The Christmas Train

by David Baldacci

  riding in a belt clip.

  This couldn’t be the famous director, could it? This guy didn’t seem like the director type — not that Tom knew what that type was, exactly. Then he had to be either a star or a writer. Tom’s money was on his being a writer. He had a computer and a printer, after all. And he seemed like the young, hip scriveners probably much in demand out there. As everyone knew, people over thirty were ceremoniously stripped of their cool gene and given a bad haircut and a pair of sensible shoes in return.

  Tom went to the next compartment. He was about to take a look when a man slid the door open and almost collided with him.

  “Sorry,” he said. Tom glanced at the unlighted cigarette in the man’s hand. “I was just told I can’t smoke in my compartment,” he explained.

  Tom quickly ran his gaze over the fellow, a longtime reporter’s habit. He was medium height, early sixties and slim, but with the beginnings of a small paunch. He had thick silver hair, a healthy California Christmas tan, and was dressed very expensively in black slacks, white silk shirt, tweed jacket, and, on his feet, Bruno Maglis. To Tom he just reeked of casual, frolicking millions.

  “They have a smoking lounge on the lower level,” Tom advised.

  “Well, I guess that’s where I’m headed then. Tried a hundred times to kick this habit. Did the patch, even hypnosis. Nothing.”

  “I was a two-packer a day, but now I limit myself to the occasional cigar.”

  He looked interested. “How’d you manage it?”

  “Well, my life sort of depended on it.”

  “I hear you. Who wants to die of lung cancer?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I used to be a news correspondent overseas. I was in a convoy of journalists that was attacked by guerrillas. One of the cars in front of us was hit. Our guards told us to remain calm. Then a truck in front of us exploded. The guards told us to keep calm, stay put. Then a mortar round hit right next to us, and the guards told us one more time to keep calm. Right before they jumped out and ran.”

  “My God, what happened?”

  “Well, they obviously had us in range, and we weren’t waiting for the next shot to find us. We all jumped out and ran for the mountains. A guy from Reuters, about fifty and a heavy smoker, didn’t make it. He dropped to the ground, probably due to a heart attack.”

  “Did you stop and help?”

  “I would have, but I was carrying somebody at the time — twisted ankle, the person couldn’t run. I was hauling up that mountain, my heart and lungs near to bursting; it seemed like every smoke I’d ever had was coming back to haunt me. But we made it to a friendly camp, barely.”

  “And the other guy?”

  “I hope the heart attack killed him before the guerrillas reached him; they weren’t known for their compassion. I haven’t touched a cigarette since.” Tom added, “I wouldn’t recommend that method for everyone, of course. It could have some serious side effects.”

  “I guess so. Wow, what a story. War correspondent, huh?”

  “Not anymore. The most dangerous things I report on these days are how to construct his and her closets in a way that allows the husband actually to live, and the harrowing pitfalls of home barbecuing.”

  The man laughed and put out his hand. “That’s good. That’s funny. I’m Max Powers, by the way.”

  Tom thought he had recognized him, and when the man said his name it all clicked. He was a very famous director, regularly in the top ten of the most powerful people in Hollywood. Though he was known more for his enormous box-office successes, he’d also done some work that had pleased the critics, been nominated several times for Academy awards, and had taken home the grand prize a few years ago.

  “Tom Langdon. I’ve seen a lot of your movies, Mr. Powers. You really know how to tell a story. And I’ll take that over the highbrow stuff the critics always tout.”

  “Thanks. That’s all I try to do, tell a story. And it’s Max.” He slipped the unlighted cigarette into his shirt pocket and looked around. “Well, we’re trying to cobble a story together about this mode of transportation.”

  “Because there’s something about a train?”

  “You got that right. Cars? Forget it! Crazy drivers, jammed interstate highways, eating fast food till you drop? No thanks. Planes are impersonal and nerve-racking. Now, I don’t like to fly, but in my business you have to. I was coming back on a flight once from Cannes, and we hit some really bad turbulence and I went into the lavatory and lighted up, because I was so nervous. Well, the smoke alarm went off, and when we landed they took me to jail. Jail! All for smoking one unfiltered menthol. Cost me thirty grand in legal fees, and I still had to do community service.”

  He calmed. “But trains, that’s something else. I’m a native Californian, and my old man was a conductor on the Santa Fe passenger line back in the days when trains were really the classy way to travel. He’d arrange it so I could ride up with the engineer. Let me tell you, there’s no greater feeling in the world. Ever since, I’ve known there’s a story to be told about riding the rails, and not like the stuff that’s already been done. And now I’m finally doing something about it.”

  Tom told him about the story he was writing and some of his impressions of train travel. “It’s not getting from A to B. It’s not the beginning or the destination that counts. It’s the ride in between. That’s the whole show,” he said. “If you only take the time to see it. This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It’s a living, breathing something — you just have to want to learn its rhythm.” Tom wondered where this was all coming from, but there it was. Maybe the Cap was growing on him.

