in my suitcase but it can’t compare with this. Nothing can. My name’s Trask, by the way, Teddy Trask. Call me Teddy, everybody does, and it’s only fitting. I was named after Theodore Roosevelt. My father was a Bull Moose Republican, still is. He hasn’t voted since 1912.”

There were introductions, and before long another round of drinks.

“Funny thing,” said Teddy Trask, speaking loudly enough to be heard by Rita Tessinger. “I was over in Scotland not so long ago, and couldn’t get any Scotch for love or money. I come back to the States and what do I get? Some Scotch.”

“What were you doing in Scotland?” Mary said.

“Mr. Anderson,” said Teddy Trask. “You’re a unique man. You are the man who gave me the first drink of Scotch I’ve seen in six months. Nowhere in Europe could I find a drop of it.”

Rita Tessinger was watching him with bright interest. Mrs. Tessinger raised her eyes from her magazine, sniffed inaudibly, and returned to her reading.

“Excuse me,” Teddy Trask said to Mary. “I was in Europe entertaining the troops. Three shows a day for six months. Some fun. Now they want me in the Pacific. Where’s Trask? Nimitz says to MacArthur. We want Trask. So here I go.”

“What sort of a show do you do?”

He took a cigarette out of Anderson’s left ear and lit it with a bewildered smile. Rita Tessinger laughed excitedly.

“I’m a magician,” Teddy Trask said. “I’m an illusionist. I also read minds.”

Rita spoke for the first time. “Please do some mind-reading. I’d love to have my mind read.”

“Anybody but yours. I like you the way you are, mysterious.” She blushed at the outrageous compliment, but swallowed it whole.

“Anyway, I do wish you’d do some more tricks. I think tricks of magic are utterly fascinating, don’t you, Mother?”

“Utterly,” said Mrs. Tessinger flatly.

But Teddy Trask needed no urging. He opened a black leather suitcase and made his preparations. Then, for an hour or more, he showed us his bag of tricks. He changed a glassful of rice into a whiskey highball. He performed all the variations of the ring trick. He did things with cards and found unexpected objects in Anderson’s breast pocket, in Miss Green’s hat, in Rita Tessinger’s purse. The train crawled across the flat snowbound farmlands of Illinois, crossed the frozen Mississippi, and began to crawl into Missouri. The bottle of Scotch became empty and Teddy Trask and I opened our bottles of bourbon.

Mrs. Tessinger broke down and had a highball, and allowed Rita a short one.

“You said you could read minds, Mr. Trask,” Rita said when he was packing up his gear. “I think it would be awfully interesting if you’d read somebody’s mind.”

“I shouldn’t have shot off my mouth. I can’t do much in that line without a helper.”

“I’ll help. Just tell me what to do.”

He grinned like a satyr. “I’d like to take you up. But I need a trained partner. Right now my partner’s in Frisco.”

“Is she going out to the Pacific with you?”

“It’s a he. Unfortunately. Sure he is.”

“I don’t understand why you need a partner.”

“Well, you can do a one-man mind-reading act, but that takes preparation. It’s much better as a two-man act. Joe and I have a pretty tricky little routine. You should see it sometime.”

“I’d love to.”

He poured another round of highballs and passed them around. “A very tricky little routine,” he insisted amiably over his fresh glass. “I usually stay on the stage and Joe goes down in the audience. So he asks a guy to take something out of his pocket or a woman to take something out of her purse and hold it in their hand. Right away – I’m up on the stage, see? – I tell the audience what it is. Now how do you think I do that?”

“I suppose you have some sort of a system of signals,” I said.

“This certainly is interesting,” said Anderson, with a boyish pleased smile.

Everyone at our end of the car was listening, except the dark man with the long sullen face. He was half-turned in his seat, frowning out the window at the water-ravaged earth of northeastern Missouri as if he felt personally responsible for it.

“Sure, we have signals,” Teddy Trask went on. “We’ve got a dozen systems. For example, Joe touches his left eye – it’s a lipstick. He touches his right eye – it’s a watch. He smoothes his hair – it’s a handkerchief. That’s the simplest kind. But say I’m blindfolded, that system doesn’t work. I’m blindfolded, can’t see a thing. What do we do then?”

“You could have verbal signals,” I said. “Key words that would mean something to you, but not to anybody else.”

“Say, this boy’s sharp. Isn’t this boy sharp?” he said to Anderson.

“Sharp is absolutely the right word for him,” said Anderson.

“Sure, we use key words,” Teddy went on. “But you’d never figure our best system. Our best system is a honey. Get this. Joe and I practiced counting together with a metronome. We set it for one beat per second and practiced counting with it, must have been three or four hours a day for a month. We got so we could count together up to a hundred and always be both on the same number.

“O.K., we’re putting on a show. I’m up on the stage, blindfolded. Joe’s down in the audience, talking. He gives me the signal to start counting, and we both start counting together. He goes on with his line of patter, talking and counting at the same time. Then he gives me the signal to stop. We both stop counting, and we’re both on the same number, see? Let’s say it’s thirty-five. Thirty-five is a lady’s brooch. Forty-five is an automatic pencil. Every number has a meaning.”

“That’s wonderfully clever,” Rita said. “But what if it’s something you haven’t got a number for?”

“That’s practically impossible,” Teddy said proudly. “There only are a hundred things that people carry in their pockets or their purses. Of course we have to change some of the meanings for a military audience. But not as many as you’d think.”

“I thought I knew a little about codes,” I said. “But this is the first time I ever heard of a time code. Did you invent it?”

“Sure. Joe and I invented plenty of them. I tried to tell the Army Signal Corps about some of them, but they weren’t having any. They seem to think all they’re good for is entertainment.”

I noticed that the small black eyes of the man by the window were watching him. His impassive ophidian stare made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. He was as silent as a snake, and his long heavy-shouldered body had some of a snake’s quiet menace. I was interested in Teddy Trask’s codes and wanted to hear more about them. They struck my mind with a sense of unexplained excitement, like an answer to a question which had troubled me once but had been forgotten. But I decided to wait for a time when we’d have more privacy.

I met Teddy in the smoking compartment a few minutes later, and thanked him for the entertainment.

“Always glad to oblige,” he said with a wide rubbery smile. “Keeps me in practice. By the way, what do you think of that Tessinger girl?”

“She’s as pretty as hell. If I didn’t have other irons in the fire–”

“Yeah, you have, haven’t you? That girl of yours is as slick a blonde as I’ve seen for a long time. You’ve got your hands full, but not everybody can have his hands full of that kind of a package.”

“You seem to be doing all right with Rita.”

“Sure I am. And I like ’em young. I’m getting so I like ’em so young they look as if when you touch ’em they’ll smear. It looks as if I’ll have to break down the old lady first, though. But that shouldn’t be so hard.”

“Have you got a system for that, too?”

“Watch me,” Teddy said. “Just watch me.”

7

UNDER the influence of the pleasant tedium of motion, the fading effect of whiskey, the soft advance of night, I felt comfortable and sleepy and a little sad. While I sat holding hands with Mary, the train became a luminous worm boring through a continent of darkness. Our lighted car was a center of life and brightness moving in a mysterious shadow pinpointed by the infrequent lights of lonely farms and lost static towns.

She yawned charmingly, curled in her chair like a kitten, and brushed my shoulder with her cheek. “A penny for your thoughts,” she whispered.

“I was thinking about Teddy Trask’s code.”

“Damn you, I thought maybe you were thinking about me. Give me back my penny. I might as well be holding hands with a mechanical thinking machine.”

“You put your penny in the slot, and that’s what came out. I’m not responsible for the workings of my fine well-oiled brain.”

“Well-oiled is the word. Well-oiled with whiskey. And what was the thinking-machine thinking about Teddy Trask’s code?”

“I was thinking that a code like that might possibly be used by an enemy agent. Remember the argument I had with Eric that day in Honolulu? All the codes and ciphers I knew about involve the use of letters, numbers or words. But a code like that of Trask’s could be used without any of them. A monitor wouldn’t even know he was listening in on a code.”

“I don’t get it. But you go right ahead and think about your codes, and I’ll think about all the interesting men I’ve met in my life.”

“Have I been neglecting you?” I squeezed her hand.

“You’re not now. Maybe I won’t think about all those interesting men. As a matter of fact they weren’t so very interesting.”

At dinner we sat with an army officer named Wright who had boarded the train at Fort Madison. He was a short rotund man about forty, wearing the oakleaf of a major and the insignia of the Army Medical Corps. His interest in Mary was too obvious and self-assured to please me. His special field was the psychiatry of battle exhaustion, and he gave us a lecture on it with the air of a peacock spreading his tail-feathers.

In the diner I noticed that Teddy Trask had contrived to share a table with the Tessingers, and that Mrs. Tessinger was beginning to regard him with some favor. Anderson and Miss Green, at a table by themselves, seemed to have found a great deal to talk about.

Shortly after eight o’clock we reached Kansas City, where our Pullman was to be added to the train. There was a half-hour wait, and Mary and I, along with most of the other occupants of the club car, left the train for a breath of air and a walk on the station platform. When our time was nearly up, an army private carrying a large canvas bag came up to me and said:

“Can you tell me where Car 173 is, mate?”

“Isn’t that our car?” Mary said. “It’ll probably be down at the far end.”

The three of us walked down the platform and found Car 173, which was the last car on the train. I left Mary in our compartment and went back to the club car to fetch our bags. When I got back to the Pullman most of our friends from the club car were there: Major Wright, Anderson and Miss Green, the Tessingers with Teddy Trask hovering helpfully about them. The old lady from Grand Rapids had one of the two drawing rooms to herself, and I noticed some time later that the dark man with the sulky face had the other.

The soldier who had asked me his way was sitting in our compartment with Mary while his berth was being made up. He was a young-old man somewhere between 25 and 35, with a lean tanned face and a long lanky body. He said his name was Hatcher. He wore the European Theatre ribbon with three battle stars, and the bottoms of his khaki trousers were tucked into high field boots. I noticed when I sat down beside him that he was a little drunk. I myself was feeling no pain.

As the train began to move he said in a soft voice that had probably originated as a Missouri drawl: “Well, I wonder when I’ll get to see K.C. again.”

“Home on leave?” I said.

“Brother, you said it. And what a leave. Wowy. I’ve seen London and Paris and Shanghai, but K.C. is the town for me. I spent seven hundred and forty dollars in two weeks, and it was worth every cent of it.”

“You didn’t see Shanghai in this war.”

“This war has been going on longer than some people think. I was in Shanghai in ’37. I was a seaman on a British freighter. After that I had a berth on a British passenger ship in the Yangtze fleet.”

“You should be in the Navy.”

“I tried to get into the Navy, but I couldn’t pass the physical. I was in good enough physical shape to move in on Sicily and walk across Normandy, but not good enough to get into the Navy. What do you know about that?”

