Death Train to Boston (18 page)

Neither of these names meant a thing to me. I felt
panic when I thought how far I had to go, what an ordeal I had before me in order to escape.

"Now," said Striker, "before I bring in Father Pratt and his wife, I ask you again. Are you a virgin?"

I remained silent for a moment. Finally I said, "Do you really want to see me married to Melancthon Pratt, who already has five wives? A man who is ignoring the laws of this country, the United States of America?"

"In Utah it is not all that uncommon. For us, Washington, D.C., seems so far away as to be another world, irrelevant to ours. The practice of polygamy has been officially outlawed since statehood, that's true, but, well"—Arnold Striker shrugged eloquently—"I myself have three."

"Three?"

"Wives, that is."

Oh, for heaven's sake,
I thought. It was all I could do to restrain myself from rolling my eyes.

But then I had a brilliant idea, which immediately translated into an equally brilliant lie, and I heard it come out of my mouth: "All right, I'll tell you. I am not a virgin, of course not. And I can't marry Melancthon Pratt, because I'm not a widow. That's only what I tell people when I travel alone, as I was doing when the train I was on got blown up. I further use the widowhood ruse in order to do all manner of other things alone without censure. My husband, however, is very much alive. He lives in Boston, which is why I must return there every so often. I was on my way to Boston via Chicago when the train wreck occurred, as anyone who checks the passenger list will tell you.

"So you see," I concluded, somewhat triumphantly, "I cannot marry Pratt, or anyone!"

"What's wrong with him?"

"With whom?"

"Your husband."

"Oh. I see what you mean. There's nothing much
wrong with him. He just doesn't like to travel and I do. I'm sure by now he must be frantic to know what's happened to me." I leaned forward, pleading with all my heart, putting all the emotional intensity I could muster into my next question.

"Might you be willing, Dr. Striker, to send my husband a telegram for me? Just to let him know I'm all right?"

"I don't know. I might."

"Please."

"I'll think on it."

"It would have to be done without Melancthon's knowledge."

"I said I'll think on it."

"Perhaps—" I did not want to push this too far, but I'd committed myself now, so I went ahead. "Perhaps you might even, in your telegram, tell him exactly where I am and ask him to come for me."

That produced a very big frown. Yet still he said, a third time, "I'll think on it. What is your husband's name and where can I reach him?"

"Jones, not James. Pratt, er, he misunderstood what I said the first time he asked, and I decided just to let them all call me James, because by the time I was conscious again they were all thinking of me as Carrie James. My husband's full name is Leonard Pembroke Jones, and he lives on Beacon Street in Boston."

Michael burst through the connecting door and stood upon the metal linkage platform between the two railroad cars, feeling the thrum of the wheels on the silver rails beneath his feet. The car ahead was coach class, rows and rows of high-backed seats on either side of a long aisle. Michael peered through the glass window in the top half of the door, and caught sight of his quarry just as he sat down. He was all too obvious: the one
person in the whole car whose chest rose and fell too rapidly, the one who was breathing too hard because he had been running.

A big man. Both tall and broad. Gray hair, very distinguished, yet with a ruggedness about him. He'd taken a seat with his back to Michael. Did he know he had been followed? Probably not.

It was not Hilliard Ramsey.

The man seemed very familiar, but Michael could not come up with a name. Or, for the moment, even the time and the place where he had known the man.

MEILING, PETULANT? If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, Michael would never have believed it.

"You eat a second breakfast, if one of us must," she said, tossing her long hair back over her shoulder and refusing to meet his eyes. "I have already told you more than once, I am not hungry. You may order coffee for me, that is all."

Michael had insisted Meiling go along to the dining car and take a table, while he detoured by his own compartment before joining her. During that brief stop he'd armed himself with his revolver, but he did not intend to tell her that. He felt it was enough of an explanation to say he believed they had best seek safety in numbers, at least for a while.

He gave their order to the dining steward—cinnamon toast and fresh-squeezed orange juice for himself, a pot of coffee for Meiling—and then leaned back in his chair, doing his best to relax. Continual tension can
drive a man mad. At the moment he felt he was not far from it.

Still, he must make an effort, and so, when he had regained his equilibrium he asked, "What is it that has you so uncharacteristically peevish, Meiling? Are you just venting on me your feelings about the train's policy of allowing women in the club car only at the dinner hour?"

