Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  “And he said he worked for Beaumont?”

  “Yes. And that’s what Beaumont himself said, too.”

  “You called him?”

  “I called him myself,” Ruth said, emphasizing the last syllable. “At a number I had, not one this man gave to me.”

  “And you know Beaumont’s voice?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Are you saying Beaumont . . . knows?”

  “No! Nobody ever did. Not about . . . you. But this man, he . . . he knows how it works. One of the girls who left, that’s who I think told.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the big man said, dead-voiced.

  “It does to me!” Ruth said. “You know why I—”

  “I just meant, it doesn’t matter how he knows,” Sherman said, his detective’s mind raising and rejecting possibilities. “He only knows about . . . what happens. He doesn’t know it’s me.”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t . . . ?”

  Ruth lowered her face into her cupped hands.

  “It’s all right,” Sherman said. “He hasn’t got any—”

  “You bastard!” Ruth snarled, lifting her tear-streaked face to stare up at Sherman. “You thought that I . . . that I would ever . . .”

  “Oh Christ, Ruth. I’m sorry. I was just trying to . . .”

  “What? Make me feel better for betraying you? After all, what could you expect from a whore anyway, right?”

  “I never—”

  “Yes you did, Sherman,” she said, getting to her feet and moving over to where he stood against the wall. “You hurt me deep. You’re the only man on earth who can do that. The only man who can make me cry. I hope you’re proud.”

  “I’m not proud, goddamn it! I’m . . . sorry, Ruth.”

  “You should be sorry. Because I gave that foul man what he wanted, all right. A name. I told him it was Bobby Wyeth.”

  “Hah!” Sherman chuckled, despite himself. “That was perfect. The last man in Locke City Royal Beaumont needs to blackmail is Mayor Bobby Wyeth. He already owns him.”

  “And he does come here, Sherman,” Ruth said, eagerly. “Plus, he’s got his own . . . tastes. If a blackmailer just dropped a little hint—you know how they work; they’re very careful what they say—he’d probably even pay up!”

  “That was really slick,” the big man said, admiringly.

  “The man who came here, I wish you could have seen him, Sherman,” Ruth said, glowing under the big man’s praise despite herself. “He said he worked for Beaumont. But he said something else, too. He said he knew I didn’t.”

  “Ruth, what are you talking about?”

  “He said, this man, that he knew I was really in business for myself. Paying Beaumont was like paying tax. And if Beaumont was gone, I’d just pay someone else.”

  “Seeing if you were loyal, you think?”

  “No, Sherman. Telling me, I think telling me, that he was in business for himself, too.”

  “That’s why you think his . . . source wasn’t Beaumont?”

  “Yes. I’ve never seen him before. I don’t think he’s from around here, so I don’t know where he could have found out. But it was more like he was fishing than . . . I mean, I think he’s the kind of man who would hear a lot of things, but wouldn’t have any way of knowing if they were true. So, when he came here, I think it was really to see if whoever told him was lying.”

  Dett, Walker, Sherman Layne thought, replaying the information he had vacuumed from the records of Ajax Auto Rentals. A gentle hint that someone who may have rented from them within the past month was a “possible suspect” in a bank robbery had been enough to get the clerk to turn over the ledger and step outside for a smoke that lasted a half-hour. Date of birth: March 3, 1920. Height: 6′1″, Weight: 175 pounds. Home address: Star Route 2, Rogersville, Oregon. No restrictions.

  “I can never come here again,” he said aloud.

  “I know.”

  “Ruth, I apologize. Not for what I said, or even for what I was thinking . . . because I wasn’t. But if I hurt your feelings . . .”

  “There’s another way,” she said, looking down.

  “I—”

  “If you want me, there is.”

  “Ruth . . .”

  “I’d do it for you, Sherman,” she said, tilting her face up to look at him. “I’d do anything for you.”

  “I . . .”

  “Yes you could,” she whispered.

