On the Blue Comet (16 page)

Three times Mr. H. walked me through the story. Each time I remembered a little more about the robbery, but the memory as a whole stood just to the side of my vision.

“Your story would make a good movie,” said Mr. H. with an unhappy sigh, “but, alas, we don’t have the special effects yet to make it believable. It would be like filming the
Titanic
using a ten-foot model in a studio tank. It would be a terrible movie.”

He stood and picked up his glass. “I must go, Oscar. Alma and I are invited to a very boring cocktail party. I would rather listen to you. However, your father wishes to finish his work on the layout downstairs.” He held out his hand to shake mine while bending and whispering in my ear. “I, alone,” he said, “actually believe that you are still eleven years old, Oscar. And that you evidently managed to get onto a Lionel train.”

“You believe me?” I asked.

“Of course! Look at your haircut. No man of twenty has a boy’s haircut with a cowlick sticking up like a tent pole! Cowlicks calm down in late puberty.”

“Dearest!” called Alma from upstairs. “We’re late!” Mr. H. bolted up the stairs much more quickly than I thought a pear-shaped man could ever run.

Down in the Crawford basement, my dad was at work restoring Christopher Crawford’s Hell Gate Bridge. “Gonna take hours to fix her, Oscar,” Dad said. He handed me a pair of needle-nose pliers.

I examined the damage I’d caused jumping into the layout the night before. “I feel like a fool for wrecking everything, Dad,” I said.

Dad grinned with a piece of copper wire in his mouth. He looked me up and down. I was bandaged up, with my knee taped and my hand in gauze. “Looks like you did more wreckage on yourself,” he said. He had a full array of tools on the table. Little screwdrivers, special pliers, and glue. He picked up a small clamp and held one of the pylons in place while he glued it back together.

“This is like the old days, son,” he muttered happily.

We worked side by side in the basement until the ruined layout began to take better shape. Dollops of plaster of paris had to dry over the screens in the precise Colorado River banks where my foot had wrecked the original ones. Like a jeweler, I fit a score of tiny glass panes to restore Denver’s Union Station. My big fingers got in my way.

Suddenly Dad winked at me. “Let that plaster dry, Oscar,” he said. He pulled out a cigar and brought fifteen red-and-white Lionel boxes up from under the layout table. They were stamped
PROTOTYPE
and unopened. Out of the boxes came a silver train, twelve cars long.

“What is it?” I asked. I had only once seen such a wonderful train, and that was in a picture. It gleamed like sterling silver. On the nose of the streamlined engine was an enameled red eagle emblem.

“Remember, Oscar? It’s the President,” said my dad.

“Of course I remember!” I said. “That train was in the catalog that came in the mail the night you told me we had to sell the trains.”

Dad puffed a few smoke rings of delight. “Lionel never actually sold many of these. Too expensive! But look at this, Oscar! The whole thing’s made of pure polished nickel! And see! Every car has a different president on the seal. . . . Right here’s the Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, Taft, TR, McKinley . . . it goes right through back to Lincoln.”

I could see why the President was so expensive. It had a circling searchlight on its observation car. It worked, of course. Sure enough, on a plush seat, which changed into a bed at the push of a lever, sat the little tin girl with pigtails.

Dad opened the tiny door of the dining car. With an eyeglass screwdriver, he showed me the galley’s cupboards. Two of the cabinets lay cunningly hidden beneath the seats of the diner’s booths. The doors slid back and forth as if someone might just come along and fill them up with cans of soup and frozen steaks. “Keen little hidden closets!” Dad remarked. “No wonder this baby cost an arm and a leg.”

“Even George Washington’s got his name on the diner!” I said. “I wonder how he’d like that if he knew!”

“Let’s let her rip!” said my dad. “It’s probably the only one still in existence. I wonder where Mrs. Crawford ever got this prototype.”

I nodded to the upstairs. “Dad, I bet movie stars are so rich they get everything they want overnight.”

