Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  “I saw no point in bringing it out. It seemed irrelevant at the time. You know that the very mention of Communism to a great many people is like a red rag to a bull. It still seems irrelevant to me.”

  “It may be irrelevant, but I’m not going to drop it till I make sure. I’m going to ask the FBI to investigate Sue Sholto.”

  “Have you been to the FBI?”

  “I didn’t mean to tell you that. Yes, I have.”

  “Why don’t you leave the case to them, then, Sam? Can’t we forget it for a little while?”

  “I know. We came on this trip together to have fun. I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out that way so far.”

  “It never will,” she said bitterly.

  “Maybe I’m not as callous as I thought. I can’t forget about the things that have happened. Or maybe it’s just that last night they started to happen to me.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?” Her wide stare searched my face.

  “Yes. I’m afraid. But from now on I’m going to be more careful. Eventually I’m going to get my hands on somebody or something that I’ll take great pleasure in choking to death.”

  “You make me shudder.” She smiled palely, but her hand had involuntarily gone to her throat.

  “Did I scare you? I’m sorry.”

  I looked around, decided that our compartment gave us enough privacy, and kissed her. Her head went down to my shoulder and her bright hair tickled my face. With my arms around her I could feel a light shiver run along her back. She leaned towards me and we held each other close. I breathed through her fragrant hair. I felt that she was more precious to me than a part of my own body. She said: “Don’t ever let me go.”

  “Excuse me,” Mrs. Tessinger said. She was standing in the aisle, smiling down at us with exaggerated tolerance.

  We separated quickly, and Mary’s hands went automatically to her hair. I started to light a cigarette, then remembered that smoking was forbidden in the Pullman.

  “I didn’t mean to butt in,” Mrs. Tessinger said. “Would you two care to have dinner with us tonight?”

  Mary looked at me and giggled. “Sam. There’s lipstick on your mouth. Here, let me take it off.”

  She dabbed at my face with a handkerchief. I surreptitiously kissed her hand.

  We had dinner with the Tessingers. Teddy Trask, who was inseparable from them by this time, made a fifth on a chair placed in the aisle. Mrs. Tessinger was extraordinarily vivacious. Her bosom seemed higher than ever, and her waist tighter. Rita sat by the window with an air of being left out of things. Every now and then she gave her mother a black glance edged with malice.

  “I was so hoping you’d give us another performance this afternoon,” Mrs. Tessinger said to Teddy. “Why did you let us down?”

  “I didn’t feel in the mood, after that nasty business last night. I guess not many other people did either.” He looked pointedly at me.

  “Do you really think you and that soldier were deliberately poisoned, Mr. Drake?”

  “I don’t know. The authorities don’t seem to think so.”

  “I think Mr. Drake would rather talk about something else, Mother. The subject must be painful to him.”

  “The experience was painful,” I said. “The subject isn’t particularly. I’m afraid I can’t be very entertaining on that topic, though.”

  “Teddy, do tell Mr. Drake and Miss Thompson those glorious shaggy-dog stories of yours. This man is priceless,” Mrs. Tessinger said to us.

  “But we’ve heard those stories, Mother.”

  “I’m sure that Miss Thompson and Mr. Drake haven’t heard them. Even if they have, the way Teddy tells them, they’re very well worth hearing again. Teddy, I insist.”

  With a deprecating smile, Teddy told a long and involved shaggy-dog story about a man who worked in a zoo and couldn’t remember the names of the animals. Mrs. Tessinger kept up a low tittering. Rita looked out of the window. Mary watched the three of them with a faint smile on her lips.

  He told the story well, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. Something kept prodding at my attention from below, an unremembered fact in my unconscious which insisted on its importance and clamored to be remembered. When Anderson and Miss Green moved past us down the aisle, her junk jewelry tinkling like faint facetious sleighbells, I realized what it was.

