Mister White: The Novel

by John C. Foster

  Gerard grunted. “She said some things in there she wants you to know.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know. I know that my dad has been gone more than he’s been home the last two years. I know—I think I know—that mom is seeing someone. I know that they’re going to get a divorce. And I know that they haven’t said one thing to me about it.”

  Gerard sipped his coffee, pursing his lips against the heat. “Tough way to look at it.”

  “Tough thing to look at.”

  Gerard sat down in his seat and placed his works on the table, tapping a line of tobacco down the center of a cigarette paper.

  “Can you make me one?” Hedde asked. Gerard gave her a steady look to which she replied, “I haven’t been a kid since I was a kid.”

  He slid a small square of white paper over to her and handed over the tobacco.

  “Like this,” he said, demonstrating. “Now wet it.”

  Hedde’s fingers were nimble and she rolled a competent cigarette on her first try.

  Gerard struck a wooden match alight off the corner of the table and held it to his cigarette until he inhaled a hot stream of smoke. He offered the bright flame and Hedde leaned in, piloting the tip of her cigarette into the fire until it had achieved a healthy smolder.

  “You know about lighting no more than two off one match?” Gerard asked.

  “Bad luck,” she said.

  Man and girl attended to hot coffee and smoldering cigarettes in silence as the two ribbons of smoke intertwined overhead.

  - 6 -

  It had taken all of Cat’s self-control to wait until she crossed the border into Vermont before pulling off the road in front of a white clapboard general store with two gas pumps in front.

  She bought a coffee from the teenager at the counter and several dollars of quarters, which she loaded into a coat pocket as she eyed a glass jar full of enormous green pickles.

  “Buck fifty,” the kid said, and she looked at him in confusion before pushing out through the glass door.

  The big ice machine next to her clunked and rattled as she fed quarters into the pay phone. The false comfort of the aromatic steam rising off the coffee was threatening her fragile composure. Cat deliberately scalded her tongue with a molten sip, a painful if expedient way to quell her rebellious emotions.

  She had a good memory for numbers and was just handy with them in general. Lew always made her calculate the tip, and she rarely, if ever, used a calculator for anything. Still, the number she dialed was years old, and she was afraid she had bungled it even as the phone on the other end began to ring. She decided that if she had dialed in error, she would drive to another public phone in another town before trying again. Paranoia was nibbling at her and she didn’t want to make herself memorable to the Guardian of Pickles by asking for more quarters.

  Four rings. Five. She had blown it. Or the number had changed.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Bierce,” a tinny voice said into her ear.

  “Are you missing a pet?” she asked. Hearing the question aloud, she realized how stupid it sounded. Hell, it was too foolish to even be thought of as a code.

  There was a long quiet marked only by breathing from the other end before Bierce responded. “I had one once, but it ran away and we never found it.”

  She closed her eyes. “Do you know who this is?”

  “I think so.” A pause. “Can you help me find mine?”

  “That’s what we need to talk about.”

  “We really do.” Another pause. “It’s cold, much better to talk inside.”

  Cat agreed and told him both where and how.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  - 1 -

  Herr Steiner took a last sip of tea and set the cup on its saucer, the delicate rattle of china folding itself into the wash of sound created by a living, breathing train. The clatter and roar of steel wheels on the rails, the tock-tock-tock of the individual railroad ties thundering up from below with machine gun speed. The constant whoosh of the air circulation system that made conversation something of an art, and the under-hum created by so much humanity in close proximity, the insect buzzing of a dozen European languages punctuated by the occasional cough or sneeze.

  It was quite late, and the dining car of the Berlin Night Express was empty, so Herr Steiner took the moment of privacy in the long, table-filled car to collect himself as he searched the snow-covered countryside for the ruined convent, the remnant of some unnamed Nazi atrocity. He made a specific effort to watch for the crumbling stone on every trip, both to mark the distance they had traveled—the six-hour point of their ten-hour journey—and because such a thing should never be forgotten, even if Herr Steiner was the only one to remember.

