The Night Train: A Novelette (The Strange Files of Modesty Brown Book 1) (5 page)

She hustles back to the train car where we
first found her, where she burned Piano Teeth with a cigarette, where she first
encountered The Reform School Girls. It is empty of all that when she returns,
only a fine dusting of cigarette ash on the floor, a stray feather from a boa,
the crumpled foil of a caramel shoved into the ashtray.

Her
carpetbag is still safely stowed under the seat, and she pulls the case file
from it. She rips through it, scanning for anything useful. Aha. Piano Teeth’s
mugshot torn from some kind of book. Next to his picture, a rap sheet: Breaking
& Entering, Bad Checks. Wonderly’s scrawl over the page:
Low Level Shapeshifter.
Mostly pigeon and rat. Small time with aspirations. He’s no mastermind.
Scars:
upper right chest, stab wound.
Looks like he tried to black a chorus girl’s
eye, so she tried fill him with daylight with a shiv she made from her manicure
set. I should send the gal flowers.

Modesty
can’t help but laugh.

She
finds the matchbook on the Chinese takeout menu, pulls it off. The back reads
HOTEL MARLENE and there is more of Wonderly’s scrawl across specials for Peking
Duck and Chicken Chow Mein: FONG.
Can’t seem to get close enough to her to
get any real intel. She circulates the room, but won’t really talk. She’s nice
enough, but there’s something…powerful at work there. I’m not going to push it,
as I value my…well, as I value my everything. Played Pai Gow at her parlour for
four hours. Won 2 dollars. Lost 6. There goes the light bill.

She
scans news clippings all telling of the same thing: stolen dominos from local
casino, be on alert etc.

More
of Wonderly’s scrawl:
Not stolen. Counterfeit. Looks like somebody’s trying
to queer Mrs. Fong’s racket. Rumor mill says she takes care of it herself. Fake
Fong tiles all cursed: play a game with them and win, and your soul is hers.
God knows what she does with them. Lines them up like ceramic cats on the
mantle? Uses them for fuel? Rolls them up and smokes them? Who knows.

I
don’t know how Franco got his paws on these, but I’m pretty sure that accounts
for how much he’s been winning. I say let Fong have him and good riddance. It’s
the tiles I need to find. If they circulate, some poor kid down on his luck
takes them up? It’s hard to say no to Free Luck. Nope. The tiles have to be
recovered.  

She
can’t confront him directly, that could be dangerous, and might not get her
what she wants. She thinks about his fingers walking up her leg, his
sweetheartbaby business. Fine. She can use that.

And
a plan starts to form. A plan involving a drink with him at the bar, and help
from Pinky (who she was pretty sure would be all game), and drinks and flirting
and switching the cases back. All misdirection and sleight of hand. Nothing up
my garters.

It
is a cockamamie plan, a hare-brained plan, with a hundred moving parts and a
dozen ways to go wrong. But it is what she has. And she isn’t getting to the
City without that typewriter.

She
shoves the case file back into the carpetbag, and shoves it back under the
seat. If she does this right, she won’t have enough hands for it.

Modesty Brown pushes through the door of
the carriage and she is in that in between place, that liminal landscape
between the cars, the place that's full of her Not Jumping when a metal screech
tears a hole in the night air, the wheels of the train shudder. She feels the
train stopping, in a slowed down Cinemascope, everything goes silent and edged,
and she can hear only her breath, her heartbeat like something mechanical and
overwound. 

She
feels herself falling, the lurch and the shudder and the flush of hot to her
face. Her arms windmilling like something out of a Saturday Matinee comedy,
only it doesn't feel funny at all. It feels like the world stopping, it feels
like the ground changing, and as she reaches out to steady herself and loses
her grip on her typewriter case. And like a stone from a height, she falls
after it, into the wet, into the night.

