Death on the Patagonian Express

by Hy Conrad

  It tasted pretty much the way Amy expected a shrub to taste, and yes, it was bitter, although she didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction. “Good,” she managed to say and handed the gourd back down to Fanny.

  “This, I take it, is TrippyMother,” said Edgar with a polite half bow. “Edgar Wolowitz. And our fellow traveler Todd Drucker.”

  Fanny stopped playing with her gourd long enough to take part in the introductions.

  “Are you here to keep Trippy out of trouble?” Todd asked her with a condescending twist of the head.

  “Out of trouble?” Fanny’s tone remained neutral.

  “I expect you’ll be a calming, more mature voice of reason,” said Todd. “That’s what I meant.”

  And here Fanny bristled. “So you think I’m what? Some ancient, boring chaperone?”

  “Not chaperone exactly, but . . . Well, I assume you read your daughter’s blog—all her escapades and wild sex and impulsive behavior. You’ll be keeping an eye on her.”

  “What makes you think she’s the one who needs an eye . . . kept on her?”

  For a few seconds Todd didn’t get her point. When he did, he broke into a hearty laugh. “Yeah, right. You’re the one we have to look out for.”

  Fanny retracted her chin as if she’d just been punched. “Why is that so funny?”

  “No reason, Mrs. Abel. Sorry. Just makes a great mental picture.”

  “Really?” Fanny extended her chin. “And why is that picture so funny?”

  “Well . . .” The travel writer probably had a blithely sarcastic reply on the tip of his tongue. He didn’t seem the type to back down, at least not verbally. But the reply never arrived. What did arrive was the echoing blare of a tango band. All the lingering people by the staircase—Todd and Edgar, the Abels, Alicia Lindborn, and the three Spanish speakers—turned toward the nearest archway that opened onto the nearest train platform. So did half the denizens of Constitución Station.

  Jorge O’Bannion stood in the middle of the archway, decked out in top hat and tails, his arms flung wide like a ringmaster welcoming his spectators into the big top. Ten yards behind him was the tango band, which looked suspiciously similar to the band that had played last night at the Iglesia del Tango, complete with the eighty-year-old accordionist.

  Wordlessly, the eight luxury explorers gravitated up to and through the archway, exchanging solemn sideway glances as they merged. Amy couldn’t help feeling an instant, almost eerie bond, as if they were all about to share in some life-changing adventure. To a certain extent, she felt this way at the beginning of every tour. But in this case, with the old Victorian station and the tango band and the shiny Chilean ringmaster. . . And behind the ringmaster were the photographers, one video and one still, capturing the moment for future brochures and PR releases and Web sites. Amy wished she’d worn something nicer. Fanny had already handed off her maté gourd to Pablo, taken the sports camera out of her bag, and joined in the photographic frenzy.

  A moment later the train cars came into view. Amy couldn’t see the engine at the other end, but from the fog enveloping the track, she assumed it to be a steam engine. The carriages themselves were straight from a Turner Classic Movie. Marlene Dietrich could have been gazing out of one of those fogged windows that were edged in beveled glass. Cary Grant could have been checking out his reflection in the polished brass fittings. The carriages did not look identical—different lengths, slightly different heights, undoubtedly rescued from various long defunct lines. But the wood was a uniform dark brown, lustrous, and rich.

  “Welcome, my friends, to the New Patagonian Express,” boomed Jorge, then repeated himself with equal volume and intensity in Spanish. “It is my honor to welcome my most distinguished guests.” Again translated. “These glorious carriages, magic carpets from long ago, are prepared to transport us to a bygone world of luxury and adventure.” The ringmaster had just finished a much longer Spanish version of this when his attention was diverted by a man in a semiofficial-looking brown uniform who was scurrying down the platform from the direction of the engine. “Eight days of wonder, carrying you to the Eighth Wonder . . .”

