He had started in 1926, on the old heavyweight cars, when the berths were made up with the curtains and the passengers undressed behind them and the whole car breathed together in the dark. He had ridden through the Depression, when the cars ran half empty and the tips ran thinner than the coffee. He had ridden through the war, when the troop trains ran and the porters worked double shifts and nobody tipped at all and everybody said thank you like they meant it. He remembered the winter of '32, when he worked the Chicago–Omaha run and counted his tips in nickels and was glad of the nickels. He remembered the troop trains of '43, the cars packed with boys younger than he had been in 1926, and how he had learned to make a berth around a sleeping soldier without waking him, and how some of those boys had pressed their last dollars into his hand and told him to buy something for his mother. He had no mother living then. He had bought a good winter coat, and worn it for ten years, and never told a soul where the money came from. He was fifty-one now, and his knees told him the weather a day ahead, and he could make a Pullman berth in the dark with one hand while holding a flashlight in his teeth, and he had never once, in twenty-six years, raised his voice to a passenger.
The first thing he knew about Friday evening was the dinner hour. At six o'clock, while the first seating filled the diner, he moved down Car Seven with his passkey, turning down the berths. It was the rhythm of the job: the passengers at dinner, the car empty, the beds made for the night to come. He did the roomettes first, quick and practiced — seat folded away, berth down, sheets drawn tight, blanket folded at the foot, the little pillow plumped.
Mrs. Ellison's roomette, number nine, he did at six o'clock exactly, because he always started at the forward end and worked aft, and he remembered it because there was nothing to remember. The berth was empty. The seat was folded away as the diagram required. Her suitcase was in the rack, her handbag in the net, her book on the little shelf. Nothing under the pillow. Nothing in the berth. A clean, empty, made-up bed, like a hundred thousand beds he had made before it.
He finished the car by half past six and went forward to the linen closet to restock his towels, and the evening went on in its ordinary way. It was the best hour of the run, that dinner hour, when the car belonged to him alone — the corridor empty, the doors closed on their little private worlds, the whole long silver tube of it humming westward with nobody watching. He moved through it the way a man moves through his own house, straightening a curtain here, picking up a dropped magazine there, and the train did the rest. The second seating at eight. The car empty again, then filling. At twenty past eight he was coming aft down the corridor of Car Seven with an armful of fresh pillowcases when he saw Mr. Kessler.
Kessler was the wholesale representative in roomette four, a smooth man of thirty-eight with a good suit and an easy way of talking to the steward. Thomas knew him the way he knew all the regulars on the western runs — by the shoes left out, the tip at the end of the trip, the small habits. At twenty past eight, Kessler was in the corridor outside the linen closet, and he was carrying a bundle wrapped in a bath towel, carrying it the way a man carries something he does not want to be seen carrying — close to his body, one hand under it, walking fast but not running.
Thomas stepped back into the shadow of the open linen closet door. It was instinct, twenty-six years of it. He watched Kessler go past, toward the aft end of the car, toward the big linen hamper where the soiled sheets and towels went. Kessler stopped at the hamper, looked up the corridor both ways — Thomas was behind the door and Kessler did not see him — and pushed the towel-wrapped bundle down deep among the soiled linen, and closed the hamper lid, and smoothed his jacket, and went back to his roomette and closed the door. Thomas did not move until the roomette door clicked. Then he went on with his pillowcases, his hands doing what they knew, while his mind did what it had been trained for twenty-six years not to do. A towel from the car's own stock, he thought. He would know it again if he saw it — the Continental Pacific's linen was marked, though nobody but the laundry ever looked. And the way the bundle had sat in Kessler's hands, heavy and square. Not clothes. Something with edges.