She regarded him sidewise out of her almond-shaped obsidian eyes, and somehow her reply came out sounding a bit like a hiss: "It is a senseless custom made up by men for the advantage of other men. It is unfair to allow only the males all the time access to this—what is it called—clubs car, for the reason that it is the only place where one can go on this train when one is simply bored with one's own company. Or with the company of one's traveling companion. Certainly I do not like it. How could I like it? But there is nothing I can do about it. I prefer not to waste my time allowing my feelings to be consumed by matters I can do nothing about."

This speech, certainly the most direct and lengthy one Michael had ever heard from any Chinese woman, got his full attention. Not that he hadn't been learning by bits and pieces how much she had changed; or if not exactly changed, for she'd always had a strong personality, how much she had grown up. But this attitude and way of speaking were both new and powerfully adult.

Somehow, when he hadn't been paying enough attention, the little girl he'd known from birth had become not just a beautiful woman but a force to be reckoned with. Michael felt a prickle of respect, almost a thrill, for the extent of her transformation.

But never mind that. The question was: How the devil was he going to leave the train? Goddammit, he couldn't look after her safety and also do the job he had to do.

Meiling, apparently having said what she had to say, calmly stared out the window at the passing scenery.

The cinnamon toast came, a golden pile of it, sweetly fragrant upon a flowered plate. The steward, immaculate in his stiff white tunic, served Michael's orange juice in a crystal glass nestled in shaved ice within a silver bowl. Meiling's coffee came in a silver pot; her cup and saucer were fine china, flowered like the toast plate but in a different pattern. Everything so elegant, and so . . . wasted. So impossible, under the circumstances, to enjoy.

It was late in the morning; they had arrived at the tail end of the last seating for breakfast and now had the dining car almost to themselves. One other couple sat several tables away on the opposite side of the train; much nearer a man sat all alone at a table for four. Michael watched him, suspicious of everyone now, until he felt reasonably certain the man was fully occupied with eating and reading the newspaper, and had no interest in eavesdropping on their conversation.

"Come, Meiling," he said, "your coffee will get cold."

She gave him another disgusted look. "No, it will not. The metal of the pot will keep it warm for at least an hour. I will talk when you are ready to be sensible, instead of—I cannot think of the right word for what you are being, either in English or Mandarin."

Michael could read her look, and suspected the word she sought was of the sort proper females, young or old, were taught not to utter. It might not even be in her vocabulary.

But it would be in Fremont's. Fremont could swear like a sailor when she wanted to, which was not often. She contended she had learned all these words from Michael, although he suspected she'd picked them up at a shockingly young age from sneaking into some room at night to listen to her father and his cronies. Her
mother had died young, leaving Fremont to be her father's hostess—and an often lonely, if unusually privileged, adolescent girl.

Michael roused himself, deliberately shutting a door in his mind against any thoughts of Fremont except those directly related to this case. For that was how he was beginning to think, the direction his analytical mind was increasingly bent upon. Somehow this was all one case, all related: the harassment of the railroad that J&K had been hired to look into, the explosion of the train they'd been on, everything that had happened since. He just didn't know quite how it all fit together, and if Fremont's disappearance was related to all the rest. He continued to think, to hope, she'd been dazed but not seriously hurt, and had wandered away on her own.

But for now, Meiling deserved his attention. His mind might have wandered for a few seconds, but still he'd heard, even been amused by, what she'd said.

Careful to keep any trace of that amusement out of his voice, he inquired, "Shall I help you choose the word you're looking for? I quite take your meaning, you know. You think I am being—how about difficult? Unreasonable? Stubborn?"

"Like the head of a pig," she said, "or the donkey of a horse."

"I think you mean a horse's ass."

"Yes, that is it. A horse's ass."

"And pigheaded."

"That also." Meiling bowed from the waist, a mockery of maidenly deference.

Michael sighed, shaking his head. Women.

He leaned forward and held one hand out, palm up, on the table in a gesture of concession. "Obviously we need to talk this through. It's not the club car that has you out of sorts, it's me. And I have to tell you, Meiling,
I'm a little out of sorts with you too. So we'll talk, and then you'll agree to get off this train."

