Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  It would be late the following evening before the train arrived in Lamy, where von Niehauser would change for the short run to Santa Fe. Dowland was going on all the way to Los Angeles. His war, thank God, seemed to be in the Pacific. Because, of course, it would be impossible to stay in anyone’s company for very many days without arousing their suspicion. There were simply too many things about which it was necessary to remain vague.

  So it would be just as well if the major slept late tomorrow morning. With any luck at all, given the headache with which he was likely to wake up, he might even decide he could live without breakfast.

  Would he remember very much of what he had said the night before? It was difficult to imagine he would—he had to have been fairly far gone in drink to have given so much of himself away. Perhaps the whole evening would be nothing more to him than a clouded impression, a buzz of words that meant nothing. That would, on the whole, be better.

  Because no man entirely trusts the receptor of his confessions; he begins looking for some secret stain in you, something to redress the balance. And von Niehauser had no wish to stand that kind of close examination.

  Besides, he didn’t have any illusions about how far he could rely on the good will of Archie Dowland—this was no sterling character.

  The major said—he said—that what had gotten him into trouble with the Indian command in Kanpur had been certain irregularities in his dealings as a supply officer with some of the native merchants. It’s the old kickback system, you see. The little yellow bandits expect a chap to grease their palms. Yes, von Niehauser had seen. He simply wondered whose palm it was that had expected to be greased.

  So Dowland had escaped court martial and had been shipped over to the States where, presumably, he would be out of harm’s way. I have a cousin in the War Office, you see—well, one hand washes the other. A chap’s family ought to be good for something.

  It had been a tissue of lies, of course; but it wasn’t the sort of story anyone would have told about himself cold sober. So one could only hope he would have forgotten telling it by the morning.

  But the morning was a distant consideration, an unreal event that could, for the moment, be viewed in perfect seriousness as something which might never take place at all. In a darkened sleeping compartment, looking out into the blackness of an empty landscape, it was possible to dismiss the future. There was only now.

  . . . . .

  In the morning, Archie Dowland was sitting disconsolately on the edge of his bunk, his head held between his hands. He did not seem pleased with life.

  “My God, what a thumper.”

  “I have some aspirin in my kit,” von Niehauser said quietly. “Would you like a few?” He smiled, trying to appear sympathetic.

  “Can’t take the stuff. Upsets the tum.” Dowland looked up at where von Niehauser was standing in the doorway to the tiny lavatory, and there were large purplish bags under his eyes. He really looked bad. “What ’d set me up ’d be a spot of coffee. Only thing is, I’d never make it to the dining car—all those damned bumping pneumatic doors. It’d kill me.”

  “I’d be happy to go fetch some for you.”

  “Oh, that’s a chap.” For the first time, the major was able to manage a pained smile. “But no hurry—when you’ve finished your breakfast. I don’t think I’d be able to keep it down just yet anyway.”

  It was five cars up to the diner. Von Niehauser ordered a bowl of Cream of Wheat, and the waiter brought him a pot of strong tea.

  “Is that still Missouri?” he asked. The ground outside the dining car window was a checkered pattern of snow on plowed fields. There was hardly even a road to be seen.

  “No, suh, that’s Kansas,” the waiter replied. He seemed to find nothing astonishing in the question.

  “And then we’re in New Mexico?”

  “No, suh, not yet. First we go through Oklahoma, then Texas, and then New Mexico.”

  “And was Missouri anything like this?”

  “Jes’ the same.”

  Perhaps people breakfasted later when they traveled by train, because the diner was only about half full. There were mainly couples, mainly middle aged, and they sat and ate with intense concentration.

  In Europe, when people traveled by train, they kept an anxious watch out the window, searching the sky for bombing planes—the Allies seemed to love attacking trains; perhaps nowhere were you in as much danger as aboard a train. But these people seemed to be nothing more than hungry and bored—they hardly glanced outside. It was as if an element were missing from them, a basic thread of their humanity.

  For some reason, the corridors were much colder on the way back. Von Niehauser clutched the little paper cup of scalding coffee the waiter had made up for him, trying to keep from squeezing the sides in as he swayed from side to side in an effort to keep his balance. His feet were freezing.

  It was nine in the morning. In fourteen hours he would be in Lamy, and he would get off the train. For fourteen hours he would remain reasonably safe, and then everything would once more be at hazard.

  He opened his compartment door and stepped inside. The first thing he noticed was that the bunks had already been closed back up; the second was that Archie Dowland was sitting next to the window, in the seat facing the engine, and was pointing a revolver at him.

  “I bet you thought you were wonderfully clever,” he said, through his teeth, almost whispering. “You Jerries always think you’re such a brainy bunch of chaps.”

  For a second or two, von Niehauser stood perfectly still, and then he sat down. He was directly opposite from Dowland—their knees were almost touching.

  “You’ve been going through my suitcase,” he said casually, simply as a statement of fact. It wasn’t the sort of thing that could be denied, because the suitcase was still lying on its side on the floor, and the lid was popped open about three inches.

  “Of course—what did you think, that you had me fooled? I had you spotted for a ringer the second you stepped on the train.”

