The Putt at the End of the World

by Lee K. Abbott

  The next car and the next, no red light. A half dozen or so briefcases kept on the floor under the seat — more than Gorman would have guessed. Laptop computers, he imagined, wondering if twenty kilos of plastique could fit inside such a small case. Then it occurred to him for the first time that Le Tour did not need more than a pound or two of his stash to wreak considerable damage and loss of life, and this thought depressed him, because Le Tour would also think to hermetically seal the explosive in multiple layers of heavy-mil plastic, to wipe the outside of each layer with pure alcohol before sealing the next. Le Tour might use couriers, might even slip the explosives — however disguised — into someone else’s luggage, perhaps even doing so at the luggage compartments at either end of the train cars, the very compartments Gorman had ruled out as too public. These thoughts swirled inside his head, dizzying and fatiguing.

  The possibility of a courier increased his suspect population to now include women, whom he had all but ruled out previously. He reached the end of the train — a locked luggage car — turned around, and started through the cars once again, every face a potential killer, every case a potential bomb. Twenty minutes later he stepped through an electronic door into the dining car. A woman grabbed him from behind, spun him around, and kissed him on the lips.

  “I thought you’d ditched me!” Edna Zuckerman complained when she pulled away from the kiss.

  A stunned and overtired Gorman just stared into two eyes buried in mascara. He wiped off lipstick from his lips. “Exercise,” he said, recovering. “Been walking off that breakfast.”

  “Tea?”

  “Why not?”

  “Come on.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him through the car like a child eager to show a parent a new toy. She turned and kissed him again. “No red light,” she whispered into his ear.

  He held her close. “Same here,” he said.

  “What next?”

  “I’m thinking courier,” he told her.

  She laughed loudly enough for everyone to take notice of her. She reminded him all at once of Bette Midler. “Here?” she gasped as if Gorman had propositioned her.

  “Tea,” he said.

  “There you are!” came a male voice.

  Gorman looked up to see Franklin coming toward them.

  “Thought I’d lost you!” Franklin said.

  Gorman pulled Edna close to him possessively, the curtain up on act one of Edna Does Neddy, the roles defined. Only the script remained to be provided. He and Franklin shook hands as Zuckerman introduced them. They leaned in together, all three faking laughs. Franklin said, “Zero.”

  “No hits,” Gorman confirmed in a practiced voice that did not carry. He turned to the bar to order two teas, leaving his girlfriend and the stranger to share a private conversation, all the while glancing over at them as if convincingly concerned he might loose Edna to the interloper.

  All in a day’s work. Ned Gorman’s body begged for a few hours’ sleep.

  With his mind dulled by time zones and his body jazzed by tea, Gorman arrived at a solution to the problem of so much overhead luggage avoiding his electronic sniffer. Solutions to problems were often so simple “if you allow them to be” — as he had once been taught by an academy spook. All he did was place the E-9 in an outer flap of one of his own suitcases and then attempt to find a home for the suitcase. The process involved playing a jet-lagged American, too stupid to boil water, moving from car to car as he tried to create a space in the overhead luggage racks. This brought his suitcase in physical contact with dozens of others and, in proximity to the rest, allowed him to steal a look at his sniffer between cars in hopes of confirming the existence of the plastique.

  When overly tired, Ned Gorman’s ears tended to ring and his head felt heavy, as if filled to overflowing with congealed Jell-O. He worked a couple seconds behind real time, as if some kind of electronic delay had been installed in his brain. He lost hold of thoughts as quickly as he formed them, condemned then to mine his subconscious and retrieve them to the surface. Like speaking in an echo chamber.

  This helped explain why, at the rear of car seven, as he stooped to lift the suitcase flap and check the electronic sniffer, he suddenly wondered if he had forgotten to check the device one car earlier. He couldn’t remember much of anything, except that he’d certainly checked this damn thing enough times over the last half hour, and if he’d left out one car, what the hell?

  A red light blinked on the device.

