“Been saying it all my life.” He looked at the clock again. It was three minutes until eight. “If you hurry,” he said comfortably, “you might still make it.”
I hurried, the fifty-eight-pound suitcase banging against my right knee. There was really no need. The train was ten minutes late in pulling out.
The last train ride I took was the Trans-Europ-Express from Cologne to Paris. The food had been good, the service excellent, the ride fast, and the track smooth. The Pennsylvania Central Railroad offered none of these. I had paid $8.15 extra for the privilege of sitting in a chair that swung 360° so that I’d miss none of the megalopolitan mess that was the eastern seaboard of the United States. There were some factories to look at, some junk yards, several vistas of rather interesting slums, and one cow.
I’m not sure when it was that American railroads went to the bad. Some claim that it started as far back as the twenties, but it was probably just after World War II when they began building super-highways and you could buy a car again and an airplane ride was no longer much of an adventure. It must have been a gradual decline. The coaches and the Pullmans that wore out were junked and not replaced. The crack train became a joke. The help got old and died and nobody much wanted to work for the railroads anymore. Then suddenly, sometime in the mid-sixties, the country awakened to learn that its skies and highways were choked while its rails were empty. At least of passenger service. Between Washington and New York they finally got one new high-speed Metro-liner running, but only once a day, and it was supposed to make the 227-mile trip in two hours and fifty-nine minutes — an hour faster than the Greyhound bus. Someday they may even run it all the way up to Boston.
Meanwhile, in car or bus, you could creep along highways that were built for the traffic of the early fifties or go by planes that stacked up for hours over airports that turned obsolete as soon as they were completed.
Many of the good ones were gone, I thought. The Commodore Vanderbilt and the 20th Century Limited, for instance. Even the Wabash Cannonball. Yet elsewhere in the world trains were still running, most of them on time. You could go from Tokyo to Osaka, 320 miles, in three hours and ten minutes on the New Tokaido Line. The Blue Train still ran luxuriously from Johannesburg to Capetown, and on the Rheingold you could go from Amsterdam to Geneva, 657 miles, in a little more than eleven hours and dictate to a secretary who spoke four languages while you stared out the window at the castles on the Rhine. I doubted that I could even get a decent cup of coffee on the Penn Central.
At one o’clock we pulled into Washington’s rococo Union Station, almost an hour late. It was still raining hard and I had to wait fifteen minutes for a cab. By the time I got to the Madison and into my room, it was a quarter to two. I called down for a large breakfast and then went into the bathroom to get rid of my beard and the grubbiness of the train.
After breakfast, I called Lieutenant Demeter. “Nice of you to check in,” he said. “How’s the bag-man business?”
“They called a fake switch in a motel about halfway across New Jersey to see how well I follow instructions.”
“But they didn’t show.”
“No.”
“Maybe you’d better drop around and tell me about it.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I was supposed to check in here at twelve-thirty, but the planes aren’t flying and I had to take a train so I was late. They’re supposed to call me here.”
“Have you got the money with you?” Demeter said.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Here. In my room.”
Demeter exploded. “For Christ sake, St. Ives, get it into the hotel safe. Maybe it’s different in New York. Maybe the people up there are all beautiful and gentle and fond of flowers, but I wouldn’t walk across the street in this town with more than forty bucks cash in my pocket.” He seemed to turn his head away from the phone. “He’s got the money in his room, for Christ sake.” He must have been talking to Sergeant Fastnaught.
“I’d planned to put it in the safe.”
“Quit planning and do it. Where you staying, the Madison again?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your room number?”
I told him.
“We’ll be there in half an hour.”
With the money safely stored in the Madison’s vault, I went back up to my room and stood by the window and watched it rain some more. Twenty minutes later there was a bump at the door; not a knock, but a bump that was followed by a dry, scratching sound as if someone were trying to peel off the paint. I moved to the door and opened it. It was Ogden and his face was screwed up into a wrinkle of pain as the tears ran down cheeks that had all the color of old paste.
“Lemme in,” he said. “Lemme in.”
I let him in, and he stumbled. He was wearing a tan raincoat and he pressed it tight against his belly with both hands, but even the raincoat didn’t stop the blood from seeping through his fingers.
“On the bed,” I said, and grabbed his arm and helped him over to it. He wouldn’t lie down. He sat there on the edge of the bed and held his stomach.
“Oh, God, I hurt! Get a doctor, get me a doctor.”
I picked up the phone and dialed the operator. “Send a doctor up to 429,” I said. “A man has been injured.”
She didn’t argue or ask questions. “I’ll call the emergency ambulance.”
“Do something,” I snapped.
Ogden had fallen over on the bed, his head rested on the pillow, his feet were still on the floor, and his hands still clutched the widening red stain on his raincoat.
“In the lobby,” he muttered. “He used the goddamn knife right in the lobby.”
“Who?”
“Both of them were there. That bitch giggled when he did it.” Ogden groaned and the groan grew into a scream. “Why do I have to suffer so?” he moaned, but I couldn’t think of an answer.
“Who was in the lobby, Ogden?” I said.
“Get me a doctor. Get me a goddamn doctor.”
“He’s on his way. Who was in the lobby?”
“You got the money?” he said, and struggled to get up. “You got the money? Lemme see it. Lemme see the money.”
“It’s not here; it’s in the vault. Who stabbed you, Ogden?”
“I saw ’em on the train and then they came here and the bitch giggled when he did it.”
“Who, goddamnit?” I said.
“That pimp, Freddie. That pimp and his whore.”
“Freddie who?”
Freddie something he started to say but the blood bubbled out of his mouth, and then there was a big gush of it that went all over the pillow, and Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of the New York Police Department’s vice squad lay still on the bed, very still and dead.
The phone rang and I picked it up. “We’re downstairs and on our way up,” Demeter said.
“You’re too late,” I said, and hung up.
Chapter fifteen
The assistant manager of the Madison gave me another room on another floor and looked as if he wished that I would go to another hotel, preferably in another town. After I had told my story to three plain-clothes detectives from the homicide squad who had been summoned by Lieutenant Demeter, I told it again. And then, just to make sure that I’d left nothing out, I told it a third time. When one of the homicide detectives asked for a fourth rendition, I turned to Demeter, who leaned against the door and stared at the body of his former FBI Academy classmate, Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of the New York Police Department. Fastnaught was at the window looking at the rain.
“The fourth time won’t be any different from the third or the second or the first,” I said.
Demeter didn’t look at me; he kept on staring at the body on the bed. “Just tell it, St. Ives. Just tell what happened.”