Super (3 page)

“That’s good, that’s good,” said Ralph. “It’ll be out of our way.”

Wheeler turned toward Sanders. “I hope the Santa Fe didn’t bring you on this train just to see about me, Mr. Sanders.”

“You and other important people aboard the Super, sir,” Sanders said. “That’s my wonderful job.”

Otto Wheeler was not at the top of the VIP list given to Sanders for this trip, but he was on it. Seven assistant general passenger agents worked out of the Santa Fe headquarters in the Railway Exchange Building on Michigan Avenue, only a short walk north from Dearborn Station. Assisting on various
publicity and travel promotion projects was their principal duty but, on occasion, they were sent off on trains with important passengers. As the junior man, Sanders caught mostly slow-train travel assignments. This was only the second time he had been on the Super Chief, which he passionately believed was the finest streamliner in the world.

“Are you ready for dinner now, sir?” Ralph asked Wheeler. “Sooner you eat, sooner I can make up your berth and all.”

“Right, Ralph. I’ll be ready when it’s ready.”

Charlie Sanders opened the drawing room door and began to exit as Ralph backed out behind him. But Wheeler said, “Could I speak with you a moment privately, Ralph?”

With smiling efficiency, Ralph motioned for Sanders to complete his departure into the passageway, then he closed the door behind him.

“Yes, sir,” Ralph said to Wheeler. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“I am not able to go to the dining car, of course, but I would like to know if a particular person is there … a woman, dark reddish brown hair, magnificent white skin—stunningly attractive. Green eyes, a nose that is quite small. Her eyes flutter when she talks. Laughs like a … like she really means it. She would be traveling to Los Angeles.”

“We all know her, Mr. Wheeler, and we’ve watched for her before many times, haven’t we?”

“We have, Ralph, we surely have.”

“I will find her if she’s on this train tonight, Mr. Wheeler, I promise you that.”

“Thank you, Ralph.”

Ralph reached for the latch on the door again. “For your information, sir, there’s another Super Regular, a movie man named Mr. Darwin Rinehart, in the other drawing room and a connecting bedroom here in your car. I’m sure you’ve seen him here on the Super before.”

“Yes, yes, I have talked to him a time or two. Don’t tell him I said it but his movies are mostly very awful.”

Ralph smiled and said, “Here in the compartment on your other side is a Mr. Rockford, as in the town here in Illinois. Never seen him on the Super before this trip. He asked about you when he got on some thirty minutes ago or so. Wanted to know if you’d boarded yet. I thought you’d like to know who you’re traveling with, sir.”

“Yes, thank you, Ralph.”

Ralph smiled and nodded and Wheeler returned both the smile and the nod.

“Mr. Clark Gable’s with us again, too. Nobody’ll probably get to see him much but I thought you’d like to know.”

“Mr. Gable and I have spoken a few words back and forth here on the Super a time or two,” Wheeler said. “I thought he was wonderful in
Red Hat
. So were Joan Crawford and Miss Dodsworth. Too bad that Rinehart fellow can’t make movies like that.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Wheeler,” said Ralph.

He had not seen
Red Hat
but he had been with Grace Dodsworth in person many times, of course, back when she was a familiar Star on the Super.

Now Ralph felt the train—
his
train—moving. As always, there was no jerking, no banging, only a gentle, majestic gliding away with a slight sound of a bell and a whistle from the engine way up front.

“We’re off, Mr. Wheeler.”

That first minute or so of departure was always a special time for Ralph and, it seemed to him, most everyone who ever had the supreme pleasure of departing Chicago on the greatest train in the world.

Ralph shared that joy by exchanging knowing smiles with Otto Wheeler.

But then, in a reflexive act of privacy, Ralph looked away from the tears he saw in the sick man’s eyes and said farewell.

At five after nine, Ralph came to serve Clark Gable the dinner he had requested. The porter had to use his own passkey to enter the locked drawing room after getting no answer to his several knocks.

Once inside, he found Gable in a chair, sound asleep. Only one of the four bottles of scotch had been opened and it was
still almost full. Ralph had known The King to routinely finish a whole bottle before dinner without showing a sign of having had a drop.

Gable was slow to rouse but before too long he was not only awake, he was alert, cutting into his sirloin steak and sipping on a glass of red wine that Ralph had set before him on a small tray table.

“Are there indeed fair prospects for the evening?” the King of Hollywood asked Ralph the porter.

“Only two worth mentioning, it seems to me,” said the porter. “One a blond woman I saw first in the middle lounge below the dome car and then in the dining car. She found me and asked if I might introduce her to you, Mr. Gable. She said a couple of the others in the crew said I might be the one to help.”

“How old would you say she is?” asked Gable, as if asking the size of a sport coat he was considering.

“A good thirty, maybe thirty-five, Mr. Gable.”

“A looker?”

“Are there any other kind fit for The King?”

Gable, showing that smile that had helped make him famous, said, “What did you tell her?”

“Oh, the same as I tell every one of them when they ask. I told her that only The King knows where he will be and what he will do and where he will do it and what time. I assume you’ll be wanting to do it at the usual time.”

Clark Gable hesitated before saying, “Yes, you bet. The usual time.”

“A little after ten it will be, yes, sir,” said Ralph. “I will return to make up the berth in plenty of time.”

