by Chad Dundas
Massive muscles flexed in Fritz’s jaw. His eyes went black and for a moment he was his old self again, Abe Blomfeld’s enforcer, the leg breaker. In a blink, it passed. “Fine,” he said. “Think whatever you like. Just get him to the ring.”
After that, there was not a lot to say. When Pepper got back to the cabin, it was dark inside and Moira was in bed with the blankets pulled up to her neck. He hung his shirt on the back of a chair and started unbuckling his pants. “Do you mind?” he asked.
“Not a bit,” she said in the dark. “Just don’t think of trying anything fresh.”
He slipped into bed wearing his underclothes, and when she pressed against him he discovered she was nude. She kissed him, sliding her hand up the inside of his thigh, and he breathed in the smoky smell of her hair. They made love in a tangle with the cold of the cabin all around them. He felt wrapped up in the warmth of her body, the wetness of her mouth, and when it was over they smoked cigarettes side by side and he told her how much he’d missed her. He told her about Taft’s condition when he’d left the lodge and his conversation with Fritz. She was right, he said, it had been a bad idea coming here, but it was almost over. Soon they would be back on their feet. When he was done she ground out her cigarette on the windowsill and rolled over to kiss him behind the ear. She lay there clinging to him and he went to sleep feeling as happy as he had in weeks.
The morning came too soon. He felt dizzy and light-headed from lack of sleep as the hunting camp came alive for its last few hours of operation. The reporters emerged as one from the lodge, bleary-eyed in their overcoats, a few of them using their typewriter cases as chairs as they waited by the car. Fritz seemed to have shaken off their argument from the night before and greeted Pepper with a grin and a rough clap on the shoulder. He even nodded congenially to Moira when they came up from the cabin, Pepper carrying their trunk. He wanted to ask Fritz how Taft was feeling, but didn’t dare do it while the reporters were within earshot.
He got his answer soon enough. After Fritz sent the reporters ahead to the station in a car with James Eddy, they had to haul Taft out of bed and down the stairs. He was still in much the same state as the night before, mumbling and talking to himself, not acknowledging any of them. Carol Jean was wan and quiet. As little sleep as Pepper had gotten, she had obviously gotten less. He rode up front with Fritz, while Moira and Carol Jean squeezed into the back on either side of Taft. A couple of times, as they drove down the hill through the blinding snow, he glanced back to see Moira holding Carol Jean’s hand atop Taft’s knee.
Eddy was waiting for them at the curb in front of the station, his fingers squeezing the steering wheel like he wanted to snap it in half.
“What about this one?” Moira said, cutting her head in Eddy’s direction as Pepper helped Fritz unload the bags from the trunk.
“I’m told he’s to stay on at the camp,” Fritz said. “One of their Canadian men will be joining him in order to help chaperone Mr. O’Shea’s other interests there.”
“Chaperone,” Pepper said. “That’s one word for it.”
Fritz didn’t smile at the joke, just walked over to the other car and rested his hand on top to have some final words with Eddy. As Eddy’s car roared away, Pepper realized he’d never see the hunting camp again. The idea didn’t bother him, though he couldn’t help but notice how it fit the pattern of the rest of his life: the same place for a few nights, a few months, a few years, then gone, never to be back.
He’d packed hurriedly, stuffing his things into their trunk before it was time to go. Now he left it with a porter while he and Fritz helped get Taft to his private stateroom, hurrying him down the aisle as people stopped to stare. At least it would keep him away from the reporters until he came out of his spell, Pepper thought. They laid him out in the bed and tucked in the corners of the sheet so he wouldn’t fall out. Carol Jean stood in the doorway with a handkerchief pressed to her lips, Moira still with her and still holding her hand. As they squeezed past her on their way out, she laid a hand on Pepper’s shoulder as if to say thank you. It was an odd gesture, but he smiled at her in the most encouraging way he could.