  He had been a conductor for eight years, eight years since his wife succumbed to an infection following a routine surgery, eight years of working through the night because he could no longer sleep in the dark. During those years, the living organism of the train sustained him and crowded out the shrieking voices inside his head. The routine of his duties kept him occupied and gave him a sense of purpose. If he was mildly bored, he enjoyed the occasional moment when he could assist a confused passenger or solve the minor problems that were brought to his attention.

  Tonight he was uneasy.

  The electric lamps dimmed, except for the running lights on the floor, and for a moment the rush of air quieted, as if to allow the clatter of wheel and tie their own musical solo. As the ferocious yellow light faded, it was replaced by the gentle, azure glow of the snowscape outside. These were special moments for Herr Steiner, and much as a child hopes that summer will never end, he always wished for a few extra seconds of darkness in which to enjoy a mystical atmosphere that seemed to have been created for him and him alone.

  Not this night. This night he counted the seconds with mounting tension until the light and sound flooded back in.

  It had begun with the goat. The bloody, ghost-furred goat.

  The evening had been marred by the unusual since leaving the station in Sweden, all but one event unnoticed by the passengers but already causing enough muttering among the crew that Herr Steiner had spoken to the engineer about it, and the gossiping was silenced.

  Not two miles south of Malmo, their point of departure, the engineer had told him, “We were entering a black woods where the leafless trees stab skyward like a forest of pikes.”

  Herr Steiner nodded, hiding surprise at words that spilled straight from the id of M.R. James or Algernon Blackwood, these from a man whose preferred reading material generally included a centerfold. But the grizzled engineer was entranced at the memory and it made Herr Steiner uneasy to see the old salt rattled.

  “Its eyes, its damnable eyes. The forward light picked them out first. They glowed like shining coins over the tracks and I could see no body…” When the old man hesitated, Herr Steiner had rested a hand on his shoulder, concealing his growing concern. The engineer was not a man given to pause.

  “It’s me,” the head conductor said, and the old man squared his shoulders as if pressing forward into a squall.

  “There was no body,” the engineer said. “I know you would think to tell me that its fur was so dark that it could not be seen against the night, but the thing was white as flour when we finally saw it. If you ask me…” And here he paused again, fixing his glittering eyes on Herr Steiner. “If you ask me, the body of the goat did not fill in behind those eyes until it had to, until it knew that the light should be showing a form.”

  “It?”

  “The damnable goat,” the engineer swore. “It stood without moving on the tracks, eyes red in our headlight, the rest of it little more than an outline. I sounded the horn and it reared back as if to butt the train in the instant before it was sucked beneath the wheels.” He wiped a rag across the oily sweat on his forehead. “For a terrible moment I was certain that we would derail, but the train held.”

  The assistant engineer had slipped from the locomotive at
the next stop to examine the front for damage, reporting blood and fur smeared across the bow of the car and a crack in the single, nose-mounted headlight. It wasn’t until the next stop, owing to the need to keep on schedule, that they had been able to dispatch a crew with water and cleaning fluid to hastily wipe away the blood.

  Herr Steiner replayed the conversation in his mind as he stood and placed his cap on his head, evening the brim over his eyes. The lights and sound in the food car dimmed again and he counted, “One-one thousand, two-one thousand…” The interruptions struck him as uncommonly frequent on this trip, and he wished for the damned journey to hurry up and be over.

  He rebuttoned the top of his white uniform shirt and straightened his tie, nose wrinkling at the faint stink that remained in the car after the second incident. It was an unpleasant, organic smell loitering beneath the herb and roasted boar from the evening’s dinner service.

  The Belgian chef, another reliable man and something of a friend to Herr Steiner after so many years, assured the head conductor that he had personally inspected each carton of produce as it was loaded on board with the fish.