“I’ve always said the infantry had it tougher than anybody else. The Navy has a pretty quiet time, unless your ship gets hit and you have to swim for it.”

“This is the most unusual Army-Navy debate I’ve ever heard,” Mary said with a smile.

“Well, it’s the truth,” I said with somewhat alcoholic emphasis. “I know damn well the chief reason I applied for a commission in the Navy was so I wouldn’t be drafted as a private in the Army.”

“Say, brother, I like your attitude,” Private Hatcher said. “You’re open-minded, even if you are an officer. How about a drink on it?”

He started to get up but I stopped him. “I’ve got a bottle right here. Half a bottle anyway.”

We each had a drink but Mary turned it down because we had no mixer.

“You say you spent some time in China in the thirties,” I said. “Did you see anything of the Chinese war?”

“I saw the rape of Nanking. It’s something I won’t forget.” His gaze turned inward, and his face lost its cheerful expression. Mary looked at him with interest, but said nothing.

With something compulsive in his voice, something reminiscent of the Ancient Mariner, Hatcher went on: “The ship I was on was hauling passengers out of Nanking up the river to Hankow. Most of them were European, British and French and Russian and some Americans, getting out of Nanking while the getting was good. This was in the winter of 1937. We loaded up the ship for the last run – we didn’t know it was going to be the last run but it was – but we couldn’t get any food for the passengers. We lay off Nanking fully loaded with passengers for a day and a night, while the first mate beat out his brains trying to get something for them to eat. There was food in Nanking all right, see, but the Japs had moved in on it.

“On the second day the first mate went into town, and took along me and five other fellows who knew how to shoot. We were supposed to be a sort of bodyguard. I’ll never forget that walk along the wall to the city. I’ve seen things in Europe since, but nothing like that. On both sides of the wall for it must have been a couple of miles, there were piles of corpses, stiff and starved-looking and sort of thrown together and tangled in heaps. It’s the only time I ever saw human beings treated worse than cordwood.”

Mary was pale and her eyes were large and bright. Hatcher noticed this and said: “Excuse me. I shouldn’t be shooting off my mouth like this. Anyway, you can see why I’m sort of looking forward to getting into the Pacific half of the war. I never felt just the same way about the Germans, but I reckon that’s because I never saw a Nazi concentration camp.”

“Did you manage to get food for your passengers?”

“Yeah, we got in touch with a black market operator. He was a white man, too, can you beat that? But he had an in with the Nips all right. I guess he’d cornered just about all the rice in the city, and he was asking monopoly prices. The first mate finally got about fifty bags, but it didn’t do much good.”

“Why not?”

“When we were one day up the river the Nips bombed the ship. Nearly everybody got off her, but she burned right down to the water. We had a hell of a time getting back to Shanghai. After that I got out of China.” He smiled slightly. “I thought I was getting out of China for good, but I bet I’m there a year from now. I’d like to meet the little yellow-belly that dropped that bomb.” Anderson moved past us down the aisle. I offered him a drink, and he joined us. I told Mary that I’d go to the club car and try to get some setups, but Anderson said:

“I don’t think he’ll sell you any. Kansas is a dry state.”

“I’ve had enough to drink anyway,” Mary said.

I hadn’t. We continued to work on my diminishing bottle. Anderson had a short one and went back to Miss Green. The porter started to make up our berths, and Mary went to sit with the Tessingers while Hatcher and I moved down to the men’s smoking-room.

He leaned towards me and said in an elaborate alcoholic whisper: “Is that fat guy a friend of yours?”

“No, I just met him on the train today.”

“What’s his name?”

“Anderson. He’s in the oil business.”

“So his name’s Anderson, eh? And he’s in the oil business, eh?”

“Do you know him?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I reckon maybe I do. If I do, it’s going to be very interesting.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh,” he said, “he just looks like an interesting kind of guy. I’ve always been interested in the oil business.”

If I had been in another mood his evasion would have made me curious, and I’d have tried to cross-question him. But the pulse of good whiskey was beating in my body like a long lifting swell. I was swathed in the mellow calm of semi-drunkenness. At the distance of the day’s journey and the Olympian height from which I regarded them, even the deaths of Sue Sholto and Bessie Land seemed unimportant. Their ruined bodies were trivial things, broken dolls remembered from somebody’s childhood. The whole dark world outside the train window was unreal to me. The only reality was the bright moving room in which I sat drinking with an interesting companion, and the reflection of my own stupidly complacent face in the dark pane.

Hatcher had taken a crumpled envelope from the breast pocket of his khaki shirt, and was fumbling in his other pockets.

“What are you looking for?” I said. “Name it and you shall have it.”

“I’ve got a letter here I’ve got to get off. I’m damned if I know what happened to my pen.”

I handed him mine. He told two folded sheets from the crumpled envelope and spread them out so that I could see that they were closely covered with handwriting. Holding a magazine on his knee he began to write on the back of the second sheet, moving his lips as he silently spelled out the words to himself. If I had been a lip-reader I’d have known the contents of his postscript, and perhaps been able to save his life.

When he had finished he replaced the amplified letter in the envelope and gave me back my pen. I noticed that the letter was already stamped and addressed, and marked ‘Airmail.’

“I should have got this off before. Girl-friend,” he said. “Do you know if there’s a place I can post a letter on the train, or do I have to get off and post it in a station?”

“There’s a mailbox in the club car. It’s a glass box on the wall between the writing table and the bar.”

“Thanks.” He sealed the envelope and went away. But he reappeared in the doorway in a few minutes carrying a bottle of whiskey. The letter was still in his other hand.

“Your whiskey’s all gone,” he said. “Try some of mine.”

He handed me the bottle and went away again. The label on it, which was unfamiliar to me, announced that it contained Rare Old Bonded Kentucky Bourbon, Aged Five Years, Ninety Proof. I broke the seal and uncorked it with the corkscrew on my penknife. I thought I detected the rough rank odor of fusel oil, but I suppressed my doubts and poured myself some in a paper cup. It wasn’t a smooth drink but it was warming, and at that stage I didn’t care.

Hatcher came back, having posted his letter in the club car, and asked me how I liked his liquor.

“It’s terrible,” I said. “But I’ve drunk worse.”

His first drink made him snort. “It’s terrible all right. With this liquor shortage, I had to take what I could get, but the guy that sold it to me said it was real bonded stuff. God knows I paid enough for it.”

“I wish I’d brought more liquor from Chicago,” I said. “I forgot about these dry states. Say, maybe Anderson has some more. I’ll ask him.”

Anderson was sitting with Miss Green in a darkened compartment at the other end of the car. Close together, with their faces turned to each other, they looked incongruously like lovers. But what they were talking about, from the few words I caught before they noticed me, was the oil business in New Mexico. It occurred to me that perhaps he was trying to persuade her to invest money in one of his enterprises.

I broke in on their oleaginous endearments and told Anderson how liquorless I was. But he said:

“I’m sorry, old boy, but you and your friend will have to drink what you’ve got or go dry.”

“He’s your friend too,” I said.

“What do you mean by that? I never saw him before in my life.”

“Maybe he’s seen you somewhere. He was talking as if he knew you.”

There was a trace of impatience in Anderson’s voice now. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you anyway. That Teacher’s was all I had.”

I underwent one of the swift changes of mood which occur in an alcoholic state, and became suddenly ashamed of myself.

“Excuse me,” I said to Anderson, and bowed low to Miss Green. “Excuse me for disturbing you so tactlessly.”

“Hell, that’s all right, old boy,” Anderson said heartily. “It happens to all of us. I’m only sorry I can’t help you out.”

Mary left the Tessingers, who were on the point of going to bed, and joined me in the aisle. Most of the berths were made up now, and the car had shrunk to a high narrow tunnel between green curtains. Some of the unreality of the world outside had seeped into the train. For a moment I had a sense of terror, as if the dim aisle were an ancient path in an unknown jungle where dangerous creatures waited in ambush.

“We’re coming into Topeka,” Mary said. “Let’s go out on the platform and have a look.”

We made our way to the platform at the rear of the car. Topeka was a scattering of lights, a series of warehouse walls broken by glimpses of almost deserted streets stretching drearily into darkness, then a quickly extinguished vista of neon lights grinning in many colors on the unheeding heads of after-movie crowds, finally the long irregularly lit platform of the station. One of a hundred such cities that one saw for the first time with remembering boredom, and left immediately with relief. My jag was running down like an unfuelled engine, and I felt very sorry for all Topekans, whose city was a poor gathering of feeble lights in the immense darkness of the hemisphere.

Mary slipped her warm hand between my arm and my side. “When I was a little kid I was very poor,” she said dreamily. “I used to watch the passenger trains come into the station. It was the bottom of the depression, but there were still plenty of rich people to ride them. I had never been on a train, and it seemed to me that the men and women behind the lighted windows were like kings and queens on thrones.”

I was touched by what she said, but distrusted the sentimentality. “Every kid feels that way about riding on trains,” I said. “But once you’ve taken a few trips the illusion collapses. The parts of cities you see from trains always seem to be on the wrong side of the tracks.”

“I’ve still got my illusion. I feel more alive when I’m on a train. It gives me a feeling of power to ride across the country and leave the rest of the world sitting.”

“I guess you’ve never grown up. Maybe you’re lucky.”

“Maybe I am, but it’s sort of painful. Now I’m the lady in the lighted window, but I still see myself the way I did when I was a kid. I’m on the inside looking out, but I’m on the outside looking in, too.”

“You’re schizophrenic,” I said, and kissed her.

The baggage and mail had been loaded, the travellers taken aboard and the doors closed behind them. The brakemen swung their lanterns and the train began to move, laboring toward the staccato frenzy of speed.

Her mood changed suddenly, and she said:

“I shouldn’t have spent so much time with the Tessingers, but I couldn’t resist the situation. Mrs. Tessinger must know as well as I do that Teddy isn’t interested in her, but she’s a woman, and she just can’t help being grateful for his flattery. He’s been saying the most outrageous things, and she eats them up.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, everything. Her beauty, her youthful spirit, her energy, her clothes. Tomorrow, I expect, he’ll go into all the anatomical details.”

“What’s Rita’s reaction?”

“Admiration, so far as I can see. She knows what he’s doing, and she seems to be all for it. She’s spent the last few years in a very conservative girls’ school.”

I took hold of Mary and kissed her again, hard.

“You are a little drunk, aren’t you?” she said.

“Do you mind?”

“No, I’m very tolerant.” She put her hand on the back of my neck, drew my head down, and kissed me. “Let’s go in now, shall we? I’m cold.”

We turned toward the door but before my hand found the knob, the door opened and Hatcher’s long lean face appeared in the opening:

“Say, mate, I was looking for you. I been all the way up to the club car looking for you. How’s about another drink?”

“Go ahead if you like it,” Mary said. “I’m going to bed.”

She kissed me lightly on the cheek and disappeared down the passageway.

