Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  “Nobody said anything about partners.”

  “Not until now, maybe. Is it worth an hour of your time to hear more?”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 10:48

  * * *

  “I think one of our investments is going sour,” SAC Wainwright said.

  “Which one would that be?” asked the bland-looking man seated on the other side of Wainwright’s bird’s-eye maple desk. Only the thick weal of a repaired harelip rescued his features from total anonymity.

  “The Führer.”

  “Him? He’s a nothing. Just some freak who likes to dress up and play Nazi.”

  “No,” Wainwright said. “No, he’s not. Maybe he has only ten, twelve ‘followers,’ but he’s got something else, too. Something we helped him get. He’s got a platform.”

  “I thought that was what we wanted him to have.”

  “That’s right. But the chain of command is now . . . rethinking the whole scenario. If he does go ahead and announce he’s running for office, where do you think he’s going to get votes from?”

  “Mohr? What’s he going to run for, state rep? He’ll get the . . . I don’t know what you’d call it, the votes from people who hate the coloreds. And the Jews, I guess.”

  “Don’t forget the Catholics. They’re on Mohr’s list, too.”

  “So? Those kind of people wouldn’t be voting for our guy, anyway.”

  “That’s what we thought, what everyone thought, when the operation was launched. But that’s not what we’ve been hearing lately.”

  “I don’t understand,” the man with the harelip said, a faint sprinkling of hostility edging his words.

  “It’s the chickens coming home to roost,” Wainwright said. “During the war, men like Mohr, they were very useful, especially in dealing with union problems. Instead of focusing on things like wages and hours and working conditions—you know, stuff the Commies could organize around—they had the men ready to riot if they had to work next to coloreds on the assembly lines.

  “But some people fell asleep at the switch. What our intelligence says now is, if a man like Mohr ran for office, he’d be pulling his votes from some of the same people—the same white people—who would have voted Democrat.”

  “Our intelligence? Or do you mean—?”

  “In-house,” Wainwright said, carefully enunciating each syllable. “And our . . . friends don’t know any more about it than they do about you working for us.”

  “Why don’t you just tell Mohr to—?”

  “We can’t tell him anything. He’s not on our payroll. And all the money we spent on his group just made him worse.”

  “Then . . .”

  “Can’t do that, either,” Wainwright said. “The last thing we need is another Jew conspiracy. We don’t want to make him a martyr. We need him neutralized. Discredited.”

  “How the hell can you discredit a guy who runs around calling himself a Nazi? What’s left?”

  “This,” Wainwright said, sliding a blue folder across the glossy surface of his desk. Clipped to the outside of the folder was a photograph of Carl Gustavson.

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 11:17

  * * *

  “It’s so beautiful,” Tussy said. “I was never out here before except in the summer.”

  “If you’re cold . . .”

  “Not me,” she said. “I’m pretty well insulated. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “I . . .”

  “Some men just like women who’re . . . hefty,” she said, hands on hips. “Gloria told me—”

  “Gloria may know a lot about men,” Dett said. “She might even be an expert, maybe. But she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know anything about me.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 11:22

  * * *

  “So they’re both fruits,” the man with the repaired harelip said, putting down the dossier. “What can we do with that?”

  “That’s a good question,” Wainwright replied. “After all, Mohr says he’s a Nazi, and they marched fags into the ovens right along with the Jews. We’ve got a tape of a speech he made. Mohr said there’s no room in the party—that’s what he calls that collection of pathetic misfits he’s got, a ‘party’—for fags. ‘A man that can’t fuck can’t fight,’ is what he said. So you’d think, we threaten to release what we’ve got, he backs off, plays along like he’s supposed to.”

  “Only . . . ?”

  “Only we’ve got men inside, like I told you. Sometimes, I think all of these freak-show organizations would dry up and die if we pulled our informants out—they’re probably the only ones who ever pay their dues on time. Anyway, we had one of our assets get into a conversation with Mohr about it. The subject, I mean. Nothing confrontational, just sounding him out.

  “This asset of ours, he spent time in prison—that’s like a credential to those people—so it was a natural subject for him to bring up. What our man did, he admitted butt-fucking some boys while he was doing time. But he didn’t say it like a confession; he said it like, what would you expect a real man to do when there were no women around?

  “And Mohr never blinked. In fact, he said he’d do the same thing himself. He said a true member of the master race is a master of his situation, too. Fucking a man doesn’t make you a fag, only getting fucked.”

  “But Mohr’s . . . relationship with this Gustavson fruit, that’s not because he’s in prison,” the man with the harelip protested.

  “Mohr’s got a line that covers that, too. He has this whole long story about ancient Greek warriors—”

  “Greeks aren’t Aryans.”

  “You know that, and I know that,” Wainwright said, smiling thinly. “But these homegrown Nazis don’t. Anyway, Mohr told our guy that part of being a real man is doing whatever you want. He didn’t come right out and say he was doing . . . that with anyone, but it’s easy to see how he expects it to come out someday. And he’s ready for it.”

