Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  TWO

  TRAINS

  RUNNING

  Andrew Vachss

  PANTHEON BOOKS, NEW YORK

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Two Trains Running

  About the Author

  Other Books by Andrew Vachss

  Copyright Page

  For my mother and my father

  who are as one

  always

  1959 September 28 Monday 21:22

  * * *

  A candy-apple-red ’55 Chevy glided down the rain-slicked asphalt, an iridescent raft shooting blacktopped rapids. Behind the wheel was a man in his mid-twenties, with a wiry build and a narrow, triangular face. His elaborately sculptured haircut was flat on top, long on the sides and back, ending in carefully cultivated ducktails.

  The Chevy’s headlights picked up an enormous black boulder, standing sentry in a grove of white birch. The driver pumped the brake pedal, then blipped the throttle as he flicked the gearshift into low. He gunned the engine, kicking out the rear end in a controlled slide through a tight S-curve. As soon as the road straightened, he eased off the gas and motored along sedately.

  A quarter-mile later, the driver pulled up to what looked like a miniature cottage. A lantern-jawed man slowly rose from his seat on the one-man porch. He held a double-barreled shotgun in his right hand like an accountant holding a pencil.

  “It’s me, Seth,” the driver said, out his side window.

  “I knew that a few minutes ago, Harley,” the man with the shotgun replied. “Heard those damn glasspacks of yours a mile away.”

  “Come on, Seth. I backed off as soon as I made the turn,” the driver said.

  “You’re getting way too old for that kid stuff,” the man said reproachfully. He stepped closer to the Chevy. The driver reached up and flicked on the overhead light. The man with the shotgun glanced into the back seat, then shifted his stance slightly to scan the floor.

  “Let’s have a look out back,” he said.

  The driver killed his engine, took the keys from the ignition, and reached for the door handle.

  “I’ll do it,” the man with the shotgun said. “You just sit there, be comfortable, okay?”

  “Are you serious?” the driver said.

  “You been here enough times, Harley.”

  “Exactly,” the driver said, with just a hint of resentment. “So what’s with all the—?”

  “Ain’t my rules.”

  “Yeah, I know,” the driver said, sourly. “Let’s go, okay? The boss said nine-thirty, and it’s getting close to—”

  “Next time, come earlier,” the man with the shotgun said, taking the keys.

  He walked behind the Chevy and opened the trunk with his left hand, leveling the shotgun to cover the interior. He pulled a flashlight from his belt and directed its beam until he was satisfied. Finally, he closed the trunk gently, walked back to the driver’s window, and handed over the keys.

  “See you later, Harley,” he said.

  * * *

  1959 September 28 Monday 21:29

  * * *

  The darkened house was a featureless stone monolith, the color of cigar ash. Harley ignored the horseshoe-shaped brick driveway that led to the front door; he drove carefully past the big house, his engine just past idle, until he came to a paved area clogged with cars. He slid the Chevy into a generous space between a refrigerator-white Ford pickup and a gleaming black ’56 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and climbed out, not bothering to lock his car.

  A short walk brought him to a freestanding single-story building. Its wooden sides had been weathered down to colorlessness, but the roof and windows looked newly installed.

  As he approached, Harley saw his reflection in the mirrored finish of a small window set at eye level. Before he could knock, the door was opened by a short, bull-necked man wearing a threadbare gray flannel suit. The man’s perfectly rounded skull was covered by a thick mat of light-brown hair, roughly trimmed to a uniform length. His facial features were rubbery; his mouth was loose and slack.

  “It’s me, Luther,” Harley said.

  The short man nodded deliberately, as if agreeing with a complex proposition. His slightly protuberant eyes were as smooth and hard as brown marbles, reflecting the moonlight over Harley’s shoulders. Wordlessly, he tilted his head to the left.

