The Coming of the Quantum Cats

21 August 1983

4:50 P.M. Nicky DeSota

When you're a mortgage broker you don't have any Sundays. Sundays are the days when your customers are off work, so if you want to get the breadwinner at home with the housewife, Sunday is your best bet. It was a beautiful day, with fleecy white clouds sailing over the trees of the Mekhtab ibn Bawzi Forest Reserve and the pool sparkling at me as I drove past. No pool for me that day. No church. No sneaking off to watch the Cubs game. No anything but calculating down payments and points and the pitfalls in transferring a Torrens title; I didn't even get a chance to look at the Sunday paper until almost five o'clock that evening, and that on the interurban down to the city. I caught the 4:38 out of Elk Grove, grabbed a paper as the train began to move off, and spent ten minutes on the really important news stories—you know, the ones in the sports section, about the Cubs and the Sox and how far ahead the Brooklyn Dodgers were in the standings. With only about a month left to play, the Cubs were ten and a half games out. The situation wasn't impossible, no. But it didn't justify a lot of time spent poring over the standings, so before long I turned to the main news section.

Now, of course I hadn't forgotten that crazy drive down to Dixon. I guess I really hadn't been worried about my own position before that. Scared, yes. You can't help being scared when the FBI gets hold of you. But not worried, because after all I knew that I wasn't there and I had plenty of witnesses to prove it.

So, in a way, it was Ron's big hot-air promises to help me that really started me worrying. I kept waiting for the phone to ring, and,

I don't know, some radio news reporter from the NBC Blue Network or somewhere to ask me what my feelings were about the demonstration in Chicago that day.

Well, there hadn't been any calls. There hadn't been any demonstrations, either, or at least none that made the first couple pages of the Tribune. The big news story was about President Daley coming back to Chicago to break ground for his library—that was the Tribune for you. (A tiny box at the bottom of the page told about renewed fighting between Lithuania and Russia, with the Russians charging aggression in the League of Nations.) There was also a story about the horribly loud roaring and screaming noises in the sky around Old Orchard Field (the Army Air Force denied any knowledge of what caused them), and all in all we were nearly into the Loop before I got to page seven and the headline that said:

FORMER MOVIE STAR ARRESTED ON

CHARGES OF SLANDERING U.S. & FBI

So old Ron was in the slammer.

Not only was old Ron in the slammer, but when I read the story more carefully the things he was accused of having said—the FBI were "fascists"; it was a citizen's duty to "resist" them—were things he had said while I was sitting right there.

There had only been four people at that table. I didn't suppose Ron had turned himself in, nor that his wife had done it; I knew I hadn't.

My mystery pal Larry Douglas had put the finger on him.

He had deliberately dragged me down there-no, even before that. He had sought me out and got me indebted to him. Then he had taken me down there for the specific purpose of getting old Ron Reagan in trouble. Why? I couldn't guess. I didn't care. The one thing I was sure of was that Larry Douglas was bad news.

I really began to worry about that; but by then it was a little too late.

The Twentieth Century Limited was due in at six P.M. exactly. I had left myself plenty of time to get there. But I was almost late, because as I was coming along Randolph sirens screamed up behind me and stopped, six cars blocking the street just ahead of my car. My heart was suddenly in my mouth.

It wasn't me they were after. It wasn't anyone they were after. They were just doing their duty to the rich and famous, convoying a limousine that was a football field long and with hubcaps of silver. Arab, of course, Big Arab. I thought for a moment it might be old Mekhtab ibn Bawzi himself, though he hardly ever came out in public any more. No, not quite, but it was his firstborn son, Faisal ibn Mekhtab. Faisal wasn't ever hard to recognize, because you never saw him in public without the egg-sized ruby he wore around his neck and the six hard-nosed bodyguards who never took their eyes off it. Not even the city cops got between the bodyguard and Faisal. What the cops were there to do was to hold us gape-eyed civilians back while Faisal, in white robes and tarboosh, minced across a scarlet carpet to enter a big new A & P supersuq. He was officially opening it. That made sense; he owned the whole chain, after all. The radio reporters, eyes respectfully averted, put a microphone in front of the august lips; camera bulbs flashed; a truckload of musicians struck up a medley of happy songs; and with golden shears, Faisal clipped the scarlet ribbon in the doorway.