“She’s a sweet number,” Hatcher said. “How did you happen to get in so close with such a sweet number?”

“I met her in Honolulu at a party. Then I met her again in Detroit.”

“Some guys are born lucky. She looks like warm stuff to me.”

“Even if I am not entirely a gentleman,” I said with a certain pomposity, “Miss Thompson is a lady.”

“Don’t let her kid you. They all have the same instincts. The same beautiful instincts.”

“Shut up, God damn it! I’m thinking of marrying this girl.”

“Sorry. Sorry. You got your angle and I got mine. Play it the way you like it. How about that drink?”

“Anderson didn’t have any. We’ll have to drink yours.”

“O.K., I was weaned on moonshine. Come on, I left the bottle in the smoking-room. Hope it’s still there.”

It was under the seat where he had left it. He fished it out and took a long pull from the mouth. I poured a little in a paper cup and drank it, but the interruption had spoilt my taste for drinking. Besides, the stuff was even more nauseous than I remembered. My stomach flopped over like a dying fish.

“Jesus,” I said, “this stuff is terrible. Worse than any jungle juice I ever had.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad.” In a spirit of bravado, Hatcher tipped up the bottle and took another long gulp. In the next few minutes he swallowed his adam’s apple more frequently than was normal, but he managed to control any other symptoms of queasiness.

He sat back and lit a cigarette and told me some of the things he had seen as a merchant seaman. The sailor in Canton who had his belly slashed by a razor and came running down the street with his bowels exposed. “Yeah, I heard they sewed him up and he got over it.” Once on a little tramp steamer on which he shipped out of Australia he had a mad captain who slept every night with a lifesize rubber woman. Her painted rubber face, the captain’s steward said, gradually grew paler from his kisses.

As he told that story, Hatcher’s own face gradually grew paler. His bright blue eyes became glaucous and rolled slowly in their sockets. His speech became blurred as if someone had swaddled his tongue in cotton batting. “’Scuse me,” he said finally. “Don’t feel s’good.”

With his jaw hanging beneath pale parted lips he got up with an effort and lumbered through the door to the men’s toilet. For a few minutes I could faintly hear the sounds of retching, like heavy paper tearing.

I didn’t feel so good myself. The smoking room rocked cumbrously like the cabin of a ship riding a long deep swell. The lights in the ceiling divided like amoebas and danced like elves. I raised my right hand to my face in order to cover one eye and stop their insane reproductive dancing, but my fingers struck me across the bridge of the nose. I discovered that my hands were exceedingly remote objects, only partially animate and only nominally under my control. My whole body was growing numb, as if my nervous system were a live wire gradually going dead as the battery ran down.

It seemed to me that the train was slowing but perhaps, I thought, it was only my metabolism. Suddenly the train stopped with a jerk, lights outside the window became as fixed as my eyes could hold them, and my stomach flopped over again like a dead fish turning in its grave.

Hatcher was still in the men’s room, so there was only one thing for it: I had to get outside. On legs which were as hard to handle as rubber stilts I got out into the passageway. The walls seemed to expand and contract on either side as I edged my way between them across the buckling floor to the door.

I stumbled out onto the open platform into cool night air under a high clear sky. The stars descended upon me like an elevator in a shaft.

8

AS THE falling stars entered the narrow field of my consciousness they patterned themselves in circular groups which began to turn. Rotating towards each other the wheels of stars clustered like grapes into a turning silver fist, a rolling white eyeball, a seed of light which eloigned itself in darkness until it was a remote chink in a bellowing heavy curtain and finally swallowed up. Then the low sallow sky of unconsciousness, starless as the skies of hell and roiled and weaving at the desolate horizon with dusky orange smoke, blossomed suddenly in an intricate array of turning wheels. In time with a low humming which rose and fell like the sourceless ululation of cicadas, the wheels spun monstrously in geometric patterns.

My surviving speck of consciousness was as helpless and hurried among them as a grain of sand caught up in the churning of a millwheel. Yet the innumerable millwheels churned an element as intimate as my blood.

Come as close to death as you may, there is no complete cessation of consciousness. The mind’s torment clings to the flesh till the heart has stopped and the brain dies. While I lay straddled by nightmare my mind, lost in the horrible interior of my body’s engines, prodded them into continued effort. My diaphragm wrestled with paralysis and won. I went on breathing.

The dark wheels lost their motion and their shape, extending, like a spattered gout of blood, blood-red fingers which groped among the unknown terrors of my situation. I lay in a jungle of dark weaving tendrils and limp leaves which swayed and bowed like sinuous feathers in a desultory wind. When I opened my eyes this soft inconstant world was resolved into the real world of solid dimensions. But a trace of the movement persisted in a teetering of the whole universe above me. The fulcrum of this motion was the small of my back, which seemed ready to break under the strain.

I was conscious of a dark rectilinear shape, as fearfully palpable as the lid of a tomb, which loomed between me and the night sky. Reflected dimly by this huge and shadowy object, I saw faint lights, some fixed as stars, one or two moving like comets in remote orbits. Like a voice calling across stellar space, I heard a faint “All aboard!” A light moved in an arc near me. I became conscious, in a blinding flash of terror and recognition, that the painful fulcrum on which my back rested was a rail. I was under the train and it was about to move across my body.

Simultaneously I let out a yell which was drowned in the snort of rushing steam, and flung myself forward. I struck my head on a brake rod. Grovelling and scuttling like a lamed crab I dragged myself out from under the wheels and flung myself on the platform beside the rails.

“What the hell!” somebody said.

I turned on my back and sat up, and a brakeman came towards me swinging a lantern.

“Hold the train,” I said in a hoarse voice hard to recognize as my own. “I’m supposed to be on it.”

He moved his lantern in a signal and I lost my feeling that the train was pawing the ground with its steel hooves. “Look here,” he said. “What were you doing under the train?”

Self-pity and the hammering and droning in my head made me bark irritably, “Lying there. For fun.”

He took hold of my arm and dragged me up: “You get up on your feet and give me a straight answer. This train can’t wait all night.”

My legs were still only partly under my control, but I balanced myself on them.

“What’s the matter, you sick?” the brakeman said. “Say, you’re drunk.” He shook me by the shoulder. I struck his hand away.

The conductor came up, biting impatiently at his heavy grey moustache. “What’s the holdup here?”

“I was unconscious,” I said, unnerved into childishness because I had never been unconscious before. “Somebody put me under the train.”

“He’s drunk,” the brakeman said. “You can smell his breath. He says he’s on the train.”

“Well, get the hell back on or I’ll call the Shore Patrol. Wait a minute, let me see your ticket.”

“It’s in my berth. Don’t you know me?”

The brakeman raised his electric lantern to the level of my face and the conductor gave me a narrow-eyed look. “Yeah, I know you. Climb back on and get in your berth. You’re lookin’ bad, boy. And if you make any more trouble this trip, any trouble at all, the S.P. will put you off the train.”

There was no use in arguing and I was uncertain of my grounds anyway. I transported my roaring head and raw throat down the platform to the end of the car, up the iron steps, in the door, down the passageway toward the men’s smoking-room. Before I got there the train had begun to move. Remembering my flashing terror of the wheels, I had a swelling sense of relief, like a man walking on a grave in which his own empty coffin has been buried.

My relief gave way to blank wonder and then to another terror when I saw that the men’s smoking-room was empty, and found by experiment that the door of the men’s room was locked. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked more loudly, until the sound of my knocking echoed in my tender skull like the blows of a metalsmith’s hammer. There was still no answer.

I tried the knob again and rattled the door in its frame. Then it occurred to me with a pang of shame that I was acting like a child. Hatcher, of course, was in some other part of the train, probably in bed by this time.

But the door was locked, and it locked only on the inside. If there was anyone in that little room capable of speech, he would have answered. “Hatcher!” I called through the wooden panels. “Hatcher!”

“What’s the trouble?” someone said behind me. “Gotta go bad?” I turned and saw Teddy Trask wearing a purple silk bathrobe over candy-striped pajamas, and carrying a shaving kit.

“I think there’s a sick man in there. The soldier that got on at Kansas City.”

“My God, you don’t look so good yourself. Where’d you get the dirt all over your uniform? Let me see this door.”

He tried the knob and examined the narrow space between the door and its frame. “We’ll soon find out.” From his shaving kit he took a new safety razor blade, unwrapped it deftly, and applied it to the crack of the door.

When he had been hunched over his work for perhaps a minute I heard him say “There!” and the bolt snapped back in its socket. He turned the knob and opened the door, but it wouldn’t open far.

He forced it a few inches more till the space was wide enough for his head, and looked around the edge of the door.

“My God!” he said. “What’s the name of that Army doctor down the line?”

“Major Wright.”

“I’ll go and get him.”

He hustled away, his slippers lapping the floor in quick syncopated rhythm. I took my look into the little room.

Hatcher was kneeling on the floor in a posture similar to the Moslem attitude of prayer. Most of the weight of his body was supported by his legs, which were bent under him. His head, turned sideways, rested on the edge of the toilet bowl. The wall light two feet above his face allowed me to see that his one visible eye was staring blankly at the blank wall. There was about him a souring sweet smell of sickness and drugs.

I tried to get in to him, pressing my shoulder against the door, and he moved suddenly. He fell sideways into immediate stillness like a loosely filled sack. I felt such pity for his helplessness and indignity, which I myself had so nearly matched a few minutes before, that I cried out.

“Here, here,” Major Wright said behind me, taking hold of my shoulder with one hand. “Let me see what I can do for him.”

While I stood back on unsteady legs and watched, Teddy Trask, who was smaller than I, stepped around the door. He maneuvered Hatcher into a more nearly upright position, embraced his chest from behind, and brought him out into the smoking-room where he gently laid him out on the floor. Hatcher’s face grinned bleakly at the ceiling.

The doctor made a quick examination, attempting to take his pulse, inspecting his chest and mouth for signs of breathing. When he touched a staring eyeball with his finger I winced and turned away, but not before I had noticed the absence of any reflex. Private Hatcher’s eyeballs were as insensate as glass.

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Major Wright said, squinting at me over his shoulder through rimless spectacles. “What made him sick?” There were marks of Hatcher’s sickness on his rumpled uniform.

“We were drinking some pretty terrible liquor,” I said with shame. “I passed out, too.”

“It would take a good deal of liquor to kill a man like that. How much did he have?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a pint in the last couple of hours.”

“Is there any of it left? I want a look at the stuff.”

The bottle of Bonded Bourbon was in plain sight on the floor near Hatcher’s limply spread field boots. At the sight of it my nerves crawled. I picked it up with aversion and handed it to him. He uncorked the bottle and took one sniff. His squinting little eyes narrowed to two steel edges.

“This man’s been drinking ether,” he said. “No wonder he’s dead.”

He recorked the bottle quickly and replaced it on the floor.