  Gorman stared at it and nearly resealed the luggage flap before connecting the thought and verifying that the sniffer had detected explosives. As his heart began to feel like a bass drum in a Main Street parade, Gorman reminded himself that “false-positives” were not uncommon in these less sophisticated portable sniffers. It doesn’t necessarily mean explosives, he reminded himself. But of course the greater part of him was screaming: EXPLOSIVES!

  He reset the device, staying on the floor and kneeling over his suitcase long enough to block traffic, so that when the door hissed open and he found himself staring into the crotch of a pair of blue jeans, and those jeans turned out to be occupied by a very attractive woman, he muttered an apology as that crotch, pressured from behind, rubbed the back of his head as he ducked out of the way and the passengers squeezed past, the woman basically straddling his head to get past him.

  It wasn’t a false-positive. He knew this intuitively, since his job on board this train was to locate explosives and the person carrying them. He glanced up, past the woman’s blue jeans, to see the back of a man carrying a suitcase heading for the far end of the car. His eyes jumped to the overhead rack where, midcar, he spotted a hole in the crowded luggage rack that had not been there a minute earlier. This time his numb brain reacted before his body, and he stumbled as he leapt to his feet, falling forward over his own bag and pulling down Miss Blue Jeans with him as he went. There was some chortling in the seats, and a few strong arms quickly came to the assistance of the downed woman, while Gorman was left to fend for himself. He apologized to the woman, and though determined to now pass her, waited for her to collect herself and brush herself off and lead the way down the narrow aisle. The stainless steel door at the far end of the car hissed shut. Gorman lost sight of his suspect.

  “I lost him,” he explained to Edna Zuckerman. They stood together in the cramped bathroom of car five, adjacent to the dining car. She smeared some lipstick on his lips and cheek, loosened his tie, and rebuttoned his shirt incorrectly as they talked. Should anyone encounter two people leaving a bathroom together, she wanted it to look as if they’d had sex. She dabbed some water onto her face, checking the mirror to make sure it looked like perspiration.

  “We don’t know it was him.”

  “No,” he agreed. “And I couldn’t very well go trying my little ruse all over again, stuffing my suitcase up there like that.”

  “So he could still be wherever he was in the first place — if that wasn’t him you saw leaving the car.”

  “I was in car seven. Quite honestly, I’m not convinced I checked the E-nine after car six. I’m a little jet-lagged. It could be either.” He added, “And if it was him I saw leaving car seven, then he could be anywhere at this point.”

  “The bag?”

  “Black nylon.”

  “Terrific.”

  “I know,” he agreed. One of hundreds on the train.

  “But he’s on here,” she said.

  “Could be on here,” he corrected.

  “I’d say it’s damn likely he’s on this train,” she said.

  “Or a courier,” he reminded. “Knowingly or unknowingly.”

  “And the one with the bag?” she asked.

  “May have wanted to brush his teeth or change a shirt or not leave his cash behind when he went to buy a sandwich.”

  “But he didn’t go to buy a sandwich. You lost him. Lost sight of him,” she corrected herself, attempting to lay less blame on Gorman. “Listen,” she suggested, “I can place the sniffer i
n my handbag and check cars six and seven a second time. Go from piece to piece of luggage as if I’ve lost my own.”

  “That would work.” He mumbled, “Golf clubs.”

  “What?”

  “Have you noticed all the bags of golf clubs?”

  “Time of year,” she agreed.

  “And each with a dozen zippers. If I’m our boy, and I’m looking for a blind courier — someone who has no idea he or she is being used — I slip the plastique into a golf bag. And you know why? Because no one is going to touch their clubs until they’re out on a course. It’s a perfectly safe place to hide something for the duration of the train trip.”

  She nodded excitedly. “I like that!”

  The train rocked uncharacteristically, and she fell into him in full frontal contact so that they hugged like long-lost friends. Her hand unexpectedly cupped his crotch. As she stood back up, regaining her balance, he saw red in her cheeks, and that struck him as cute. He felt seventeen again.

  “Balls,” she said, letting go of him down there.

  His turn to blush. “Excuse me?”

