The younger of the two men leaped easily into the square mouth of an empty boxcar, turned, and held out his hands to the woman.
She stumbled and cried out as one of her low heels broke. Pearson put an arm around her waist (he got a heartbreakingly faint whiff of Giorgio below the much fresher smell of her sweat and her fear), ran with her that way, then yelled for her to jump. As she did, he grabbed her hips and boosted her toward Cameron Stevens’s reaching hands. She caught them and Pearson gave her a final rough shove to help Stevens haul her aboard.
Pearson had fallen behind in his effort to help her, and now he could see the fence which marked the edge of the train yards not far ahead. The freight was gliding through a hole in the chainlink, but there would be no room for both it and Pearson; if he didn’t get aboard, and quickly, he would be left behind in the yard.
Cam glanced around the open boxcar door, saw the approaching fence, and held his hands out again. ‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘You can do it!’
Pearson couldn’t have — not back in the old two-pack-a-day life, anyway. Now, however, he was able to find a little extra, both in his legs and in his lungs. He sprinted along the treacherous bed of trash-littered cinders beside the tracks, temporarily outrunning the lumbering train again, holding his hands out and up, stretching his fingers to touch the hands above him as the fence loomed. Now he could see the cruel interfacings of barbed wire weaving in and out of the chainlink diamonds.
The eye of his mind opened wide in that moment and he saw his wife sitting in her chair in the living room, her face puffy with crying and her eyes red. He saw her telling two uniformed policemen that her husband had gone missing. He even saw the stack of Jenny’s Pop-Up books on the little table beside her. Was that really going on? Yes; in one form or another, he supposed it was. And Lisabeth, who had never smoked a single cigarette in her whole life, would not be aware of the black eyes and fanged mouths beneath the young faces of the policemen sitting across from her on the couch; she would not see the oozing tumors or the black, pulsing lines which crisscrossed their naked skulls.
Would not know. Would not see.
God bless her blindness, Pearson thought. Let it last forever.
He stumbled toward the dark behemoth that was a westbound Conrail freight, toward the orange fluff of sparks which spiraled up from beneath one slowly turning steel wheel.
‘Run!’ Moira shrieked, and leaned out of the boxcar door farther, her hands imploring. ‘Please, Brandon — just a little more!”
‘Hurry up, you gluefoot!’ Cam screamed. ‘Watch out for the fucking fence!”
Can’t, Pearson thought. Can’t hurry up, can’t watch out for the fence, can’t do any more. Just want to lie down. Just want to sleep.
Then he thought of Duke and managed to put on a little more speed after all. Duke hadn’t been old enough to know that sometimes people lose their guts and sell out, that sometimes even the ones you idolize do that, but he had been old enough to grab Brand Pearson’s arm and keep him from killing himself with a scream. Duke wouldn’t have wanted him to be left behind in this stupid trainyard.
He managed one last sprint toward their outstretched hands, watching the fence now seeming to leap toward him out of the corner of his eye, and seized Cam’s fingers. He jumped, felt Moira’s hand clamp firmly under his armpit, and then he was squirming aboard, pulling his right foot into the boxcar a split second before the fence would have torn it off, loafer and all.
‘All aboard for Boy’s Adventure,’ he gasped, ‘illustrations by N. C. Wyeth!’
‘What?’ Moira asked. ‘What did you say?’
He turned over and looked up at them through a matted tangle of hair, resting on his elbows and panting. ‘Never mind. Who’s got a cigarette? I’m dying for One.’
They gawped at him silently for several seconds, looked at each other, then burst into wild shouts of laughter at exactly the same moment. Pearson guessed that meant they were in love.
As they rolled over and over on the floor of the boxcar, clutching each other and howling, Pearson sat up and slowly began to investigate the inside pockets of his filthy, torn suitcoat.
‘Ahhh,’ he said as his hand entered the second one and felt the familiar shape. He hauled out the battered pack and displayed it. ‘Here’s to victory!’
The boxcar trundled west across Massachusetts with three small red embers glowing in the dark of the open doorway. A week later they were in Omaha, spending the mid-morning hours of each day idling along the downtown streets, watching the people who take their coffee-breaks outside even in the pouring rain, looking for Ten O’Clock People, hunting for members of the Lost Tribe, the one that wandered off following Joe Camel.
By November there were twenty of them having meetings in the back room of an abandoned hardware store in La Vista.
They mounted their first raid early the following year, across the river in Council Bluffs, and killed thirty very surprised mid-western bat-bankers and bat-executives. It wasn’t much, but Brand Pearson had learned that killing bats had at least one thing in common with cutting down on your cigarette intake: you had to start somewhere.
Crouch End
By the time the woman had finally gone, it was nearly two-thirty in the morning. Outside the Crouch End police station, Tottenham Lane was a small dead river. London was asleep . . . but London never sleeps deeply, and its dreams are uneasy.
PC Vetter closed his notebook, which he’d almost filled as the American woman’s strange, frenzied story poured out. He looked at the typewriter and the stack of blank forms on the shelf beside it. ‘This one’ll look odd come morning light,’ he said.
PC Farnham was drinking a Coke. He didn’t speak for a long time. ‘She was American, wasn’t she?’ he said finally, as if that might explain most or all of the story she had told.
‘It’ll go in the back file,’ Vetter agreed, and looked round for a cigarette. ‘But I wonder . . . ‘
Farnham laughed. ‘You don’t mean you believe any part of it? Go on, sir! Pull the other one!’
‘Didn’t say that, did I? No. But you’re new here.’
Farnham sat a little straighter. He was twenty-seven, and it was hardly his fault that he had been posted here from Muswell Hill to the north, or that Vetter, who was nearly twice his age, had spent his entire uneventful career in the quiet London backwater of Crouch End.
‘Perhaps so, sir,’ lie said, ‘but — with respect, mind — I still think I know a swatch of the old whole cloth when I see one . . . or hear one.’
‘Give us a fag, mate,’ Vetter said, looking amused. ‘There!
What a good boy you are.’ He lit it with a wooden match from a bright red railway box, shook it out, and tossed the match stub into Farnham’s ashtray. He peered at the lad through a haze of drifting smoke. His own days of laddie good looks were long gone; Vetter’s face was deeply lined and his nose was a map of broken veins. He liked his six of Harp a night, did PC Vetter.
‘You think Crouch End’s a very quiet place, then, do you?’
Farnham shrugged. In truth he thought Crouch End was a big suburban yawn — what his younger brother would have been pleased to call ‘a fucking Bore-a-Torium.’
‘Yes,’ Vetter said, ‘I see you do. And you’re right. Goes to sleep by eleven most nights, it does.
But I’ve seen a lot of strange things in Crouch End. If you’re here half as long as I’ve been, you’ll see your share, too. There are more strange things happen right here in this quiet six or eight blocks than anywhere else in London — that’s saying a lot, I know, but I believe it. It scares me.
So I have my lager, and then I’m not so scared. You look at Sergeant Gordon sometime, Farnham, and ask yourself why his hair is dead white at forty. Or I’d say take a look at Petty, but you can’t very well, can you? Petty committed suicide in the summer of 1976. Our hot summer.
It was . . . ‘ Vetter seemed to consider his words. ‘It was quite bad that summer. Quite bad. There were a lot of us who were afraid they might break through.’
‘Who might break through what?’ Farnham asked. He felt a contemptuous smile turning up the corners of his mouth, knew it was far from politic, but was unable to stop it. In his way, Vetter was raving as badly as the American woman had. He had always been a bit queer. The booze, probably. Then he saw Vetter was smiling right back at him.