  Harley stepped past the slack-mouthed man into what looked like a modern two-car garage. A charcoal-gray Lincoln sedan was poised on the concrete slab, its nose pointing toward a wide, accordion-pattern metal door. Conscious of the other man somewhere behind him, Harley opened a door in the back wall, and followed a passageway to his left.

  He paused at the threshold of a large, low-ceilinged, windowless room. One wall was lined with file cabinets, another with bookshelves. Various chairs and a pair of small couches were scattered about, all upholstered in the same dark-brown leather. Most of them were already taken. A few of the seated men glanced expressionlessly at the new arrival, the youngest man in the room.

  The far end of the room was dominated by a lengthy slab of butcher block, laid across four sawhorses to form a desk. Behind it sat a massive man in a wheelchair, like a stone idol on a gleaming steel-and-chrome display stand. He had a large, squarish head, with wavy light-brown hair, combed straight back without a part, going white at the temples. His ears were small, flat against his skull, without lobes. Heavy cheekbones separated a pair of iron-colored eyes from thin lips; his nose was long and narrow; a dark mole dotted the right side of his jaw. The man was dressed in a banker’s-gray suit, a starched white shirt, and a midnight-blue silk tie with faint flecks of gold that occasionally caught the light. On the ring finger of his right hand was a blue star sapphire, set in platinum.

  The man glanced at his left wrist, where a large-faced watch on a white-gold band peeked out from under a French cuff, then looked up at the driver of the Chevy.

  “I was held up at the gate,” Harley said. “Seth took about half a day to . . .”

  Nobody said anything.

  Harley took a chair, and followed their example.

  * * *

  1959 September 28 Monday 21:39

  * * *

  “Procter!” a sandpaper voice blasted through the half-empty news-room.

  All eyes turned toward a broad-shouldered man hunched over a typewriter. “What’s up, Chief?” he shouted back, without breaking his hunt-and-peck rhythm, eyes never leaving the keyboard.

  “Get the hell in here!”

  The broad-shouldered man kept on typing.

  A pair of night-shift reporters at adjoining desks exchanged looks. One scrawled “2” on a piece of paper and held it up; the other crossed his two forefingers to make a “plus” sign. Each man reached for his wallet without looking, eyes focused on four large clocks on the far wall, marked, from left to right: Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and New York.

  In perfect rhythm honed by long practice, a dollar bill was simultaneously slapped down on each man’s desk.

  The second hands of the clocks swept on. One full revolution, then another. Two minutes and seventeen seconds had elapsed when . . .

  “Procter, goddamn it!” rattled the windows.

  The reporter who had made the “plus” sign plucked the dollar from the other’s desk as Procter slowly got to his feet. His hair was as black as printer’s ink; raptor’s eyes sat deeply on either side of a slightly hawked nose. Wearing a blue shirt with the cuffs rolled above thick wrists, and a dark-red tie loosened at the throat, he stalked through the newsroom holding several sheets of typescript in his right hand like a cop carrying a nightstick.

  Procter ambled into a corner office formed from two pebbled-glassed walls. Be
hind a cigarette-scarred, paper-covered desk sat a doughy man wearing half-glasses on the bridge of a bulbous nose. His bald scalp was fringed with thick mouse-brown hair.

  “Chief?” Procter said innocently.

  “How many goddamn times have I told you not to call me that?” the doughy man snapped, his scalp reddening. “You’ve got a lot of choices in that department, Jimmy. ‘Mr. Langley’ will do. So will ‘Augie,’ you like that better. Save that ‘Chief’ stuff for your next editor.”

  “So I’m fired?” Procter said, his voice not so much empty as without inflection of any kind.

  “I didn’t say that!” the doughy man bellowed. “You know damn well what I meant. This isn’t one of those big-city sheets you’re used to working for. We do things differently around here.”

  “I’ve been around here all my life,” Procter said, mildly. “Born and raised.”

  “You like playing word games, maybe you want to take over the crossword. You haven’t been around this newspaper all your life. You came home, that’s what happened.”