  Max gripped Tom’s arm excitedly. “You understand exactly what I’m trying to get at here.” He suddenly smacked his forehead. “I just had an unbelievable brainwave. This is always happening to me, Tom, all the time. Look, you’re a writer, seen stuff all over the world, and you’re on this train trying to take the pulse of America over the holidays.”

  “Right, so?” Tom said cautiously. He had no idea where this was going, but Max Powers seemed to be floating in the clutches of his brainwave.

  “So, you and my writer should team up — I mean, for this trip, for the research part. Swap notes, stories you’ve heard, brainstorming, stuff like that. And I’m not talking for free. I’ll pay you, believe me.”

  “But I’m already working on a story.”

  “That’s the sheer beauty of it. You write your story, fine. But the same stuff you’re doing for your story can help my writer put the film plot together. It’s perfect. Two bangs for one. Get it?”

  Tom nodded. However, he wasn’t really looking forward to working with the ten-year-old with the headset. Tom was neither very young nor very hip, and if the guy called him “dude” just once or perhaps blurted out “Ciao!” instead of simply “goodbye,” it might get ugly.

  To Tom’s surprise, Max led him right past the compartment with the headset-wearing hipster and went to the first compartment and rapped on the glass.

  “You decent? It’s Max.”

  The door slid open, and in that instant Tom felt every bit of breath leave his body. He could no longer even hear the hum, hush, siss-boom-bah of the mighty Cap as Eleanor Carter stared back at him.

  chapter eight

  Max said, “Eleanor Carter, Tom Langdon. Tom, Eleanor.”

  Neither Tom nor Eleanor uttered a word. They just stared at each other for so long that Max finally said, “Um, do you two know each other?”

  “It was years ago,” Eleanor said quickly.

  She was even more lovely now than the last time Tom had seen her, and that bar had been set pretty high. She was tall and still slender, and hadn’t cut her auburn hair short as so many women closing in on forty do. It was still shoulder-length and sexy. Her face, well, there were a few more lines there, yet they possessed an attractiveness — a statement that the owner had actually lived — that smooth, unblemished skin could never match. And the big green ey
es still packed a wallop and made Tom want to find a chair to sit in before he fell over. She was wearing gray wool slacks, stylish black, low-heeled shoes, and a white sweater with the collar of a blue shirt sticking out.

  Tom remembered vividly the first time he ever saw Eleanor on campus. She wore short shorts, showcasing those long legs, a red sleeveless sweater, flip-flops, and a yellow bandanna in her hair. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. For the next fifteen years he rarely had..

  Both journalism majors, they’d decided to be a team after graduation. Their first investigative assignment for a little newspaper in Georgia had been following the legendary Reverend Little Bob Humphries around the Deep South, from Anniston, Alabama, to Tupelo, Mississippi, and every backwater in between. Reverend Bob, dressed in his white suit, white shoes, and wide, wide white belt, could heal the sick, calm the angry, cheer the bereaved, and save the wicked, all in a night’s work, and for a very reasonable amount of money (namely, all that you’d brought). You could hide your last penny as well as you could, and Reverend Bob would find it and take it with a charm and manner that made you feel ashamed for holding out on him.

  The holy man drove a custom-built Impala, the biggest Tom had ever seen. It was mostly for the prodigious trunk space, he discovered, for the good minister unabashedly accepted everything from legal tender to salt-cured hams to the occasional spare relative to serve as an assistant. Tom had always thought that the Reverend must be related in some way to the Duke and the Dauphin, the shysters of Huckleberry Finn infamy. As far as Tom knew, unlike the genteel highway robbers in Twain’s masterpiece, Little Bob had never been ridden out of town on a rail tarred and feathered. Yet the defrauded citizens could have indeed done such a thing and God probably wouldn’t have even blinked. In fact, He might have sent a miracle or two their way as compensation for such a good deed.

  Yet Tom had to admire the man’s tenacity. During their investigation, Tom had even ended up giving Little Bob his last twenty bucks and he wasn’t even Baptist. It was a moment of insane weakness that Tom still felt shame for. However, to Eleanor’s credit, she’d gotten Tom’s twenty back, the only person living or dead ever known to have retrieved money from Reverend Bob without recourse to the courts. Their resulting exposé of the charlatan hit the national newswire, made their reputations, and also stopped the Reverend’s little con game..

  “How have you been?” Eleanor asked coolly.

  “I’ve been working. Mostly here in the States the last year,” Tom managed to say.

  “I know. I read the piece on Duncan Phyfe furniture you did for Architectural Journal. It’s the first article on antique furniture that made me laugh. It was good.”

  Vastly encouraged by that, Tom said, “Well, between you and me, I didn’t know Duncan Phyfe from Duncan Hines when I pitched that story, but I crammed like hell, got the gig, and blew the money on something. You know me.”

  “Yes, I know you.” She didn’t even crack a smile, although Max chuckled. Tom’s gut tightened, and his throat dried up as those big emerald eyes bored into him with nothing whatsoever inviting in them. Tom felt cement shoes forming around his ankles. The sensation of imminent doom was somehow of solace to him, as though the end would be quick and relatively painless.

  He found his voice. “So you’re a screenwriter?”