“You don’t look nearly worried enough about this,” Pepper said as he and Fritz made their way back toward where the rest of the men were staying. Moira had remained behind to help Carol Jean get situated and, Pepper hoped, to keep an eye on Taft.
“It’s all going to work out,” Fritz said. “Trust me.”
The reporters had gathered in Fritz’s stateroom, wanting to know how Mr. Taft was feeling. The way the seats were set up in there, they all had to sit facing each other and Pepper watched Fritz squirm in his chair as he told them Taft was feeling much better. As the train lurched to a start, a couple of the reporters started in on an ambitious series of backgammon while Fritz and the others got a card game going. Despite their protestations, Pepper let himself out and walked to the room he would share with Moira at the other end of the car.
By the time she joined him, he’d eaten his way through the complimentary peanuts. The train had reached its cruising speed, clattering up over the continental divide and into the wide, flat belly of America. After she washed up using a damp towel from the room’s small vanity setup, Moira sat with him on the bench seat. She said Carol Jean was trying to put a brave face on, but Moira could tell she was shaken. They would need to get Taft a doctor when they got to New York, she said. Probably one for Carol Jean, too.
“He’ll snap out of it,” Pepper said. “He’s got to.”
Eventually he dozed, and when he woke up, Moira was gone. Back to the Tafts’ room, he guessed, to help keep an eye on the big fellow. After a while he got bored sitting by himself, staring out the window, and he drifted back to see Fritz and the reporters. He joined them at cards and discovered they were easy pickings. The few tricks he’d picked up from Moira were enough to unravel them in short order. One of the men even had a habit of biting his lower lip when he thought he had a hand.
There was an observation car on the train, and when Pepper got sick of deflecting the reporters’ questions about how he thought they’d defeat Lesko and where Taft was hiding, he walked up there and ate dinner by himself. When he’d finished, he got a plate for Moira and carried it back to their room. At some point he slept again and woke in the bright light of morning to find the train stopped and the brick buildings of some midwestern city all around him. Moira had not returned, her plate of food untouched on the small table. He walked down to the Tafts’ room and tapped lightly on the door but got no response.
He had never been good at this part: the downtime, the traveling. Being on the train, constantly moving, constantly vibrating and shifting into its turns, made him feel trapped, pent-up. He wanted to be back in the hills with Taft, running through the trees. The last thing he wanted to do was go back to Fritz’s room and deal with the reporters, so he went out to stretch his legs.
Walking up and down the platform, he tried to determine which of the cars might belong to the Tafts, but couldn’t tell for sure from the outside. Several had their blinds pulled down tight. He checked the station clock and was surprised how early it was. He put a plug of tobacco in his lip, and as he stood there listening to the train cough and chug, he felt the sudden urge to wander off. The idea of going back into the train to sit alone in their stateroom or to stare at the fat faces of the reporters for another forty-eight hours seemed like the last step before hell. If he could just find Moira, they could get lost in town for a few hours—whichever town this was—and once they were sure the train had left without them, they could figure something out.
It would probably be hours, maybe even a day, before anybody realized they were gone. By then they could be on to some new adventure, some new place where no one knew them at all. It was a crazy thought, just a passing fancy, but he reveled in it for a moment. He was looking for a bench to sit on when he caught sight of Fritz at the other end of the
platform, standing in the middle of the flock of reporters, a fireplug of a cigar screwed into the corner of his mouth and swirls of blue smoke curling around him.
Their presence was turning a few heads among the other travelers. Even if they didn’t know who Fritz was, they knew he was somebody and were stopping to have a look. Fritz was enjoying it, finally having his moment. He shook out the match he had in his hand and laughed at something one of the sportswriters was saying. Seeing Pepper, he tried to wave him over.
“There he is,” Fritz called. “The invisible man!”
Pepper smiled back, waved and got back on the train.
