Trouble Follows Me

by Ross Macdonald

  “I don’t understand why you need a partner.”

  “Well, you can do a one-man mind-reading act, but that takes preparation. It’s much better as a two-man act. Joe and I have a pretty tricky little routine. You should see it sometime.”

  “I’d love to.”

  He poured another round of highballs and passed them around. “A very tricky little routine,” he insisted amiably over his fresh glass. “I usually stay on the stage and Joe goes down in the audience. So he asks a guy to take something out of his pocket or a woman to take something out of her purse and hold it in their hand. Right away—I’m up on the stage, see?—I tell the audience what it is. Now how do you think I do that?”

  “I suppose you have some sort of a system of signals,” I said.

  “This certainly is interesting,” said Anderson, with a boyish pleased smile.

  Everyone at our end of the car was listening, except the dark man with the long sullen face. He was half-turned in his seat, frowning out the window at the water-ravaged earth of northeastern Missouri as if he felt personally responsible for it.

  “Sure, we have signals,” Teddy Trask went on. “We’ve got a dozen systems. For example, Joe touches his left eye—it’s a lipstick. He touches his right eye—it’s a watch. He smoothes his hair—it’s a handkerchief. That’s the simplest kind. But say I’m blindfolded, that system doesn’t work. I’m blindfolded, can’t see a thing. What do we do then?”

  “You could have verbal signals,” I said. “Key words that would mean something to you, but not to anybody else.”

  “Say, this boy’s sharp. Isn’t this boy sharp?” he said to Anderson.

  “Sharp is absolutely the right word for him,” said Anderson.

  “Sure, we use key words,” Teddy went on. “But you’d never figure our best system. Our best system is a honey. Get this. Joe and I practiced counting together with a metronome. We set it for one beat per second and practiced counting with it, must have been three or four hours a day for a month. We got so we could count together up to a hundred and always be both on the same number.

  “O.K., we’re putting on a show. I’m up on the stage, blindfolded. Joe’s down in the audience, talking. He gives me the signal to start counting, and we both start counting together. He goes on with his line of patter, talking and counting at the same time. Then he gives me the signal to stop. We both stop counting, and we’re both on the same number, see? Let’s say it’s thirty-five. Thirty-five is a lady’s brooch. Forty-five is an automatic pencil. Every number has a meaning.”

  “That’s wonderfully clever,” Rita said. “But what if it’s something you haven’t got a number for?”

  “That’s practically impossible,” Teddy said proudly. “There only are a hundred things that people carry in their pockets or their purses. Of course we have to change some of the meanings for a military audience. But not as many as you’d think.”

  “I thought I knew a little about codes,” I said. “But this is the first time I ever heard of a time code. Did you invent it?”

  “Sure. Joe and I invented plenty of them. I tried to tell the Army Signal Corps about some of them, but they weren’t having any. They seem to think all they’re good for is entertainment.”

  I noticed that the small black eyes of the man by the window were watching him. His impassive ophidian stare made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. He was as silent as a snake, and his long heavy-shouldered body had some of a snake’s quiet menace. I was interested in Teddy Trask’s codes and wanted to hear more about them. They struck my mind with a sense of unexplained excitement, like an answer to a question which had troubled me once but had been forgotten. But I decided to wait for a time when we’d have more privacy.

  I met Teddy in the smoking compartment a few minutes later, and thanked him for the entertainment.

  “Always glad to oblige,” he said with a wide rubbery smile. “Keeps me in practice. By the way, what do you think of that Tessinger girl?”

  “She’s as pretty as hell. If I didn’t have other irons in the fire—”

  “Yeah, you have, haven’t you? That girl of yours is as slick a blonde as I’ve seen for a long time. You’ve got your hands full, but not everybody can have his hands full of that kind of a package.”

  “You seem to be doing all right with Rita.”

  “Sure I am. And I like ’em young. I’m getting so I like ’em so young they look as if when you touch ’em they’ll smear. It looks as if I’ll have to break down the old lady first, though. But that shouldn’t be so hard.”

