Death Train to Boston (23 page)

IT FELT GOOD to be doing something that would most likely have a positive outcome, even if that outcome was something so simple as getting his and Meiling's baggage off the train at the right stop.

Michael hadn't been able to find the porter he'd paid to put their things off at Provo—the man was probably tucked up behind some curtain somewhere sleeping, just as the whole train seemed to be behind doors or curtains sleeping—and although at first that had been bothersome, now he was glad. Glad because to be taking care of things himself felt far more rewarding.

That is, it would be once he found the damn bags.

He wasn't likely to find the bags unless he first found a lantern—the inside of the baggage car was black as Lucifer's heart, he couldn't see a blasted thing.

Michael stood to one side, still in the connecting area, and looked back the way he'd come. On some trains the baggage cars were attached at the rear, but not on this one. Here the baggage was stowed in the first two cars behind the locomotive and the coal
tender. The sound of the great steam engine churned loud in his ears as he peered through the small rectangle of glass in the door of the passenger car through which he'd just come.

He didn't see anyone. Didn't sense any movement. He waited.

From time to time as he made his way cautiously from car to car, he had felt as if he were being followed. But it was probably only his imagination, only tension; every trick he knew to make a follower show himself had failed, and there weren't many people on the planet who could succeed at following Michael Archer Kossoff undetected.

Hill Ramsey, maybe. If Ramsey was back there, Michael wanted to lure him out.

That was why he'd looked into the baggage car, then ducked aside without entering and allowed the door to close by itself as if he'd gone on through. Now he waited patiently amid the roar of the engines and rushing air, counting the seconds as they passed by.

At one hundred and eighty—that is to say, three minutes—Michael was convinced he had not been followed after all. Through his nose he exhaled the breath he'd been holding in a bit of a snort just audible over the noise all around, rubbed his hands together, settled his jacket on his shoulders with a semi-shrug, and was ready to proceed.

He opened the baggage car door again, and this time he went in. He struck a match, a tiny orange flare in the murky black, which settled to a small but steady glow. Then he looked around: no lantern hanging up beside the door, curse it.

Three matches later, he spied a lantern where some lazy railroad employee had left it, on top of a trunk a third of the way into the car. He squeezed down a narrow aisle that had been left to provide room for shifting
bags and trunks around, grabbed the lamp, and lit it with another match.

Ah, that was better.

Or was it?

The lamplight cast Michael's shadow up behind him in a monstrous distortion. He moved; this monster moved. It was eerie and distracting. His own shape kept drawing his eye away from the task at hand, which was to find one particular upright steamer trunk and two large leather suitcases—the latter of reasonably handsome quality and appearance, if somewhat scarred from frequent use.

Some time later, Michael realized he would have to move on through this car and into the next. The stacks of suitcases and rows of trunks were arranged, front to back, in the order they were expected to be unloaded. In this car, therefore, all the tags were labeled with the names of towns west of the Mississippi. A few Salt Lakes, a couple of Provos, and then towns with names like Grand Junction, Carbondale, Denver, Lincoln, and plenty of others he'd never heard of. Not a single damn Chicago in this whole damn car.

The train lurched and some of the bags shifted, but nothing fell.

What was that all about? He was instantly hyper-alert.

It was probably nothing, some inconsequential hitch, which at any rate was not repeated as the train continued on.

Michael had slipped a bit before regaining his footing. Now he noticed the lantern teetering close to the edge of the stacked suitcases where he'd put it down. Just as he put out a hand to steady it, one particular shadow caught his eye.

Michael made a sound low and deep in his throat, an involuntary growl. That shadow had moved, he was certain of it.

With infinite slowness he crept in the moving shadow's direction, silently as a stalking cat. Yet when he got where it had been, there was nothing there. Nothing but a black gap between two trunks, just large enough for a man to hide.

Challenge, or keep silent?

It was six of one and half a dozen of the other. Michael shrugged as elaborately as he could with only one good shoulder, intending anyone who might be watching him to think he thought he'd been mistaken. And maybe he had.

Time's wasting,
he thought.

He went back to where he'd left the lantern and moved on up to the front baggage car. As he passed from one car to the next, the train sounded its whistle through the night; he'd become so accustomed to its intermittent, lonely wail that for the most part he didn't consciously hear it anymore.

Not good, not good at all.

Michael shook his head as he entered a second car full of trunks and suitcases and valises and boxes and bags, all shapes and sizes, not arranged in any particular order that he could see, except he felt certain most of them were destined for Chicago.

While scanning rapidly in search of his own bags, which he was sure he would recognize, he wondered how many things he might have missed during the last couple of days simply because he'd become so used to them that he wasn't seeing them. Like the train whistle he didn't hear.

In his business he couldn't afford to do that, not ever.

Michael left off lecturing himself a few moments later, when he found what he'd been looking for. He began shifting things around in order to make a path for himself; he would have to take their three items back to the other car, where the pieces labeled for Salt
Lake City were stored. His suitcases were one thing, but Meiling's trunk was going to be a problem.

Not to mention that some poor person was going to end up waiting on the platform at Salt Lake with no luggage because Michael had stolen his tags, and as of this moment was busily relabeling them with his own name in black grease pencil.

Click.

