1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Express

by Ryohgo Narita

  “This ain’t good.”

  “No, it really isn’t.”

  Jon, the dining car bartender, and Fang, the cook’s assistant, were the men who had told Jacuzzi’s gang about the train. Technically, according to the original plan, they should have reached New York without anyone discovering this fact, but the situation had turned ugly on them.

  “Think we’ll get the boot?”

  “We just might.”

  When Jacuzzi had recaptured the dining car from the black suits, the two of them had taken control with guns in their hands, as large as life. It had been glaringly obvious that they were used to using guns and, on top of that, that they were friends of the young guy who’d said he was occupying the train. Fortunately, because the cargo robbery that Jacuzzi’s gang had pulled off hadn’t been discovered, they’d managed to avoid a trip to the police station, but after everything was over, they’d been called out by the head cook. At the very least, that was what the two of them thought.

  “If they fire us, what are you going to do?”

  “My big sis is a waitress at a honey shop. Maybe I’ll see if they’ll hire me as a cook.”

  “What’s this ‘honey shop’ business? And, anyway, didn’t you cause trouble and get yourself run out of Chinatown?”

  “They ran my sister out later. They said it was ‘collective responsibility.’ Then the Italians picked her up. From what I hear, there’s a speakeasy in the back of the honey shop they run, and that’s where she works.”

  As his pal spoke pragmatically, Jon murmured, gazing into empty space:

  “Ah… A speakeasy, huh? I wonder if they’re looking for bartenders, too.”

  With his listless voice as the last sound, a heavy silence pressed down around them.

  A mouthwatering aroma drifted through the area around the counter seats where they were sitting. All they could hear from the depths of the kitchen was the sound of the head cook stirring a big pot of stew. It echoed in the silence, further amplifying Jon’s and Fang’s anxiety and appetite.

  Abruptly, the noises from the kitchen ceased, and the head chef’s bearlike voice resounded, quietly.

  “You boys won’t need to board this train tomorrow.”

  At those words, Jon and Fang sighed. In a way, their expressions seemed relieved.

  “We’re fired?”

  They’d half expected that answer. Since they’d been prepared, the shock wasn’t that great. However—

  “Fired, hell. The whole dining car’s being eighty-sixed.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sir?”

  At this, conversely, the two looked bewildered. The head cook paid no attention to them; his dispassionate voice just went on telling them the facts.

  “The almighty company that gave us room as tenants is going to make it so this train never existed. In other words, their cheap trick to hush up the incident is costing you fellas your jobs. That goes for me, too, of course.”

  At this unexpected development, Jon and Fang looked at each other. In that case, why were they the only ones who’d been called here?

  “I’m getting to that. I’m acquainted with some wealthy folks by the name of Genoard, and they’re looking for a cook and bartender. I’m going to badger the owner of the main store into letting me go back there, so you two go work for the rich folks for a bit. They’re flush enough to be hiring their own bartender. No complaints there, right?”

  Jon’s and Fang’s eyes were round. Without even attempting to ask what they thought, the head cook forced the conversation ahead.

  “I don’t care what sort of gang you run with, or what kind of reprobates you are. You’ve got solid skills as a cook and bartender, and I’ll vouch for those. Besides, you were the only duo with a bartender that I could think of. From what I hear, they’re in their second home in New York right now, so head over and introduce yourselves tomorrow. Got it?!”

  His tone brooked no argument, and Jon and Fang nodded in spite of themselves. However, deep down, they were also happy to hear they were trusted.

  “Stew’s ready. Eat up.”

  For the first time, the two responded in unison to the voice that came from the depths of the kitchen:

  “Thank you, sir! We’ll take it!”

  However, at the head cook’s next words, their smiles froze.

  “Is that right. It’s enough stew to feed a hundred people, and I was just worrying about how it was going to go to waste. That’s a load off my mind. You said you’d eat it, so you better eat all of it. If you leave any leftovers, I’ll stew your hands from the wrists down and make bouillon out of ’em, and don’t you forget it.”

  “…And so we brought you a get-well snack. Eat. It’ll give you energy.”

  “Not only that, it’s delicious! If you don’t eat this, you’ll die! Because we’ll curse you.”

  Behind a huge pot that contained easily over twenty-five gallons, Jon and Fang wore patently fake smiles.

  “G-gimme a break.”

  On the other side of the pot, Jacuzzi was lying in bed, looking as if he was about to start crying in earnest.

  Jacuzzi’s bed was in a room of the hospital Fred ran. For now, they’d decided to admit him, but it sounded as if he’d be able to leave in a few days.

  Jack was in the bed next to Jacuzzi, and Donny was asleep in the bed beyond that one. Both were snoring loudly. On Jon and Fang’s orders, Donny had helped them carry the pot over, and while he was at it, he’d polished off enough of its contents to feed about twenty people.

  Even so, the pot showed no sign of running out of stew. They’d been told it was enough for a hundred people, but they wondered if it might not actually be more than that.

  Nice and Nick were there, too. In other words, all the friends who’d been on the train were here together. As they were discussing what to do about the stew, there was a sudden commotion outside the room.