“Those poor bloody dog-faces never learn,” Teddy Trask said. “Two of my buddies in France drank poison liquor. One of them died, and the other’s blind.”

Major Wright looked at him sharply at the word ‘dog-faces.’ He said to me: “How much of this stuff did you drink, Mr. Drake?”

“A couple of short ones. But that was enough to put me out. How long did we stop at that last place?”

“Emporia? About five minutes. Why?”

I told him why.

“Do you suggest that someone deliberately dragged you under the wheels of the train?”

“I don’t suggest it. I state it. I know I didn’t do an Anna Karenina under my own power. I passed out on the rear platform, and if I’d fallen from there I’d have fallen either behind the train or to one side. I couldn’t have fallen under the wheels.”

“You can’t tell what you did when you were unconscious. Ether makes people do some awfully funny things.”

“Such as die,” I said.

“That’s true too. All the ether addicts eventually die if they keep it up. Where did this bottle come from?”

“He bought it somewhere in Kansas City. I think someone poisoned it.”

“Someone on the train, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“We’d better get the conductor and the Military Police,” Major Wright said.

“I’ll get them.” Teddy Trask slapped away again.

“That’s a genuine seal on the bottle, isn’t it?” I said.

He examined it near-sightedly. “Looks like it to me.”

“I broke that seal myself. I even smelled it when I opened it. It didn’t smell so good, but I didn’t smell any ether.”

“You didn’t smell the ether when you drank it, either. Some people don’t have a very good sense of smell, especially when they’ve been drinking. I think your olfactory evidence is questionable.”

I admitted sheepishly that that was true.

“Smell this.” He uncorked the bottle and passed it quickly under my nose. “Do you smell ether?”

“I can’t be sure. I’m not very familiar with drugs.”

The odor was a pungent, sweet and nauseous mixture. It reminded me of hospitals and of something else which I couldn’t place.

“That’s ether all right,” he said. “I’d stake all the money I ever earned in anaesthetist’s fees on it.”

“Is ether ever used in cheap liquor to hop it up?”

“I’ve never heard of it. But you can’t tell what these bootleggers will do. I’d never touch bootleg alky myself.”

A combination of things, the sick hospital odor in the air, the dead man on the unswept floor, and my own reaction from fear, made me dizzy again. The room lost weight and reality, became a foul shape-changing bubble in a dark stream. For a minute I held on to the curtain in the doorway with both hands. Then by an effort of will I focussed my eyes and mind again. But I felt shaky.

Major Wright was watching me narrowly. “See here, you’re looking terrible. Sit down on this seat.”

He took my pulse and listened to my chest. “You couldn’t have got a great deal of that stuff, or you wouldn’t be up and around. An ounce taken internally is enough to kill a man. But you’ve got to remember ether poisoning sometimes has secondary consequences. You go to bed now and let me look at you again tomorrow.”

There was the sound of several footsteps approaching in the passageway. “I’ll go in a minute. But first I want to talk to the conductor. That’s probably him now.”

The conductor came in preceded by his paunch and followed by a Shore Patrol man. He was biting his moustache hard as if the tobacco which stained its fringes was edible but bitter.

Then he saw the dead man waiting on the floor. A tremor of nervous anger went through him, from his knees through his belly and heavy shoulders to his multiple chin.

“What in God’s name happened?” he said.

Major Wright took natural charge of the situation. “This man is dead. I’d say it was ether poisoning, though I can’t be sure without an autopsy. The dead man and Ensign Drake here were drinking poison liquor.”

The conductor raked me with a hard old eye. “That’s what you were doing under the train, eh? Don’t you know it’s illegal to drink liquor on a train in the State of Kansas?”

“It’s more illegal to poison people,” I said unpleasantly. “Somebody poisoned that bottle.”

He picked up the bottle and examined it, turning it over and over in his hands. His palms were netted with dark lines like a railway map.

“Where did the liquor come from?” the S.P. man said. He added a perfunctory “sir.”

Wright answered him. “Private Hatcher – the man there on the floor – got it in Kansas City. The stuff’s got ether in it.”

“Look here,” the conductor said suddenly. “This is how the ether got in.”

He had turned the bottle up, and the discolored nail of his right forefinger pointed to something in the bottom. It was a small circular flaw in the center of the thick round glass.

“I’ve seen this done before,” he said, “mostly during Prohibition. In my state it would be technical homicide.”

“What is it?” Major Wright said.

“Somebody who handled this liquor drilled a hole in the bottom of the bottle and extracted the good liquor. Then he refilled the bottle with his own deadly concoction, and sealed the hole with molten glass.”

The S.P. man, who was young and eager, said: “I’ve seen that done, too. You can change the liquor without opening the bottle and breaking the seal. It’s a quick way to make money. If you don’t care what happens to the people that drink the cheap stuff.”

“Murder is a quick way to make money,” the conductor said solemnly. “This is technical homicide.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The salesman who sells poison liquor is legally responsible for its effects. That’s probably the Missouri law the same as it is where I come from. But it’s going to be an awful job finding the liquor store where this bottle came from.”

My certainty that someone on the train had poisoned the bottle was dissolving and trickling away. I had a hard time trying to think clearly.

“Does this mean it couldn’t have been poisoned on the train?”

“It sure looks like it,” the S.P. man said. “You don’t get equipment on a train for melting glass and drilling bottles. It’s this consarned liquor shortage that does it. These fly-by-night sharks know that the boys will drink anything if it’s all they can get, and they take advantage of it. We get more trouble from bad liquor than from everything else put together.”

“Damn it!” I exploded. “I didn’t walk under the train by myself.”

Major Wright put his hand on my shoulder. The paternal effect was spoilt by the fact that he had to reach up. “You can’t tell what you did. Maybe it just looked like a comfortable place to lie down.”

The light dazzled me. My eyes were sore and heavy in my head. My throat felt raw, as if someone had reamed it out with a file. “This is the third death,” I said. “Yet nobody seems to give a damn. Don’t people get tired of all these deaths?”

The conductor and the S.P. man paid no attention to me. They were making plans to get Hatcher’s body off the train.

“Look,” Major Wright said. “I like my work, but one corpse on my hands is enough for one evening. For God’s sake go to bed. That’s an order in two senses, professional and military.”

“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Good night. Pleasant dreams.”

On the way out I heard him tell the conductor that he thought he’d close Hatcher’s eyes, because the sclera of the eyeball was drying and turning brown.

The ladder was standing ready at my upper berth. As I started up on shaky knees, I noticed that the light in Mary’s lower berth was still on.

“Sam?” I saw her white hand fumbling between the heavy green curtains, and then her face. Washed shining for the night, with her bright hair done up on top of her head, she looked naïve and very young, like a nymph peering between green boughs.

I said, “Good night.”

“Sam, what’s the matter with your face? What’s happened?”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake everyone.”

“I won’t be quiet. I want you to tell me what’s happened. You’ve got a bruise on your forehead, and you’re covered with dirt. You’ve been fighting.”

“No, I haven’t. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“Tell me now.” She reached up and took light hold of my arm. The confused alarm on her face was so flattering that I almost laughed.

“If you insist. Move over.”

I sat on the edge of her berth and, in a low voice which grew steadily hoarser, told her what had happened.

More than once she said, “You might have been killed.”

The second time I answered, “Hatcher was. By God, I don’t believe it was an accident. Maybe that poisoned bottle was intended for me.”

“How could anyone know that you were going to drink out of it? And didn’t you say a hole had been bored in the bottom and resealed? That couldn’t have been done on the train.”

“I don’t know. I do know one thing. I’m not going to touch another drink until I get to the end of this trouble.”

My mind’s eye was struck by the sordidness of the scene which had seemed jolly enough at the time: Hatcher and me sprawled on the shabby leather seats of the smoking-room drinking ourselves to death or to the edge of it. A strong revulsion placed me for the first time in my life on the side of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

The remembered scene was so vivid that I could see every detail of the room, the brown bottle on the floor, Hatcher’s thin lips mumbling over his letter.

“I wonder if it’s still on the train,” I said to myself.

I must have spoken aloud because Mary said, “What?”

“Hatcher’s letter. He wrote part of a letter while I was with him and went to mail it in the club car. Maybe it’s still there.”

“Do you think there could be anything in it bearing on his death?”

“It’s possible. I’m going to the club car now, before that letter’s taken off the train.”

I leaned forward to get up but she laid a restraining hand on my arm. “No. I’ll go. You look terrible, Sam.”

“I admit my head’s swimming. I think it’s trying to swim the English Channel.”

“Poor dear.” She patted my arm. “Please go to bed, Sam.”

“See if you can read the name and address on that letter through the sides of the box.”

“I will.”

I climbed the ladder to my berth. It seemed very high. I took off my coat. It was such an effort that I played with the idea of simply falling back and going to sleep as I was, without undressing. I heard the heavy rustle of Mary’s curtains falling to behind her, and then the soft rapid sounds of her feet retreating in the direction of the club car.

Then I heard fainter sounds moving towards me, a mere susurrus of feet so faint that it was suspicious. I opened a narrow crack in my curtain and peered down. Moving swiftly and silently like a panther in the jungle path which I had imagined the aisle to be, a man glided beneath me in the direction Mary had gone. All I could see was the top of his head and his shoulders, but I knew him by their shape.

When the door at the end of the car had closed softly behind him I climbed down the ladder and followed him. My mind, inflamed by shock and fear, hated the beady-eyed man so much that I hoped wildly I would catch him in some overt act, and have an excuse to club him with my fists. He had looked like an animal stalking game. I felt like another.

But when I stood on the shaking windy platform at the end of the club car and saw him again through the window in the door, he was standing in the passageway quietly doing nothing. Rather, he was standing with his face turned away from me, intently watching the interior of the car. Making no attempt to conceal my movements, I opened the door and walked towards him. He started and turned in a quick graceful movement and his right hand jumped unconsciously towards the left lapel of his coat. I deliberately jostled him as I passed him, and made contact with a hard object under his left breast which could have been a gun in a shoulder holster.

It was Mary he had been watching. She was sitting by the mailbox at the far end of the shadowy car, which was half full of sleeping people and dimly lit by a small light at each end. As I walked towards her among stretched-out legs, I tried to keep in the line of vision of the man in the passageway. She glanced up startled when she heard me. She had a pair of eyebrow pluckers in her right hand and Hatcher’s letter in her left.

“Put it back,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re being watched, and it’s a Federal offense to tamper with a mailbox.”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“I told you to try to read the address through the glass. Now put it back.”

There was so much intensity in my voice that her hand moved as if in reflex and dropped the envelope through the slot.

“Did you get the address?”

“No. It was your fault I didn’t.”

I looked back over my shoulder and saw no one in the passageway. “I didn’t want you to get in trouble. There was a man watching you.”

“Who?” The pupils of her eyes had expanded, making them seem almost black. Her mouth was soft and vulnerable, and her hands were trembling slightly.