  “Came home after being fired, you mean.”

  “I say what I mean, Jimmy. You’re a great newshound, but this is your fourth paper in, what, seven years? We both know you wouldn’t be working for the Compass if there was still a place for you with one of the big-city tabs.”

  “I—”

  “And we both know, soon as a job on a real paper opens up again, you’ll be on the next bus out of here.”

  “I can do what I do anywhere.”

  “Is that right? For such a smart guy, you do some pretty stupid things. What happened up in Chi-Town, anyway?”

  “The editor spiked too many of my stories,” Procter said, in the bored tone of a man retelling a very old story.

  “So you went behind his back and peddled your stuff to that Communist rag?”

  “That exposé never saw a blue pencil, Chief. They printed it just like I wrote it.”

  “Yeah, I guess they did,” the doughy man said, fingering his suspenders. “And I guess you know, that’s never going to happen here.”

  “I’ve been here almost three years. You think I haven’t learned that much?”

  “From this last piece of copy you turned in, I’m not so sure. Your job is to cover crime, Jimmy. Crime, not politics.”

  “In Locke City—”

  “Don’t even say it,” the editor warned, holding up one finger. “Just stick to robberies and rapes, okay? Shootings, stompings, and stabbings, that’s your beat. Leave the corruption stories for reporters in the movies.”

  * * *

  1959 September 28 Monday 21:52

  * * *

  “You sure he’s the guy we need for this?” a thin man with a sharply receding hairline and long, yellowing teeth asked.

  “Red Schoolfield says he is,” replied the man in the wheelchair.

  “Yeah, but that’s Detroit. We’re just a—”

  “You ever been to Detroit, Udell?” the man in the wheelchair asked. He waited a three-second beat, then said: “Okay, then, how about Cleveland? You ever been there, either?”

  “I was there one time,” the thin man said, his voice wavering between resentful and defensive.

  “Good. Now, that’s a big city, too, am I right?”

  “It is, Mr. Beaumont. They got buildings there you wouldn’t—”

  “We’re not arguing,” said the man in the wheelchair. “In fact, you’re right—Cleveland is a big city.” He shifted his position slightly, so that his glance took in the entire room. “But here’s the thing, boys. Detroit and Cleveland, they’ve got one thing in common. You know what that is?”

  “A lot of niggers?” a jug-eared man sitting in the far corner ventured, grinning.

  “Yeah, Faron,” Beaumont acknowledged. “But you know what else they’ve got? They’ve got a whole ton of folks just like us. White people.”

  “That don’t make them like us,” Harley ventured. He twirled one of his ducktails, a nervous habit.

  “Now you’re using your brain, Harley,” Beaumont said, approvingly. “Being white’s just a color. Doesn’t make us like them, or them like us. There’s things inside color. Even the coloreds themselves see it that way. Look who they pick for their preachers and their politicians. It’s always the light-skinned ones, with that processed hair. The ones that got white in them, you don’t see them mixing much with the ones look like they just got off the boat from Africa.

  “And it’s the same with us. With white people. Inside that color, we got all these groups. Like . . . tribes, all right? You’ve got the Italians, you’ve got the Irish, you’ve got the Jews, you’ve got the—”

  “Jews?” a man with long sideburns, wearing a leather aviator’s jacket, piped up, somewhere between a question and a sneer.

  “Sure, Jews,” Beaumont said. “What did you think, Roland? They weren’t in our business?”

  “I thought they was all . . . I mean, maybe in the business, but not at our end. Not like the stuff we—”

  “You should read a book once in a while,” Beaumont said, “it wouldn’t hurt you. Wouldn’t hurt you to pay attention to what goes on in the world, either. You go back far enough—and, trust me, it’s not that damn far—you find Jews started the same way we did. With this,” he said, knotting a fist and holding it up to the faint light from the desk lamp, like a jeweler checking a gem for flaws.