Dad put the train together, carefully joining the couplings. “We’ve got a better life, Oscar,” he declared, very seriously. “So long as we keep ahold of it. You’ve got me, and I’ve got you, and from what I hear, that’s a heck of a lot more than poor little adopted boy Christopher Crawford or his divorce-happy mama will ever have in this world!”

He tilted back in his seat and pulled the throttle. The President streaked over the tracks, through the tunnels like an arrow, faster and quieter than any other train we’d ever run. Dad switched the Golden Gate to a siding and sent the President from L.A. over the foothills of the Rockies, over the plains, and into Chicago on the regular L.A.–Chicago run.

“How about running her all the way to Grand Central?” said my dad, drawing fully on his cigar. He sidelined the Twentieth Century express train in Dearborn Station and sent the President flying past the Great Lakes loop over the heartland of America to New York City’s Grand Central Terminal.

The late-day sun played in through the basement windows of the Crawford mansion, casting deep, soft shadows on the layout’s mountains. Upstairs in this house were famous people, their expensive furniture polish, and their oriental carpets. But down here things weren’t too different from our basement in Cairo, where we had not a care in the world.

But we were not in Cairo, and the United States Army was coming to get me in less than twenty-four hours.

“Oscar,” Dad said after a few coast-to-coast traversings of the President, “we’re still in the soup. An eleven-year-old boy in the army’s gonna spend most of his time throwing up in the brig.”

“What’s the brig, Dad?” I asked.

“It’s the cooler, son. The slammer. It’s where they put the recruits who won’t march in a straight line.”

“Are we going to Montana, Dad?” I asked.

He answered, “Oscar, as soon as the banks open after breakfast tomorrow, we’re on our way. Got three hundred and fifty dollars saved up. We’ll go to Montana.” He waved in the general direction of the north. “We’ll find a little cabin in the mountains someone’s forgotten about. I’ll get a job as a park ranger. You can catch fish, shoot game, and do the cooking, just like home. We’ll get you all the schoolbooks you need to keep up. And we’ll wait for you to grow up and really be twenty-one. Then we’ll come back and no one will be the wiser. If the army still wants you when you’re really twenty-one, then you’ll serve your country like every other red-blooded American. Okay, Oscar?”

“Okay, Dad!” I said.
Fish,
I thought. I’d never cooked fish before. But we would be together, Dad and I, and that was not going to change if a team of wild horses tried pulling us apart.

Mr. H. sauntered downstairs in his dinner jacket and gazed in admiration at Dad’s work.

“I won’t be able to paint any more until morning,” said Dad. “Plaster’s got to dry.”

“In that case, you are welcome to spend the night in the guest suite,” said Mr. H.

Around eight o’clock, Dad and I took a break for sandwiches brought in by the lovely Miss Chow, who said not one word.

Dad and I worked until ten on the broken windows in the Denver station. Then we stumbled upstairs. “Oscar,” said my dad, “I didn’t tell Dutch or Mr. H. or anybody about this plan of mine. Just between you and me. Okay?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“We’ll go tomorrow morning, Oscar,” he continued. “If we hurry, we’ll make the 11:22 local for Seattle, then change to the 7:41 to Billings, Montana.”

On the pillow of my bed were silk guest pajamas, neatly folded. I put them on. I had never worn silk in my life.

There was a modest tap on my door.

“Yes?” I said.

“Excuse me! Miss Chow here!”

“Yes, Miss Chow?” I opened the door.

“Toothbrush and soap,” said Miss Chow. She had all the amenities neatly assembled on one of her silver trays. I took them and thanked her.

“And something else,” said Miss Chow.

“Yes?” I asked.

She smiled. “Miss Chow hears everything! I will let you open your locked door of memory in the Oscar mind! Easily. Easily!” she said. “Chinese method going back two thousand years!”

Miss Chow sat down right
next to me on my bed. From a velvet-lined box she produced a black rock shaped roughly like a ball. It was glass and semi-see-through. Somewhere inside darted a little luminescent fish, or what seemed to be a fish. But it wasn’t a fish. It couldn’t be.

“What is this?” I asked Miss Chow.