  Max said, “She’s one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets. She specializes in script doctoring. You know, where a script has real problems and you need a miracle on a short fuse? Eleanor comes in and whips it into shape, like magic. She’s pulled my butt out of the fire on a bunch of occasions when the A-list writer I paid millions to fumbled the ball. My last five films she basically rewrote all the scripts. I finally talked her into doing her own original screenplay.”

  “I’m not surprised — she was always a terrific writer.” Again, there was no response to this compliment. The cement was now inching up Tom’s calves.

  “So what’s up, Max?” Eleanor said with a slight nod of her head in Tom’s direction. She obviously didn’t want a trip down memory lane; she wanted to bring this all — meaning him — to a hasty close.

  “I had this brilliant idea.” Max explained his “brilliant idea” to Eleanor, while Tom stood there wondering whether he should throw himself through one of the windows and under the wheels of the Cap. It couldn’t be clearer that Eleanor wasn’t at all pleased with the percolations of the director’s genius.

  Yet she said, “Let me think about it, Max.”

  “Absolutely. Hey, I tell you what, later, we can have a drink. Somebody told me they drink on this train.”

  “They do,” Tom said. Then he added jokingly, “In fact, the whole train is a bar.” He looked at Eleanor, but she was simply staring off. Tom’s arms were now immobile.

  “Done, then. Drinks around, what, eight?” said Max.

  “They serve dinner here too. I have reservations at seven?” Tom looked at Eleanor again, as though trying to will her to say she’d join him.

  “I had a late lunch in D.C.,” she said. “I’m skipping dinner.”

  Max said, “Yeah, dinner’s not good for me either, Tom. I’ve got a few calls to make.”

  “Well, don’t starve yourself.” Ironically, it was at this point that the cement seemed to arrive at his mouth.

  “Not to worry: Kristobal brought some of my favorite stuff on board. I’m more of a snacker, really.”

  “Kristobal?”

  “My assistant. He’s in the compartment right there.” Max pointed to the compartment where Tom had seen the headset kid.

  As if the mention of his name by his boss had reached his ears through the closed door, Kristobal emerged from his room.

  “Do you need anything, Mr. Powers?”

  “No, I’m fine. This is Tom Langdon. Tom might be helping us on our project.”

  Kristobal was as tall as Tom, and young and handsome and well built. He was very stylishly dressed, and probably made more in a week than Tom made in a year. He also seemed efficient and intelligent, and Tom instantly disliked him for all those reasons.

  “Excellent, sir,” said Kristobal.

  Tom reached out and they shook hands. “Good to know you,” Tom said, ignoring the imagined crunch of gravel between his teeth.

  Max said, “Okay, that’s settled. Eleanor will think about it and we’ll have drinks at eight, and now I have got to go smoke before I start hyperventilating.” He looked around, puzzled.

  Tom pointed, “That way, two cars down, through the dining room, into the lounge car, down the stairs, to the right and you’ll see the door marked ‘smoking lounge.’ ”

  “Thanks, Tom, you’re a gem. I know this is going to work out; it’s an omen. My palmist said something good was going to happen. ‘A chance meeting,’ she said. And look what happened. Yep, a good day.” He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and hustled off in his Bruno Maglis.

  Kristobal called after him: “Your lighter is in your right-hand jacket pocket, sir.”;

  Max gave a little wave; Kristobal retreated to his office hovel. And then it was just Eleanor and Tom.

  For a few moments they stood there, each refusing to make eye contact.

  “I cannot believe this is actually happening,” Eleanor finally said. “Of all the people to see on this train.” She closed her eyes and slowly shook her head.

  “Well, it kind of took me by surprise too.” He added, “You look great, Ellie.” As far as he knew, Tom was the only one who ever called her that. She’d never objected, and he loved the way it sounded.

  Eleanor’s eyes opened and focused on him. “I’m not going to beat around the bush: Max is a wonderfully gifted filmmaker, but sometimes he comes up with these off-the-wall ideas that just won’t work. I really believe this is one of them.”

  “Hey, I just walked smack into his enthusiasm. I don’t want you to do something you don’t want to, and frankly, I haven’t even really thought about it either.”

  “So I can tell Max you’re not int
erested?”

  “If that’s what you want, Ellie, that’s fine.”

  She studied him closely now, and he felt himself shrink from the scrutiny.

  “That’s exactly what I want.” She went back inside her room and slid the door closed.

  Standing there, he was now a fully kilned statue of stone, ready for primer and paint. Not even the hum-hush, siss-boom-bahs and cunning whipsaws of the mighty Cap could budge the man in his rigid, unyielding despair. He wondered if it was too late to get a refund on his train ticket based on the recent occurrence of his living death.

  chapter nine

  Tom staggered back to his compartment and collapsed on the foldout bed. Eleanor was on this train? It couldn’t be possible. He’d never envisioned sharing his journey of self-discovery with the one person on earth whose absence in his life may well have led him to take the damn trip in the first place! And yet whose fault was her absence? He’d never asked her to stay, had he?

  As he sat up and stared out the window into the blackness, he