“The black-haired man with the beady eyes. He was in this car this morning.”

“Oh.”

I crouched down and tried to read the address on the envelope, but it was lying in shadow. I lit my lighter and tried again. I couldn’t make out the complete address but I saw enough for my purpose: Laura Eaton, Bath Street, Santa Barbara. I wrote it in my address book while Mary looked on.

“Why are you doing that?”

“I’m going to go and see her. I want to know what’s in that letter.”

“Is it that important?”

“It’s important. I’m getting very tired of people dying. People should die of old age.”

Her hysteria suddenly matched mine. She rose with her blue silk robe sweeping about her in tragic folds and embraced me with arms so tense they almost hummed.

“Please drop it, Sam,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll be killed.”

“I’m beginning to think that’s not so important. I don’t like these ugly deaths.”

“Don’t you want to live, Sam?” Her eyelids held bright tears like evening dew on the closing petals of flowers. “Don’t you love me?”

“I hate the cause of these deaths more. If you got off at the next stop I’d stay on. Perhaps you’d better.”

Her mood changed suddenly. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay on. If you’re going to be any good tomorrow you’d better get some sleep.”

“You’d make a good wife.” I kissed her.

“Do you think so, Sam? Do you really think so?”

A disturbed sleeper in the shadows behind us began to snore in loud protest.

“We’d better go to bed,” I said.

We passed the dark man again in the vestibule of our Pullman. He was standing at the window looking out, but he turned and stared at us as we went through. Tension hung sharply in the air for a moment and the blood pounded angrily in my temples. But I could think of nothing to do except to go to bed.

When I closed my eyes in my berth, it swayed like a windswept treetop. Outside my cell the train whistle howled desolately, and the night rushed by like a dark wind. Where are we going? I wondered in languorous desolation, and then in sleep moved confusedly among blank staring eyes. I wandered among forests of dead flesh beside typhoid streams, and emerged in an open space where a hunchbacked spider cocked his beady eyes at me and scurried away on many legs. The sun was bloody red and throbbing in the lowering sky, a beating heart which as I watched it became pale and still, and the pulse of the world stopped. I wandered in the desert of the dead world, its rotting crust crumbling beneath my running feet till it gave way utterly and I fell endlessly in a soundless void.

The worried and impatient face of the Pullman porter appeared between my curtains and announced that it was noon.

9

I GOT to the diner on the last call for lunch. On the way I saw Mary in the club car, where she was talking with the Tessingers. She walked down to the end of the car with me. She looked fresh and untroubled, clear of last night’s hysteria.

“Are you all right, Sam? You slept like a log all morning, and I hated to wake you.”

“There’s nothing I like better than sleeping in till noon. But it’s the first time I ever had a hangover after twelve hours’ sleep.”

“You should stick to nice pure alcohol.”

“I’m sticking to nice pure water.”

“I know you are. Everybody’s out of whiskey and we can’t buy any from here on.”

“It’s just as bad as being at sea.”

She leaned towards me and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Is it?”

“Well, not exactly. Life was generally much more tranquil at sea, and much less interesting. There weren’t enough women to go around–”

“None at all, in fact?”

“None at all, in fact. It’s sort of nice having women around again. I’ve always wanted a dog, too.”

“Dogs are easy to get.”

“Not as easy as you think. I am a victim of a dog shortage. Behold me dogless.”

“You are feeling better today.”

“I had to. I couldn’t have felt any worse.”

“You’d better hurry if you want anything to eat. I had my lunch ages ago.” She went back to the Tessingers.

The diner was still crowded, and my ears turned red as I walked down the aisle between the alert tables. I knew what the old ladies of both sexes would be saying behind their hands. Practically drank himself to death. Think he’d have more self-respect. Gentleman by Act of Congress. Disgrace to the uniform he wears. The trouble was that the old ladies had half the truth on their side. In the white light of hangover, my actions of the night before looked criminally foolish.

Major Wright was at a table by himself and nodded to me to join him. “You’re looking a bit better. Feeling all right?”

“Pretty good. My throat’s still sore, though.”

“Ether’s a pretty powerful irritant. I’ll have a look at your throat this afternoon.”

Looking out the window I was struck, with the inextinguishable surprise of travelling, by the difference that a day’s journey made. I had left Detroit and Chicago shivering in the grip of the northern lake winter. The prairie outside the window now was snowless and sunlit under a summer sky.

“Where are we? I haven’t looked at the timetable.”

“The Texas Panhandle. The last town we stopped at was Amarillo.”

“The spring comes early up this way.”

“It’s the best time of the year here. It gets too hot in the summer.”

The subject of the weather had been exhausted, and I asked him the question that was on my mind: “What happened to Hatcher?”

“His body was taken off at Wichita. I turned him and the whiskey bottle over to the Kansas state police. They’re going to get the Missouri police to try and find the man that sold it to him. They seemed rather doubtful that they’ll be able to. Kansas City is a big town.”

“What will happen to his body?”

“It’ll be shipped to his next of kin in Kansas City. He’s got a brother there, according to his papers. They’ll do an autopsy, of course. I would have liked to do that autopsy myself.”

“I don’t share your wish.”

“It’s a very interesting process. You retrieve the ether from the tissues by distillation. Gettler has described it, I believe.”

Over our inadequate meatballs we watched the sere flat fields slide sideways past us. There was a charcoal smudge across the horizon from the carbon-burners in distant oilfields.

“Hatcher’s death has definitely been put down to accident, then?”

“I don’t know what else you could call it, from his point of view, that is. From the point of view of the dealer, it’s technical homicide.”

“Isn’t it possible that the bottle was poisoned on the train?”

“That hole couldn’t have been made on the train.”

“But perhaps the ether was added after I opened the bottle. It was sitting in there unguarded at various times.”

“Who would be carrying ether on a train?”

“A doctor might,” I said at random. “Are there any other doctors on the train?”

The suggestion didn’t please Major Wright. His round face set in a frown of offended dignity. “I don’t know, I’m sure. Members of the medical profession don’t go around putting poison in liquor bottles.”

“Of course not,” I said soothingly. “You’re satisfied in your own mind that Hatcher died by accident, then.”

He didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said: “From the physical point of view, yes. From the psychological point of view, it’s not so simple. Hatcher must have known that he was drinking bad liquor. You did, too, didn’t you?”

“I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“Still you must have known you were taking a chance. Then why did you drink it?”

“I wanted a drink, and that was the only drink available.”

“Precisely. You wanted a drink. Why did you want a drink? Why did Hatcher want a drink? I’ll tell you why. In a word, because life wasn’t good enough for you. You wanted a little escape, a little death. Perhaps it was the war you wanted to get away from. Basically, though, you wanted to get away from yourselves. Excessive drinking is deliberate suicide by degrees.”

His discourse would have interested me at another time, but right now I had too many other things to think about. The night before I had intended to tell Major Wright the whole story. Now it seemed useless. His mind was made up, and it would probably be a waste of breath to try to change it. Even if I tried, what reason could I offer for Hatcher’s death? And which of the passengers would make a plausible suspect?

I tried to go over in my mind the events which led up to Hatcher’s death. My brief period of unconsciousness hung in front of the evening like a transparent curtain which distorted it. My memories of the night were empty glasses magically refilled, a warm ballooning sensation whirling towards the edge of nausea, snatches of conversation, too many cigarettes, sudden faces in the bright light. Anderson, Miss Green, the Tessingers, Teddy Trask, the dark man in the blue suit – I still didn’t know his name, but Uriah would do. So far as I could recall, any one of them could have had access to the bottle. It had been unguarded in the smoker for at least ten minutes, while Mary and I went out on the platform to look at Topeka.

It seemed useless to try to eliminate people I knew. There were so many other people on the train whom I didn’t know, and who might equally well have poisoned the bottle. Still, my mind had to take hold of something or it would tear itself to pieces like a motor with nothing to push.

Least likely first. The Tessingers. Rita was no suspect. She was a sweet kid only. A bobby-soxer in a bell-jar, waiting for somebody to lift the lid. Her mother, of course, was the lid. The old lady had some fire, especially since Teddy had been blowing on the coals. But the mind had to take a great leap to imagine her in a homicidal role. Mrs. Tessinger was something of a lady, a genteel woman if not a gentlewoman. She wouldn’t permit herself to get mixed up in spying and murder, if only because they weren’t respectable.

Major Wright. Sitting across the table from him and looking at his face was enough. He was rather pompous and self-important, probably because he had short legs. But he was a good man.

Teddy Trask. He was an elusive character. Probably capable of a good deal of trickery, on and off the stage. But he just didn’t seem built for murder. He had too much of a sense of humor, for one thing. For another, he had paid no attention at all to Private Hatcher. Besides, I liked Teddy.

Uriah with the short black hair. He puzzled me, and he made me angry. So far as I knew, he hadn’t said a word to anyone on the train. Yet he was constantly popping up. I had a feeling that he listened to everything that was going on, and wrote it all down in a little black book. I made a resolution to see that imaginary little black book. And I hoped I had to fight him for it.

Miss Green. There was a good deal of experience in her face, not all of it acquired at strawberry socials and Sunday School picnics. I had seen brokendown dancers and aging party girls with the same desperate devotion to cosmetic youth as she had, and the same knowing old eyes. She looked like a woman who refused to be kidded. I wouldn’t put crime past her, but it would have to pay. And it would have to be less risky than murder.

Mr. Anderson. A type which I had always disliked. My first impression was that he was a stupider and less interesting Babbitt. I still thought he was stupid, but he didn’t fit so neatly into the Babbitt pattern. A woman like Miss Green was apparently his meat. He had a bluff silly jovial air, but he seemed to understand situations. The things he said gradually seemed to get less stupid, though they never got past average. Perhaps the main thing which made me distrust him was an impression of power he gave. Yet his whole approach belied it. The last thing a Babbitt will let you imagine is that he has a will of his own. Still I felt there was a raw low-grade power in Anderson. That wasn’t much of a reason for suspecting him of murder, but I did.

Major Wright had excused himself and gone away, a little displeased by my lack of interest in his ideas. The diner was empty of passengers, and the headwaiter was looking at me inquiringly. Something about the car, probably the Negro waiters in their white coats, reminded me of Honolulu House and Mrs. Merriwell.

It occurred to me with an unpleasant shock that perhaps my prejudices limited my thinking as much as her prejudices limited hers. After all, there was plenty of reason for thinking that Hector Land had killed Sue Sholto and run away to escape the consequences. And there was a Negro porter in our Pullman, a Negro I knew nothing about. For all I knew, he could be a member of Black Israel.

I found the porter sitting by himself at the end of our car. He was reading a magazine with such close attention that for a moment he didn’t see me standing beside him. Then he looked up, closing the magazine on a black finger. It was the Atlantic Monthly.

Looking into his lined face, set in dignified reticence, I felt like a fool. I was about to question a man about a murder for the sole reason that he was black. Then something that Wanless had said to me came to my rescue. He had advised me to consult an intelligent Negro about Black Israel.