"No," she said, eyes flashing, "I do not think so. I do not think that would be wise at all, and if you were not being the donkey of a horse you would see it for yourself, Michael Kossoff!"

"Very well. Explain yourself. I'll listen." Michael leaned back and folded his arms over his chest, sling and all.

"I could have been a help to you earlier. I am quick, nimble, and can defend myself. I am skilled in jujitsu, as I'm sure you know. If we had both gone into the corridor together, I might have pursued the man and brought him down while you did whatever it was you were doing outside my door. You wasted time. He got away."

He had to admit she could be right; in such a situation, seconds did count. But he wasn't ready to admit it yet, if ever. Nor did he want to believe Meiling's jujitsu could bring down a man as big and tall as the one he'd been chasing.

He took a different tack: "I wasn't wasting time, Meiling. I was checking around the door for explosives. I was remembering, I suppose, how the train Fremont and I were on was blown up. Not only that, but the very cars in which we had our compartments appeared to have been targeted. I mean, those were the cars that ended up at the bottom of the gorge. That
could
have been coincidence.
Must
have been coincidence. And yet—"

Meiling remained quiet, calm, watchful.

"And yet," Michael said, "I had the oddest feeling it might be about to happen again. . . ."

"Odd feelings are important," Meiling said, leaning forward, instantly interested, animated. "Tell me more about this."

But Michael was reluctant. Surely nothing so irrational could be worth his consideration, or hers. Yet, irrational or not, these feelings and accompanying thoughts persisted—and since this most recent incident, they had indeed increased manyfold.

He took a piece of cinnamon toast, tore it in two, put half in his mouth, and began to chew. It was good, but he only distantly registered its spicy-sweet taste. At last Michael said, "I've had a feeling, ever since the explosion, that Fremont and I were specific targets. But that's ridiculous. Nobody would blow up a whole train just on the uncertain chance that the two of us, out of two or three hundred passengers, could be hurt or killed."

Now Michael too leaned forward. He kept his voice intentionally low: "Besides, the explosive was not on the train, it was affixed to the trestle that supported the tracks over the gorge. This was confirmed by burn marks on what was left of the trestle's wooden timbers. A part of the detonating mechanism was also found. As I'd thought might be the case, it had a timer, which was tripped when the engine passed over it on the track. A certain pre-set interval passed, during which the fuse was burning down, and then . . . boom."

Meiling blinked, even though he'd only whispered the word.

Michael paused, stunned by his memories, his eyes suddenly staring at a place only he could see.

Meiling said, "Yes, boom, and Fremont lies at the bottom of this gorge. Hurt, but alive. And now she is missing. We will find her. Let us not lose sight of this most important fact."

Now in her turn Meiling paused, to let what she had just said sink into Michael's distracted brain. Then she urged, "You are not finished, there is more. Tell me."

"Very well, but eat some of this damn toast. We must at least give the appearance of having breakfast together."

She took a piece of toast and tore it into small pieces, some of which were destined to disappear on her tongue; others ended as decoration around the rim of her saucer. Her attention was rapt, as Michael found himself slowly but surely opening up to her.

He told Meiling things he'd thought he had to keep to himself. For example, his nagging conviction that someone was conducting a vendetta not just against the railroad but also against the J&K Agency—even though this made no sense, because they had not been in business long enough to have made any enemies.

Thinking aloud, he admitted that as individuals, independent of the detective agency, he and Wish Stephenson might have old enemies. Certain shady persons who could want revenge for something he or Wish had done earlier in their respective lives, his in the spy world and Wish's with the San Francisco Police Department.

Not Fremont, though. All of Fremont's enemies were in jail; she had a tidy way of catching them and turning them in. Didn't Meiling agree this was so?

Meiling inclined her head, not quite a nod of agreement, just recognition of what he'd said, and silent encouragement to continue.

Michael sighed; his life was neither so simple nor so tidy, never. He had years of loose ends that he despaired of ever being able to tie up—but that he did not tell Meiling. Instead, having opened certain floodgates, he went on.

He told her about the dream he'd had repeatedly since the blowup, a dream in which he saw Fremont in a small room, a confined space like a prison cell yet not quite that, with chains on her legs.

Telling the dream unmanned him. Michael had to turn his head away, to cover his eyes with his hand until the tears stopped, and then to unobtrusively wipe them away.