Michael's head snapped up. This close to the locomotive engine it was hard to hear small, discrete sounds, but he'd heard that one: the distinctive click of the railroad car's door latch disengaging. He was ready, he'd been expecting this. The moving shadow had been not just a shadow but a person, and that person had followed him.

He set the lantern on the floor for greatest stability. The last thing he wanted was for it to be knocked over in the fight that was going to be taking place at any moment. The safest thing to do would be to put it out— that way he'd know it couldn't cause a fire. But then he'd have to fight in the dark, and he wouldn't be able to see the face of his assailant. He couldn't have that. He had to know who it was. Who was good enough to have stayed on his tail undetected all this time.

When things started to happen they happened fast and furiously, just a few too many yards away, in the midst of too many shadows cast by that lamp on the floor. Michael could not see clearly.

Initially he didn't understand. He was disoriented and confused. He had expected to be attacked, but he was not attacked; it was something else entirely, something totally unexpected.

A rushing, whirling black thing flew into the railroad car, spinning and turning so quickly he couldn't tell if it was human or animal. There were thumps and crashes, blurs of motion, a guttural swear word he couldn't
make out, followed by the unearthly howl of someone in a lot of pain . . . and then silence.

Through all this Michael Kossoff stood untouched.

Shockingly still.

Unmoving but not unmoved.

Then the black figure appeared in the narrow space Michael had cleared; tall, long-limbed, and strange, it came walking toward him. Was there something familiar in that walk?

No, not really, but—

But he had seen another figure dressed in black like this, not exactly but very much like this, a couple of years before. And in Japan, even before that. Ninja. All in black: body, feet, hands, black silk scarf wound round the face and neck, everything covered but the eyes . . . and even those eyes were black. They shone in the lamplight like obsidian.

The figure reached up and loosed the scarf at the back of its head, slowly unwrapped the black silk, and let it fall.

Michael said, "Meiling."

She bowed, unsmiling. "I most humbly beg your pardon. "Without your knowledge or permission I have been your shadow tonight. I have done this so that there will be no more foolish questioning of my ability in this regard."

Michael was still too stunned to know what to say, so he did not say anything. Meiling? Meiling had done what so few could?

"I have incapacitated the miscreant. For the moment he is in too much pain to move. But I suggest if you wish to question him, it should be done right away."

I knew all too well what money of her own would mean to Norma and I thanked God for having the means to
offer that enticement, as without it I very much feared she would have dropped me in the middle of the street. This poor excuse for a town was called Hiram, and it was about as attractive as its name.

Instead of dropping me in the street Norma had done only somewhat better: She left me on a wooden board sidewalk, in the approximate vicinity of a couple of establishments from whose doorways light shone. All the other buildings on the main street were dark, shut down for the night.

I stood there trembling inside, feeling the perilous effect of the same state that had made Norma vulnerable to my wiles: I had no money, none except a treasure given to me by Selene, and I was completely determined not to spend that unless my life depended on it.

I had no money because Melancthon Pratt did not hold with giving money to his wives. Not even to Verla, who as first wife was charged with the overall running of his household. He doled out money as it was needed, to the person who needed it, in the exact quantity required, and he asked for a strict accounting. Therefore the wives had been unable to lend me even so much as the price of one night's lodging in this one-horse town.

If need were dire I could spend Selene's five-dollar gold piece, which she had pressed into my hand when she'd kissed me goodbye. She had won this gold piece by taking first prize in an essay contest upon some esoteric Mormon subject when she was thirteen, and had showed it to me some weeks earlier. I did not want to take it, but there had been no way to make her take it back without calling attention to the fact that she had given it to me, which did not seem a very good idea.

I did not want to spend Selene's gold piece; indeed I was determined to go to great lengths to avoid it. I intended to see her again when all was said and done, with this adventure behind me, when my body had
completely healed and I could be reasonably sure my mind was clear.

A child-woman: That was how I thought of Selene. In some touching ways she reminded me of myself at her age, though our circumstances were entirely different. We had become close in my last few days at Pratt's house. I knew she had not wanted me to leave, because I'd provided her with a glimpse of a world that was so much bigger than any she'd ever known, and now she was hungry for it. The more I'd told her, the more she'd wanted to know. My leaving had been like turning out a light, or closing a door.

In a sense I suppose I had corrupted Selene. Perhaps I had done that with all of them. "Trouble," Verla had called me in her flat, direct way. To those wives I'd been like the snake in the Garden of Eden, saying,
Eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, stop it," I muttered to myself. There was no sense making myself feel guilty. What was more, I couldn't stand there paralyzed on the sidewalk forever.

Yet a large part of my mind was still back there at Pratt's. I wasn't used to being out in the world again. By listening hard I could still hear the creak and rattle of the buckboard on its way out of town, and a part of me wanted to run after Norma and beg her to take me back "home." But that was a very small, sick-in-the-head part of me, and I knew it. Thank God.

Resolving to think no more thoughts of that nature, I squared my shoulders, settled the crutches more firmly beneath my armpits, and turned toward the two establishments from which light flowed. One was a drinking establishment to judge by the sounds and smells emanating from within; the other had a sign over the door proclaiming
hiram's finest hotel.

The saloon was tempting, though of course I
couldn't go in there. I would have liked a drink; brandy would have gone down quite well with me right then. But I behaved myself—greatly aided in this enterprise by the lack of any money except Selene's gold piece, which I certainly could not put to such use as buying myself strong liquor.