  * * *

  1959 October 05 Monday 02:22

  * * *

  Carl stood under the shower in a cloud of steam, a safety razor in his hand. Everywhere! he repeated to himself, working with great care from the waist down.

  When he finished, he rinsed off in an icy stream, shivering but determined. As a Spartan!

  Carl turned off the shower spigot, parted the curtains, stepped out, and began to pat himself dry. While waiting for the mirror to defog, he worked baby oil into his skin with mechanical determination. Caressing his stiffened penis, Carl paused. Purity! he admonished himself, applying some of the oil to his swollen, hairless testicles. Then he coated his forefinger and penetrated his anus. I resist! By the time he was finished with his underarms and the soles of his feet, the mirror had cleared.

  A cotton ball coated with a peroxide solution was Carl’s next tool. Years ago, before he learned, he had attacked any emerging pimples with such ferocity that he caused angry red blotches to appear against his fair skin. Now he cleansed with delicacy. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, he heard his mother’s voice in his head. He bared his teeth.

  Perfect white teeth. Carl remembered the dentist, working the foot pedal of his drill during the excavation of a particularly deep cavity, pausing to compliment him. “You’d be surprised how a lot of big, strong men can’t take this,” the dentist had said. “They always want more and more novocaine. Now, you, young man, you’ve got the pain tolerance of a bull,” he had said, approvingly.

  If you only knew, Carl had thought. Dr. Gottlieb was the best dentist in all of Locke City. The Jew has a natural capacity for intellect, just as the dark races have a natural capacity for strength. One would rule by insidiousness, the other by brute force. Only the Spartans bar the gates against them.

  Carl gargled with mouthwash, then brushed his teeth for the second time since he had arrived home that evening. He inspected his nails. Why is it that a gangster can get a manicure without being thought . . . unmanly, but an Aryan warrior can never take such a risk? he thought, regretfully.

  Normally, Carl wore only white silk boxer shorts and matching undershirts. But tonight, plain white jersey briefs and a sleeveless cotton T-shirt went on beneath a dark, tailored suit.

  As he knotted his muted blue tie, Carl gazed longingly at the pair of black boots, polished to a brilliant shine, standing in the corner of his closet. He sighed and shook his head. Someday, he promised himself, settling for a pair of wingtips.

  He walked down the short flight of stairs from his private, converted-attic suite to the second floor, his footsteps silent in the carpeted hallway as he passed his mother’s bedroom. Carl wasn’t concerned about waking her—she always retired within an hour after he came home from work, taking a sleeping draught with her glass of warm milk. If the neighbors heard his car start up in the middle of the night, they would just assume he was working an extra shift at the hotel—he often volunteered for such duty.

  Carl opened the padlock and spread the doors of his garage wide. Inside sat his immaculately black ’57 Mercedes 190 sedan. It had originally been purchased in Germany, shipped home by a returning GI, and then offered for sale by a private party in Chicago. Fitting himself behind the wheel, Carl recalled that special trip. What a voyage of discovery that had been! My journey to myself.

  His mother had argued ferociously against the purchase, persisting even after he pulled his prize into the driveway for the first time.

  “I don’t see why you need a foreign car, Carl. And
it cost the earth! Why, for what you spent, you could have bought a—”

  “It’s my money, Mother,” Carl had replied, calmly. “I saved it myself. Besides, it’s not just a car; it’s an investment. Ten years from now, it will be worth more than I paid for it.”

  “I don’t see how that could be,” she said, using that passively stubborn tone he hated so.

  “Well, I guess we’ll see who’s right when the time comes,” he said, attempting to dismiss the issue.

  “It’s just too much money. Especially on your salary, Carl.”

  “I don’t really have much in the way of expenses, Mother. It’s not as if I had to pay rent someplace.”

  Catching the implied threat, his mother had subsided.

  But that was over a year ago. Tonight, Carl was alone in his perfect Reich car. He slipped the column shift into reverse, tenderly let out the clutch, and backed out of his driveway.