  “What’s that? Something smells real good.”

  “Hey, no fair hogging it all for yourselves. Give us summa that, too.”

  At that, Jacuzzi’s companions began to stream in through the door, one after another.

  “Guys!”

  Jacuzzi’s voice was cheerful. Several of them were people who’d gone out in boats as the recovery team, to retrieve the explosives that had been dropped into the river.

  “Yo, Jacuzzi! Those explosives! We got friends of ours, this old guy with a mine and a Hollywood movie tech, to buy them off us under the table. We sold ’em for sky-high prices! We’re rollin’ in dough! A hundred thousand dollars, man, a hundred thousand dollars! Don’t that beat all?!”

  “The clay shells from those grenades, too. With the contents taken out, those went for two hundred dollars apiece.”

  Jacuzzi loved his straightforward friends, who gave him a report on their finances before they worried about his injuries.

  “Is that right? That’s great!”

  “But listen, Jacuzzi. You can’t go back to Chicago no more.”

  Stuffing his face with the stew as if it was delicious, one of his friends told him the facts, pragmatically.

  “Huh?”

  “The mafia knows about all your rooms, and they’ll fill you full of daylight just for going near one.”

  “O-oh no!”

  Jacuzzi’s face went white.

  “Well, we’re in New York already. Let’s just stay. The other guys are on their way over.”

  “Nn, don’t say that like it’s easy…”

  Jacuzzi’s eyes had teared up, and his friends abruptly switched to a cheerful topic.

  “Hey, by the way, Jacuzzi. Would you believe us if we told you a looker came falling down out of the sky?”

  “Was it suicide?”

  “No, you idiot! Look, we were picking up the cargo you guys dropped, right?! She was floating along, hanging on to one of those crates! She had a wounded shoulder, but she’s a total stunner! She said, if we were gonna be in New York, she’d join up! She’s a quiet, real polishe
d doll, see? She just got the doc here to look at her injury.”

  “Huh. Really? I wonder if she got hurt during the train robbery.”

  After thinking for a little while, Jacuzzi artlessly warped the tattoo on his face.

  “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Yeah, I’ll introduce you. C’mon in, Chané!”

  On seeing the beauty in the black dress who came in through the door, Jacuzzi welcomed his new friend with a bright smile—and Nice and Nick dropped their bowls of stew all over the floor.

  EPILOGUE

  THE FLYING PUSSYFOOT

  A few days laterSomewhere in New York

  “…And what did you gain by using half of that money to buy tickets?”

  Somewhere in Chinatown. A voice spoke to Rachel, mixing with the sound of the ringing phones.

  Rachel also answered in a shout that rivaled the voice.

  “I don’t know, sir. I was just very tired somehow.”

  Unusually for her, she was speaking politely. The listener was the president of the information brokerage with which she did business.

  There were stacks of documents in the way, and she couldn’t see his face. However, she was convinced he was smiling.

  “Well, it’s up to you whether you make use of that experience in the future or forget it.”

  “More than that, I regret that I didn’t get to punch that whiskered pig myself.”

  Hearing the frustration in Rachel’s voice, the information broker, whose face couldn’t be seen, asked her a question:

  “I have a little information regarding how the aftermath of that incident was dealt with. Would you like to hear it? —I won’t charge you.”

  “I won’t stand for it! I swear I’ll take you to court! Over the security on that train, of course, and also over that business with the damned hick and the yellow monkey!”

  The fat man with the little mustache was blustering. Once he’d come to after getting his shoulders dislocated by Claire, he’d spent the whole time in the bathroom, shaking with pain and terror. He’d been discovered by a squad of police officers after everything was over. When they’d popped his shoulders back into place, he’d bawled, and the passengers in the dining car had laughed at him.

  He was an executive at a major railway company, and the humiliation had been hard for him to bear. As payback for that anger, he’d started to bring legal action against Nebula, the corporation that owned the train. However, someone had blocked that action at the last minute.

  The person who had received the mustachioed man in the Nebula reception room was a middle-aged executive with a contradiction—an expressionless smile—plastered across his face.

  “I’m afraid that won’t do, Mr. Turner. We’ve paid sufficient reparations, and damaging the image of railway travel would prove unfortunate for you as well.”

  “That’s irrelevant! This isn’t about money for me—it’s a matter of pride…”

  Just then, the reception room telephone rang.

  “I apologize for interrupting our discussion, but the call seems to be for you.”

  As he spoke, the executive remained expressionless. The mustachioed Turner grabbed the receiver away from him.

  “It’s me! Who the hell are…you…?”

  On answering the telephone, Turner’s expression changed dramatically. His face went pale, and as he continued the conversation, he broke out in a cold sweat. Before long, he put the receiver down, then glared at the executive with a fatigued expression.

  “That’s dirty. Bringing in politicians…”

  “It seems that Senator Beriam also wants to keep the incident as quiet as possible. In this day and age, it’s impossible to cover it up completely, but we can dilute its existence. There were no fatalities among the passengers during the incident, so we’d prefer not to draw too much attention to the matter.”