  “Have you got a system for that, too?”

  “Watch me,” Teddy said. “Just watch me.”

  7

  UNDER the influence of the pleasant tedium of motion, the fading effect of whiskey, the soft advance of night, I felt comfortable and sleepy and a little sad. While I sat holding hands with Mary, the train became a luminous worm boring through a continent of darkness. Our lighted car was a center of life and brightness moving in a mysterious shadow pinpointed by the infrequent lights of lonely farms and lost static towns.

  She yawned charmingly, curled in her chair like a kitten, and brushed my shoulder with her cheek. “A penny for your thoughts,” she whispered.

  “I was thinking about Teddy Trask’s code.”

  “Damn you, I thought maybe you were thinking about me. Give me back my penny. I might as well be holding hands with a mechanical thinking machine.”

  “You put your penny in the slot, and that’s what came out. I’m not responsible for the workings of my fine well-oiled brain.”

  “Well-oiled is the word. Well-oiled with whiskey. And what was the thinking-machine thinking about Teddy Trask’s code?”

  “I was thinking that a code like that might possibly be used by an enemy agent. Remember the argument I had with Eric that day in Honolulu? All the codes and ciphers I knew about involve the use of letters, numbers or words. But a code like that of Trask’s could be used without any of them. A monitor wouldn’t even know he was listening in on a code.”

  “I don’t get it. But you go right ahead and think about your codes, and I’ll think about all the interesting men I’ve met in my life.”

  “Have I been neglecting you?” I squeezed her hand.

  “You’re not now. Maybe I won’t think about all those interesting men. As a matter of fact they weren’t so very interesting.”

  At dinner we sat with an army officer named Wright who had boarded the train at Fort Madison. He was a short rotund man about forty, wearing the oakleaf of a major and the insignia of the Army Medical Corps. His interest in Mary was too obvious and self-assured to please me. His special field was the psychiatry of battle exhaustion, and he gave us a lecture on it with the air of a peacock spreading his tail-feathers.

  In the diner I noticed that Teddy Trask had contrived to share a table with the Tessingers, and that Mrs. Tessinger was beginning to regard him with some favor. Anderson and Miss Green, at a table by themselves, seemed to have found a great deal to talk about.

  Shortly after eight o’clock we reached Kansas City, where our Pullman was to be added to the train. There was a half-hour wait, and Mary and I, along with most of the other occupants of the club car, left the train for a breath of air and a walk on the station platform. When our time was nearly up, an army private carrying a large canvas bag came up to me and said:

  “Can you tell me where Car 173 is, mate?”

  “Isn’t that our car?” Mary said. “It’ll probably be down at the far end.”

  The three of us walked down the platform and found Car 173, which was the last car on the train. I left Mary in our compartment and went back to the club car to fetch our bags. When I got back to the Pullman most of our friends from the club car were there: Major Wright, Anderson and Miss Green, the Tessingers with Teddy Trask hovering helpfully about them. The old lady from Grand Rapids had one of the two drawing rooms to herself, and I noticed some time later that the dark man with the sulky face
had the other.

  The soldier who had asked me his way was sitting in our compartment with Mary while his berth was being made up. He was a young-old man somewhere between 25 and 35, with a lean tanned face and a long lanky body. He said his name was Hatcher. He wore the European Theatre ribbon with three battle stars, and the bottoms of his khaki trousers were tucked into high field boots. I noticed when I sat down beside him that he was a little drunk. I myself was feeling no pain.

  As the train began to move he said in a soft voice that had probably originated as a Missouri drawl: “Well, I wonder when I’ll get to see K.C. again.”

  “Home on leave?” I said.

  “Brother, you said it. And what a leave. Wowy. I’ve seen London and Paris and Shanghai, but K.C. is the town for me. I spent seven hundred and forty dollars in two weeks, and it was worth every cent of it.”

  “You didn’t see Shanghai in this war.”