  “I never heard of a kike with the balls for muscle work,” Udell said.

  “Udell,” Beaumont sighed, “you never heard of a lot of things.”

  “What’s this got to do with Detroit and Cleveland, Roy?” asked an older, broad-faced man with eyes so heavily flesh-pouched that it was impossible to tell their color.

  “That’s getting to it, Sammy!” Beaumont said, nodding his head for emphasis. “Look,” he said, slowly turning his massive head like a gun turret to cover each man facing him, “there’s neighborhoods in both those cities where there’s mostly people like us, understand?”

  “Hillbillies?” a tall redhead with long sideburns said, chuckling. He was wearing an Eisenhower jacket over a thick sweater, despite the warmth of the room.

  “You know I don’t like that word, Lymon,” the boss said. He didn’t raise his voice, but his words carried easily, seeming to echo off the walls. “We’re not hillbillies, we’re mountain men. And this town, it’s our mountain, understand?”

  There was a general hum of agreement from the assembled men, but no one spoke.

  “People like us, we’re clannish,” Beaumont continued. “We want to live among our own kind, even when we’re feuding amongst ourselves. You go to any city, even as big a one as Chicago, you’ll find a section where our people live. That’s no accident. Those pieces of the city, it’s just like this town here. You understand what I’m telling you? Red Schoolfield, he’s in a bigger city than this one, sure. But only a little piece of it belongs to him. What we got here, it’s all ours. Not just some slice—the whole thing.”

  The man in the wheelchair paused, individually eye-contacting each man in the room before he went on:

  “You all know how it works. Remember when we were kids? You got yourself a candy bar, what happened? Some guys, they’d want a little piece for themselves, right? And if they were your pals, well, you were supposed to cut them in. But there was always this one guy, what he wanted was the whole thing. Am I right?”

  Nods from around the room. The broad-faced man added a grunt of assent.

  “Now, if this guy is bigger than you, or tougher, what do you do then? Well, you got choices. You can stand and fight, make him take it, but all that gets you is a beating.

  “So the thing you do, if you’re like us, you give up the candy, and you wait for your chance. Then you ambush the guy, maybe bust up his head with a brick. And next time he sees you with candy, well, he keeps walking. Or, even better, you get a few of your pals—the same guys you would share with—and you mob the motherfucker, pound him so bad he don’t want a
ny more, ever.

  “You can’t change a bully. The best you can ever do is make him work, make it cost him something. They don’t like that, so they go and pick on someone else. That’s where all this started, boys, what we have now.

  “And the first rule is, always, you make sure you control your own territory. Maybe it’s only a tiny little piece, but it’s yours. Now, once you got land, a piece of ground that’s really yours, you can’t just let it sit there, you got to do something with it, am I right?”

  More nods.

  “Sure, I’m right! And I’m not talking about naming it after yourself, the way Old Man Locke did back when he opened the first mill, before any of us were born. I’m talking about making your living from it. Land is money. You can farm it, or you can brew mash on it, or you can open a little roadhouse, or . . . well, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you get something going.”

  Beaumont’s iron eyes swept the room, a seismograph, searching for the slightest tremor of inattention. Satisfied, he went on:

  “You can see it happening, everywhere you look. The Irish, the Italians, they can run a whole city, but not by themselves. When they want to do business with people outside their tribe—and you know, they have to do that—they need . . . branch managers, I guess you’d call them. And, sooner or later, those managers, they see how things work, how much money there is to be made, they want to go into the business for themselves.

  “That’s what we did. That’s how we got started here. We built up a beautiful thing for ourselves. We got the gambling, we got the girls—not just the houses, the strip joints too—we got the jukeboxes, we got the punch cards, we got the liquor, we got money out on the street, working for us. . . . And when dope hits this area hard—the way it has up in the big cities—we’ll have that, too.

  “But, remember, every time you got that candy, here comes some big guy who wants it all for himself. You understand what I’m saying?”