  When the uniform could no longer be ignored, Jorge held up his hands, begged them “Excuse me” in Spanish, then turned to face the new arrival. Everyone waited while the men pivoted away and whispered back and forth. The uniform pointed toward the front of the train with one hand, then with the other hand. Jorge’s hands stayed closer to his body, but his head moved, shaking and nodding, lowering to his chest, then up to the vaulted steel and perhaps the sky beyond. At one point the discussion seemed to get quite heated.

  “My dear friends.” Jorge O’Bannion turned to face them, once again all smiles. “I deeply regret that there is a situation here beyond our control. My very capable engineer informs me that we have encountered the shortest of delays. Your luggage awaits in your compartments. Unfortunately, you cannot yet go into your compartments due to safety concerns, not that your possessions won’t be perfectly safe. It will be a delay of a mere half hour.”

  “Safety concerns?” asked Todd Drucker, speaking for everyone.

  “No concerns,” said Jorge. “Just a station regulation whenever repairs are being made.” When Jorge repeated his explanation for the three Spanish speakers and got to the words media hora, the uniformed engineer made a face and waggled his head.

  “Una hora? One hour, then?” He watched the waggle morph into a dubious shrug. “One hour, maybe a little more. And there’s no possible danger, not to worry. No hay peligro.”

  Despite his assurance, everyone looked concerned—except Fanny. Her eyes were alight with anticipation, and she leaned up to whisper toward her daughter’s ear. “Is this how it begins?”

  “Nothing’s beginning,” Amy whispered back. “Everything’s going to be fine.” And she tried to will herself to believe it.

  CHAPTER 7

  One thing that regularly took Amy by surprise was just how big the world was. Big and often empty. She had visited plenty of these wide-open spaces. In some cases she was mentally prepared. The famously desolate deserts, of course. The row after infinite row of snow-peaked mountains. The lakes that resembled oceans, complete with tides and waves and landless horizons. But she had never stopped to think about the endlessness of South America. Even more amazing was the fact that it was right there, just below, hidden in plain sight, lying in the shadow of her own familiar, well-traveled continent. And so much of it.

  The safety concern seemed to have something to do with the train’s engine, some steam valve or gauge; even hundred-year-old technology remained unfathomable to Amy. All she knew was that the delay had lasted four hours and that Jorge O’Bannion had been torn between trying to provide four hours’ worth of distraction for his grumbling guests and sneaking away to bark anxiously into his cell phone. Fanny had used some of the time to buy her own thermos for hot water, more yerba maté for her gourd, and to rail against Todd Drucker (Toad Drucker, as she kept calling him) and his rude assumptions.

  The first part of their steam journey took them south of Buenos Aires, through the typical gradation of suburbs—upper-class ones, all gates and high walls and manicured trees behind the walls; followed by middle-class ones, with fenced yards and dogs; followed by slums, with crumbling facades and patched roofs and more dogs and properties too close to the tracks for safety or comfort. Afterward came open spaces dotted with scruffy fields and factories. And then, far off to the left of her window, Amy glimpsed the first of the seaside resorts, with high-rise hotels defining what was undoubtedly an unseen coastline.

  Their progress was slower than the normal traffic along the southern rails. The soft chug of the engine lulled them into a mellower mood, like a lullaby played out on a time machine. Only the occasional whoosh of a passing diesel engine broke the reverie. Once or twice, when their own track was preempted by the speed and schedule of a real train, they were forced to pull into a siding and wait until the intruder from the future
had passed, and the world was once more safe for the Patagonian Express.

  As they’d boarded in Constitución Station, Amy had counted nine carriages. Some were rather standard-looking affairs, such as the old caboose and the dining car. Others were much longer, like the one containing their sleeper.

  Theirs was a good-sized compartment, done in a heavy-paneled Edwardian style with velvet and leather and with tulip wall sconces for lighting. Against each side wall was a twin bed that lifted up and back to produce a couch. The two most improbable luxuries, things that shouldn’t be on any train anywhere, she thought, were (a) a bathroom with a clawfoot bathtub and (b) a bedroom fireplace. Amy assumed that the fireplace was nonfunctioning, despite the authentic kindling and birch logs laid out in the hearth. She had spent her first five minutes on board talking her mother out of lighting a fire.

