Super

by Jim Lehrer

  Harry Truman and then A. C. Browne stood up.

  Browne asked Pryor, “Who was the dead man—the suicide—if I may ask?”

  “A local Bethel man named Wheeler,” said Pryor.

  “Otto Wheeler?”

  “Yes, sir. Did you know him?”

  “Not personally but I knew of him. He was from a prominent grain elevator family—and a big Randallite.”

  “The Randallites are no friends of mine,” said Truman to Browne. “They’re conscientious objector types who really came after me for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  Browne said he’d heard that.

  “Care to join me for breakfast, Browne?” Truman said. “They’ve already arranged to serve me in that private Turquoise Room above the lower lounge, farther up the train.”

  “I’d be honored, sir.”

  Harry Truman looked at his watch.

  “See you in about an hour,” Browne said.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Mr. President, I’ll escort you back to your compartment now,” said Pryor.

  Pryor did so with a special pleasure because Truman’s gunshot report had pinpointed the time of Otto Wheeler’s death.

  That, in turn, led to the most likely jurisdictional fact that the Super had already crossed the line into Valerie County, Kansas, when the shot was fired.

  “I am so honored,” said Josephs, a trim man in his forties in a starched white coat similar to those doctors wear. He was beaming. “I cut Mr. Edward G. Robinson’s hair on the Texas Chief. Did Errol Flynn’s hair—and mustache—twice. Judy Garland’s husband also came in for a shave once. But none of that or anything counts compared to you, Mr. Gable.”

  Clark Gable was seated in the barber’s chair in the small barbershop at the end of the middle lounge car. A large white and blue striped cloth was fastened around Gable’s neck, covering his front.

  “Just a regular shave,” he said. “Nothing fancy.”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “Don’t touch the mustache,” Gable added.

  “Not even a trim?”

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “Mr. Flynn sure did think I did well on his.”

  “I’m not Mr. Flynn.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Josephs used a brush to cover the rest of Gable’s lower face in a white foamy lather that he had mixed in a heavy white china shaving mug that bore the yellow Super Chief drumhead logo. The emblem also appeared on ashtrays, towels, magazine folders, a variety of paper items and many other places throughout the train.

  “There we go,” said Josephs. “I hope that feels good.”

  Gable said nothing.

  Josephs, after sharpening a straight razor on a long leather strap, began.

  “I’ve never had a customer bleed to death on me yet, Mr. Gable,” said the barber, “if you’re thinking I might cut you.”

  Gable grunted pleasantly.

  Josephs continued to shave and make comments, most of which Gable ignored, for the next ten minutes until the job was finished.

  The official charge for a shave was two dollars and fifty cents, but Clark Gable gave Josephs a five-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. Gable then honored Josephs’s request to autograph the bill.

  “This is one five-dollar bill I am never spending,” said the barber.

  The actor shook Josephs’s hand and headed back to his drawing room.

  “That was Clark Gable, wasn’t it?” said the next customer, who had been waiting out in the passageway. He was an elderly man in a dark blue striped suit and bow tie.

  “It sure was,” said Josephs, as he began preparing to shave the man in the same chair as Clark Gable.

  “What’s he like?” asked the customer.

  “He’s like a king, that’s what,” said Josephs. “But he wouldn’t let me touch his mustache. I would have loved to be able to say for the rest of my life that once I actually trimmed Clark Gable’s famous mustache. I did Errol Flynn’s twice.”

  “I heard some lady up in the dining car just now talking about Gable,” said the other man. “She was whispering so everyone could hear that he was something close to being impotent. Could that be?”

  “We should all be so impotent,” said Josephs the barber.

  President Truman arrived at the entranceway of his car, with Jack Pryor following right behind him.

  A man stepped out in front of the former president, blocking the way. He was thin, disheveled, sickly.

  “Mr. President, I must talk to you,” said the man, who then put his hand over his mouth to stifle a heavy cough. “It’s most important,” he finally got out.