  “Golf balls. What if Le Tour had the plastique made into golf balls? Could be done overnight, I would think. He then hides the balls in some stranger’s bag. If he doesn’t get the balls out before the end of the train ride, he follows that bag to whatever hotel it’s headed toward and pinches it there.”

  Gorman pointed out, “We’re standing in a bathroom talking about pinching balls.”

  She grinned and lowered her voice. “At least it will sound right if anyone’s attempting to eavesdrop.” She unbuttoned her blouse one too many buttons, reached in and tugged her breast and bra so that she nearly spilled out. “You ready?” she asked. He was ready. If she felt him now she would know that. But he didn’t answer her. “Wait in the dining car,” she instructed. “Find Franklin and catch him up on the latest. I’ll sweep six and seven a second time and report back to you.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Wait . . . You don’t look authentic enough.” She pulled herself to him and laid a kiss on his lips that briefly stopped his heart. She smeared her lips on his and pressed closely enough to feel through his trousers that he wasn’t ignoring her. She leaned back and studied him. In a warm and creamy voice she said, “Brilliant! I believe this assignment is starting to grow on me.” She unlocked the door and said privately, “Growing on you too, I see.”

  “Are you staying in London or heading straight up to Scotland?” Billy Sprague asked Rita Shaughnessy as the flight attendant delivered the four-cheese omelets, pain au chocolat, grapefruit, and mimosas.

  “Is that a come-on?” Shaughnessy inquired.

  “I don’t think so,” Sprague answered, “but I’m drunk enough it just might be.”

  “The Brown,” she said.

  Sprague looked at his plate, believing this comment of hers had something to do with the food. A lot of yellows, but only the chocolate was brown. He took a bite of the pastry. “Delicious,” he said.

  “I’m staying at the Brown for two nights,” she said. “Adjust to the time change, shop for some evening wear — I hear Bates has some monumental parties planned — and get as high as possible. If I’m hearing right, maybe I can add getting laid to that list.”

  He sprayed chocolate onto the back of the seat in front of him, wiped up, and tried to pretend she hadn’t said that. “I’m at the Brown too.”

  “Bates,” she said. “I bet fat-ass and his caddy are with us as well.”

  “He likes you,” Sprague observed.

  “Listen. Alfonzo pinned me to an elevator wall one night when my vision was poor. In Spanish, our little run-in apparently translates to some kind of ownership, like a stock option or something. Vaguely related to ‘possession is nine-tenths,’ I think. Never mind that all I heard was the accent and I thought I was in the elevator with Nicky Moran. The girls on the tour are always talking about Nicky’s driver — if you catch my drift — and there I was with a chance to tee up. And I grabbed it — so to speak.” She delivered all this while filling her mouth with both the four-cheese omelet and the mimosa, so that some of the words garbled. “What a disappointment!”

  “You have a thing going with him?” he asked, slow on the uptake.

  “Had,” she clarified. “Just that once.” She said deliberately, “And it was a very short, very uninteresting thing.”

  “So maybe we could grab a dinner together.”

  “We could grab a lot together,” she suggested, attracted to his tan and physique. So many of the pros let their bodies go. Not this one. “But if it’s dinner you want, I’d suggest the Ivy. The concierge can book it for us.”

  “I think he should.”

  “Eight? Eight-thirty?”

  He checked his watch, which he had reset to London time, wondering if it could possibly be before noon. It felt like four in the morning. “Dinner’s a long way away.”

  “We could try lunch in my suite,” she suggested provocatively, “so long as I’m on Bond Street for my fitting by two-thirty.”

  Sprague took a stab at the omelet. He asked her, “Have you ever thought of a round of golf as a way to save the world as we know it?”

  “Only when I’m dead broke.” She added, “Which is pretty much all the time lately. Then it’s sink or swim.”

  “I mean literally,” he corrected.

  “Save the world?” she asked, bemused.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t think of anything less important to the world than a golf score. Can you?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Then why the question?”

  “Zamora’s mention of the politicians,” Sprague answered, skewing the truth.

