“He must’ve made a mistake. I told you I never saw him before in my life.” Anderson’s smooth plump face was unruffled. His pale blue eyes were alert.
I said quickly on a hunch: “How did you get out of Shanghai?”
Preceding his statement by a pause of just the right length, he said with just the right combination of puzzlement and irritation: “But I’ve never been to Shanghai. What are you trying to get at?”
I was sitting on the leather seat beside Anderson, half-facing the door. There was no audible sound in the passageway, and no visible movement, but a subtle combination of sight and hearing made me conscious that someone was there. I got up and crossed to the door in one motion, and faced the dark man again.
I said in a voice that was ready to break with cumulative anger: “I’m getting bored with having a shadow. Get out of here.”
His face was unmoved. He said softly: “Excuse me. I didn’t realize that you were in a position of authority on this train.”
“That has nothing to do with it. If I catch you eavesdropping again I’m going to slug you.”
“If you slug me, as you so elegantly put it, I’ll have you arrested. I may even slug you in return.”
His black eyes were hard, steady and impenetrable. I felt an urgent need to surround them with matching black rings. But if I did, the Shore Patrol would put me off the train. My frustration was so strong and bitter that it gathered in a lump in my throat. I left him standing there and went back into the smoking-room.
“Let me give you a word of advice,” said Anderson, who hadn’t moved from his seat or shifted his cigar. “You’re all keyed up, and I can’t say I blame you. But if you keep on going around insulting people like this, you’re going to get into a peck of trouble. Just now you practically accused me of having something to do with that soldier’s death. A minute later you accused that young man of eavesdropping. I know you had a tough time last night, but don’t let it make a crank out of you.”
The Dutch Uncle approach leaves me cold every time, and this was no exception. But I had no answer for Anderson except:
“I guess you’re right.”
“Better get some more rest,” he said patronizingly as he got up to go. My impulse was to tackle him, throw him down and search his pockets for evidence of I didn’t know what. I controlled my impulse.
10
SUSPENDED tensely between the desire to do something and unwillingness to make a fool of myself, I sat and smoked until the tension sagged and I felt able to sleep again. Then I called for the porter to make my berth. He came to the doorway and stood there regarding me grimly, his face like hewn basalt.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
He moved nearer and said in sibilant disappointment: “Mr. Drake, you said you wouldn’t tell anybody what I told you today.”
“I haven’t. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t. All I said was that I wouldn’t identify my source.”
“That’s what I mean, suh. You said you wouldn’t tell anybody that I knew anything about Black Israel.” He glanced over his shoulder as if he feared that the cohorts of Black Israel might be massing outside the door to destroy him.
“I didn’t and I won’t.”
“Maybe you didn’t, suh,” he said without belief. “But that man knows.” He jerked his head towards the drawing-room.
“Who knows what?”
“Mr. Gordon knows that I told you about Black Israel.”
“Who is Mr. Gordon?”
“The dark man in B drawing-room.”
“Him?”
“Yessuh. He was asking me about Black Israel tonight. I told him I didn’t know anything. You shouldn’t have told him, Mr. Drake. I don’t like his looks.”
“Neither do I. And let me assure you I haven’t told him anything and never will. Nor anybody else.”
“Yessuh,” he said with the ancient stolid grief of the Negro who has trusted a white and got his fingers burned, or smashed.
“I don’t know why he was questioning you, but I had nothing to do with it. He couldn’t have overheard us in the vestibule, because I watched for him–”
“You watched for him? Who is he, Mr. Drake?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to try and find out. I don’t like this any better than you do.”
He went to make my berth, and I knocked on the door of drawing-room B. The dark man answered the door in his shirtsleeves. There were wrinkles in the left shoulder of his shirt which might have been made by the harness of a shoulder-holster.
“Mr. Gordon, I believe?”
“Mr. Drake, I know. Have you come to apologize?”
“I’ll apologize when all the chips are down. What is your interest in Black Israel?”
“I am a sociologist.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Certainly not. Is there any need to?”
“The need may arise.”
“In that case I may as well tell you that I’m not a sociologist. Psychology interests me, however. At present I am attracted by the problem of you.”
“You take the words out of my mouth, Mr. Gordon. I am fascinated by the problem of you.”
“The problem of you is this,” he said in a flat cold voice which harmonized with his flat cold eyes. “What curious hallucination has persuaded you that you can ask strangers personal questions, and even threaten them, without being sharply snubbed?”
He snapped the door shut in my face. I refrained from kicking it, but I had never felt less respect for the laws and conventions of civilized society. I went back to the smoking-room and smoked more cigarettes. Physical violence had beaten my impulses down to the animal level, and I craved more than anything else some physical outlet for my feelings. Yet I sat on my tail and for want of anything better to do, played a mental chess game in which half my men were missing and the board itself was in shadow, against an unknown antagonist who made three moves to my one.
My stalemated imagination rejected the illusion offered by the train’s motion that I was getting somewhere. I was sick of its monotonous jerking, its idiot course along the line of least resistance to a predestined end. I felt boxed in and locked out.
After a long time Mary appeared at the door in her bathrobe. “Aren’t you going to bed, Sam? It’s very late. Besides, I don’t like you sitting here by yourself.”
“Sure. I’m going to bed.”
The berths were all made and the curtains were drawn for the night. The ladder stood at my berth like an admonition.
I said, “Good night, Mary,” and kissed her. Her body moved in toward me and her mouth grew soft. She said with her lips against mine: “Sam. Come in with me.”
We lay together with the blind up and watched New Mexico unroll like a faded diorama. There was a faint moonlight which touched the earth with a greenish tinge, like a country at the bottom of the sea. The strange country which at high noon was a riot of pigmentation, a dead world brilliantly shadowed with post-mortem lividity, was at night an arid pasture of the moon. But because a girl’s head was on my arm the shadowy country took female forms, was hung with a mysterious and sexual beauty.
“A train journey has a funny effect on me,” Mary said. “I feel cut off from the real world, isolated and irresponsible. The time I spend on a train is like an interlude from real life.”
“The country is Cockayne,” I said. “Would you marry me if I asked you to?”
“Don’t ask me that now,” she said drowsily. “Pull down the shade and ask me if I love you in the dark.”
That night I had no bad dreams.
At six a moral alarm clock clicked in my brain and woke me. Before I opened my eyes I could sense the warm fragrance of her breath and hear its quiet rhythm. When I opened them I could see the dim outline of her closed face, pale and lustrous as a pearl in the early morning light. Moving cautiously so as not to disturb her, I retrieved my clothes and climbed out of the berth.