  Pryor quickly moved past Truman. The detective was a giant compared to this weak little man, who seemed almost as dead as the late Mr. Wheeler.

  “Sorry, but the president can’t talk now,” Pryor said. “Please step aside.”

  But behind him he heard Truman say, “Do I know you?”

  “Yes, sir, I am Dale L. Lawrence. I was an assistant director of the Atomic Energy Commission.” He coughed again.

  “Good for you. Thank you for your service. You might want to do something about that cough. Where are you headed on this train?”

  “Nowhere but to talk to you, sir.”

  Pryor shifted slightly to one side but remained firmly in place between Truman and Dale Lawrence.

  Truman said, “Sorry, but I don’t do business on trains. I hope everything’s well with you. Have a good day.”

  Truman thrust his body forward, a signal to Pryor to do whatever it took to make a way for them to continue on through the narrow passageway to Truman’s compartment.

  “What if we had breakfast together, Mr. President?” Lawrence asked, still blocking the way.

  “No, sir, I’m already set. Now, if you’ll stand aside I will go about my business. Nice to see you.”

  Up closer now, Pryor was struck by Lawrence’s deathly, unkempt appearance.

  The detective put his hands out in front of him and gently grabbed Lawrence by the shoulders. “You heard Mr. Truman, sir, please now stand to one side.”

  Lawrence had no choice but to give way, but he said, “President Truman, thousands of lives are in your hands. I must speak to you.”

  Truman stopped. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sir, do you remember the discussions before deciding to begin bomb testing in Nevada?” Lawrence said quickly.

  “Yes. Yes, of course I do,” Truman said.

  “Do you remember one on January second, 1947, in the Oval Office? There were several papers and drawings. Do you remember that I was there with other members of a committee chaired by Secretary Stimson?”

  Harry Truman looked hard at the man.

  “Frankly, no, I don’t—not specifically. There were a number of people on the committee.”

  “Seven. There were seven in all. I was at that meeting.”

  Truman glanced away impatiently.

  “I was there!” shouted Lawrence, an act that caused him to go into a coughing spasm.

  Pryor tightened his grip on Lawrence’s shoulders.

  Truman said, “Calm down, fella. If you say you were there, fine. What’s the problem?”

  In a whisper, Lawrence said, “I argued against doing that testing. Don’t you remember, sir?”

  Truman’s patience was used up. He took another step as he said, “No, I don’t remember that at all.”

  Truman edged past Lawrence, who continued, “I said the risk of widespread radiation poisoning among the people in the test areas, caused by radioactive clouds and wind changes, was enormous. I said many people could be at risk for various kinds of cancer.”

  “There were other experts who disagreed. They said there was no danger. Please, now, I must go on to my compartment.”

  “Those experts were wrong, Mr. President. There are already beginning signs. I am one of them. There will be others—with names the whole world knows. The testing must be stopped before it
is too late …” He lost his voice. Whatever ailed Dale L. Lawrence had him by the throat.

  Pryor, now behind Truman, gently jostled the former president on and away from Dale Lawrence.

  “Think about a remake of Silver Streak,” Rinehart had said to Gene Mathews as they sat down for breakfast.

  “Bad idea,” said Mathews, opening Elmer Gantry.

  The dining car was barely a third full.

  Rinehart said, as if discussing the weather, “The kid from the Santa Fe pitched the idea to me last night—you know, in the observation car. God knows, they need to do something to get people back on the trains. The kid pitched Gable and Claudette Colbert to play the leads. I nixed Colbert.”

  Mathews raised his face from his book long enough to say, “Neither is right for a train picture.”

  “They were great in It Happened One Night.”

  “That was a bus picture, not a train picture—”

  “Won an Oscar in thirty-four, same year as Silver Streak. The Thin Man was made then, too. Thirty-four was a big year for pictures.”

  Mathews nodded, put his book on the table and buttered a piece of toast. “They’re shooting Picnic out here in Kansas somewhere right now—some little towns around Hutchinson, where we just stopped, in fact,” he said. “It’s probably full of buses and trains.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Rinehart mumbled.