  “I heard a scream and ran into the kitchen to see the sous chef reeling back from the refrigerated compartment as if she would be ill,” the chef had told Herr Steiner. “When I ran to the open door and looked inside, I understood why.”

  The chef had slipped a metal flask from his apron pocket and unscrewed the cap, shivering as he slugged back brandy.

  “No, thank you,” Herr Steiner replied when the flask was offered. He had fit a lifetime of drinking into the months following Gretel’s death and dared not return to that gloomy place. The chef knew this, and his lapse seemed yet another sign of his fear.

  “Merde,” the Belgian said. “The interior was covered with a grotesque, white fur, the mold of months,” he continued. “The vegetables had become soft things, liquid sacks that burst at the slightest motion and released a brown liquid, like watery molasses.” He paused for another bite at the flask. “And the fish…” he continued, turning away so that all Herr Steiner heard was the word “chewed.”

  “The stink, mon ami. I am ashamed to say I vomited, as did most of my staff. If an inspector had seen my kitchen then…” The chef shook his head. “I instructed my people to throw the rancid crates off the side of the train.” He held up a hand. “I know, I know, but the corruption was so powerful, I was near to panic. Even now I can smell it.”

  The chef’s eyes darted about in shame and Herr Steiner gripped his shoulder. “Then how did you prepare dinner?”

  The Belgian laughed, a forced sound but better than the furtive posture of moments before. “Monsieur Henri Lefevre shot a four-hundred-pound boar and brought it onboard the train, asking me to store it in my freezer. I arranged for the Berlin Night Express to purchase his prize on very favorable terms.”

  “That was well done,” Herr Steiner said, indicating that he would sign off on the purchase.

  The panicked chef had worked a miracle with powdered instant potatoes and herbs, and no one but the kitchen crew and Herr Steiner knew anything was amiss. But the conductor, who was in no way superstitious, began to wonder if the night’s journey was ill-fated.

  He turned smartly and checked his reflection in the windows, his image given a sinuous quality by the passing winterscape outside.

  Why he felt a need to check again on the status of the third incident he was not certain, but his general feeling of alarm was increasing as the evening went on. There had been a medical emergency on board the train. In the sleeper car.

  Herr Steiner patted his pocket to assure himself he had the master key to the sleeping cabins, but paused to stare with curious alarm at the stiffening hairs on the back of his wrists. He could feel each individual hackle rise on the back of his neck.

  “This is foolish,” he chided his reflection in the window. The expression his reflection wore indicated some disagreement. “All right then.”

  Herr Steiner headed aft to check in on the dead man in cabin number eight.

  - 2 -

  Lewis’s heart leapt into his throat as he stared down at the vibrating phone in his hand, at the picture of himself, asleep on the very bunk on which he was sitting.

  “What?”

  He leapt to his feet, lurching into the opposite wall as the train rocked while he pawed madly at the coat hanging on the back of the door. Seeing the door was locked but not believing it. How had someone snapped a picture of him sleeping?

  He batted aside his pillow and clutched the pistol in a white-knuckled hand, pressing his face against the window to see outside. Winter chill flooded his nose from the icy glass, and he cursed wordlessly at the rolling blue-white landscape, with not even a single light visible in the distance.

  He stepped back and caught the reflection of movement behind him.

  The gun snapped up and he nearly shot his swaying coat. “Shit.” He yanked the coat off the hook and tugged it on quickly, clumsily, some distant part of his mind telling him to slow down and do things right.

  But the panic was rising. The phone buzzed in his hand and he threw it, chipping the window glass.

  The damned thing was a burner phone. There was no way to trace it to him. Yet it buzzed and skittered on the floor like a mad beetle as someone tried to call him.

  He snatched up the small valise containing all of the cash he had made selling the cocaine, but his head snapped skyward, trying to see through the slanting curve of the ceiling at the clop-clop-clop he heard overhead.

  Hooves cantering on the roof.

  A heavy thump came from the cabin next to him. Lewis gritted his teeth, flipped the lock and stepped into the hall with his gun leading.