  “B-but…”

  “Mr. Turner. I hear you once pinned the blame for your own mistake on a technician. We don’t mind asking those technicians to testify again. If we tell them we’ll hire them away on favorable terms, I’m sure they’ll speak honestly.”

  Whiskered Turner went dead white, then left the room, unable to say another word.

  The executive sent the final blow at his back:

  “What goes around comes around, Mr. Turner. The senator has his eye on you. Unless you work very hard, your company will turn you into a sacrificial pawn…”

  “…And that’s how it is, or so I’m told. Does that make you feel a bit better?”

  “How do you have information like that, sir?”

  “I’m the one who sold the information on our whiskered pig’s past to the executive. It was a trade.”

  In the midst of the ringing telephones, the voice spoke to Rachel quite casually:

  “If you don’t use information, it rots away. It’s just like a craftsman’s skills. Though I do feel bad about using information about your past without permission.”

  Rachel was silent for a while. Then she spoke, addressing the far side of the stacks of paper:

  “May I bill you for travel expenses, starting next time? I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve decided to stop stealing rides.”

  “I don’t mind in the least. That’s fine. ‘Not knowing why’ is important. I think trusting your own senses is a very good thing.”

  Saying something quite unlike an information broker, at the very end, the voice from behind the documents added:

  “Just don’t forget your receipts.”

  Senator Beriam’s political clout and the railway corporation’s financial muscle were gradually making it as though the Flying Pussyfoot incident had never occurred. There had been one victim among the general public. A conductor had been discovered in the Chicago sewers, and his killer was still at large. The police weren’t putting much effort into the investigation and had concluded that it was unrelated to the events on the Flying Pussyfoot.

  The culprit had already left this world behind.

  The faceless corpse that had been found in the conductors’ room was assumed to be Claire Stanfield.

  The train itself was scrapped, except for the locomotive, and its cars stood quietly in a public park on the outskirts of the city.

  Strangely, there was one bit missing from those cars. After they were put on display, someone had taken a piece from the roof of the last one.

  Then came December 5, 1933.

  On that day, when the Prohibition Act was repealed, people danced for joy on the train and smashed it up, after which it mingled with the scrap iron in the junkyard and vanished.

  The Flying Pussyfoot—or “flying prohibition enforcer”—had swaggered across the whole of America along with the Prohibition Act.

  In contrast with the demise of the act, its end was far too lonely.

  The stage of the incident was covered up, going from darkness into darkness, and no one ever knew what had become of it.

  …Except for one piece: the message that had been cut out of the roof.

  Baccano! 1931—The End

  AFTERWORD

  First, thank you very much for reading this section, too, even though it has nothing to do with the main story.

  I’m sorry about always starting these the same way, but as usual, I have absolutely no idea what to write in an afterword.

  However, lately, I’m told that the number of people who decide whether to buy the book by looking at the afterword is on the rise. I wonder… What if the author’s the sort of writer whose afterwords and main stories are completely different in everything from style to atmosphere? Are there people who, after they make their purchase, think, I was tricked by the afterword! and cry all over the book? I’m really concerned about that.

  —But I digress.

  All right: In this story, for almost all of it, I moved things along within the confines of a train.

  The train gimmick has been depicted in media in all sorts of genres, and I think the really interesting part is the uni
queness of the train element itself. I’ve always been fascinated by how this set—which you could call a moving locked room—is used in a variety of stories in a variety of fields, and each time, it’s used in a different way. There really are an infinite number of ways to use it, mixing in similes and metaphors about the changing scenery and the travelers, the rails and roads. I think when railways are used as stage devices, it’s particularly easy for these things to show up clearly.

  I’ve been thinking constantly about how someday I’d like to write a story that uses a train in a different way from the one I’ve used here.

  In this story, I wrote about incidents that occurred during the same time frame as the previous book but focused on different characters and showed things from different perspectives.

  This isn’t especially original: Changing the perspective is a technique that’s used in all sorts of genres. Lately, I get the impression that it’s used particularly often in games. As I wrote, I thought, I want to use this structure, which is one of a huge variety of techniques, to write a story that’s as dumb as possible. I can’t even begin to imagine how readers took it, though.

  “It’s a pointless, dumb story… But it’s fun.” If they said that, I think it would be the best compliment ever. At least for books with the Baccano! title, I plan to focus on creating that sort of story.

  Parenthetically, when I first showed my editor, Suzuki, the manuscripts for Local and Express, he said, briefly, “It’s loco.” …What does he want from me?

  I’d like to write all sorts of other things in the future, from more long series to one-shot stories, and I want to get good enough to write dumb stories and stories that aren’t dumb, stories with absolutely no substance and stories with quite a lot of substance, and stories with all sorts of different orientations.

  At the very least, as I work every day to make sure the good people of the sales department don’t threaten me with demon masks and the words Your books don’t sell, so quit writing, I want to keep writing stories that ultimately have some sort of influence, both on myself and on the people who are kind enough to read them. That’s my current goal.