“Right,” said Gable. “A little after ten.”

He continued with his dinner while Ralph did his chores, placing starched white sheets and fluffed pillows on the pullout divan and doing what else was necessary to get things ready for The King.

“What was the second prospect?” Gable asked Ralph.

“A brunette, also a looker, maybe slightly younger. She’d also, as I said would happen, picked up the lightning report through the train that Mr. Clark Gable was aboard tonight.”

When Gable said nothing, Ralph said, “Say after eleven thirty or so for her, sir—as usual?”

“That’s right—always as usual,” Clark Gable said.

“Why didn’t you leave that book in the compartment?” Rinehart asked.

They had already passed into the darkened Illinois countryside, the twilit sights of the railroad yards, factories, a few slums and the suburbs of Chicago now behind them.

“Because I don’t want to spend my entire dinner listening to you whine about being washed up at forty because of
Dark Days
, Clark Gable’s snub and all the rest,” Mathews replied.

They had a large four-chair table by themselves, so arranged through Ralph by the dining car steward. There were
smaller tables for two on one side of the middle aisle of the dining car, and for four on the other. Filling up the four-place tables with strangers was common practice in all railroad dining cars. It could be prevented only by eating late and/or heavily tipping all concerned. Rinehart knew and loved the ruling customs of luxury train travel.

Both he and Mathews ate the roast rib of prime beef, with the great combination salad that was a specialty of the Super Chief. It was made of ice-cold lettuce and huge slices of giant red tomatoes with a vinaigrette dressing and crumbles of blue cheese.

There was nothing to see through the windows except the flash of lights in houses and small buildings and cars and other vehicles moving along roads and highways. The moon was either not out or not bright. Rinehart, having finished his second martini and progressed well into a bottle of a nice French cabernet sauvignon, could not tell for sure where the moon was right now and was not much interested in finding out. But it triggered a thought—a very minor thought. It was based on a conversation he and Mathews had had in New York several days earlier about
Death of a Salesman
. Rinehart had been outbid five years earlier on trying to turn Arthur Miller’s play into a movie.

“Miller was right,” Rinehart said. “No wonder Marilyn married him.”

“She married him because she was high on pills,” Mathews mumbled, barely looking up from his book.

“Failure in America is too easy because success is too easy.”

Mathews set the book down in his lap and gave Rinehart his full attention. “Willy Loman wasn’t into stuff like that—”

“You got to make millions or win Oscars because we’re a free and open country. No limit to what you can do. Be a waitress one day, a movie star the next. Be a Kansas City haberdasher one day, president the next. Anything but being on top is considered a failure because being on top is possible.”

“Willy Loman never said or believed that—”

“In Russia, you finish the sixth grade, find a place to live with a bathroom, bring home a chicken, you’re considered a huge success. Being on top isn’t possible so not getting there isn’t failure.”

“So you and Willy are moving to Moscow with all the other Commies? Jesus, Dar. Before you know it, here’ll come McCarthy and the Red Police.” Mathews returned to his book.

Rinehart and Mathews had made this trip so many times and sat in the dining car so many evenings like this. They were somewhere in Illinois, for sure. They hadn’t crossed the Mississippi yet into Iowa. That happened at Fort Madison, where the train always made a brief stop. Rinehart looked at his watch. Barely an hour out of Chicago. Still in Illinois. But
where
in Illinois?

Rinehart saw
STREATOR
on a station sign as the Super picked up speed. That meant Joliet was coming a few minutes later. Many movies had been set in or were about the prison in
Joliet. Just say the word
Joliet
, and people think of electric chairs and crying families of death row inmates.

“What about a television series set on death row in a prison?” Rinehart asked Mathews, who did a double take, grinned for the first time in weeks and then closed his book and set it down. Both of them had already finished their dessert, warm apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese melted on top and a dollop of vanilla ice cream on the side.

“You serious, Dar? You really thinking about doing television? That is great. If I was still drinking I would set ’em up for the house.”

He had another sip of his Coke and Rinehart took a gulp of red wine.

Rinehart said, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s play it out, Gene. We’ll call it
Joliet
. Each week an inmate is electrocuted. That would be the pitch …”

“Right, right,” said Mathews. “Every Thursday night at nine, right here on NBC—or whatever—come watch a heinous criminal get executed!”

“There’d be the ongoing cast of a warden, a priest, some guards, reporters and the entire population on death row that always has new people coming in to take the places of those executed …”

“We could maybe get big-name guest stars to come on each week and take the juice. Some could get fried for murder, some for treason, some for rape …”

Here they were, like old times, playing it out.

Rinehart said, “There’d be flashbacks to their crimes, lots of tears from their victims and loved ones …”

Mathews said, “We’d ask Clark Gable, The King himself, to guest star. He’d make a spectacular electrocuted corpse, don’t you think?”

“I can smell him now …”

“Maybe one week we’d have an attempted prison breakout from death row. Maybe even one that was successful. An innocent man gets out to prove his innocence …”

Back and forth they went, the way they always did.

“Or a guilty one gets out to kill the prosecutor who sent him to death row …”

“One week, the warden could start sleeping with one of the death row inmates’ visiting wives. Maybe knock her up …”

“The baby could be brought up in the prison nursery by a convicted murderess with a heart of gold …”