  Archie Dowland’s eyes were very wide and moist, and even after he had stopped speaking his lips continued to move slightly. He was holding his service revolver as if he wasn’t quite sure how it worked. Suddenly von Niehauser understood everything.

  “You’re lying. You simply went through my things looking for something to steal.”

  “That’s a bloody lie, you bastard.” But there was no conviction in the words, and hardly any anger. Dowland was past being mortified that that particular truth should be known about him. The slight flickering away of his gaze was the real truth.

  What had happened? Dowland had searched the bag, looking for anything—money, jewelry, letters of credit, anything. And what he had found was von Niehauser’s collection of forged passports; there hadn’t been anything else that could have given the game away.

  And it had rocked him back on his heels. You could see that in his face, even now; he hadn’t known what to do. So he had gotten out his gun and had sat down to wait, his mind too filled with his discovery to understand what he should be about. He was in a kind of limbo, paralyzed by the suddenness of it all.

  And when that moment had passed off, von Niehauser would be as good as dead.

  So he smiled. He had to keep Archie Dowland amused while he had a chance to think.

  “You were looking for something to steal,” he repeated. “That’s what happened to you in India, isn’t it? Somebody caught you with your hand in the petty cash box.”

  Archie Dowland seemed to have led a troubled life, because this time his reaction wasn’t anger, either real or assumed, but a general slackening depression. The creases around his mouth deepened; his shoulders sagged—he took on the appearance of a man accepting the return of a familiar burden. One could almost pity him.

  And then von Niehauser remembered that he was holding a cup of still very hot coffee. There was a little cardboard lid over the top, but what did that matter? He gave the side of the cup a faint squeeze with
his thumb and, sure enough, the lid came loose. And Major Dowland, supply officer, wasn’t holding his service revolver like someone prepared from one second to the next to pull the trigger; it was perfectly possible he had never fired the thing in his life. It was worth a try.

  “It’s all right, Archie. I understand.”

  Dowland looked up at him in blank amazement—he had forgotten all about forged passports and German spies. Von Niehauser smiled at him, waited about half a heartbeat, and threw the coffee straight into his face.

  It worked like a charm. Dowland didn’t fire—he could have, but he didn’t—and before he even had a chance to do more than open his mouth to cry out, von Niehauser had reached out with his left hand and grasped the revolver, holding the cylinder tightly enough that it couldn’t turn.

  It wasn’t until Dowland could open his eyes again that he worried about the revolver. And then, when he tried to pull the trigger and nothing happened, he really looked astonished. Von Niehauser twisted it out of his hand, and Dowland gave a little scream when his finger broke with a snap in the trigger guard, but by then he wasn’t thinking about fighting back anymore. He was just a victim. He couldn’t seem to get over what was happening to him.

  Von Niehauser rose slightly out of his seat and drove his fist into the man’s throat. Dowland jerked backward, and his head hit the seat cushion behind him with enough force to make a quite audible thud. For a few seconds he slumped back against his seat as if he were trying to catch his breath. By the time the blood began to trickle down from the corners of his mouth he had lost the look of someone living in this world; he was just staring out in front of him, his eyes glazing over as you watched. And then he tried to cough—you could hear the blood gurgling in his windpipe—and then, very slowly, he began to slide over sideways as he died. After that he never even twitched.

  Von Niehauser got up and closed the compartment door, which had been standing open the whole time. Apparently no one had been in the corridor, since no one was screaming for the porter and the police. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. And he was alone, on a crowded train, in the middle of an enemy country, with a man he had just murdered.

  . . . . .

  “You want me to come in and tidy up, suh?” The porter peered inside through the two or three inches von Niehauser had been willing to open the door. His eyes rolled up toward the figure on the upper bunk, covered to the shoulders with blankets, its face turned toward the wall.

  “I don’t think so, thank you,” von Niehauser answered, smiling and pressing a twenty-five cent piece into the palm of the man’s hand. “My friend isn’t feeling terribly well—I’d rather just let him sleep.”

  The porter gulped, staring down at the coin—was it too large a tip or too small? Had it made him suspicious?

  “Yes, suh. I c’n come back later.”

  “Oh, you needn’t trouble yourself. I expect we’ll be able to manage.” Von Niehauser smiled again—the muscles in his face felt as if they were stretched to the breaking point—and closed the door. He waited for several seconds, hardly able to breathe, until he heard the tap, tap, tap of the porter’s knuckles on the door of the next compartment down.

  It had been a bad moment. A dead body in the upper bunk, the bathroom sink filled with blood-soaked towels: the porter would have been in for a delightful surprise. But perhaps now, von Niehauser could hope, he had purchased himself a few more hours of safety.

  Fortunately, these Pullman cars were uncarpeted, because Archie Dowland had spilled a considerable quantity of blood on the floor when von Niehauser tried to move him over to the bed. It had simply poured out of his mouth and nose, and the linoleum floor had been covered with it. Right at that moment, the major was resting comfortably with a washcloth stuffed down his throat, just to make sure there would be no more little accidents. God, what a mess!