From the observation deck, he watched the Great Lakes appear and recede into the gaping sprawl of the east. He and Moira had spent the last few years living in their apartment in the Hotel St. Agnes in Brooklyn while working for Markham & Markham, but he’d never really gotten used to it. The close quarters, the sheer crush of people always made him uneasy and it seemed only more pronounced after spending the last few months in the wide-open space of Montana. As the city sprawl took over the landscape, it washed away the initial feeling of calm he’d gotten from sitting in the observation deck and replaced it with heart-ticking apprehension. Late that night, when he was sure everyone would be asleep, he went back downstairs and let himself into their stateroom.
Moira was there, sleeping in the narrow bed. He tried to wake her to see how Taft was faring, but she shook him off without really coming back to reality. Instead he sat up late by himself, their schedules opposite now, and eventually he wandered back to the observation car to eat again. He slept very little and in the morning was quickly annoyed that the other men greeted his return to Fritz’s stateroom with mock astonishment.
“We thought we’d lost you,” one of the sportswriters said.
“We feared the worst,” said another. “If you didn’t turn up today, we were going to send out a search party.”
The travel seemed to have given them their own language. There were inside jokes and meaningful glances that he didn’t understand. Being cast as the outsider didn’t bother him, but he wished the rest of them could shut up about it. Even Fritz had been allowed into their club, slapping his knees after what he thought was a particularly clever remark or cracking up midway through one of the sportswriters’ jokes as if he already knew the punch line. Pepper had nearly had enough and was about to retreat back to the silence of the observation deck, when there was a quiet knock at the door and he opened it to find Moira and Carol Jean standing in the hallway.
Carol Jean was wearing a bathrobe, and if she’d slept at all during the last few days, she didn’t look it. Her skin had turned ashen and he could see thin purple veins zigzagging through the dark circles under her eyes. Her whole body was quivering and he thought he felt some jittery, electric throb coming from her as the two women stepped inside, looking hesitant to come farther than a step or two. Moira was still wearing the clothes she’d slept in, and she squeezed his hand in a way that sent a shiver of alarm through his body.
In one hand, along with the key to her stateroom, Carol Jean was still clutching the handkerchief he remembered seeing the day they boarded the train. “Someone needs to come wake up Mr. Taft,” she said.
The men all glanced at each other, but this time there was no secret, shared joke. Fritz stood up, looking for somewhere to set the mug of coffee he was holding.
“Someone needs to help me wake up Mr. Taft,” Carol Jean repeated, her voice as thin as a reed, a catch in her throat making the words waver.
Pepper, Fritz and Moira walked as fast as they dared to the Tafts’ compartment, with men eyeing them over the tops of newspapers and women glancing up from breakfast trays. As Fritz fit the key into the lock and pushed open the door, a strange and sour odor hit them. The stateroom was dark and messy, clothes and luggage strewn across the floor, and Pepper nearly tripped over a chair as he made the two steps to the bed.
He knew Taft was dead before Fritz pulled the chain on the bedside lamp. He was still exactly as they’d left him, the corners of the thin railroad blanket tucked under the mattress. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted. After a second to get his courage up, Pepper laid his fingers on Taft’s forehead and found him cold to the touch. Fritz knelt and examined the label on a glass bottle lying on its side at the base of the bedside lamp.
“Dr. Paulson’s All-Purpose Pain Remedy,” he read aloud. He gave the lip of the bottle a sniff and recoiled: “Smells like laudanum. You think she’s been sitting in here drinking laudanum?”
“I know he hasn’t been drinking it,” Pepper said. “Not for a few days. But Moira’s been with her, on and off.”
“You think Moira—” Fritz held out the bottle and Pepper shook his head.
“Jesus, no,” he said.
He leaned back against the wall, suddenly exhausted. When he looked at Fritz squatting next to the bed, holding the empty bottle in one hand, Pepper imagined he felt the same.
“Go see if they have a doctor on the train,” he said.
Fritz bit his lip. “Wait, now,” he said, “let’s think. Let’s be smart about this.”
“Freddy,” Pepper said sharply, the sound of his real name bringing Fritz’s eyes up from the floor. “Go see if they have a goddamn doctor on the train.”