So
our poor heroine, Modesty Brown, flung from the train like a candy wrapper,
like a still burning cigarette. See her ember glow in mid arc, ass over
teakettle she goes, her grip on the case lost, her hand closing on open air as
it flings away from her in a perfect arc before landing hard on its corner,
popping its latches. The case opens wide – a maw, a mouth, an open door – and
two hundred and thirty six cursed Chinese Dominoes glow red and black against
the snow.

She
lands on the wet, snowy ground, the gravel embedding in the heel of her hands,
her knees coming through the rips in her last pair of stockings. Her last
decent pair, anyway. Her breath is ragged. Her heart, a snare drum. She takes
stock of all her various and variable parts – nothing broken, though that
ankle’s a bit wobbly, otherwise whole but shaken.

The
night around her is full of trees, full of the hiss of the steam from the
stopped train, full of her missing typewriter, full of cursed Dominoes, full of
her being stopped before she even got truly started. It’s full of noises of the
stopped train – the creak of hot metal cooling, the steam dissipating in the
air. From the forest beyond an owl cries, and there are paw prints in the snow
near the tree line. 

And
the night also full of something else. A kind of scurrying noise, a kind of
breathless, nonverbal whisper. And she might not have seen it all, had one of
them not almost lost their footing, letting out a metallic clang that filled
the night.

There,
in the mist hissing from the train, above the punctuated shouts and flashlights
of the train workers, above all this, two figures scramble out of a window, and
up to the top of the train. From a distance, Modesty sees two women – one in
something like men’s pajamas, the other wearing a coat the looks like a
dressing gown, pink platinum hair faintly glowing in the dark. In one hand, she
carries a square black case.

Modesty
feels like she’s taken a boot to the gut. How could she have been so wrong?
Maybe all of Pinky’s Free Advice had not been so free after all. The matchbook.
The Hotel Marlene. She claps herself on the forehead. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
How could she not have known a Femme Fatale when she saw one?

And
maybe it’s no coincidence at all that all these shady characters from Jack
Wonderly’s case file ended up on the Night Train with her. She can’t help but
think that she’s caught up in something awfully strange. Something beyond what
she can see. Like there is a puzzle at work and she doesn’t have all the
pieces.

No.
That’s not exactly it. It’s more like it’s a puzzle with different pictures on
each side.

She
scrapes up as many dominoes as she can, using the case as a kind of shovel or
big spoon, then quickly shoves the rest in, making sure she doesn’t touch them
with bare hands. She knows she needs to be careful of them, but she isn’t quite
sure what “careful” meant in this situation. She knows it doesn’t mean leaving
them around in the snow, but it also doesn’t mean handling them too much either.
She wrestles the case shut, snaps the latches and stands up, her bloodied knees
smarting in the wind.

And
then she climbs, one-handed, up the safety ladder to the top of the train and
follows the two figures across.

Up
on top, there is quiet and wind. Like she is standing on a battlement. Her red
coat flaps behind her like a cape, like wings.

“Ssh!”
She hears Pinky’s sotto voce whisper in the direction of her pajama clad
companion.

Modesty
drops down behind a round metal chimney until she hears the steps moving away.
Then she peeks out from behind it.

Pinky
hands the case off to her companion and gets down on her knees on top of the
train. She gives something a couple hard pulls, and with a grinding noise that
was louder than any of them would have liked a hatch opens up, and down she
slithers. Her companion hands the case down to her, and climbs down after.

There’s
no window in the hatch, so she can’t see where they went. So she hustles down a
ladder on the side of the train and enters the car. She takes a moment to
orient herself –
If I’m facing this way, and they went down that way then
the door they went through must be…There it is.

BAGGAGE
CAR.

Luckily the hallway is clear enough so she
just pushes the door open. She strides in to the room full of suitcases and
train cases and steamer trunks and crates and boxes, all arranged in clusters
like small countries on one of those battle maps that they use in war movies to
plan out attacks.  Like its own little labyrinth. She doesn’t hear voices exactly,
but as she takes her first steps into the baggage car she can her the sharp
white sound of two people shutting up.