  And he almost put two rounds through the heart of the conductor.

  He pretended to stumble, slipping the weapon into the valise while his free hand slapped against the row of windows to draw the other’s gaze.

  Herr Steiner glanced up as he closed the door to the sleeper car behind him. He regarded the disheveled man, his sleep-spiked hair and wild eyes.

  “Guten abend,” Herr Steiner said.

  Lewis patted his spiky hair into place and lowered the valise. “Guten abend. Wann ist die nachste haltestelle?” He raised his voice to be heard over the clatter of the tracks.

  “Zwanzig minuten,” the conductor replied, touching the brim of his hat as Lewis turned sideways and squeezed against the windows to let him pass. Twenty minutes until the next stop. Too long.

  Herr Steiner pressed his shoulders against the cabin doors as the passenger negotiated his way through the narrow corridor between the cabins and the windows on the port side of the train. The man was agitated, but that was nothing new for Herr Steiner, who had seen humanity in all of its forms on the Night Express. What was unusual was the pistol he believed he had seen for a fraction of an instant as the man stumbled. He had the unprofessional urge to halt the man with a hand on his arm and ask him if he had heard anything from the cabin next door. The frightened man had emerged as if shot from a cannon from the adjacent unit, number seven.

  Once they were past each other, Lewis hurried to the end of the sleeper car. He felt the conductor’s gaze like a weight pressed between his shoulder blades as he opened the door and stepped into the deafening racket between cars. Sliding the door closed, he risked a glance through the smudged porthole and saw the conductor standing outside of what appeared to be his own cabin door, staring intently at the handle.

  Lewis quickly stepped across the slippery metal floor and yanked open the door into the next passenger car, using his free hand to balance on seat backs as he passed between rows of sleeping passengers in the dim silver glow.

  - 3 -

  Herr Steiner faced the door to cabin eight and bounced the key in his palm, shifting slightly with the rolling motion of the train.

  He looked up the car at the line of scalloped curtains fluttering in the wind that slipped through the window cracks. Could there be so much w
ind? The lace fringe had an oddly chewed look, as if they had recently been brought down from a dead relative’s attic where moths had feasted on them over many years, laying eggs alongside nesting mice. He should write up a report on this shabby state. The Berlin Night Express had a reputation to maintain. In fact, an impromptu inspection of the entire train might be in order.

  A bead of sweat slid slick as mercury down his temple, and without any sort of rational, psychological transition, Herr Steiner realized that he was terrified.

  The tinkle of wind chimes reached his ears and his head whipped left and right, searching for the origin of the sound. Chimes, or breaking glass?

  He thought of summoning his friend from the kitchen, but the Belgian chef was undoubtedly sleeping by now and quite possibly drunk. And what would the rest of the crew think when they heard that the head conductor required a hand to hold in the dark?

  Unconsciously squaring his shoulders and tugging down the bottom of his uniform jacket, Herr Steiner shakily inserted the key into the lock with a quiet clatter and gave it a sharp twist to the left, the tumblers thundering within the mechanism as the door was unlocked.

  “Right, then,” he said, pushing open the door and stepping into the dark cabin. He felt along the wall for the switch and flipped it up.

  The overhead lamp flared brilliantly and went out with a faint pop.

  “Scheisse.”

  As Herr Steiner fished a steel lighter from his pocket, the door swung shut behind him and he nearly dropped it. He fumbled it open, very much aware that he was standing in the dim chamber with a corpse. He rolled the flint with enough force that blue sparks flew and a small flame sprang into being.

  Herr Steiner held the lighter up near his head, pivoting slowly in a circle as he examined the cabin, noting nothing amiss, and the shape of the old man seemingly undisturbed beneath the cover Herr Steiner himself had pulled over his face.

  He coughed violently and the lighter flame blew out. “Scheisse!” He backed into the wall opposite the bunk as he spun the wheel and the comforting flame returned.