“Translate to Star Stone,” she answered. “Very rare. We find these in north China near Harbin. Sometimes the Star Stone appears in the river. Sometimes under the ginkgo tree. Very valuable. People pay a lot of money for Star Stone on the black market. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of China, has the Star Stone to help her husband fight the war against the Japanese. Miss Chow asks you just relax, please. Just look at little star inside stone. Just relax in that bed. Don’t take your eye off little star. Okay?”

I did as she told me.

“That’s it, Oscar. Now you rub the Star Stone. Heat from your body will make the star jump around. You concentrate on that star until Miss Chow comes back in the room, please.”

Again I did as I was told. The heat of my hands and my stomach where the stone rested made the little internal star swim around like crazy in its round black home. Something warm as a summer night settled over and into me. All anxieties dwindled out of my mind. Nothing seemed to matter but the tiny moving light in my hands. My eyes darted in unison with it as I lay in a state of alert quiet. The bedroom door opened without a sound. Miss Chow tiptoed back in so silently I would not have known she was there but for the light in the hallway spilling through the door.

I heard a tiny chuckle in her whisper. “Your father fast asleep under his blanket. He did not wait for Miss Chow’s toothbrush and silk pajamas.”

I smiled a response but kept my eyes on the stone.

“How you feel, Oscar?” she asked, again in a whisper.

“Ahhhhhh!” was all I could answer.

She took the stone from me and crossed my hands on my belly.

“Now you close the eyes. Look up inside the eyes without moving the head, okay? Okay? Roll the eyes back in the head. Good! Good! Good!” said Miss Chow softly. She waited a minute and listened to my breathing.

“Tell Miss Chow your name. Speak slowly, please.”

“Oscar Ogilvie Junior.”

“How old you, Oscar?”

“Eleven years old.”

“Now you tell Miss Chow what happened inside that bank, please.”

The stubborn troll in the corner of my mind’s eye began to move to the center of my vision. I spoke without hesitation. “I am pressing my face to the fake grass on the bank’s western slope layout. The church bells ring five times out in the street. Suddenly there is a funny noise. Two men are rushing in! They have stockings over their faces, which they rip off. One of them hits Mr. Applegate on the head. Snow flies off his shoulders. Mr. Applegate goes down. Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”

Miss Chow’s hand immediately soothed mine. She asked, “He has a name, this man?”

“Yes, Stackpole!” I said immediately. The memory was clear as day. “This man is big. He’s stooped over with long arms like a monkey. He grabs Mr. Applegate and blindfolds him with a stocking mask in half a second. Then both men look around the bank. The monkey man’s all pitted with acne. He has one thick eyebrow going right across his face and a mustache like . . . it looks like a black caterpillar. The other man is a little runt. His hair is tufty and kind of reddish-yellow-colored. He has a broken nose and a big jagged scar on his forehead.

“At first they don’t see me. They’re too busy blindfolding and beating Mr. Applegate.”

I began to actually use the voices of Stackpole and McGee — I remembered his name clearly now. Their voices rang freshly in my mind, as if they were there in the bedroom at that moment.

“‘Put your mitts up and throw the keys to the teller’s drawer over to me! Right now, right now! Do it!’ yells Stackpole. ‘McGee, grab them keys and get the cash fast!’

“Mr. Applegate empties his pocket of his keys before they bind his hands behind him. I duck and then stand as low and still as I can against the side of the layout.

“McGee grabs the keys and rushes over to the teller’s window. I hear him yank open the drawer. He throws it on the tiles below. It crashes. He yells, ‘There’s no money! Where’s the cash, you dumb sap?’

“Mr. Applegate is gasping for breath. ‘Every night it gets put in the vault,’ he explains. ‘It’s locked away! I don’t have the keys. It’s a combination lock, and there’s an alarm. Just leave now, please! You can’t get the money!’ Mr. Applegate pleads with them. ‘And I can’t get it for you!’ The words come out of him fast and terrified. I remain absolutely quiet like a boy of stone. All around the huge layout, the trains are circling and whistling as if nothing is happening.