  He scowled and then stared off into the space of Kansas. He had wanted to acquire the movie rights to Picnic after seeing the William Inge play in New York. It was a sore spot. Mathews was rubbing it in—to make his own point.

  And having made it, Mathews said, “Gable was in The Hucksters in forty-seven. A lot of it happened on the Twentieth Century Limited.”

  Rinehart turned back from the window to Mathews. “Carole Lombard’s best movie was Twentieth Century, which also happened on a train. That was … hey, let me think. Yeah, yeah. It was made in 1934, too. Trains and movies.”

  “Trains and movies, right,” Mathews said. “Eva Marie Saint could be the love interest.”

  Rinehart, delighted at Mathews’s willingness to play, said, “Could we get her?”

  “Sure. She won that Oscar for Waterfront but hasn’t done anything much since.”

  “Clark Gable and Eva Marie Saint could be great together,” Rinehart said.

  “Cary Grant would be better,” Mathews said. “Must have a good villain, too.”

  “What about Karloff?”

  “Too much Frankenstein. Yul Brynner?”

  “Not funny, Gene. Not funny at all. I’ll never forgive him for stealing my Brancusi hairdo.” Rinehart ran a hand over his shaved head.

  “He had to do it for The King and I. But, okay—what about James Mason?”

  “British, sinister. Yes, he’s perfect. Maybe I could get Hitchcock to direct. He did Strangers on a Train. He knows trains.”

  Mathews shook his head. “Hitchcock does what he wants when he wants and that’s it.”

  Rinehart added, “And he’d want more than Grant, Saint and Mason, anyhow. He’d want mountains. Pikes Peak, maybe. One of those Rockies. Or Mount Rushmore. Yeah, what about Mount Rushmore with all those presidents on the top?”

  “The Super Chief doesn’t go to Mount Rushmore,” Mathews said.

  Rinehart laughed. “In the movies the Super Chief goes where we say it goes. You know that, Gene.”

  “What about the Grand Canyon? It’s as big a deal as Mount Rushmore.”

  “No canyons. I saw too many of those in Utah. Besides, people go to movies to look up, not down. It’s as simple as that. Everything is as simple as that, Gene.”

  And they played out the plot.

  Rinehart began. “It opens with the Super Chief speeding across the bridge at the Mississippi—”

  “No, no,” said Mathews. “It’s got to begin at Dearborn Station. Passengers loading, commotion, noise, train horns blaring …”

  “Mason’s a renegade spy who has been trying to steal atomic secrets for a foreign power—maybe the results from those Nevada tests …”

  “His plan is to kidnap somebody important and hold him ransom for the secrets … He’s set up an escape on a private plane from an airfield near Rushmore …”

  “He takes the hostage with him on the Super Chief from Chicago. Grant and Saint are federal agents also on the train …”

  Mathews: “Gable, not Grant …”

  Rinehart: “Okay, Gable …”

  “Once he gets the secrets, Mason plans to toss the hostage off the forehead of George Washington …”

  “Lincoln’s head, not Washington’s …”

  “Nope. Got to be Washington’s …”

  “Okay then. Gable and Saint throw Mason off the top of Lincoln’s nose …”

  “The hostage and the nuclear test secrets are saved …”

  “Gable and Saint are promoted …”

  “And married.”

  Rinehart and Mathews exchanged satisfied smiles and laughs. This was fun—as always.

  Then, after a few seconds of silence, Rinehart said, “Thinking back about Utah. Maybe that guy on the train, the one who seemed familiar, worked on Dark Days.”

  “No way,” Mathews said. “I knew—we both knew—every one of those people. There were only twenty-eight on the crew, counting everybody, remember.”

  Rinehart nodded, and he started thinking again.

  Jack Pryor had persuaded Mr. Truman to stay in his compartment until Pryor returned to escort him up to the Turquoise Room for breakfast.