“Would you object to my asking you one or two questions?”

He stood up, leaving the magazine on the seat behind him. “No, suh. You can ask me any question. That’s one of the things I’m here for, to answer questions.”

“My question has nothing to do with your job, but it’s important to me. Is there anywhere we can go to talk?”

“We can go to the vestibule, suh. There’s nobody out there just now.”

He followed me out to the vestibule, where the spring wind swept in through the open halves of the doors.

“My name’s Drake,” I said, and held out my hand.

He regarded it with cautious impassivity, as if it were a gift which might explode in his face. Then he took it perfunctorily, withdrawing his hand quickly as if from a trap. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Drake, suh. Mah name’s Edwards, suh.”

He held his speech carefully in the Amos ‘n’ Andy tradition, the slurred speech which whites have learned to expect of Negroes and resent the absence of.

I realized that I was getting nowhere fast. “Look, Mr. Edwards” – I made the Mister as casual as I could – “I used to work for a newspaper in Detroit, and I’ve always tried to help your race. You’ll have to take my word for that, but it’s true. A few days ago a woman I knew, a Negro woman, was killed in Detroit. I have reason to believe that an organization called Black Israel had something to do with her death. I haven’t been able to find out anything about Black Israel. Can you help me?”

“I don’t mess with things like that, Mr. Drake. Except for our Brotherhood, I keep myself to myself.”

“I went to Dr. Wanless at the University of Michigan. He advised me to consult an intelligent Negro.”

“Professor Wanless? I heard him speak at a meeting in Chicago. He was a fine speaker.” He had begun to use the plain Midwestern English which is natural to a Negro born in the Middle West and educated in the public schools. I felt that his resistance was lowering.

“I know that Black Israel is a Negro society. I suspect that it’s the kind of thing that intelligent Negroes disapprove of. Can you tell me anything about its purposes and methods?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Drake, but what use are you going to make of anything you find out?”

“I’ll tell you frankly I don’t know. I do know that the FBI is investigating Black Israel. If I find out anything that they haven’t already learned, I’ll turn the information over to them. You see, I discovered the body of the woman who was killed. The night before she died I heard her mention Black Israel, and I heard a man, another Negro, warn her to keep quiet. I got the impression from what she said that Black Israel was subversive.”

“So the FBI is after them,” the black man said. “It’s about time.”

“You have heard of Black Israel, then?”

“I’ve been approached. But I’ll tell you, Mr. Drake, I wouldn’t touch Black Israel with a ten-foot pole. It started out respectable enough but it went downhill fast. It’s my own opinion that somebody got into it who had an axe to grind. At one time I thought it was the Nazis. That was in forty and forty-one, when Black Israel started to go rotten.”

“The Nazis? What made you think that?”

“We had our own investigations, Mr. Drake. Investigations of certain – certain things which threatened to do harm to our cause. There was fascism behind some of the movements which claimed to speak for the Negro in America, – it was strong in Detroit. Our Brotherhood has always looked out for things like that.”

“But you said you no longer think that the Nazis are behind Black Israel. What made you change your opinion?”

“The kind of propaganda they used, chiefly. You know the propaganda that some politicians put out whenever the Federal anti-poll-tax bill comes up on the floor of Congress. That the black race is inferior, unfit for political equality, closer to the apes, careless children for the white men to look after and teach to do a few simple chores?”

I suspected that, consciously or unconsciously, he was quoting from the editorials of the racist press, but his deep voice vibrated with sincerity. He knew what he was talking about, since he had lived intimately with it for forty years.

“I know the kind of stuff you mean. Surely Black Israel didn’t use that sort of thing?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Drake. That’s the point. Black Israel has the same line, but it’s on the other side of the fence. They’re just as violent for black supremacy as the Southern politicians are for white supremacy. Their line is that the day of the white races is over, and the colored races are coming into their own. It’s a line that appeals to the unconscious desires of a good many people of my race, but all it can lead to is trouble. That’s what the Nazis want, of course, but I can’t imagine Hitlerites supporting propaganda for black supremacy.”

“I don’t know. Their motto is divide and rule, and they don’t care how they do the dividing.”

“But they’ve been backing the other corner. I know for a fact that there were fascist agents in some of the violent anti-Negro movements in Detroit. Dr. Wanless confirmed that in his talk on the race riots.”

“They’re quite capable of playing both ends against the middle. I’ll admit, though, that the Black Israel propaganda you’ve described sounds more like the doctrine the Japs have been using in East Asia.”

“That’s exactly what I think, Mr. Drake. I’ve done some reading about the Japanese line in Burma, and this smells like a fish out of the same barrel.”

“Do you know anything about the leaders of Black Israel?”

“They stay in the dark. Black Israel is a secret society. I’ve been approached – I told you that. I’ve listened to their come-on speech and I’ve read a couple of their pamphlets. That’s all I know.”

“Who approached you?”

He had been looking into my face as we talked, holding my attention with intent black eyes. Now he half-turned away and looked out of the open door. He ran the fingers of his right hand through his greying wool in a nervous gesture. Finally he said: “I won’t tell you, Mr. Drake. And if you use the information I gave you, please don’t mention my name.”

“Black Israel is dangerous, isn’t it?”

“You said that a woman you knew got killed.”

“I won’t mention your name. I’m very grateful for what you’ve told me. It was a pleasure to talk to you, Mr. Edwards.”

“Thank you.” A smile kindled on his lined and rather forbidding face. “Well, I better be getting back to work.” Before he went back into the sleeping car, a definite change took place in him. His large erect torso became somehow amorphous. Meaning went out of his eyes like a snake slipping into its hole. His movements became faintly shifty and apologetic, as if all his intentions were subject to change at a moment’s notice on somebody else’s whim. His personality shrank to fit the smooth black shell which white opinion has hopefully constructed for Negroes to live in. Watching this change, which I had never seen before because I had never before seen anything but the smooth shell, I felt a movement of anger and pity stir at the bottom of my mind. I felt that I had witnessed a partial death.

But the rest of my mind was vaguely elated. In less than three weeks I had stumbled across three bodies, each of which had seemed to be projected across my path violently and causelessly out of impenetrable darkness. Some of the shadowy horror of that darkness was beginning now to take form, becoming identifiable as a shape of human evil which I could begin to understand. Understanding it, I could fight it. I was determined to fight it. I hated the cause of those ugly deaths as intensely as I would have if Hatcher had been my brother, and the Jewish girl and the Negro woman my sisters.

Mary came to the door and joined me on the platform. “Mmm,” she said. “I can smell spring in the air.”

“Aren’t you sick of eternal spring, after those months in Hawaii?”

“I was when I left, but a few days of northern winter made me homesick for spring again. Maybe I’ll never go north again.”

“Aren’t your family in Cleveland?”

“Oh, yes. But they can come south. I really think that’s what we’ll do. What were you talking about with the porter?”

“I wrecked my blues last night. He’s going to clean and press them for me.”

“I like you in greys. It took you a long time to persuade him, didn’t it?”

“Oh, we got to talking. I’ve always been interested in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.”

Later that day, when she would have less reason to connect my theory with my conversation with the porter, I brought up the subject of Sue Sholto’s death.

“I don’t believe Sue Sholto committed suicide,” I said. “I made some inquiries in Detroit before we left, and I found out that Black Israel is a violent and subversive organization. I believe that Hector Land belonged to it, and that his wife Bessie had learned a good deal about it, perhaps enough to put the finger on one or more of its leaders. Hector himself may be one of its leaders. In any case, I’m reasonably certain that Bessie Land was killed to keep her from talking. It’s barely possible that she was frightened into killing herself, but if so, somebody connected with Black Israel frightened her.”

“You started to say something about poor Sue,” Mary said. She spoke as if the memory was painful to her, and I remembered the terrible jangling which Sue’s death had given her nerves. “What has Bessie Land to do with Sue?”

“I’m becoming more and more convinced that they were killed for similar reasons, if not by the same person, by the same organization. Don’t forget that Hector Land is associated with both killings, and he is definitely a Black Israelite.”

“That’s true,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps he killed Sue after all. But why?”

“Certainly not for the reason Mrs. Merriwell gave. Her accusation was a red herring which really served to protect him by confusing the issue. Can’t you think of a reason? I know you feel loyal to Sue’s memory, but can’t you think of anything which would connect her with Hector Land? You saw her every day.”

“Sue lived a quite simple, ordinary life. She had love affairs, but you knew that. She wasn’t promiscuous, she was monandrous while it lasted. Of course she was a Communist, but I don’t see what that could have to do with it.”

“She was a Communist?”

“Oh, I don’t mean that she had a party card. Nothing like that, so far as I knew. She had Communistic views on some things, that’s all. Perhaps I should have called her a fellow-traveller.”

“What things?”

“Government ownership of heavy industry, the race question, things like that.”

“She did, eh? Why on earth didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I saw no point in bringing it out. It seemed irrelevant at the time. You know that the very mention of Communism to a great many people is like a red rag to a bull. It still seems irrelevant to me.”

“It may be irrelevant, but I’m not going to drop it till I make sure. I’m going to ask the FBI to investigate Sue Sholto.”

“Have you been to the FBI?”

“I didn’t mean to tell you that. Yes, I have.”

“Why don’t you leave the case to them, then, Sam? Can’t we forget it for a little while?”

“I know. We came on this trip together to have fun. I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out that way so far.”

“It never will,” she said bitterly.

“Maybe I’m not as callous as I thought. I can’t forget about the things that have happened. Or maybe it’s just that last night they started to happen to me.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” Her wide stare searched my face.

“Yes. I’m afraid. But from now on I’m going to be more careful. Eventually I’m going to get my hands on somebody or something that I’ll take great pleasure in choking to death.”

“You make me shudder.” She smiled palely, but her hand had involuntarily gone to her throat.

“Did I scare you? I’m sorry.”

I looked around, decided that our compartment gave us enough privacy, and kissed her. Her head went down to my shoulder and her bright hair tickled my face. With my arms around her I could feel a light shiver run along her back. She leaned towards me and we held each other close. I breathed through her fragrant hair. I felt that she was more precious to me than a part of my own body. She said: “Don’t ever let me go.”

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Tessinger said. She was standing in the aisle, smiling down at us with exaggerated tolerance.

We separated quickly, and Mary’s hands went automatically to her hair. I started to light a cigarette, then remembered that smoking was forbidden in the Pullman.

“I didn’t mean to butt in,” Mrs. Tessinger said. “Would you two care to have dinner with us tonight?”

Mary looked at me and giggled. “Sam. There’s lipstick on your mouth. Here, let me take it off.”

She dabbed at my face with a handkerchief. I surreptitiously kissed her hand.

