Super (15 page)

This man is making a speech—to himself as much as to me, thought Browne. He said, “Yes, sir. As I said, I supported you then and I support you now. I can only thank the good Lord that you were strong enough to make such a difficult decision.”

“It wasn’t difficult. Only a fool or a nincompoop could have, would have decided otherwise.”

“I understand.”

Their waiter, a man named Fred, came to clear their plates and refresh their coffee.

“Where were you when you heard the news?” Truman asked Fred.

“What news, sir … Mr. President?”

“The A-bomb. The big bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

Fred thought for a count of two or so. Then he said, “I was right here on this train, the Super.”

“What did you think when you first heard it?”

“I was happy the war was going to be over.”

“See,” said Truman to Browne. “That’s the way it was for everyone.”

“Yes, sir. I agree.”

“How did you get the news here on the Super Chief?” Truman asked Fred. “What time of day was it?”

Fred said, “Well, now let me think … It was after dark, but the dining car was still open. Somebody, I think it was a conductor, came through and told everyone. Kind of made a public announcement. He’d heard it on the radio.”

“What happened in the dining car?”

“There was some hard gulps and talking about what it was and what it meant and then a lot of cheering and then a lot of drinking.”

Truman smiled at Browne. “See?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

A. C. Browne began to consider the reality that here now was a much better story than the one he was going to California to work on: how, ten years later, Harry Truman was dealing with his decision to obliterate two Japanese cities.

And what the sick man Lawrence had to say.

“Is there anything to what the man said about the Nevada radioactive fallout?” Browne asked Truman.

“Not that I know of. What famous victims was he talking about?”

“I have no idea, sir,” Browne said.

“Makes you think that maybe whatever sickness he has is up here,” Truman said, putting a finger to the side of his head.

Mathews and Rinehart had had a great view of Dodge City.

After finally finishing breakfast and their coffees, they had moved to adjoining swivel seats in the glass-enclosed dome atop the lounge car in the middle of the train. They had come here, as always, in anticipation of the spectacular scenery just up ahead in the southeast corner of Colorado and then east to west through the entire State of New Mexico.

Rinehart, the first few times he made this trip, was brought close to tears by the sheer beauty of these deserts and hills. The pastel colors were beige, rust, light green and blue. To Rinehart,
it seemed as if somebody with a soft touch had literally come along and painted everything. Not with real paint but with colored chalk.

Now, to Mathews, he said, sweeping his hand out across Dodge City and beyond to the great Southwest of the United States, “There are only so many times you can be wowed by the same thing. That’s why nobody ever made a living showing the same picture twice. They’re talking about someday putting movies on television—you know, as repeats. Forget that. It’ll never happen. You’ve seen
Gone with the Wind
, you’ve heard Gable say ‘Frankly, lady’—or whatever—‘I don’t give a damn’ and you don’t want to hear him say it again. You with me on that, Gene?”

“Always with you, Dar,” said Mathews.

“What about
The Super Chief
as a title for our train movie?” Rinehart said suddenly.

“Forget it,” Mathews said. “Sounds like an Indian picture.”

“What about
The Super?”
Rinehart asked.

Mathews shook his head. “Everybody’d think it was about an apartment house.”

“Then, maybe just the one word,
Super
. Can you see it in lights—
Super
, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason?”

“Mason would get second billing to Gable and Saint. But
Super
’s no good. Everybody’d think it was about that guy who flies from building to building in a single bound.”

“Grant—not Gable,” murmured Darwin Rinehart.

Then, glancing down at the platform in front of the Dodge City train station, he said, “Look, quick, Gene! See him? That’s the guy! I know who he is.”

Mathews’s eyes also went to the disheveled man leaving the train in the company of that Santa Fe detective Pryor.

“He was the Atomic Energy Commission guy who came around before we started shooting there at Snow Canyon,” Rinehart said excitedly. “I’m sure of it.”

“Right, right,” said Mathews. “He had a Geiger counter or something in his hands.”

“Didn’t he try to convince us that the ground was radioactive?”

“Yeah, but the local people said that was from uranium deposits that were going to make everybody around there rich someday,” Mathews said.

“Wonder what happened?” Rinehart asked rhetorically as the Super Chief pulled away from the Dodge City station toward the beautiful scenery.

