On one of the parallel tracks, blocked from view to either side by strings of freight cars on adjoining lines, sat three consecutive railway carriages of a type that, to this point in her life, Saskia had only seen in museums of transportation.
In Amsterdam’s central train station, there was a special waiting room, technically for the use of Saskia or whoever was currently king or queen, but never actually used because it was so outrageously non-norMAL. It was where the kings of the Belle Époque would cool their heels waiting for their private trains. From there, when all was ready, they would be ushered into carriages that probably resembled the ones Saskia and the others were looking at now. They were the Victorian equivalent of today’s private bizjets. In the American version, they were not for hereditary royalty but for business magnates, thundering to and fro over the Gilded Age rail network with their families and support staff, smoking cigars and dashing off telegrams as Kansas or Appalachia glided by outside the windows.
As usual, there were helpers, trim and polite, wired up with earplugs. Each of the VIP guests was escorted to a different private suite on one of these cars, encouraged to wander, and reminded that the cars might, without warning, go into movement at any time. After freshening up, Saskia strolled up and down the length of this three-car string, gawking like an unabashed railway-buff tourist. Clearly each of these cars had a long and interesting backstory. But circumstantial evidence told her that one had been owned by a St. Louis beer baron of German ancestry. Another seemed to have been the property of a resource extraction magnate from the mountain West: mostly timber, some mining. The last was fancier, but harder to suss out. She guessed someone from New York, in finance. She mentally dubbed them the Beer Car, the Tree Car, and the Money Car. Saskia’s lodging was at the aft end of the Money Car and consisted of a bedchamber with en suite washroom complete with claw-footed cast-iron bathtub. A narrow passageway ran along one side of it. On the other side, big windows provided a view out of the left side of the train.
As warned, the cars had gone into motion almost as soon as the guests had stepped up into them, and since then had never stopped for long. It was a back-and-forth, inconclusive shuffling. If Saskia had been a train buff, she would have followed the details avidly. This string of three antique carriages was being made part of a longer train consisting mostly of freight cars. The view out the window became longer as neighboring tracks were cleared. The sulfur pile came back into view in the distance. But eventually the train pulled out for good and began to traverse the largely industrial landscape that ran west along Buffalo Bayou from Trinity Bay (which they had now put behind them) toward downtown Houston and the vastness of Texas beyond.
In the midst of Houston’s industrial belt, only a few minutes’ transit time from the sulfur pile, the train slowed and eased onto a side track in a larger switching yard. Awaiting them, pre-assembled, was a string of half a dozen Amtrak passenger coaches, plus a dining car. The fleet of buses and SUVs, which Saskia had last seen at the T.R. Mick’s, had ended up here. She had to exit her suite and cross to the right side of the Money Car to see it. But looking into the windows of those coaches as they glided by, she could see faces she recognized, including some of her own staff.
Having passed all the Amtrak cars, the train slowed, stopped, reversed direction onto the side track, and backed up until it thudded into them. Saskia by now had abandoned all pretense of not finding it fascinating, and opened windows on both sides of the Money Car so that she could stick her head out and assemble a mental picture of what was going on. The Money Car had until now been the last in the train. Her compartment was in its rear. Another suite at its forward end appeared to house the lord mayor. Forward of that was the Tree Car, home to Sylvester and Michiel, and forward of that was the Beer Car, which was T.R.’s temporary residence as well as serving as a private saloon well stocked with, unsurprisingly, beer. Everything forward of the Beer Car, all the way to the locomotives, was freight: sulfur hoppers, container carriers, and the odd tank car.
What now happened was that the string of Amtrak coaches was coupled to the end of the Money Car, immediately to the rear of Saskia’s compartment. The corridor that ran along one side of her bedchamber was terminated by a door—of polished wood, naturally, with gleaming brass fittings—with a window in it, through which she watched as the train eased together and finally connected with a jolting thud. On the other side of the gap she could see Amelia’s face framed in the corresponding window. They had been in touch electronically the entire day, of course, but one of Amelia’s training and disposition could never quite relax until she had eyes on the person she was charged with looking after. So the relief on her face was evident even across the gap.
Making all the connections between the cars took another few minutes, but then the train pulled out onto the main line and began to pick up speed toward downtown Houston. The doors opened. Amelia and Fenna came forward, followed by a porter carrying Saskia’s baggage. Willem took care of stashing it in Saskia’s compartment while Fenna set up the apparatus pertaining to her trade on the tiny makeup table in the corner. Alastair and Rufus, the Odd Couple, entered and loitered awkwardly until Saskia invited them to make themselves at home in the middle part of the Money Car, which was a sort of parlor. Terribly important Englishmen stormed past them to get after Bob. A waiter emerged and took drink orders. Saskia excused herself and lay down on her bed for a nap. When she woke up, the fiery sun had reddened and cooled. She opened her curtain to behold the hill country of Texas, glowing in the flat red light of the setting sun.
Chandigarh
Laks took the move from Amritsar to Chandigarh as an opportunity to do a little more traveling around the Land of Five Rivers. He had actually seen very little of it so far. It was at this point that the social network—no, the society—that he’d become a part of, just by sticking with it, humping the langar’s lentils and digging the akhara’s dirt, came into its own and he saw its full power and virtue. Sikhs were well represented among truck drivers. Pick a road out of town and everyone knew someone who would be driving a truck or a bus or even a motorbike in that direction soon. And if not soon enough, there was free food at the langar and maybe some pointers on where to find a place to sleep. So once he had established a basic fund of trust and cred, grown his beard out, learned how to dress and how to talk, then, just by virtue of being a likely young man traveling on his own he was able to move around the Punjab, if not always quickly, then at least cheaply. In a way, the less he spent, the easier it got, for people were more willing to help out a scrappy wanderer sleeping rough than they were a Canadian tourist with a fat wallet.
His objective was to go and visit all five of the eponymous rivers: from north to south, the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej. Eventually all of them flowed into the Indus, the great river that gave India its name.
He was under no particular compulsion to do this. It wasn’t a ritual pilgrimage or anything like that. It just appealed somehow to his innate sense of completeness. He’d be able to say that he had really seen the Punjab.
Amritsar was right between the Ravi and the Beas, so those were easy day trips. He went to the site on the western bank of the Beas where Alexander the Great had thrown in the towel, abandoned all hope of adding Pentapotamia to his empire, and turned back toward far Macedonia with his exhausted and disgruntled troops.