We had dinner with the Tessingers. Teddy Trask, who was inseparable from them by this time, made a fifth on a chair placed in the aisle. Mrs. Tessinger was extraordinarily vivacious. Her bosom seemed higher than ever, and her waist tighter. Rita sat by the window with an air of being left out of things. Every now and then she gave her mother a black glance edged with malice.

“I was so hoping you’d give us another performance this afternoon,” Mrs. Tessinger said to Teddy. “Why did you let us down?”

“I didn’t feel in the mood, after that nasty business last night. I guess not many other people did either.” He looked pointedly at me.

“Do you really think you and that soldier were deliberately poisoned, Mr. Drake?”

“I don’t know. The authorities don’t seem to think so.”

“I think Mr. Drake would rather talk about something else, Mother. The subject must be painful to him.”

“The experience was painful,” I said. “The subject isn’t particularly. I’m afraid I can’t be very entertaining on that topic, though.”

“Teddy, do tell Mr. Drake and Miss Thompson those glorious shaggy-dog stories of yours. This man is priceless,” Mrs. Tessinger said to us.

“But we’ve heard those stories, Mother.”

“I’m sure that Miss Thompson and Mr. Drake haven’t heard them. Even if they have, the way Teddy tells them, they’re very well worth hearing again. Teddy, I insist.”

With a deprecating smile, Teddy told a long and involved shaggy-dog story about a man who worked in a zoo and couldn’t remember the names of the animals. Mrs. Tessinger kept up a low tittering. Rita looked out of the window. Mary watched the three of them with a faint smile on her lips.

He told the story well, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. Something kept prodding at my attention from below, an unremembered fact in my unconscious which insisted on its importance and clamored to be remembered. When Anderson and Miss Green moved past us down the aisle, her junk jewelry tinkling like faint facetious sleighbells, I realized what it was.

Hatcher had said something about Anderson before he died, something which seemed to indicate that he knew him. The possible implications of this, strengthened, if anything, by Anderson’s denial, hit me suddenly and hard.

Anderson had sat down a few tables away, with his broad impassive back to me. I felt like getting up and going to him then. But I stayed where I was, watching the plump whitish wrinkles in the back of his reddish neck, wondering what went on under that thin barbered hair, inside that stolid head.

Mary’s hand found mine under the table. “What’s the matter, Sam?” she said in a whisper.

“Nothing. I was just thinking.”

“You’ve got a dreadfully one-track mind.”

“I guess I have.”

The story ceased, and we laughed dutifully, except for Rita. As if to convince herself of her own existence, she launched into a rapid strained monologue on all the things she was going to do in La Jolla, and what fun she was going to have. Mrs. Tessinger and Teddy exchanged long queer looks.

Then Teddy talked about his practically front-line experience in France. Mrs. Tessinger wreathed herself in girlish graces. Teddy seemed larger than he had the day before, as if somebody had blown air into him. I liked him better small.

Mary and I excused ourselves when we could, and made our way back to the Pullman. When Anderson came back with Miss Green, I went to him and told him I wanted to talk to him.

“Absolutely, old son,” he said. “Any time. I hear you had some trouble on the train last night.”

“Trouble is the word. Would you mind coming down to the smoking-room? There’s nobody there just now.”

“If you’ll excuse me, Miss Green?”

“Oh, don’t mind me. I’ve got a love-story magazine to read.”

When we were seated in the smoking-room and Anderson had lit a cigar, I said: “Private Hatcher, the man who died last night, seemed to know you. Did you know him?”

“He must’ve made a mistake. I told you I never saw him before in my life.” Anderson’s smooth plump face was unruffled. His pale blue eyes were alert.

I said quickly on a hunch: “How did you get out of Shanghai?”

Preceding his statement by a pause of just the right length, he said with just the right combination of puzzlement and irritation: “But I’ve never been to Shanghai. What are you trying to get at?”

I was sitting on the leather seat beside Anderson, half-facing the door. There was no audible sound in the passageway, and no visible movement, but a subtle combination of sight and hearing made me conscious that someone was there. I got up and crossed to the door in one motion, and faced the dark man again.

I said in a voice that was ready to break with cumulative anger: “I’m getting bored with having a shadow. Get out of here.”

His face was unmoved. He said softly: “Excuse me. I didn’t realize that you were in a position of authority on this train.”

“That has nothing to do with it. If I catch you eavesdropping again I’m going to slug you.”

“If you slug me, as you so elegantly put it, I’ll have you arrested. I may even slug you in return.”

His black eyes were hard, steady and impenetrable. I felt an urgent need to surround them with matching black rings. But if I did, the Shore Patrol would put me off the train. My frustration was so strong and bitter that it gathered in a lump in my throat. I left him standing there and went back into the smoking-room.

“Let me give you a word of advice,” said Anderson, who hadn’t moved from his seat or shifted his cigar. “You’re all keyed up, and I can’t say I blame you. But if you keep on going around insulting people like this, you’re going to get into a peck of trouble. Just now you practically accused me of having something to do with that soldier’s death. A minute later you accused that young man of eavesdropping. I know you had a tough time last night, but don’t let it make a crank out of you.”

The Dutch Uncle approach leaves me cold every time, and this was no exception. But I had no answer for Anderson except:

“I guess you’re right.”

“Better get some more rest,” he said patronizingly as he got up to go. My impulse was to tackle him, throw him down and search his pockets for evidence of I didn’t know what. I controlled my impulse.

10

SUSPENDED tensely between the desire to do something and unwillingness to make a fool of myself, I sat and smoked until the tension sagged and I felt able to sleep again. Then I called for the porter to make my berth. He came to the doorway and stood there regarding me grimly, his face like hewn basalt.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

He moved nearer and said in sibilant disappointment: “Mr. Drake, you said you wouldn’t tell anybody what I told you today.”

“I haven’t. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t. All I said was that I wouldn’t identify my source.”

“That’s what I mean, suh. You said you wouldn’t tell anybody that I knew anything about Black Israel.” He glanced over his shoulder as if he feared that the cohorts of Black Israel might be massing outside the door to destroy him.

“I didn’t and I won’t.”

“Maybe you didn’t, suh,” he said without belief. “But that man knows.” He jerked his head towards the drawing-room.

“Who knows what?”

“Mr. Gordon knows that I told you about Black Israel.”

“Who is Mr. Gordon?”

“The dark man in B drawing-room.”

“Him?”

“Yessuh. He was asking me about Black Israel tonight. I told him I didn’t know anything. You shouldn’t have told him, Mr. Drake. I don’t like his looks.”

“Neither do I. And let me assure you I haven’t told him anything and never will. Nor anybody else.”

“Yessuh,” he said with the ancient stolid grief of the Negro who has trusted a white and got his fingers burned, or smashed.

“I don’t know why he was questioning you, but I had nothing to do with it. He couldn’t have overheard us in the vestibule, because I watched for him–”

“You watched for him? Who is he, Mr. Drake?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to try and find out. I don’t like this any better than you do.”

He went to make my berth, and I knocked on the door of drawing-room B. The dark man answered the door in his shirtsleeves. There were wrinkles in the left shoulder of his shirt which might have been made by the harness of a shoulder-holster.

“Mr. Gordon, I believe?”

“Mr. Drake, I know. Have you come to apologize?”

“I’ll apologize when all the chips are down. What is your interest in Black Israel?”

“I am a sociologist.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Certainly not. Is there any need to?”

“The need may arise.”

“In that case I may as well tell you that I’m not a sociologist. Psychology interests me, however. At present I am attracted by the problem of you.”

“You take the words out of my mouth, Mr. Gordon. I am fascinated by the problem of you.”

“The problem of you is this,” he said in a flat cold voice which harmonized with his flat cold eyes. “What curious hallucination has persuaded you that you can ask strangers personal questions, and even threaten them, without being sharply snubbed?”

He snapped the door shut in my face. I refrained from kicking it, but I had never felt less respect for the laws and conventions of civilized society. I went back to the smoking-room and smoked more cigarettes. Physical violence had beaten my impulses down to the animal level, and I craved more than anything else some physical outlet for my feelings. Yet I sat on my tail and for want of anything better to do, played a mental chess game in which half my men were missing and the board itself was in shadow, against an unknown antagonist who made three moves to my one.

My stalemated imagination rejected the illusion offered by the train’s motion that I was getting somewhere. I was sick of its monotonous jerking, its idiot course along the line of least resistance to a predestined end. I felt boxed in and locked out.

After a long time Mary appeared at the door in her bathrobe. “Aren’t you going to bed, Sam? It’s very late. Besides, I don’t like you sitting here by yourself.”

“Sure. I’m going to bed.”

The berths were all made and the curtains were drawn for the night. The ladder stood at my berth like an admonition.

I said, “Good night, Mary,” and kissed her. Her body moved in toward me and her mouth grew soft. She said with her lips against mine: “Sam. Come in with me.”

We lay together with the blind up and watched New Mexico unroll like a faded diorama. There was a faint moonlight which touched the earth with a greenish tinge, like a country at the bottom of the sea. The strange country which at high noon was a riot of pigmentation, a dead world brilliantly shadowed with post-mortem lividity, was at night an arid pasture of the moon. But because a girl’s head was on my arm the shadowy country took female forms, was hung with a mysterious and sexual beauty.

“A train journey has a funny effect on me,” Mary said. “I feel cut off from the real world, isolated and irresponsible. The time I spend on a train is like an interlude from real life.”

“The country is Cockayne,” I said. “Would you marry me if I asked you to?”

“Don’t ask me that now,” she said drowsily. “Pull down the shade and ask me if I love you in the dark.”

That night I had no bad dreams.

At six a moral alarm clock clicked in my brain and woke me. Before I opened my eyes I could sense the warm fragrance of her breath and hear its quiet rhythm. When I opened them I could see the dim outline of her closed face, pale and lustrous as a pearl in the early morning light. Moving cautiously so as not to disturb her, I retrieved my clothes and climbed out of the berth.

The passage between the green curtains was as deserted as a forest aisle, and as full of silence. A silence which held in suspension the rustlings and murmurs of hidden life. Periodically a long strangled snore fell through the silence like a falling tree. I hurried past the dangerous snore, but before I reached the end of the car a curtain moved and parted and a small agile figure in striped pyjamas climbed out backwards like a honeybear. I knew that the berth was Mrs. Tessinger’s. The man, tousled, puff-eyed and cheerful-looking, was Teddy Trask.

He laid a finger on his lips and grinned sideways. I followed him to the men’s room without speaking. There he said:

“Caught in the act. Oh, well.”

“Sleep where you like. But I thought it was Rita you were working up to.”

“So did I. For God’s sake don’t tell Rita I slept with her mother. She’d never speak to her again.”

“It would be just as embarrassing for me as it would be for Rita.”

“Yeah, and it would be twice as embarrassing for me. Oh, well.”

I filled a washbowl with water and unwrapped a piece of soap. “I was under the impression that you liked them young.”

