Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

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 MacArthur. 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.”

“I don’t understand why you need a partner.”

“Well, you can do a one-man mind-reading act, but that takes preparation. It’s much better as a two-man act. Joe and I have a pretty tricky little routine. You should see it sometime.”

“I’d love to.”

He poured another round of highballs and passed them around. “A very tricky little routine,” he insisted amiably over his fresh glass. “I usually stay on the stage and Joe goes down in the audience. So he asks a guy to take something out of his pocket or a woman to take something out of her purse and hold it in their hand. Right away – I’m up on the stage, see? – I tell the audience what it is. Now how do you think I do that?”

“I suppose you have some sort of a system of signals,” I said.

“This certainly is interesting,” said Anderson, with a boyish pleased smile.

Everyone at our end of the car was listening, except the dark man with the long sullen face. He was half-turned in his seat, frowning out the window at the water-ravaged earth of northeastern Missouri as if he felt personally responsible for it.

“Sure, we have signals,” Teddy Trask went on. “We’ve got a dozen systems. For example, Joe touches his left eye – it’s a lipstick. He touches his right eye – it’s a watch. He smoothes his hair – it’s a handkerchief. That’s the simplest kind. But say I’m blindfolded, that system doesn’t work. I’m blindfolded, can’t see a thing. What do we do then?”

“You could have verbal signals,” I said. “Key words that would mean something to you, but not to anybody else.”

“Say, this boy’s sharp. Isn’t this boy sharp?” he said to Anderson.

“Sharp is absolutely the right word for him,” said Anderson.

“Sure, we use key words,” Teddy went on. “But you’d never figure our best system. Our best system is a honey. Get this. Joe and I practiced counting together with a metronome. We set it for one beat per second and practiced counting with it, must have been three or four hours a day for a month. We got so we could count together up to a hundred and always be both on the same number.

“O.K., we’re putting on a show. I’m up on the stage, blindfolded. Joe’s down in the audience, talking. He gives me the signal to start counting, and we both start counting together. He goes on with his line of patter, talking and counting at the same time. Then he gives me the signal to stop. We both stop counting, and we’re both on the same number, see? Let’s say it’s thirty-five. Thirty-five is a lady’s brooch. Forty-five is an automatic pencil. Every number has a meaning.”

“That’s wonderfully clever,” Rita said. “But what if it’s something you haven’t got a number for?”

“That’s practically impossible,” Teddy said proudly. “There only are a hundred things that people carry in their pockets or their purses. Of course we have to change some of the meanings for a military audience. But not as many as you’d think.”

“I thought I knew a little about codes,” I said. “But this is the first time I ever heard of a time code. Did you invent it?”