  “This war has been going on longer than some people think. I was in Shanghai in ’37. I was a seaman on a British freighter. After that I had a berth on a British passenger ship in the Yangtze fleet.”

  “You should be in the Navy.”

  “I tried to get into the Navy, but I couldn’t pass the physical. I was in good enough physical shape to move in on Sicily and walk across Normandy, but not good enough to get into the Navy. What do you know about that?”

  “I’ve always said the infantry had it tougher than anybody else. The Navy has a pretty quiet time, unless your ship gets hit and you have to swim for it.”

  “This is the most unusual Army-Navy debate I’ve ever heard,” Mary said with a smile.

  “Well, it’s the truth,” I said with somewhat alcoholic emphasis. “I know damn well the chief reason I applied for a commission in the Navy was so I wouldn’t be drafted as a private in the Army.”

  “Say, brother, I like your attitude,” Private Hatcher said. “You’re open-minded, even if you are an officer. How about a drink on it?”

  He started to get up but I stopped him. “I’ve got a bottle right here. Half a bottle anyway.”

  We each had a drink but Mary turned it down because we had no mixer.

  “You say you spent some time in China in the thirties,” I said. “Did you see anything of the Chinese war?”

  “I saw the rape of Nanking. It’s something I won’t forget.” His gaze turned inward, and his face lost its cheerful expression. Mary looked at him with interest, but said nothing.

  With something compulsive in his voice, something reminiscent of the Ancient Mariner, Hatcher went on: “The ship I was on was hauling passengers out of Nanking up the river to Hankow. Most of them were European, British and French and Russian and some Americans, getting out of Nanking while the getting was good. This was in the winter of 1937. We loaded up the ship for the last run—we didn’t know it was going to be the last run but it was—but we couldn’t get any food for the passengers. We lay off Nanking fully loaded with passengers for a day and a night, while the first mate beat out his brains trying to get something for them to eat. There was food in Nanking all right, see, but the Japs had moved in on it.

  “On the second day the first mate went into town, and took along me and five other fellows who knew how to shoot. We were supposed to be a sort of bodyguard. I’ll never forget that walk along the wall to the city. I’ve seen things in Europe since, but nothing like that. On both sides of the wall for it must have been a couple of miles, there were piles of corpses, stiff and starved-looking and sort of thrown together and tangled in heaps. It’s the only time I ever saw human beings treated worse than cordwood.”

  Mary was pale and her eyes were large and bright. Hatcher noticed this and said: “Excuse me. I shouldn’t be shooting off my mouth like this. Anyway, you can see why I’m sort of looking forward to getting into the Pacific half of the war. I never felt just the same way about the Germans, but I reckon that’s because I never saw a Nazi concentration camp.”

  “Did you manage to get food for your passengers?”

  “Yeah, we got in touch with a black market operator. He was a white man, too, can you beat that? But he had an in with the Nips all right. I guess he’d cornered just about all the rice in the city, and he was asking monopoly prices. The first mate finally got about fifty bags, but it didn’t do much good.”

  “Why not?”

  “When we were one day up the river the Nips bombed the ship. Nearly everybody got off her, but she burned right down to the water. We had a hell of a time getting back to Shanghai. After that I got out of China.” He smiled slightly. “I thought I was getting out of China for good, but I bet I’m there a year from now. I’d like to meet the little yellow-belly that dropped that bomb.” Anderson moved past us down the aisle. I offered him a drink, and he joined us. I told Mary that I’d go to the club car and try to get some setups, but Anderson said:

  “I don’t think he’ll sell you any. Kansas is a dry state.”

  “I’ve had enough to drink anyway,” Mary said.

  I hadn’t. We continued to work on my diminishing bottle. Anderson had a short one and went back to Miss Green. The porter started to make up our berths, and Mary went to sit with the Tessingers while Hatcher and I moved down to the men’s smoking-room.

  He leaned towards me and said in an elaborate alcoholic whisper: “Is that fat guy a friend of yours?”

  “No, I just met him on the train today.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Anderson. He’s in the oil business.”