“It didn’t work out that way. Christ, I was practically raped. I guess it worked out all right, though. I can’t complain.”

The swirling water in the metal bowl seemed especially clear and hot. My senses were quick and appreciative. The rather sordid irony of Teddy Trask’s affair with Mrs. Tessinger struck me as intensely amusing. I felt simultaneously alert and relaxed, ready for anything.

An hour or so later at early breakfast, I had a chance to ask Teddy for more information about his time code:

“You said you’d offered it to the Army Signal Corps. Could it be used on the radio, do you think?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said, sliding easily into his favorite subject. “You could go on the air and broadcast nothing but a tick every now and then. The enemy wouldn’t even have to know you were broadcasting. But if they did, all they’d hear would be the same sound repeated at irregular intervals. That’s where this code is different from any other code. The signals themselves don’t mean anything. The meaning is in the time between them.”

“We use the same principle in whistle signals. A six-second blast means one thing. A twelve-second blast means something else.”

“That’s right, it’s the same principle,” he admitted.

“Say the Army used your code. Wouldn’t it take a long time to pass on a little information? And wouldn’t the number of things you could say be pretty limited?”

He sipped his black coffee and lit a cigarette. “Sure, I admit that. That’s probably the reason the Army turned it down. That and the fact that I wasn’t a brass hat, or even a second lieutenant. But don’t forget that you could work it out much finer on the air, with clocks synchronized to one-fifth of a second. That gives you five hundred meanings per one hundred seconds, if you take a fifth of a second as your unit.”

“But then you’d still be limited to saying five hundred things and if your message was the five hundredth meaning you’d have to wait a hundred seconds between ticks. It would take you a hundred seconds to say it.”

“That’s right, too. It’s slow. But I never thought it could be anything but a special-purpose code.”

“And wouldn’t an enemy cryptanalyst catch on pretty fast to your limited list of prearranged meanings?”

“That’s where you’re wrong, boy. Unless he had a time-sense better than any I’ve ever heard of, your enemy cryptanalyst wouldn’t ever know he was listening to a code. That’s the beauty of it. It could be used in guerrilla warfare, by advance agents in enemy country. But say your enemy cryptanalyst had an ear like a chronometer, or caught on some other way and started to time the ticks, you could still fool him.”

“You could change your prearranged meanings at regular intervals, you mean?”

“Why not?” he said triumphantly. “You could change ’em every day. Say, you don’t think the Navy would be interested in this, do you? I still think it’s got possibilities.”

“Maybe it has. I can’t speak for the Navy. I can tell you what C.N.O. would say if you took it to them, though. They’d tell you it was fundamentally insecure because, in the first place, you know about it, and in the second place other people do. Me, for instance. Navy codes are originated by naval officers and by a few carefully chosen civilians, and they keep them under their hats.”

“By God, I never thought of that.” The light of triumph went out of his eyes like small sinking suns. “I’ve been shooting off my mouth all this time. Say, for all I know, maybe they’ve got it. Maybe they’re using it right now, and I don’t know anything about it.”

“Maybe they are. I wouldn’t know.”

I left him with whatever vicarious fulfilment he could squeeze out of that. His ideas had suggested a possibility to me which seemed worth investigating. Sue Sholto had worked in a broadcasting station.

But the moldering body of Sue Sholto and the problem to which her dead face had introduced me were in the Territory of Hawaii, and I was on a train in Arizona. There was a more recent corpse and a more immediate problem to occupy my mind. Why had Hatcher died, assuming that it wasn’t accident? And what, if any, were the relations between Hatcher and Anderson? Though I had no notion of what to do or say when I saw him, I sat in ambush in the club car waiting for Anderson to pass through to the diner, as if the mere sight of his face might suggest the key to the conundrum.

I waited a long time while the breakfast parade went by. Major Wright walking authoritatively on short legs. Rita Tessinger looking fresh and restless. Her mother with a complacent look of pleasant fatigue. The old lady from Grand Rapids armored in purple flowered silk against the menaces to her comfort which her quick old eyes found in every corner. Finally Mary looking very young and beautiful, and deceptively virginal.

I told her about the first two and omitted the third.

“You’re up early this morning,” she said.

“I slept well last night.”

“So did I. I dropped off as soon as my head hit the pillow.”

“And I am the emperor’s white horse and Halsey can ride me any time he wishes. I’ve already eaten breakfast. Shall I wait for you here?”

“Do.”

She went away, her hips moving as if in gentle reminiscence. In a grey flannel dress her body had regained its mystery, and the cycle of desire began again in me.

It was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Green, alone, in a green dress the color of artificial Easter grass and matching green shoes. When she came nearer I could see that she had added jade earrings to her travelling exhibition of jewelry. She looked sick.

“Good morning,” I said. “Have you seen Mr. Anderson this morning?”

“Didn’t you know? Mr. Anderson got off the train.”

“But he told me he was going through to L.A.”

“Oh, he was. But he made a long-distance call to one of his oil-fields, and they told him he better stay in New Mexico for a couple of days. So last night, or I guess it was early this morning, he got off at Gallup. He told me he was going to Albuquerque.”

“I wish I’d known. I would have liked to say good-bye to him. You don’t have his California address, do you?”

“No, he said he moves around so much. He’s got mine, though.” She giggled hoarsely. “Well, I guess I’ll go and see what they got for breakfast. See you later.”

I felt blocked and yet, to a certain extent, vindicated. Perhaps my questions, which had seemed asinine at the time even to me, had frightened him off the train. If I could get the FBI in Los Angeles to cooperate with me, he could be found and asked those questions again.

I went back to the Pullman and asked the porter if Anderson had taken his bags with him.

“No, suh, he told Miss Green to tell me to put them in the baggage car. She said that he’ll be going on to Los Angeles in a couple of days and they’re to be held for him there. Mr. Gordon only had one bag and I guess he took that with him.”

“Is Gordon gone too?”

“Yes, suh. It suits me.”

“Did the two of them leave together?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Drake. All I know is that they both got off at Gallup. Neither of them said a word to me.”

Three possibilities occurred to me besides the one I had suggested. Gordon was following Anderson. Anderson was following Gordon. Or one had killed the other and bundled his body off the train. Actual melodrama and violence had accustomed my mind to move easily among melodramatic and violent possibilities. The melodrama of the situation deepened when I made inquiries and found out that nobody had seen Gordon or Anderson leave the train.

Miss Green and Mary came back from the diner together, and I asked Miss Green if Anderson had made arrangements for his luggage in advance.

“He left me a note. It was under my pillow when I woke up this morning. It was a very nice letter, not just a note.”

“Are you sure he wrote it?”

“Of course I’m sure. Who else would write me a note?”

“Did you know his handwriting?”

“I don’t know. No, I guess I don’t. But I’m positive he wrote it. He said he was going to Albuquerque and to send his bags on to L.A.”

“Had he mentioned getting off the train before?”

“No. I was surprised when I got his note.”

“Where is it now?” I said.

“The note? Just a minute.” She went to her compartment and searched it. But she came back empty-handed.

“It’s gone,” she said. “I can’t understand it. I had it less than an hour ago.”

The unreal painted flesh of her aging face hid her thoughts from me. I couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not. Everything she said and did was artificial, slightly off the human center-line. The steady trembling of her hands was as if her nervous system had received a delicate and irreparable damage. A corpse returned to life after the tissues had decayed a little would have moved and spoken as she did, and had her taste in clothes.

Miss Green returned to her love-story magazines, and quickly became absorbed in a Spicy Romances. I went back to our compartment and sat down beside Mary.

“Miss Green wants to know if there’s anything the matter,” I said in a low voice. “If you ask me, there’s something the matter with her.”

“What do you mean? She’s a type you see all over. An ignorant woman who got hold of money somewhere, and doesn’t know how to use it on herself.”

“Yeah, but how did she get her money?” I looked over my shoulder at Miss Green. Her fading prurient eyes were fastened on the pages of her pulp magazine. “There’s something about her I don’t like, something reptilian.”

“Maybe she won it in a lottery,” Mary said with a laugh. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Sam. She’s a pathetic old hag. I think I know women, and that’s all I can see in her.”

“She was pretty friendly with Anderson, too. I was beginning to feel there was something queer about him and now he’s dropped out of sight. Too many people have been dropping through trap-doors. Gordon’s gone, too.”

“Gordon?”

“The man that was spying on you the other night in the club car. He left the train last night.”

“Is that sinister? For all you know, he may have had a perfectly respectable reason–”

“Maybe he had. But I’m not taking it for granted. He acted fishy.”

“Everything’s looking fishy to you, Sam. Aren’t you letting the whole thing get you down?”

“You’re damn right I am. Can’t you see we’re both in this thing up to our necks? You or I may be the next to drop through the trap-door. I almost did.”

“I know you did.” She leaned towards me and put a firm white hand on my knee. “Then why do you insist on sticking your neck out?”

“There’s trouble in the air, and I believe in meeting trouble halfway. I want something to get hold of.”

“But what if there isn’t anything to get hold of?”

“A minute ago you said I was sticking my neck out. Now there’s nothing to get hold of, and all this is my imagination. But I suppose I can’t expect a woman to be logical.”

“Maybe I’m not logical. I follow my feelings. And my feeling is that you should try to forget about this business.”

I couldn’t forget it, and I knew that she couldn’t either, but I dropped the subject. My nerves were stretched and waiting, but there was nothing to do. I did my best to enjoy the long peaceful day.

We read and talked, intimate desultory talk. The train dragged itself across Arizona, spanned the Colorado gorge, spiralled up into the last great wall of mountains, slid down through blue-white light into the California coastal plain and the green season.

At ten-thirty that night the train stopped for the last time in the Los Angeles station, and we left it together. Climbing up the long sloping tunnel from the train, I had more than the usual feeling of strangeness on coming into an unfamiliar city. It was like climbing out of a tight little hell into an unpredictable chaos. Even my own intentions were unpredictable, but at the last minute I made up my mind.

“I’m going to Santa Barbara,” I told Mary at the baggage counter.

“But you said you were coming to San Diego with me!” There was an angry flush in her cheeks. Her proprietary tone made me angry, too.

“I’m not,” I said bluntly. “I may see you in Diego tomorrow night.”

“What on earth are you going to Santa Barbara for?”

“I’m going to look up Laura Eaton. The girl Hatcher wrote the letter to.”

She put her hand on my arm and drew me aside from the crowd at the checking desk. “Please don’t go, Sam. Stay in Los Angeles with me tonight.”

“You’re not jealous of a girl I’ve never seen?”

“I’m not jealous of anybody. I just don’t want you to go to Santa Barbara. I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“What might happen to you. You mustn’t go running around the country looking for trouble.”

“I don’t have to look for it. It found me long ago: I want to know what’s in that letter, and I have to go to Santa Barbara to find out.”

“And if I don’t like I can lump it!” she said flatly.

She took her hand away from my arm. I felt very much alone.