“Lord,” I gasped. “In that window, the coffin. He’s in there. Oh God, it’s him!”
I shut my eyes.
“This is Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train!”
From somewhere along the midnight train came another low cry. The black crepe fluttered.
Then a man came running and jolting down the platform, an old friend, Elmer Green, a studio press agent. He collided with me and yelled in my face.
“Hey, ain’t this a catch? I’ll give you the tour. Come on.”
But I stood with my shoes sunk in concrete.
“What’s wrong?” Green said.
“What’s it look like?”
“You’re not crying?” he said. “Cut that out. Let’s go.”
He backed off by the midnight cars, and Marty and I followed. I stumbled, my eyes blind with tears.
He stopped at last and said, “See that big red Pacific Electric trolley? Don’t fit in with the rest of the train, right? Look. Middle window.”
“Four guys in business suits, playing cards, smoking cigars. The plump guy, wait.”
“Who?”
“Louis B. Mayer, the MGM studio mogul. Louie the Lion! Why’s he here? He’s dead.”
“Not so you would notice. Okay. Back in 1930 Louis B. and his yes-men climbed on this big red trolley and pulled out of MGM Studios on its own track and trained to Glendale for surprise screenings. Then they piled back on this super Lionel electric train and roared home, shouting the good preview cards or letting them fly like confetti if they were bad.”
“So?” I said, bleakly.
“So, when you’ve got trains like that and someone comes along with trains like this, you listen. Now climb aboard and meet Louis B., the reborn Christian Jewish Arab in this big trapped butterfly time machine.”
I stared at my legs with half-blind eyes.
“Christ!” said Green. “Help me get him up.”
Marty grabbed one elbow and Green the other and they yanked me up on the train.
We staggered through smoke-filled cars where scores of men riffled cards.
“God!” I exclaimed. “Is that Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox’s chief? And there, Harry Cohn, the beast of Gower Street? How in hell did they get lost in this nightmare?”
“Like I said, trapped in a time retrieval Butterfly Net. The biggest damned net in history scooped them out of the grave, with an offer they couldn’t refuse: six feet of dirt, or a ticket on the John Wilkes Booth Forever Express.”
“My God!”
“No, Elmo Wills,” cried Green. “In an MGM Las Vegas basement, he jiggered some digital computers into conniption fits and nailed together a super-traveling catcher’s mitt.”
I stared along a smoke-filled gambling hall.
“Is that how you catch a train nowadays?”
“Yup,” said Green.
“There are names of studios on each car,” I said. “And inside, dead moguls, alive.”