  * * *

  1959 October 05 Monday 02:51

  * * *

  Finished with his meal, Dett took a short length of rope from his suitcase and stood ramrod-straight. He held one end of the rope in his right hand, draped the length of it down his back, and grasped the other end with his left. Dett pulled at both ends of the rope, lightly at first. Then he increased the tension until the rope vibrated, the muscles in his arms and shoulders screaming in protest. He willed away the pain, breathing steadily and rhythmically through his nose, counting slowly to one hundred. He switched hands and repeated the exercise.

  Dett stood under a hot shower for several minutes. Wearing only a towel around his waist, he took a small pair of steel springs from his suitcase. Placing one in each hand, he began to compress them, over and over, until his forearms locked and the springs dropped from nerveless fingers.

  He stood up, rotating his head on his neck, first in one direction, then the other, making five full circles each time. Next, he unscrewed the top of a small hexagonal jar, dabbed his finger into the dark-red paste inside, and applied it to each of his hands. He dry-washed his hands until the paste was fully distributed and he felt a familiar tingling sensation.

  Spreading fresh towels over the tatty carpet, Dett lay on his stomach, placing his hands, palms-down, on either side of his face. Then he raised his neck all the way back until his sternum was barely touching the improvised mat, and held the position for a count of six. He did four repetitions. Then he rolled over onto his back and slowly drew his body into a ninety-degree angle, sitting straight up, back perfectly aligned. He lowered himself to the mat, moving in small, smooth increments, feeling the tightening of his abdominal muscles with each repetition.

  On arising, Dett walked to the far wall, placed his spread fingers against it, and pushed until his entire upper body cramped.

  Dett stepped away from the wall, arms dangling at his sides, the middle finger of each hand barely touching his thighs. Slowly, he moved his hands behind his back until they met, and clasped them together. He took a deep breath through his nose, held it for a few seconds, then expelled it as he brought his hands up behind his back and over his shoulders in one smooth, continuous motion. When the arc was completed, his clasped hands were at his waist.

  Dett held that position for a full minute, then repeated the entire exercise. He went back under the shower, toweled off, and lay down on the bed in the darkness, holding his derringer.

  After a while, he closed his eyes. But he did not sleep.

  * * *

  1959 October 05 Monday 02:59

  * * *

  “What’s all that you writing, brother?”

  “It’s what I found in that man’s room,” Rufus said. “Look for yourself.”

  Kendall stepped behind Rufus. He saw a grade-school notebook—white ruled paper, bound in a hard black cover with a random pattern of white splotches. Rufus opened the book, as if displaying a trophy. The right-hand page was divided by a lengthwise line, creating two columns:

  Under the columns was a string of addresses, all public buildings: the city library, the police station, the post office . . . and three different banks.

  At the very bottom of the page, in the far right corner, was a ten-digit number.

  “I thought you said there wasn’t nothing in his room,” Kendall said.

  “There wasn’t,” Rufus replied. “But when I meet with the boss greaseball, Mister Dioguardi himself, this is going to be what I tell him I copied down, see?”

  “Does it mean anything?”

  “Only the long number at the bottom. And that one’s a pay phone, in a part of Chicago they call Uptown. White man’s territory. Ivory picked it up one day, on his route, and it went right into our information book. Now we finally got a use for it. Only I wrote it backwards, like it was in code.”

  “You going to tell the man that, Omar?”

  “What?”

  “That it’s in code, man. Otherwise, what good is—?”

  “Brother, listen to me. The last thing I would ever do is explain anything to those kind of people. See, niggers is stupid. We don’t know nothing. We just good little monkeys, taking orders, stepping and fetching. We smart enough to take money for stuff they tell us to do, but that’s about it. You understand?”