  A door at the far end opened up onto a semiprivate lounge with a bar and comfortable seating for four around a circular mahogany table. Beyond that was another suite, where one of the Spanish women was in residence and which was part of the same elongated carriage. They wondered aloud if that one also had a fireplace and if she was going to try to use it.

  Dinner on the first evening was in the dining car, the menu choices being a poached sea bream or the omnipresent Argentine steak or some vegetarian dish. Amy and Fanny both ordered the fish.

  The dining space was equipped with enough red-striped armchairs facing enough white linen–covered tables to comfortably seat forty, which gave all eight of the guests the opportunity to stay in their own little cliques and not mingle. Amy felt both relieved and vaguely disappointed. Travel was supposed to be all about new people and new experiences, wasn’t it? And here she was, making conversation with her mother, splitting her attention between Fanny’s annoying growing expertise with the maté gourd and, through the tableside window, her view of the Argentine pampas.

  The steam-driven locomotive chugged on at a relaxed clip, which somehow made the landscape seem even more vast. The pampas were these immense, cool pastures of green, which took on a slightly purplish hue in the shadows of the late-day sun. Peppered here and there, always at a lonely distance, was a farmhouse or two, usually with red roofs. And then the smaller brown dots of cattle moving gently from one zone of empty green to another. Not a human being in sight.

  “You should be careful with too much maté,” said Pablo, shyly pointing to Fanny’s gourd. He had stepped up to their table, and Amy motioned for him to sit down and join them as they waited for dessert. She moved a little closer to the window, and he squeezed in an armchair next to hers. “There is caffeine in the herbs, you know.”

  “Good. It’s probably the only thing keeping me awake,” said Fanny. Between the long day of travel and the rocking rhythm of the train, exhaustion seemed finally to be catching up with her. “But I get your point.” And she set her gourd and thermos aside. “It’s not a drug, is it? I mean, I’m not going to be getting any crazy visions or heart palpitations?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Pablo. “But everyone is different.”

  “At least it keeps me from smoking.” Fanny shot her daughter a sly, crooked smile.

  “That’s your excuse?” said Amy. “And what are you going to use to get off maté?”

  “I was thinking heroin.”

  Their guide’s eyes widened.

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Amy assured him. “Just kidding.”

  “Good,” said Pablo. “There are enough problems without that.”

  “Problems? Is everything all right with the engine?” Amy was voicing the concern that had been nagging at her since the start. She felt self-conscious even mentioning it. “I don’t mean to be a worrier.”

  “The train engine? Yes, yes, all fine,” Pablo said with the confidence of a man who probably didn’t know very much. “They say it was a bad valve that needed replacing. It runs on oil, not coal, like in the old days. All very modern, although we still have steam. Steam is more romantic than diesel, yes?”

  “Very romantic,” said Fanny, stifling a yawn.

  Pablo made small talk with them until their desserts arrived. It was dulce de batata, he explained, a kind of sweet potato jam served with crackers. “Delicious,” he added, just in case they doubted it. Then he left them to prod the dark gelatinous mounds with their sterling silver spoons.

  Fanny took a tentative bite, pronounced a hearty “yum” for all to hear, then leaned across to her daughter. “I think we may want to save up, dear. You know, store the credits away in the old calorie bank for another day.”

  “Agreed,” said Amy, pushing her dulce away and stifling her own yawn. She was already mentally preparing for her snug single bed, gently rocking in the shadow of their unlit fireplace.

  * * *

  By the time her mother pulled back the velvet to welcome the day, the landscape beneath their wheels had changed. The endless green pastures had given way to a dry, almost desertlike plateau. The gray-brown earth was streaked with purple-green outbreaks of thorny bushes. Now and then a line of wooden fence posts would stretch across their view in a series of odd angles, the posts connected by a few slackened strands of barbed wire, keeping out nothing, since there seemed to be nothing to keep out or in. And above it all in the far, far distance was a line of snowcapped mountains.

