“That’s suspicious in itself,” he said. “Your ordinary above-board Negro club or society is only too glad to get a little publicity. I asked Kate Morgan about it, but she wouldn’t talk. Maybe she didn’t know anything. I don’t know. It’s more likely she was scared. She saw what happened to Bessie Land.”
“Do you think Black Israel killed Bessie Land?”
“How the hell should I know? Anyway, it’s Hefler’s baby now.” He yawned again and retreated into his blankets.
I called Hefler back, and told him what Joe had told me. Then I got up and dressed. It was Hefler’s baby all right, but I couldn’t drop it. I had already made up my mind to go to San Diego with Mary. San Diego is a half hour’s drive from Tia Juana.
PART III
TRANSCONTINENTAL
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 ni
ghtmare, 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 MacArthu
r. 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.”
Trouble Follows Me Page 8