“Pinky?”
she calls out into the baggage car.  “I don’t have time for this.”

Pinky
rises up from behind a couple of steamer trunks, her hand to her eyes like she
is looking at the sun off the bow of a ship. “Pilgrim? Is that you?”

“You’re
goddamn right it is,” she seethes. “And I think you’re holding something that
belongs to me.”

Modesty
Brown storms over to Pinky’s luggage fort and topples one of the steamer
trunks. It’s heavier than she anticipates and it rocks menacingly a couple of
times before falling to the ground with a great dull thud, and not the dramatic
crash that she wanted.

“I’m
sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The
tipped over steamer trunk reveals Pinky’s companion, the one dressed in striped
pajamas. Modesty can see now that she’s small, and the pajamas way too large on
her. Her blond hair is lacquered into an elaborate coiffure, fraying just at
the edges. A hairpin, a beaded white butterfly is coming detached. And what
she’s holding isn’t a typewriter, but a small black suitcase, big enough maybe
for some hats and gloves, combs and lipsticks.

“Pilgrim?
Meet Janet.”

“Janet?
Wasn’t that…?”

“Yep.”

“In
the suburbs…”

“That’s
the one.”

“But
you’re.”

“Yeah.”

“And
she’s…”

“Yeah,
well, Pilgrim. It is what it is.”

“Where’s
your wedding dress?” Modesty asks.

“Incinerator,”
she replies.

“And
your case?”

“The
only thing I could grab.” Her lip trembled and she turned away.

“It’s
okay, pal,” Pinky says, crouching down next to her. “We’ll get you all set up
with new rags once we hit the Marlene.”

“Shit,”
Modesty says, letting her bum hit the floor next to the other two women.

She
pulls out her last Chesterfield. Pinky shakes her head, and offers one of her
own. Modesty takes it and holds it, unlit between her fingers.

“It’s
a good cover, you see,” Pinky begins. “The band? Oh, we’re a real band with
real gigs and everything. It’s just…it’s a real good cover. For gals who…for
gals who want something else and don’t know quite how to get out of the life
that they’re in.”

“You’re
an escort for runaway brides?”

“I
prefer
Underground Railroad.
And we do divorces, too. Get them to the
City, and hand them off to some other gals who get them straight down to Reno.
But it’s easier if the wedding hasn’t happened yet. Fewer lawyers, less money.
 A couple days in the Marlene, a good dye job, put a triangle in her hand,
get her on the Pleasure Cruise, and Bob’s your uncle.”

“So
they just … they just forget about them?”

“Every
single time. Sometimes it takes longer than others. But that has more to do
with how much money’s involved. You don’t have any money, do you Janet?”

Janet
shakes her head.

“See?
No money? No problems. Maybe they’ll stay with the band, maybe they won’t.
Either way, it gets them out of there. And the thing is, once you’re out, it’s
hard for someone to talk you back in. It’s the getting out that’s hard. A whole
new life, waiting for each and every one of them.”

Pinky
reaches out and carefully removes the beaded butterfly now hanging from only a
couple of strands of Janet’s fine hair, and folds it into her hand. “Here,” she
says. “You hold on to this, pal.” Modesty is touched by the tenderness of the
gesture.

“So
then you didn’t pull the cord?”

Pinky
shakes her head, and takes a flask out of somewhere in her garter. She takes a
pull, passes it to Modesty.

“Nope.
But I knew the moment someone did, that there’s be coppers and porters all
manner of folks I am trying particularly to avoid roaming around, asking
questions, counting heads. So I thought it best to let Janet here, lay low with
the crates and suitcases until we get to the City. Easier to take her topside.
So no. We did not pull the emergency cord on a moving train in order to burgle
your typewriter.”

“Your
sarcasm it noted. But the typing?” Modesty pulls on the flask and hands it to
Janet.

Janet
fumbles a little with her left hand, takes a good long swig from the flask,
then holds up the hand she was hiding. It was bandaged and taped and glowing
purple and yellow from bruises.