  Hatcher had said something about Anderson before he died, something which seemed to indicate that he knew him. The possible implications of this, strengthened, if anything, by Anderson’s denial, hit me suddenly and hard.

  Anderson had sat down a few tables away, with his broad impassive back to me. I felt like getting up and going to him then. But I stayed where I was, watching the plump whitish wrinkles in the back of his reddish neck, wondering what went on under that thin barbered hair, inside that stolid head.

  Mary’s hand found mine under the table. “What’s the matter, Sam?” she said in a whisper.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking.”

  “You’ve got a dreadfully one-track mind.”

  “I guess I have.”

  The story ceased, and we laughed dutifully, except for Rita. As if to convince herself of her own existence, she launched into a rapid strained monologue on all the things she was going to do in La Jolla, and what fun she was going to have. Mrs. Tessinger and Teddy exchanged long queer looks.

  Then Teddy talked about his practically front-line experience in France. Mrs. Tessinger wreathed herself in girlish graces. Teddy seemed larger than he had the day before, as if somebody had blown air into him. I liked him better small.

  Mary and I excused ourselves when we could, and made our way back to the Pullman. When Anderson came back with Miss Green, I went to him and told him I wanted to talk to him.

  “Absolutely, old son,” he said. “Any time. I hear you had some trouble on the train last night.”

  “Trouble is the word. Would you mind coming down to the smoking-room? There’s nobody there just now.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Green?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me. I’ve got a love-story magazine to read.”

  When we were seated in the smoking-room and Anderson had lit a cigar, I said: “Private Hatcher, the man who died last night, seemed to know you. Did you know him?”

  “He must’ve made a mistake. I told you I never saw him before in my life.” Anderson’s smooth plump face was unruffled. His pale blue eyes were alert.

  I said quickly on a hunch: “How did you get out of Shanghai?”

  Preceding his statement by a pause of just the right length, he said with just the right combination of puzzlement and irritation: “But I’ve never been to Shanghai. What are you trying to get at?”

  I was sitting on the leather seat beside Anderson, half-facing the door. There was no audible sound in the passageway, and no visible movement, but a subtle combination of sight and hearing made me conscious that someone was there. I got up and crossed to the door in one motion, and faced the dark man again.

  I said in a voice that was ready to break with cumulative anger: “I’m getting bored with having a shadow. Get out of here.”

  His face was unmoved. He said softly: “Excuse me. I didn’t realize that you were in a position of authority on this train.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. If I catch you eavesdropping again I’m going to slug you.”

  “If you slug me, as you so elegantly put it, I’ll have you arrested. I may even slug you in return.”

  His black eyes were hard, steady and impenetrable. I felt an urgent need to surround them with matching black rings. But if I did, the Shore Patrol would put me off the train. My frustration was so strong and bitter that it gathered in a lump in my throat. I left him standing there and went back into the smoking-room.

  “Let me give you a word of advice,” said Anderson, who hadn’t moved from his seat or shifted his cigar. “You’re all keyed up, and I can’t say I blame you. But if you keep on going around insulting people like this, you’re g
oing to get into a peck of trouble. Just now you practically accused me of having something to do with that soldier’s death. A minute later you accused that young man of eavesdropping. I know you had a tough time last night, but don’t let it make a crank out of you.”

  The Dutch Uncle approach leaves me cold every time, and this was no exception. But I had no answer for Anderson except:

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Better get some more rest,” he said patronizingly as he got up to go. My impulse was to tackle him, throw him down and search his pockets for evidence of I didn’t know what. I controlled my impulse.

  10

  SUSPENDED tensely between the desire to do something and unwillingness to make a fool of myself, I sat and smoked until the tension sagged and I felt able to sleep again. Then I called for the porter to make my berth. He came to the doorway and stood there regarding me grimly, his face like hewn basalt.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  He moved nearer and said in sibilant disappointment: “Mr. Drake, you said you wouldn’t tell anybody what I told you today.”

  “I haven’t. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t. All I said was that I wouldn’t identify my source.”