  “So his name’s Anderson, eh? And he’s in the oil business, eh?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I reckon maybe I do. If I do, it’s going to be very interesting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh,” he said, “he just looks like an interesting kind of guy. I’ve always been interested in the oil business.”

  If I had been in another mood his evasion would have made me curious, and I’d have tried to cross-question him. But the pulse of good whiskey was beating in my body like a long lifting swell. I was swathed in the mellow calm of semi-drunkenness. At the distance of the day’s journey and the Olympian height from which I regarded them, even the deaths of Sue Sholto and Bessie Land seemed unimportant. Their ruined bodies were trivial things, broken dolls remembered from somebody’s childhood. The whole dark world outside the train window was unreal to me. The only reality was the bright moving room in which I sat drinking with an interesting companion, and the reflection of my own stupidly complacent face in the dark pane.

  Hatcher had taken a crumpled envelope from the breast pocket of his khaki shirt, and was fumbling in his other pockets.

  “What are you looking for?” I said. “Name it and you shall have it.”

  “I’ve got a letter here I’ve got to get off. I’m damned if I know what happened to my pen.”

  I handed him mine. He told two folded sheets from the crumpled envelope and spread them out so that I could see that they were closely covered with handwriting. Holding a magazine on his knee he began to write on the back of the second sheet, moving his lips as he silently spelled out the words to himself. If I had been a lip-reader I’d have known the contents of his postscript, and perhaps been able to save his life.

  When he had finished he replaced the amplified letter in the envelope and gave me back my pen. I noticed that the letter was already stamped and addressed, and marked ‘Airmail.’

  “I should have got this off before. Girl-friend,” he said. “Do you know if there’s a place I can post a letter on the train, or do I have to get off and post it in a station?”

  “There’s a mailbox in the club car. It’s a glass box on the wall between the writing table and the bar.”

  “Thanks.” He sealed the envelope and went away. But he reappeared in the doorway in a few minutes carrying a bottle of whiskey. The letter was still in his other hand.

  “Your whiskey’s all gone,” he said. “
Try some of mine.”

  He handed me the bottle and went away again. The label on it, which was unfamiliar to me, announced that it contained Rare Old Bonded Kentucky Bourbon, Aged Five Years, Ninety Proof. I broke the seal and uncorked it with the corkscrew on my penknife. I thought I detected the rough rank odor of fusel oil, but I suppressed my doubts and poured myself some in a paper cup. It wasn’t a smooth drink but it was warming, and at that stage I didn’t care.

  Hatcher came back, having posted his letter in the club car, and asked me how I liked his liquor.

  “It’s terrible,” I said. “But I’ve drunk worse.”

  His first drink made him snort. “It’s terrible all right. With this liquor shortage, I had to take what I could get, but the guy that sold it to me said it was real bonded stuff. God knows I paid enough for it.”

  “I wish I’d brought more liquor from Chicago,” I said. “I forgot about these dry states. Say, maybe Anderson has some more. I’ll ask him.”

  Anderson was sitting with Miss Green in a darkened compartment at the other end of the car. Close together, with their faces turned to each other, they looked incongruously like lovers. But what they were talking about, from the few words I caught before they noticed me, was the oil business in New Mexico. It occurred to me that perhaps he was trying to persuade her to invest money in one of his enterprises.

  I broke in on their oleaginous endearments and told Anderson how liquorless I was. But he said:

  “I’m sorry, old boy, but you and your friend will have to drink what you’ve got or go dry.”

  “He’s your friend too,” I said.

  “What do you mean by that? I never saw him before in my life.”

  “Maybe he’s seen you somewhere. He was talking as if he knew you.”

  There was a trace of impatience in Anderson’s voice now. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you anyway. That Teacher’s was all I had.”

  I underwent one of the swift changes of mood which occur in an alcoholic state, and became suddenly ashamed of myself.

  “Excuse me,” I said to Anderson, and bowed low to Miss Green. “Excuse me for disturbing you so tactlessly.”