  But the porter had seen nothing. At that precise instant he was busy making up the beds next door; von Niehauser could hear him through the wall, humming to himself like a man without a trouble in this life.

  Von Niehauser sat down on the narrow seat on which Archie Dowland had died; he held his hands knitted tightly together to keep them from shaking, and he forced himself to breathe with a long, regular rhythm. It had been half an hour, and his reaction had been postponed as he had tried to prepare things for the porter’s inevitable visit, but now it was on him with accumulated force. It was cold in the compartment, but he could feel the sweat popping out on his brow and under his armpits. Was the strain of these last few weeks beginning to tell? Was he losing his nerve? It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all.

  No—he was going to be perfectly fine. Anyone was entitled to a moment or two in which to allow the tension to pass off. Even the officers of the German Wehrmacht were only made of flesh and blood.

  Simply to give himself something with which to occupy his mind, von Niehauser took out Archie Dowland’s little leather valise, undid the straps that held the lid in place, and began going through it.

  There wasn’t a great deal, and what there was wasn’t of the highest quality. Like their owner, Major Dowland’s possessions had that slightly down-at-heel look of things retained beyond their useful life span. Underwear, a couple of tan shirts, a khaki tie, a small box containing an assortment of inexpensive men’s jewelry, a shaving kit. At the bottom, carefully folded, a spare uniform. A five year old copy of a magazine called La Vie Parisienne, the pages containing illustrations of naked women. All the sorts of things one would expect.

  In one of the side pockets, along with half a dozen handkerchiefs, was a small bound parcel of letters.

  A few of them were from a woman whom one could only assume had to be Archie Dowland’s latest ex-wife, nagging, nasty propositions concerned exclusively with threatening demands for money and allusions to the major’s failures as a husband. One was bound to wonder what had possessed him to keep them—a few were as old as a year—but perhaps they had represented for him some last lingering personal attachment. No one was ever going to know now. The rest were from a solicitor in London.

  “I haven’t yet convinced the Appeal Board to schedule a second hearing, but I have every confidence that our petition will be attended to as soon as the court martial calendar has cleared. It might even be to our advantage to seek a delay, since in the present atmosphere. . .” The date was December 16, 1942.

  So it would seem that the incident in India had been a little more serious than Major Dowland had led him to believe. The uniform, the mess talk, the expressions of concern for “the rough time my old mates are having over there” were all a pretense. Archie had gotten himself cashiered.

  Von Niehauser rose out of his seat and took Dowland’s military jacket from where it hung in the narrow closet next to the lavatory. There was a thin billfold in the inside pocket; it contained twenty-three pounds and about fifty dollars in notes and a set of heavily creased identity papers dating from before the war. As expected, the papers did not include a photograph—that particular security refinement was of a later vintage.

  On a sudden impulse, von Niehauser tried on the jacket. It was a trifle roomy, but the arms were of approximately the right length. And most of the world’s soldiers went around in ill-fitting uniforms; that sort of thing was almost one of the defining characteristics of war. It was possible that half the British officer corps had lost significant amounts of weight since 1939.

  The germ of an idea began to stir in his mind.

  . . . . .

  Under the best of circumstances, it was a difficult proposition to dispose of a dead body, and the sleeping compartment of a moving train wasn’t the best of circumstances. Obviously there were only two choices, either to get off at the next stop and leave Archie Dowland where he was or to throw him out the window and hope no one noticed.

  The first option would have been the simpler, but ultimately the risks were greater. How long after he disembarked, von Niehauser wondered, would the porter find the body? He would pr
obably be in here within half an hour to make up the bed for the night; he would have witnessed von Niehauser’s departure, perhaps wondering why the party with a ticket for Lamy, New Mexico, was getting off somewhere in Oklahoma. Within two hours at the latest, von Niehauser could expect himself to be the object of a police dragnet—and he had been through that particular experience once already, thank you very much.

  So Archie was going to have to make an unscheduled disembarkation through the compartment window.

  It was simply a question of whether to do it now, in broad daylight, or to wait for the covering darkness. Which was greater, the danger of being seen at ten-forty in the morning or of being discovered before, say, eight in the evening? Von Niehauser decided he would wait.

  It was a long day. He missed lunch; he missed dinner—he simply didn’t dare risk leaving the compartment. Around two in the afternoon the porter made another try at getting in to clean up.

  “Really—I have the impression it’s the flu or something. It might be best if as few people were exposed to him as possible. No—no, I don’t think it’s serious enough to warrant a doctor. Thank you.”

  And he smiled and pressed another quarter into the man’s hand.

  By seven he judged it was dark enough. He opened the window—in an instant the whole compartment was freezing cold—and stuck his head out to look back and check if the windows behind were lit up. Fortunately, all the rest of that side of the car seemed to have their shades drawn; probably, since there was nothing to see except a vague horizon line, they had all decided to try keeping the heat in.

  He began pulling the late Major Dowland off the upper bunk and discovered that his eyes were still open, which was disconcerting enough, and that he was as stiff as an iron rod. The washcloth was still stuffed into his mouth; von Niehauser took it out and threw it through the window, along with the blood-soaked towels—there wasn’t going to be any more bleeding at this late hour.