  “That’s what I mean, suh. You said you wouldn’t tell anybody that I knew anything about Black Israel.” He glanced over his shoulder as if he feared that the cohorts of Black Israel might be massing outside the door to destroy him.

  “I didn’t and I won’t.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, suh,” he said without belief. “But that man knows.” He jerked his head towards the drawing-room.

  “Who knows what?”

  “Mr. Gordon knows that I told you about Black Israel.”

  “Who is Mr. Gordon?”

  “The dark man in B drawing-room.”

  “Him?”

  “Yessuh. He was asking me about Black Israel tonight. I told him I didn’t know anything. You shouldn’t have told him, Mr. Drake. I don’t like his looks.”

  “Neither do I. And let me assure you I haven’t told him anything and never will. Nor anybody else.”

  “Yessuh,” he said with the ancient stolid grief of the Negro who has trusted a white and got his fingers burned, or smashed.

  “I don’t know why he was questioning you, but I had nothing to do with it. He couldn’t have overheard us in the vestibule, because I watched for him—”

  “You watched for him? Who is he, Mr. Drake?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to try and find out. I don’t like this any better than you do.”

  He went to make my berth, and I knocked on the door of drawing-room B. The dark man answered the door in his shirtsleeves. There were wrinkles in the left shoulder of his shirt which might have been made by the harness of a shoulder-holster.

  “Mr. Gordon, I believe?”

  “Mr. Drake, I know. Have you come to apologize?”

  “I’ll apologize when all the chips are down. What is your interest in Black Israel?”

  “I am a sociologist.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Certainly not. Is there any need to?”

  “The need may arise.”

  “In that case I may as well tell you that I’m not a sociologist. Psychology interests me, however. At present I am attracted by the problem of you.”

  “You take the words out of my mouth, Mr. Gordon. I am fascinated by the problem of you.”

  “The problem of you is this,” he said in a flat cold voice which harmonized with his flat cold eyes. “What curious hallucination has persuaded you that you can ask strangers personal questions, and even threaten them, without being sharply snubbed?”

  He snapped the door shut in my face. I refrained from kicking it, but I had never felt less respect for the laws and conventions of civilized society. I went back to the smoking-room and smoked more cigarettes. Physical violence had beaten my impulses down to the animal level, and I craved more than anything else some physical outlet for my feelings. Yet I sat on my tail and for want of anything better to do, played a mental chess game in which half my men were missing and the board itself was in shadow, against an unknown antagonist who made three moves to my one.

  My stalemated imagination rejected the illusion offered by the train’s motion that I was getting somewhere. I was sick of its monotonous jerking, its idiot course along the line of least resistance to a predestined end. I felt boxed in and locked out.

  After a long time Mary appeared at the door in her bathrobe. “Aren’t you going to bed, Sam? It’s very late. Besides, I don’t like you sitting here by yourself.”

  “Sure. I’m going to bed.”

  The berths were all made and the curtains were drawn for the night. The ladder stood at my berth like an admonition.

  I said, “Good night, Mary,” and kissed her. Her body moved in toward me and her mouth grew soft. She said with her lips against mine: “Sam. Come in with me.”

  We lay together with the blind up and watched New Mexico unroll like a faded diorama. There was a faint moonlight which touched the earth with a greenish tinge, like a country at the bottom of the sea. The strange country which at high noon was a riot of pigmentation, a dead world brilliantly shadowed with post-mortem lividity, was at night an arid pasture of the moon. But because a girl’s head was on my arm the shadowy country took female forms, was hung with a mysterious and sexual beauty.

  “A train journey has a funny effect on me,” Mary said. “I feel cut off from the real world, isolated and irresponsible. The time I spend on a train is like an interlude from real life.”

  “The country is Cockayne,” I said. “Would you marry me if I asked you to?”

  “Don’t ask me that now,” she said drowsily. “Pull down the shade and ask me if I love you in the dark.”