In less than five minutes, they came out the door of the hotel. The darkly dressed man was at least six feet tall, which made him appear gigantic next to Pollack, who couldn’t have been more than five feet six.

Charlie Sanders, from around the corner of the hotel building, carefully watched them look up and down Main and start
walking. He followed at a safe distance as they went south on Main back toward the Santa Fe station.

At the corner they crossed Main and stopped in front of the Farmers and Drovers Bank. Sanders stayed back on the other side, pretending to look into a store window.

Pollack went across the street and into the train station while the large man waited in front of the bank.

Within moments, Pollack reappeared and gave a wave to the man to come into the station—and hurry. Sanders read it as a signal that the coast was clear.

Sanders waited until both were well inside the waiting room and out of sight before continuing on. He heard the sound of a departing train. There was that familiar
Whaah!
of a diesel locomotive’s horn, and the roar of the big engine.

Right, right. That was the local to LA, Train #4, the companion to the #3 that went nearly an hour later.

Sanders raced through the long waiting room and on out the doors to the platform just in time to see the last car of Train #3 disappear into the west.

Could it be that the man would ride #3 only to a town close by and then board the eastbound #4? Then when he arrived here in Bethel he would simply stay aboard, out of sight of any law enforcement personnel who had returned to the platform to watch the eleven o’clock departure …

“Detective.”

Charlie Sanders heard the word, spoken by a male voice. But it was not a word he was used to responding to on reflex.

“It’s me, Pollack,” said the voice.

Sanders turned around.

“I must talk to you, detective,” said Pollack.

“Mr. President, excuse me for asking, but have you given any additional thought to what that former AEC man Lawrence said about the risks from the Nevada testing?”

Harry Truman looked away from A. C. Browne and out the window at the Southwest countryside.

“You may be about to end a new friendship,” he said after a full minute.

“Sorry, sir, but I ask questions for a living. I can’t help myself.”

“I used to answer questions because I had to. I don’t have to anymore.”

A. C. Browne knew he was pushing this—possibly too far. But he couldn’t help himself. “I just know, sir, from my own experience that memories can play tricks on people sometimes. And concentration on an event can, in fact, bring back sounds and sights that the person didn’t realize were still there.” Browne put his right hand to his head to make the point of where “there” was.

He could feel warmth in his face and he assumed it was a bright scarlet, more than bright enough for Harry Truman to see it.

“I think we’ve talked enough about this, Browne. Just for the record I do not recall a thing the man said. I’m going back to my compartment.”

Browne stood. “Thank you. Maybe we could talk again later?”

Truman shrugged but said nothing.

“Clark Gable’s on the train,” said Browne quickly, trying to reestablish the relationship. “Maybe I’ll look him up for an interview. I’m writing something about how television is scaring the movie business.”

“Gable’s a Republican who came out big for Ike in fifty-two,” Truman said. “But, as far as I know, he never said anything bad about me like so many of those other Hollywood types.”

“I think he’s been so busy bedding down his leading ladies and all the other ladies he could, he didn’t have much time for politics. Too, too bad about his wife, Carole Lombard.”

“A heartbreaking story, that’s right.”

“He’s also known as a drinker. Would you be interested in having a private whiskey with him early this evening, maybe before Albuquerque—if I could set it up?” asked the editor-publisher of the
Strong Pantagraph
.

“Why not?” replied, the thirty-third president of the United States.

They moved to part.

“We can do it in my drawing room,” said Truman. “Gable will probably want it all to be private.”

A. C. Browne had to hold back a laugh at the thought of a
former president being concerned for the privacy of the King of Hollywood.

“It’s not what it looks like, detective,” said Pollack to Charlie Sanders.

Sanders just stared ferociously. He would thus attempt to become the first detective to make an arrest armed only with a scowl. He did have the additional weapon of physical size because he had five inches and at least forty pounds on Pollack.

“Follow me!” he said, also ferociously.

To Sanders’s satisfaction and surprise, Pollack began to walk right behind as he marched toward what he knew was a small office next to the baggage room. Conductors and other crew members used it to do paperwork while their train was in the station. Sanders hoped it would be vacant at the moment.