It was interesting, kind of, but it took a good twenty minutes before he minced back into his Cadillac and the whole procession evaporated as rapidly as it had formed. So I found a place to park, and got into the station about five minutes of the hour, with my mind all full of rich Arabs and nasty FBI women and treacherous Larry Douglases, and hardly at all of my lady-love, Greta. I didn't always meet her at the station when she came back from the New York run, but I tried to when possible. Especially on a Sunday, like today, when the weather was nice, and the two of us might take a walk down along the lakeshore, or go to the zoo. Of course, a stewardess worked for a living, and if she'd been up all night with cranky passengers or train-sick kids, then we'd just jump on the interurban and I'd take her home ...

How peaceful those bygone days seemed! I'd had everything I ever wanted, and hadn't known it.

In the big train room the dispatchers were busy posting arrival and departure times. It's kind of exciting being in Union Station, because from there you can go almost anywhere in the world— anywhere in America, anyway. There were trains coming in from Los Angeles and Salt Lake City and New Orleans and Washington, D.C., and departures for Boston and Minneapolis and Detroit and Houston. There were grinning redcaps wheeling bags with fussy passengers trotting worriedly beside them, and honeymoon couples being kissed good-bye by their families, and vacationers dragging themselves across the terrazzo floor with suitcases full of sandy seashells and straw hats and damp bathing suits. Apart from an occasional trip with Greta, and business now and then to Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, I didn't travel much. Maybe that's why Union Station always seemed so exotic to me. And so—I don't know—competent. You can set your watch by the trains; they take off on the click of the minute, come in just as the clock hand jumps to the dot.

For which reason I was astonished to see that up on the train board, next to TWENTIETH CENTURY LIMITED, a dispatcher was putting up the word delayed.

I hurried to the crew lounge to see if I could find out why, half hoping that the dispatcher had made a mistake and Greta would be there waiting for me. She wasn't. No one seemed to know why, either. I caught up with another stew just as she was coming out of the women's locker room. She'd worked with Greta a time or two, but had switched to the prestigious Los Angeles Superchief run as soon as she'd accumulated enough seniority. She gave me a look of astonishment. "The Twentieth Century late? No, Nicky, that can't be; it's never late."

And she went off to make a phone call and came back looking worried. "Funny," she said. "They stopped it in the yards. Put on a new engineer."

"That doesn't sound good," I said, throat suddenly dry—had something gone wrong? An accident? An engineer who had a heart attack, or went crazy, or— There was no limit to the catastrophes my mind could invent.

But I didn't invent the right one.

I sat there for twenty minutes, waiting for something to happen, and when it did happen it was not good at all. It came in stages. Stage one was a trainman, hurrying in, looking scared. "You won't believe this," he called to a buddy as he entered. "They stopped the train in the yards. Took off the stewardesses, the conductor, the porters, the two other trainmen, the engineer, the fireman—only reason they didn't take me, I guess, is that I'm just pulling a relief shift, it's not my regular run. Clean sweep! Said something about conspiracy. . ."

Stage two was when I recovered from all that enough to hear someone ask who "they" were . . . and heard the answer, by then not unexpected at all: "FBI."

And stage three was when I started to go out of the lounge and

two neat young men fell into step beside me, one on each side, efficiently grasping my arms.

Nyla Christophe was standing at the Official Use Only door they took me through, her hands locked behind her, looking satisfied. She had every reason for that.

Silly me.

I had failed to see how simple this problem was from the point of view of Chief Agent Nyla Christophe. Eyewitnesses that gave me an inconvenient alibi? No problem. Just arrest the witnesses. A witness in an FBI jail, to all intents and purposes, no longer existed as a witness at all. So there was a nice, simple case to be made on the basis of photographs and fingerprints, and no need to worry about confusing details. No problem at all—for Nyla Christophe.

But for me, oh, yes! Lots of problems! And the worst of them just beginning.