Part IV
THE GRANDDADDY OF THEM ALL
The doctor was a little guy who really looked after his beard. He came from the rear of the train, following Fritz, flanked by a team of railroad employees all talking at once. Pepper watched them from his spot outside the locked door to Taft’s stateroom. He’d let himself out not long after sending Fritz to find the doctor. He needed some air, unable to take it any longer in the stuffy compartment with the smell of death, Taft’s body lying there left behind like something for the trash. Moira had taken Carol Jean back to their room. Anything to keep her away from the reporters while they figured this out, Fritz had said. As if there was something they could do.
“If you think he might be contagious,” one of the railroad guys was saying as they approached, “then we really must ask you to keep him away from the other passengers. I’m sure you understand.”
“We’ve got a sick man here, that’s all,” Fritz said, barely looking back. “Nothing to write the president over, though I assure you we will keep him under lock and key.” He turned sideways to present the doctor to Pepper as if the man was about to crack some important secret code. “A doctor,” he said, and then, with special emphasis: “For our sick friend.”
“You work for the railroad?” Pepper asked.
“Certainly not,” the doctor said. He looked sleepy, like they had gotten him out of bed. “I’m on my honeymoon.”
“No kidding?” Fritz said, grinning at everyone and no one. “You didn’t mention that.”
“Not that you gave me the opportunity,” the doctor said, “while you were pulling me from the arms of my new bride.”
Pepper said, “Poor you.”
“Please accept our apologies,” Fritz said. “We’ve encountered a bit of a situation here.”
Farther down, a stateroom door opened and a scruffy man in a nightshirt poked his head out. “What’s all this?” he asked.
Fritz switched on the grin again. “Nothing at all, sir,” he said.
“It’s too early for this racket,” the man said.
Pepper turned around. “Go back inside.”
The man’s head disappeared and the door clicked softly shut. The doctor was rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Shall we have a look?”
Fritz used his key and the three of them slipped inside, shutting the door behind them before the railroad employees could crowd in for a look. The room was still dark and the doctor had already set his bag down on the bedside table before he noticed that Taft wasn’t breathing. It alarmed him. “This man is deceased,” he said.
�
��Must’ve just passed,” Fritz said. He already had a roll of bills in his hand and he passed them to the doctor, who, after a long moment to think about it, tucked the money into his pocket and bent to begin the examination.
He whipped the blanket back and took Taft’s chin in his hand, rotating the head slowly from side to side, and then used two fingers to open the jaw a bit to peer inside his mouth. He unbuttoned Taft’s shirt and inspected his chest and then motioned for Pepper and Fritz to help roll him onto his side to get a look at his back. The doctor made a few small grunting sounds as he worked. Pepper stepped back, looking at the floor as the doctor roughly jerked down Taft’s pants. Pepper had seen his share of dead bodies, and it surprised him how unsettling it was to see Taft now regarded as just a thing. Here was a man who just a couple weeks ago could’ve folded the doctor up and put him in his pocket, a man about to wrestle for the world’s heavyweight championship, reduced to a frog on a grammar school kid’s examination tray. The doctor took a few more minutes to check Taft’s body and then yanked his pants back up to his waist without fastening them.
“We want to know what happened to him,” Pepper said.
The doctor stood straight and regarded them as fools. “This man is an obvious late-stage syphilitic,” he said. “He should have sought medical care years ago. Left untreated . . .” He shrugged, the answer obvious.
Fritz was incredulous. “What are you talking about?”
“The scarring on the back is the giveaway,” the doctor said. “There is some additional scarring on the legs and scrotum, likely from old pustules.”
“Pustules,” Fritz said.
“Sores,” the doctor said.
“I think I’m going to be ill,” Fritz said.
The doctor cocked an eyebrow. “This man was your friend?”
“He is,” Pepper said. “Was.”
“Business acquaintance would be more accurate,” Fritz said.