  “So where’s our edge?”

  “Our boy Carl. He’s not a fraud like most of them. He’s the real thing. A true believer.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s where the finesse comes in,” Wainwright said. “And that’s why I sent for you.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 11:29

  * * *

  Tussy bent at the waist and scooped a flat piece of slate from the ground in the same motion, as agile as a gymnast.

  “Want to see something?” she said, holding the stone with her forefinger curled around its edge.

  “Sure.”

  “Come on,” Tussy said, tugging Dett toward the water’s edge with her free hand. Fireball followed at a judicious distance, eyeing the water distrustfully.

  “Watch,” she said. She stood sideways to the water, her right arm extended. Then she took a step forward, twisting her hips as she whipped her arm across her body, releasing the flat piece of slate. It hit the water, skipped, flew through the air, skipped again, and continued until it finally sank, a long way from shore.

  “Damn! That must have gone a couple of hundred feet,” Dett said.

  “I can do long ones with just a couple of skips, or I can make it skip a whole bunch of little ones,” she said, grinning.

  “Where did you learn how to do that?”

  “My father taught me. I was watching him do it one day, when I was just a little girl, and I wanted to do it, too. Mom told me girls didn’t throw rocks, and I told her, well, I sure did, every time boys threw them at me. She said she’d better not catch me doing that. Then my dad said we’d make a deal. He would show me how to skip stones, the way he did, and I wouldn’t make my mother frantic by throwing them unless we were at the lake.”

  “That sounds fair.”

  “It was. And I kept to it. I never threw any more stones. I did throw a dish once, though.”

  “At someone?”

  “I sure did. At the diner, one time, this ma
n—well, a boy really, he probably wasn’t old enough to vote—he put his hand right under my dress and kind of . . . squeezed me. I dumped a bowl of hot soup on him. It didn’t scald him or anything, just got him mad.

  “I was going back behind the counter to tell Booker when I heard someone yell. I turned around, and he was coming right at me.

  “Later, they told me he had just been coming over to apologize. But that’s not what it looked like to me then, so I just picked up a dish—a little one, like you serve pie on—and slung it right at him.”

  “Did you hit him?”

  “Right in the head. Or, anyway, it would have been right in his head, if he hadn’t put his arms up. He was real mad. I guess I was, too.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well . . . not much of anything, really. His friends started razzing him, and he just stalked out.”

  “He never came back?”

  “I never saw him again,” Tussy said. “Wanda took over my table—the one where he had been sitting. They gave her a good tip, too. I remember, because she wanted to give it all to me, but I made her split it, instead.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Walker, what’s wrong?”

  “With me? Nothing. I was just—”

  “Your face, it got all . . . I don’t know, scary. Your eyes went all . . . black. Like someone turned off the light behind them. It was years ago, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s eat some of the sandwiches I made,” she said. “That’ll make you feel better.”

  “I hope they’re tuna.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 11:36

  * * *

  “It’s coming to an end, Cyn.”

  “What, Beau?”

  “All of this. I can feel it.”

  “But why? Everything’s going just like—”

  “Like what, honey? Like we planned? It doesn’t feel that way to me. Not anymore. We’re riding the train, all right. But we’re passengers, not the conductor. The best we can do now is hang on and keep from falling off.”

  “You’re just tired, Beau. You’ve been working so much. . . .”

  “I am tired, girl. But not from work.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 11:44

  * * *

  “That’s such a lovely place,” Tussy said, from the front seat of the Buick. They were parked on a slight rise, looking down the slope toward a three-story brick house surrounded by a terraced garden. A turquoise ’57 Thunderbird with a white hardtop and matching Continental Kit was visible at the side of the property, at the end of a long driveway.

  “It’s pretty big, all right.”

  “It’s too big,” she said, firmly. “Unless they have about a dozen kids, who needs a place like that? I wonder who lives there.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 15:09

  * * *

  “There’s no way to do it,” Dett said. “The house is too big. They probably have a nursemaid living in, and I’m guessing the baby sleeps on the top floor, too. We’d have to have people watching for weeks even to find an opening. Plus, it’s a long run from where they live to anyplace safe.”

  “That’s it, then?” Beaumont said.

  “Maybe not. Do you own any local cops?”

  “We have . . . friends on the force,” Beaumont said, concentrating. “Men who would do us a favor, men who owe their jobs to the organization . . .”

  “The chief?”

  “Jessup? He’s a sideline man, like most of them are now. Chalk players, watching to see who’s the favorite before they make their bets.”

  “There’s a way to hit them all,” Dett said. He was looking at Beaumont, but his eyes were unfocused, somewhere in the middle distance. “If it worked, you’d be the only one standing at the end.”

  “I don’t like gambles.”

  “Then you won’t like what I came up with.”