  “You mean if Mubarak and Qaddafi are in the same foursome and Mubarak wins? Something like that?”

  “Maybe so,” he answered. “I’m not quite sure. That’s why I asked the question in the first place.”

  “You’re tired and you’ve been drinking. I wouldn’t give it much consideration.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  “I think we should focus on the present. The moment. Don’t you? Like lunch in my suite. I’d like to unpack and take a bath first. We could say around . . . noon. What do you think?”

  “Or maybe it’s more a question of opportunity. If you’re in a foursome with some Balkan dictator, do you play nice or do you pull out a knife and run him through?”

  “Jesus, you’re hung up on this. That’s awful, what you just said. There’s course etiquette, you know? You don’t stab someone on a green. It just isn’t done.”

  “And all those guys who get fried by lightning every year? What about them? Lifting their putter in anger and a bolt of lightning frying them on the spot. Is that a certain kind of justice? A similar justice to what I’m talking about?”

  “If Qaddafi gets fried by lightning,” she suggested, “there won’t be a lot of tears shed. I’ll give you that. But if a course pro from the Midwest runs a butter knife through his heart, there’s a slightly different spin to it, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not so sure there is.”

  “Are you telling me I’ve got the hots for a psychopath?” she asked disappointedly. “Just my luck: if they aren’t gay, they’re fucking crazy.”

  “No butter knives,” he said. “It’s the concept that interests me. The ethics. The responsibility to our fellow man. It’s that old question: if you knew what you know now about Hitler, but you knew it back then, say four years before he came into power, and you met him in a bar, do you kill him on the spot or do you let him live?”

  “I ask him to buy me a drink,” she answered, accepting another mimosa from a sweating stainless steel pitcher poured by the flight attendant. “And I take it from there.”

  “But take it where?”

  “You think too much,” she complained, consuming half the mimosa in a single swig. “Can’t we just keep this as lunch in my suite at twelve-thirty? How’s that for a co
ncept?”

  “And the Ivy for dinner,” he said.

  “At least you’re listening,” she said. “That’s a start.”

  Waiting for Edna Zuckerman to return from her sweep of the train cars, Ned Gorman spotted a man at the dining car bar, a black nylon suitcase at his feet. He couldn’t be sure it was the same man he had seen leaving car seven in a hurry, but he couldn’t say it wasn’t that man either. All at once his depth of fatigue vanished, replaced by a speeding heart and prickling skin. Le Tour? A courier? An innocent passenger? He nudged past two American couples complaining about the exchange rate and England’s refusal to support the Euro.

  The man at the bar either sensed him or happened to look back, but either way he briefly met eyes with the approaching Gorman. Given his dark features and a serious tan, the brown-eyed man looked surprisingly nondescript to a federal agent trying to memorize his features. The tan could have been cosmetics, the hair a wig, the eye color contact lenses. Average height. Average age — early thirties perhaps.

  The man lowered his plastic cup of tea, picked up his nylon bag, and calmly walked away from Gorman, who was blocked by a fat woman with a small child.

  There was nothing abrupt about the man’s actions — he moved smoothly and with control — and yet Gorman wanted to interpret them as those of a man attempting to escape.

  The dining car was positioned in the middle of the Edinburgh train, five passenger cars to either side of it, a locomotive and baggage car to the front, a solo baggage car to the rear. Gorman heard the far door hiss, although his sight of it remained blocked by the curving bar. He nudged past the fat woman, dodged a man carrying a pair of beers, and ran smack into another group of Americans, this time discussing how expensive the train service was. By the time he reached the end of the car, triggering one door open and then the next, the man with the nylon bag had disappeared again.

  He spun around. Through the two layers of thick glass he saw that the dining car ended with a public restroom. The suspect might have ducked into the restroom while intentionally tripping the door to open, hoping to confuse Gorman. He glanced right, down the long empty aisle of the passenger car where he stood. Probably a restroom down there as well. He scanned the backs of heads, checking if the suspect had taken a seat. The man had been wearing a black leather jacket and blue jeans — he and a few hundred others, Gorman realized.