  Then the detective raced away in search not only of Dale Lawrence, who had disappeared, but also of a curly-haired man named Rockford.

  Pryor did the numbers. The “Kansas City” car, where he deposited Truman, was the fifth from the front, almost in the middle, between the dining car and the dome car on this nine-car consist, as the arrangement of cars on any particular passenger train is called.

  He headed for the front of the train, knocking on and opening compartment and bedroom doors, asking every passenger, conductor, steward and porter if they had seen either a man in a brown suit he described as “short, seedy, sickly, shifty, crazy” or a six-foot curly-headed man in a dark suit, shirt and tie.

  Nobody had seen anybody who matched either description. Which didn’t make sense. It was impossible to simply disappear on a train. Nothing was making sense!

  Pryor ran back to the dining car and went right to the table where Rinehart and Mathews were sitting. The conductor had pointed to them as being in the drawing room complex next to Wheeler’s compartment.

  “Gentlemen, first, did you hear anything unusual early this morning?” Pryor asked after introducing himself and apologizing for interrupting their breakfast.

  Rinehart and Mathews said they had heard nothing out of the ordinary.

  Each responded the same when asked if they had seen the man in the compartment on the other side of Wheeler’s or, just now, another man, probably running through here, who was “short, sickly.”

  “Did something happen to that Kansas man Wheeler?” Rinehart asked. “I didn’t really know him except to speak occasionally here on the Super. He seemed awfully ill himself.”

  Pryor, anxious to move on, said, “Yes, something did happen. He passed away this morning.”

  Rinehart smiled. “Good for him,” he said.

  Pryor’s facial expression must have transmitted concern over that response, if not alarm.

  Rinehart quickly added, “If you have to go, what better way than The Chief Way,” referring to that well-known Santa Fe motto he had seen on every Santa Fe ticket envelope and advertisement: “Travel Santa Fe, The Chief Way.”

  Pryor moved on.

  But nobody had seen either man. His Dale Lawrence description brought a particularly distasteful response from the dining car steward, reminding Pryor that some of the most discriminating people aboard the Santa Fe’s first-class trains were the employees rather than the passengers.


  Pryor ended up again at the last car.

  He realized that it had been a while since he had seen Ralph, the ever-present sleeping car porter. Where was he? He should be around here somewhere.

  And there he came from the next car.

  “Where you been, Ralph?” Pryor asked, as calmly as he could manage.

  “Oh, I had to see about breakfast for some of my people.”

  “One of your people is dead, Clark Gable’s already eaten and most of the rest of your people, your movie people, are up in the dining car.”

  “That’s where I was, seeing to their comfort. Mr. Rinehart is always one of my biggest tippers. I do special seeing about him.”

  “That’s interesting because I was just in the dining car talking with Mr. Rinehart and I didn’t see you, Ralph.”

  Ralph smiled, shrugged and raised his arms in front of him in an exaggerated way, as if saying only God in Heaven knows the answer to some of our mysteries.

  “How long you been a Santa Fe cop?” asked Hubert Ratzlaff, the husky, bald county sheriff.

  “Only awhile,” said Charlie Sanders, keeping his big lie alive with his same stupid answer.

  “Must have gone right from grade school, I’d say,” said the sheriff. “Kansas is one of the few states in the Union that’s had mandatory free kindergarten for years. Did you know that?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “Most of the detectives I’ve run into have been a lot older than you look, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Sanders elected to remain silent.

  The sheriff and Helfer were standing at the table looking at the remains of Otto Wheeler when Sanders had returned from the restroom.

  “Helfer here says it was probably suicide,” said the sheriff. “Otto Wheeler was definitely a man dying of cancer. Is suicide what the Santa Fe thinks?”

  What the Santa Fe thinks?

  Here now was a question that Charlie Sanders had never been asked before—about a dead man on a train or anything else. What the Santa Fe thought about anything was what others at the railroad decided.

  “All the evidence certainly seems to point that way,” said Sanders, giving it as much authority as he could manage.