Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

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.

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?”

“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.”