  “No,” Kendall said, his voice tightening. “I know how you always be saying—”

  “Yeah, K-man. I always be saying, but you don’t always be listening. Look, we’re not a ‘minority’ for nothing, understand? That means just what it says—there’s more of them than there are of us. Always going to be like that, too. So we learn to slip and slide, hide what we got. And what we got the most of is brains, brother. Those ‘race leaders’ of ours,” Rufus said, his voice clotting with disgust, “they’re all about convincing the white man he’s wrong about us. We’re not ignorant apes that only want to fuck their women—with our giant Johnsons, don’t forget—no, not us. We good boys. They should call us ‘Negroes,’ not niggers, or jungle bunnies, or spooks. They should let us go to school with them, work in their businesses, ride on their buses.”

  Rufus unconsciously shifted into his natural orator’s voice, but kept the volume down. “But the ‘good’ whites, they don’t see us as equals. No, to them, we’re pets. And you got to take care of your pets. Make sure they get enough food and water, right? See, pets, they don’t want to be free. No, they just want to be taken care of.

  “So let them think we’re all like that. Why do you think we’re raising those puppies out back, brother? Whitey thinks we all scared of German shepherds, because that’s the dogs they use on us down south. White man thinks, I got me a German shepherd, I never have to worry about no nigger burglar, okay? But dogs, they’re like children. They don’t have no natural hatred of any race. They have to learn that. So we’re raising our own.”

  “Our own children, too,” Kendall said, proudly.

  “Yes, brother. But you can’t teach a child if you can’t feed a child. The child will not respect the father who doesn’t take care of him and protect him. You got millions of black children in this country, and who’s their father? Uncle Sam, that’s who. The white man, the Welfare. Same thing.

  “We got to have our own, K-man. Our own businesses, our own money. Our own land. And the only way we even get that chance is to sneak up on Whitey.”

  “But the NAACP—”

  “Let them walk their own road, brother. Let them eat white rice, even though everybody knows the brown rice is better for you. Let them straighten their hair, bleach their skin. Let them marry whites, they love them so much. You know where the word ‘nigger’ comes from?”

  “No, man. I don’t.”

  “Me, neither. But I know what a ‘spook’ is. A spook is a haunt. A ghost. Something you scared of. The white man who calls us spooks, he’s not lying. How many of our people got hung from trees? Shot like mad dogs? Dumped in graves nobody will ever find? All those dead niggers, that’s their ‘spooks.’ I can hear them, calling to me.”

  “For real?”


  “Real as life, brother. Real as death. You know how a preacher say he ‘got the call’? Well, I did, too. Not to preach. Not to yell and scream and beg. Jesus ain’t for us. If he was, he wouldn’t be white. And he wouldn’t stand by and let them do us the way they do.”

  Rufus’s voice dropped a few degrees, in volume and in temperature. “Let Mister Dioguardi be happy with his tame nigger, Rufus Hightower. Nigger like Rufus, he be too stupid to make up some phony list and say he copied it down from what he seen in the man’s room. He’ll never see the real me, brother. You can’t actually see a spook.”

  “Never see us coming, you mean!” Kendall said, holding up a clenched fist.

  The man he called Omar tapped Kendall’s fist with his own, a blood oath.

  * * *

  1959 October 05 Monday 03:10

  * * *

  Carl loved this time of night. Or, rather, morning, he corrected himself. On the other side of town from where he ruled the Claremont’s front desk, it was as if he rode through a transparent-walled tunnel, watching the filth and degeneracy of the streets flare like a match just before it dies. He could feel the desperation just outside his steel-and-glass cocoon, the whores and junkies and con men and burglars and drunks and . . . all trying to make one last score, one final connection, one more try, before they were driven back by the coming morning, when the good citizens would take back the streets. Temporarily.

  Carl wished they could meet at HQ. How glorious that would be, especially in the meeting room itself, with the crossed flags standing sentry to their cause. But he understood why this was never to be.

  The warehouse district was a thing of such beauty that it sometimes brought moisture to Carl’s eyes. Most, he knew, would look upon it as a cluster of abandoned buildings, symbolizing the death of the town’s industries. But Carl saw a different symbol entirely. He saw . . . Cleansing! This is how whole cities will look, someday. The streets empty, free of vermin, awaiting the occupation of the Master Race.