  Once again, they ate in the dining car, at the same table—a breakfast of pomegranate juice, cold cuts, cheese, and a croissant, plus strong coffee for Amy, the ever-present maté gourd for Fanny—and finished just in time to see the train pulling into the ancient town of Carmen de Patagones, on the banks of the Río Negro. This, Amy knew from the itinerary, would be the stop for the day, their first chance to escape the mesmerizing rocking of the past fourteen hours, to stretch their legs, and to do a little sightseeing.

  Amy couldn’t remember the last day of touring she’d done with her mother. Buenos Aires didn’t count, since Pablo and Alicia Lindborn had been along, acting as unwitting buffers. But now, as the Abel women wandered the sleepy, winding streets that wove from the train station down to the river, Amy was surprised to find that it wasn’t so bad. When separated from the cares and distractions of everyday life, Fanny could actually be good company. Funny and relaxed and ready for anything.

  From the outset, they’d been determined to find some kind of memorable souvenir in Carmen, which was probably the least touristy town Amy had ever encountered. In fact, it was hard for her to imagine what the main industry of the town was or ever had been, or even a possible reason for its existence for the past two hundred-plus years, except perhaps that it was situated on a river.

  For her souvenir, Fanny settled on a Peruvian wool hat with earflaps, a pompom, and a silver, mirrorlike Batman insignia sparkling over the forehead. As they exited the store, she stuffed the hat into her oversize purse and heaved a disappointed sigh.

  “I think it’s cute,” Amy said. “Batman goes Peruvian disco.”

  “That’s not why I’m sighing. I’m just disappointed.” Reaching into her purse again, she rummaged, then pulled out her camera by its glittery red strap. “Outside of an inconvenient little delay, absolutely nothing’s happened. No murder. No threats. I hate to say it, but you’re losing your touch.”

  “Is that why you came?” Amy asked. “To see someone get killed? To record it for your blog?”

  “You make it sound so heartless. No, I just thought there might be an adventure. That jerk Toad Drucker is accusing us of making things up.”

  “Very perceptive man.”

  Fanny gave her a look. “You laugh. But I promised my readers a South American adventure. I can’t just make one up. Well, I could, but not with Drucker hovering over us like a vulture. Unless I help create a little something.”

  “No. You are not going to concoct an adventure.”

  “Of course not.” Fanny thought for a moment, nodding her head. “It doesn’t have to be a murder, you know. It can be a simple kidnapping or a jewel heist. Or a revolu
tion. How stable is this government, by the way?”

  “I know you’re perfectly capable of starting a revolution, Mother, but please don’t.”

  “I’m just asking. Are you hungry for lunch? I know there’s food on the train, but I don’t want to get back on. Is there a restaurant in this town? Or are we going to be reduced to knocking on the door of some shack and washing dishes in exchange for a few handmade tacos? Do they have tacos here? Or is that just Mexico?”

  Amy was in the process of thinking up a witty answer, although much of her attention was consumed by keeping her footing on the uneven cobblestones. And that was when they heard the explosion, echoing through the meandering stone streets. It was a single blast, with more resonance than one would expect from a leftover firecracker. “Oh, my God!”

  “About time!” Fanny crowed with something like glee. The camera was already in her hand. She fumbled for the ON switch, then held the camera out in front of her. “Which way to the station?”

  “It doesn’t have to be the train,” Amy argued. “It could have been an engine backfiring or a firecracker.”

  “How much do you want to bet?” And before her daughter could take the bet, Fanny was on the move, the small square camera in front of her like a flashlight. Amy raced to catch up.

  Within two blocks, they didn’t have to guess anymore about directions. Doors had opened onto the street, and half a dozen locals, maybe more, were making their way across the little town, chattering and exchanging questions. Amy and Fanny simply followed—all the way to the train station. Other locals poured out of other streets, joining the parade, chattering more, and going faster. Fanny tried to catch as much on video as possible.

  The engine, Jorge O’Bannion’s antique steam engine, was the finish line of this informal race. The machine was where Amy had last seen it, off on the siding by the old water tank, looking perfectly normal—except for the splintered brown wood toward the rear of the engine, and the gaping hole, and the two men lying on the gravel by the tracks.