Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

Laszlo and Jim, two men who deal in these pictures for Mammoth Titan, entered with their own saucers of gravy. Jim set his down on the table across the aisle, and lit a Fleetwood. He liked a little cigarette ash in his gravy: good training for army food, he said. I don’t know if the military will get desperate enough to take him.

He blew the smoke at me and intoned, “Ya eedmo Ob-Ararat!”

“Thank you,” I said. “Rehearsing my lines will take my mind off what I’m eating. Think they’re really going to make that Jekyll movie, Laszlo?”

Laszlo scowled; he’s important enough that jokes about the studio are subversion, to him. “You want to walk home?” he demanded.

“I don’t want to go home at all,” I told him. “I have to pay for the gravy there.”

The conductor bustled back through the car. George was so perfect he could have been supplied by Casting: white hair, little white mustache, uniform polished and in perfect repair. But he came with the train. He was a Railroad Man to the bone, with forty years’ service. His only flaw was that he hated people — movie people, anyway. Not that movie people gave him lots of encouragement to change his mind.

“Be a doll, George, and take this back, would you?” drawled Velvet, pushing her plate at him.

He dodged it, not even looking at her, and rolled along, grumbling, “ ‘Fetch salt and pepper, take my plate.’ Be rinsing out their step-ins for ’em next.”

“Hey, I charge for that!” Velvet called after him.

The only person George ever accommodated was The Child Star. Jim figured it was because she was the only real star on the train, but I thought George just took her youth into account. He assumed she’d grow out of this movie business and get into honest work.

“Don’t you agree with me in that tone of voice!”

The sound of the penalty for agreeing with Mrs. Marr rang through the club car not once but several times. It should have warmed the cockles of my heart, but we just sort of lowered our heads and ate faster. We had been through this all before.

“Is she whacking The Child Star again?” inquired the refined tones of Jewell deChante, entering the car a step ahead of George and his salt and pepper shakers. “Let’s throw them both off the train, huh? Peace in our time?”

Aside from the crime of having the train’s only private car, Mrs. Marr had snubbed Jewell more than once. And, after all, Jewell was the ranking grownup star in the excursion. We knew this was so, for Jewell had admitted it herself. (She did not admit that she needed this trip, as she was having a difficult war. She had specialized in exotic vamps and was now considered too foreign-looking to play homegrown heroines and too sinister for the heroines of the Resistance.)

She was really much too important to be seen talking to us, but for the moment we were united against a common enemy. She glanced down at the letters all around us.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you girls about the letters I’ve been receiving. Is there room for me at your table?”

She called us “girls” only when she wanted something. Olivia leaned back. “There isn’t even room for you in that dress.”

Jewell deChante could frown without wrinkling her pretty face, though time was taking care of that for her. She lifted one nostril and moved on, preferring to dine alone in our sleeping car.

“That Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps could start drafting people around here,” noted Velvet, wiping some gravy off the table with one of Jewell’s letters.

“They’d get us instead,” I told her. “She’s over age.”

“Didn’t I see Jewell come in?”

Bevis Flint was your standard hero player, with a face so square and solid it must have hurt to move it. His rock solid muscles made for great pictures at every stop: he picked up a couple of local kids on each arm. He carried two plates of gravy, one of them for Edwin Lorenzo, who strolled in behind him. This made up our usual crowd, the poker crowd. The pinochle crowd ate in the dining car.

“To change her dress, I think,” Sissy told him. “There wasn’t any room at the table, so she went to put on a different dress.”

This made no sense, but perhaps Bevis couldn’t tell. He set Edwin’s plate down and moved out of the car with his own.

“Oh yes,” said Velvet, who had been sliding over to make room for him if he was so inclined. “How sad for her that she has to sleep in the same car as the nobodies.”

“Maybe somebody can find her another place to sleep,” Olivia suggested as the door closed behind Bevis.

“Ladies, mind your innuendo. There are gentlemen in this car.”

I looked up and down the car and didn’t spot any, which I pointed out to Edwin. He raised his chin, the way he did. Edwin was a veteran of rolling voice and grandfatherly mien, generally found playing judges, congressmen, and crusty old generals. He was a very important person on this trip as well, for he carried the cards.