  “Maybe I should hear it, first.”

  “You have another place you could meet Dioguardi in?”

  “Another place besides this house? I’m not going to any—”

  “Another place in this house. A place not so fancy. A place we could fix up the way we wanted.”

  Beaumont exchanged a glance with his sister. “We have a meeting room. But you have to walk right past a car to get in there. Anyone who sees it would know what it’s for.”

  “If you decide you want to do this, that won’t matter,” Dett said, snapping his eyes into focus.

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 16:21

  * * *

  “Well, what do you think now?” Ace said to Lacy. “Did we show you something or not?”

  “Yeah,” Lacy said. “You showed me you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”

  “What!? I iced that—”

  “Only thing you iced was your own club. You’re finished, all of you.”

  “Hey, man, come on. The cops haven’t even been around. They don’t have any clue about who—”

  “You’re the one with no clue, sucker,” Sunglasses said. “Preacher’s as alive as I am.”

  “He didn’t die? But I—”

  “Die? He didn’t have a scratch. I saw him myself, strutting around with his boys like a . . . well, like a fucking king, man. Get the joke?” Sunglasses laughed, harshly. “I hope so. Because the joke’s on you, chump.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “You ever check that pistol? Fire it yourself?” Lacy said.

  “Hell, yes, man. It works perfect.”

  “Then it was the bullets. I guess the ‘Klan’ gave you a box of blanks.”

  “Those weren’t no blanks.”

  “Yeah? Better give it to me, let us see for ourselves.”

  “You’re not taking my gun,” Ace said, pulling the pistol from his jacket. “This is mine. I don’t know what your fucking game is, but I’ll find out. I’ll find that nigger Preacher, too. See if I don’t.”

  “Relax,” Lacy said, holding out both hands in a calming gesture.

  At that signal, one of the waiting Gladiators smashed a length of rebar into the back of Ace’s skull.

  Ace crumpled, still gripping his sacred pistol. The Gladiator holding the rebar bent over and raised his arm.

  “Never mind,” Lacy told him. “He’s not getting up.”

  Lacy slipped on a pair of thin leather gloves, then took the pistol from Ace’s limp hand.

  “This is how he goes out,” Lacy said, holding the pistol. “Word’s all over the street about Wednesday night. Niggers talking about Preacher like he came back from the dead. If we don’t do something, they’re going to be too strong to handle.”

  “I thought you said we were getting out of bopping,” Sunglasses said. “We’re going to be part of the—”

  “That’s right,” Lacy cut him off. “And it’s going to be just like I said. But you don’t just sign up to be with an organization like Mr. Beaumont’s. We have to prove in. Show our true colors. And this,” he said, pointing to Ace’s body, “this is what they told us we have to do.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 22:24

  * * *

  “Sherman!” Holden Satterfield exclaimed. “Boy, am I glad to see you. I got a lot of new stuff in my logbook.”

  “Good,” Sherman said, moving closer to where the woodsman stood in the darker-than-night shadows. “But that’s not why I came out here, Holden.”

  “What do you mean, Sherman?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about a job.”

  “A job? But I already got a job, Sherman. Working for you.”

  “This would be the same thing,” the big detective said. “Working for me. But not doing this. Not anymore.”

  “I don’t get you, Sherman.”

  “I’ve got some land, not too far from here. Twenty-two acres. It’s just about all forest; I only cleared a little bit of it, for my house.”


  “But I don’t drive a car, Sherman. And this forest, it’s mine. I mean, it’s where I live. You know. . . .”

  “Yeah, I know where you live, Holden. Remember, you let me come and visit you there, once? But I was thinking, how would you like to live in a house? A real house. A little one, you could build yourself. In your own forest?”

  “I couldn’t do that, Sherman. If anybody found out—”

  “It wouldn’t matter,” the big detective said. “Because it wouldn’t be out here, it would be where I live. On my land. We could put up a dandy little house, you and me. It wouldn’t be much, but it’d be a house, Holden. A real one.”

  “But what would I do? I mean, I have my job. . . .”

  “You could watch the forest for me, Holden. And, in the daytime, you could be clearing the land, working on the house. I always wanted to breed dogs. Maybe we could—”

  “I don’t like those hounds, Sherman. They go after—”

  “Not hunting dogs, Holden. Dobermans. Do you like them?”

  “I . . . guess so.”

  “Sure you do!” Sherman Layne said, patting Holden’s shoulder. “And you could take care of animals that get hurt, same way you do now, only it would be easier if you had a stove and a refrigerator, right?”

  “I . . . I think I could. But, Sherman . . .”

  “What?”

  “How come things have to change?”

  “Because we’re friends, Holden. And I’m changing, so I thought you might like to come along with me.”

  “You’re moving away, Sherman?”

  “No,” the big detective said. “I’m getting married.”

  * * *

  1959 October 08 Thursday 22:49