  That night I had no bad dreams.

  At six a moral alarm clock clicked in my brain and woke me. Before I opened my eyes I could sense the warm fragrance of her breath and hear its quiet rhythm. When I opened them I could see the dim outline of her closed face, pale and lustrous as a pearl in the early morning light. Moving cautiously so as not to disturb her, I retrieved my clothes and climbed out of the berth.

  The passage between the green curtains was as deserted as a forest aisle, and as full of silence. A silence which held in suspension the rustlings and murmurs of hidden life. Periodically a long strangled snore fell through the silence like a falling tree. I hurried past the dangerous snore, but before I reached the end of the car a curtain moved and parted and a small agile figure in striped pyjamas climbed out backwards like a honeybear. I knew that the berth was Mrs. Tessinger’s. The man, tousled, puff-eyed and cheerful-looking, was Teddy Trask.

  He laid a finger on his lips and grinned sideways. I followed him to the men’s room without speaking. There he said:

  “Caught in the act. Oh, well.”

  “Sleep where you like. But I thought it was Rita you were working up to.”

  “So did I. For God’s sake don’t tell Rita I slept with her mother. She’d never speak to her again.”

  “It would be just as embarrassing for me as it would be for Rita.”

  “Yeah, and it would be twice as embarrassing for me. Oh, well.”

  I filled a washbowl with water and unwrapped a piece of soap. “I was under the impression that you liked them young.”

  “It didn’t work out that way. Christ, I was practically raped. I guess it worked out all right, though. I can’t complain.”

  The swirling water in the metal bowl seemed especially clear and hot. My senses were quick and appreciative. The rather sordid irony of Teddy Trask’s affair with Mrs. Tessinger struck me as intensely amusing. I felt simultaneously alert and relaxed, ready for anything.

  An hour or so later at early breakfast, I had a chance to ask Teddy for more information about his time code:

  “You said you’d offered it to the Army Signal Corps. Could it be used on the radio, do you think?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t see why not,” he said, sliding easily into his favorite subject. “You could go on the air and broadcast nothing but a tick every now and then. The enemy wouldn’t even have to know you were broadcasting. But if they did, all they’d hear would be the same sound repeated at irregular intervals. That’s where this code is different from any other code. The signals themselves don’t mean anything. The meaning is in the time between them.”

  “We use the same principle in whistle signals. A six-second blast means one thing. A twelve-second blast means something else.”

  “That’s right, it’s the same principle,” he admitted.

  “Say the Army used your code. Wouldn’t it take a long time to pass on a little information? And wouldn’t the number of things you could say be pretty limited?”

  He sipped his black coffee and lit a cigarette. “Sure, I admit that. That’s probably the reason the Army turned it down. That and the fact that I wasn’t a brass hat, or even a second lieutenant. But don’t forget that you could work it out much finer on the air, with clocks synchronized to one-fifth of a second. That gives you five hundred meanings per one hundred seconds, if you take a fifth of a second as your unit.”

  “But then you’d still be limited to saying five hundred things and if your message was the five hundredth meaning you’d have to wait a hundred seconds between ticks. It would take you a hundred seconds to say it.”

  “That’s right, too. It’s slow. But I never thought it could be anything but a special-purpose code.”

  “And wouldn’t an enemy cryptanalyst catch on pretty fast to your limited list of prearranged meanings?”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, boy. Unless he had a time-sense better than any I’ve ever heard of, your enemy cryptanalyst wouldn’t ever know he was listening to a code. That’s the beauty of it. It could be used in guerrilla warfare, by advance agents in enemy country. But say your enemy cryptanalyst had an ear like a chronometer, or caught on some other way and started to time the ticks, you could still fool him.”

  “You could change your prearranged meanings at regular intervals, you mean?”

  “Why not?” he said triumphantly. “You could change ’em every day. Say, you don’t think the Navy would be interested in this, do you? I still think it’s got possibilities.”