meant to go on. If there was a train from Ottawa to Toronto I would take it instead of flying.
There was indeed a train, the hotel confirmed. Leaving at five-fifty, arriving four hours later. Dinner on board.
Ottawa had shovelled its centre-of-town railway station under a rug, so to speak, as if railways should be kept out of sight like the lower orders, and built a great new station several miles away from anywhere useful. The station itself, however, proved a delight, a vast airy tent of glass set among trees with the sun flooding in with afternoon light and throwing angular shadows on the shiny black floor.
People waiting for the train had put their luggage down in a line and gone to sit on the seats along the glass walls, and thinking it a most civilized arrangement I put my suitcase at the rear of the queue and found myself a seat also. Filmer or not, I thought, I was definitely enjoying myself.
Dinner on the train was arranged as in aeroplanes with several stewards in shirtsleeves and deep yellow waistcoats rolling first a drinks trolley, then a food trolley down the centre aisle, serving to right and left as they went. I watched them idly for quite a long time, and when they'd gone past me I couldn't remember their faces. I drank French wine as the daylight faded across the flying landscape and ate a better-than-many-airlines dinner after dark, and thought about chameleons: and at Toronto I took a cab and booked into another in the chain of the Four Seasons hotels, as I had told Bill Baudelaire I would.
In the morning, a few hundred thoughts later, I followed the hotel porter's directions and walked to the offices of the travel organizers, Merry amp; Co, as given in their brochure.
The street-level entrance was unimposing, the building deceptively small, but inside there seemed to be acres of space all brightly lit, with pale carpeting, blond woods and an air of absolute calm. There were some green plants, a sofa or two and a great many desks behind which quiet unhurried conversations seemed to be going on at a dozen telephones. All the telephonists faced the centre of the huge room, looking out and not at the walls.
I walked to one desk whose occupant wasn't actually speaking on the wire, a purposeful-looking man with a beard who was cleaning his nails.
'Help you?' he asked economically.
I said I was looking for the person organizing the race train.
'Oh yes. Over there. Third desk along.'
I thanked him. The third desk along over there was unoccupied.
'She'll be back in a minute,' comforted the second desk along. 'Sit down if you like.'
There were chairs, presumably for clients, on the near sides of the desks. Comfortable chairs, clients for the pampering of, I thought vaguely, sitting in one.
The empty desk had a piece of engraved plastic on it announcing its absent owner's name: Nell. A quiet voice behind me said, 'Can I help you?' and I stood up politely and said, 'Yes, please.'
She had fair hair, grey eyes, a sort of clean look with a dust of freckles, but she was not as young, I thought, as her immediate impression, which was about eighteen.
'I came about the train,' I said.
'Yes. Could you possibly compress it into five minutes? There's such a lot still to arrange.' She walked round to the back of her desk and sat, looking down at an array of list upon list.
'My name is Tor Kelsey,' I began.
Her head lifted fast. 'Really? The Jockey Club told us your name this morning. Well, we've put you in because Bill Baudelaire said he'd cancel the whole production if we didn't.' The unemphatic grey eyes assessed me, not exactly showing that she didn't think the person she saw to be worth the fuss, but pretty near. 'It's the dining car that's the trouble,' she said. 'There are only forty-eight places. We have to have everyone seated at the same time because the mystery is acted before and after meals, and two or three of those places are taken by actors. Or are supposed to be, only now there isn't room for them either, as my boss sold too many tickets to late applicants, and you are actually number forty-nine.' She stopped briefly. 'I suppose that's our worry, not yours. We've given you a roomette for sleeping, and Bill Baudelaire says anything you ask for will we please let you have. We said what would you ask for and he didn't know. Maddeningly unhelpful. Do you yourself know what you want?'
'I'd like to know who the actors are, and the story they're going to enact.'
'No, we can't do that. It'll spoil it for you. We never tell the passengers anything.'
'Did Bill Baudelaire tell you,' I asked, 'why he so particularly wanted me on the train?'
'Not really.' She frowned slightly. 'I didn't give it much thought, I've so much else to see to. He simply insisted we take you, and since the Jockey Club are our clients, we do what the client asks.'
'Are you going on the train?' I asked.
'Yes, I am. There has to be someone from the company to sort out the crises.'
'And how good are you at secrets?'
'I keep half a dozen before breakfast every day.'
Her telephone rang quietly and she answered it in a quiet voice, adding her murmur to the hum of other murmurs all round the room. I realized that the quiet was a deliberate policy, as otherwise they would all have been shouting at the tops of their lungs and not hearing a word their callers said.
'Yes,' she was saying. 'Out at Mimico before ten. Four dozen, yes. Load them into the special dining car. Right. Good.' She put the phone down and without pause said to me, 'What secret do you want kept?'
'That I'm employed by the Jockey Club… to deal with crises.'
'Oh.' It was a long sound of understanding. 'All right, it's a secret.' She reflected briefly. 'The actors are holding a run-through right now, not far away. I've got to see them some time today, so it may as well be at once. What do you want me to tell them?'
'I'd like you to say that your company are putting me on the train as a trouble-spotter, because a whole train of racing people is a volatile mass looking for an excuse to explode. Say it's a form of insurance.'
'Which it is,' she said.
'Well, yes. And I also want to solve your problem of the forty-ninth seat. I want to go on the train as a waiter.'
She didn't blink but nodded. 'Yes, OK. Good idea. Quite often we put one of the actors in as a waiter, but not actually on this trip, luckily. The rail company are very helpful when we ask. I'll fix it. Come on, then, there's such a lot still to do.'
She moved quickly without seeming to, and presently we were skimming round corners in her small blue car, pulling up with a jerk outside the garage of a large house.
The rehearsal, if you could call it that, was actually going on in the garage itself, which held no car but a large trestle table, a lot of folding chairs, a portable gas heater and about ten men and women standing in groups.
Nell introduced me without mentioning my name. 'We're taking him on the train as company eyes and ears. Anything you think might turn into trouble, tell him or me. He's going as a service attendant, which will mean he can move everywhere through the train without questions. OK? Don't tell the paying passengers he's one of us.'
They shook their heads. Keeping the true facts from the passengers was their daily occupation.
'OK,' Nell said to me. 'I'll leave you here. Phone me later.' She put a large envelope she was carrying on to the table, waved to the actors and vanished, and one of them, a man of about my own age with a mop-head of tight, light brown curls came forward, shook my hand and said, 'She's the best in the business. My name's David Flynn, by the way, but call me Zak. That's my name in the mystery. From now on, we call each other by the mystery names, so as not to make mistakes in front of the passengers. You'd better have an acting name, too. How about… um… Tommy?'
'It's all right by me.'
'Right, everybody, this is Tommy, a waiter.'
They nodded, smiling, and I was introduced to them one by one by the names they would use on the train.
'Mavis and Walter Bricknell, racehorse owners.' They were middle-aged, dressed like the others in jeans and causal sweaters. 'They're married in real life too.'
David/Zak went briskly along the row, an enormously positive person, wasting no time. 'Ricky… a groom in the mystery, though he'll be travelling with the racegoers, not the grooms. His part in the mystery finishes at Winnipeg, and he'll be getting off there. This is Raoul, racehorse trainer for the Bricknells, their guest on the train.
