Written For: veryrach in Crossworks 2023
Phryne's book was not as exciting as the cover had promised, but it was the best entertainment she had at the moment. Next time I want to cross America, I shall take an aeroplane, she promised herself. The views of the Rocky Mountains had been breathtaking, but the great plains were, well, plain. And endless. And alas, there were very few people on this train interesting enough to be worth watching on their second day together.
Well, they would be in Chicago soon enough, and the nightlife there would be worth the wait. After years of a war on Australia's own front doorstep, she was eager for a city that hadn't been directly touched by it. Phryne was wearing red and was eager to show the world it was well-earned.
She wished, not for the first time, that Dot or Jane had been able to come with her. But Dot was a homebody at heart, and wouldn't want to be away from Hugh and the children for this long, especially with Hugh only just returned from the service. And as for Jane, well, her employer was itching for an excuse to replace her with one of the men freshly home from the war, and a long holiday would certainly be more than enough justification. Not that Jane needed the money, of course, but much like Phryne she needed something to occupy herself with or she'd run mad very shortly.
She turned another page in her book and sighed. She'd been planning on purchasing more books on her arrival in the United States, Australia's publishing industry being paltry in comparison. But what with one thing and another, she hadn't had time for more than a cursory glance at the stock on offer at the newsagents.
Raising her eyes, she glanced over the other people in the first-class lounge car. Five newly demobbed officers not quite used to civilian suits; one Navy, four Army, and drearily similar to the Australian veterans even now flooding the streets back home. Three elderly ladies traveling together, all with a sort of shabby gentility that said they'd lost much in the Great Depression and neither reconciled themselves to it nor recovered their fortunes. One elderly lady in a smart suit and pearls, traveling with a teenaged grandson just too young to have fought, and resentful of having missed his chance. One young woman with mousy hair, no makeup, and dowdy clothes who could have been quite attractive with the right toilette and the right confidence, industriously knitting away at a sweater that never seemed to get any closer to being done. One young woman all in black, who kept shooting bitter glances at the officers, as if wondering why they'd survived when her husband hadn't.
In short, nothing had changed since the last time she'd looked at them.
Phryne looked out the window. The same endless fields of corn she'd been watching for hours.
She picked her book up again.
The mousy woman surreptitiously unraveled a bit of her sweater. Phryne wondered why she was trying to hide it; even accomplished knitters sometimes made mistakes. Perhaps she was embarrassed, she mused, and tried to pick up the thread of the story.
Phryne looked up from her book as the motion of the train changed. They were slowing down but—she craned her neck to see—this was certainly not Chicago. It wasn't even a proper station, merely a place out in the middle of nowhere that locals might flag for the train to stop, since it was too far between stations to expect them to be able to make that journey with their luggage. Australia had such stops as well, but they were for local trains only, not long-distance expresses such as this one.
The other passengers were noticing it, too; the impoverished ladies were complaining to each other about it. The veterans were mostly resigned. The youth was whining to his grandmother. The widow was settled back in her seat, staring blankly out at the field they were stopping in. The dowdy woman was … she was still knitting, but that was a remarkably awkward way of holding the needles. And the bag that held her yarn was no longer tucked away between her feet, but out almost in the aisle.
Phryne turned back to the window. The train was almost stopped, now, and there were a string of cars pulled up along both sides of the tracks, with a whole slew of men waiting. Armed men, but not in uniform; in suits and ties.
Curiouser and curiouser.
The men outside started swinging up to the cars of the train before they had even come to a complete stop.
One burst through the door to the lounge car where Phryne was sitting. "I'm Agent Williams of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this is Agent Morgan," he jerked his thumb at the man behind him, "and we have reason to believe a fugitive might be on this train. Please be calm, and we'll have you on your way as soon as possible." He was in his forties at least, and possibly older, but his figure was trim despite that.
Well, thought Phryne, at least I won't be bored any longer.
Morgan stayed by the door they had entered through, while Williams walked through the car inspecting every passenger, asking their name and where they were headed and what their reason for travelling was.
Interestingly, he barely glanced at the men in the car, but scrutinized the women. The fugitive must be female. Williams asked Phryne more questions than anyone, and she wondered if it was because of her obvious interest in the proceedings, because even in her late forties she was an attractive woman, or because she had a foreign accent.
It didn't take him long to question the people in the car, but when he was done he didn't leave; instead, he told them to remain seated and took up a position at the far door, so that both exits were guarded.
They sat there like that for at least fifteen minutes. Phryne thought about trying to strike up a conversation—this was turning out to be far more boring than she'd thought at first—but given the way Agent Williams's hand was hovering near the holster of his weapon, she decided against it.
At last Williams waved at someone through the open door. "Got one for you to check, Miss Carter," he said.
A woman in a practical blue pant suit climbed up into the car at Williams's hail. "It's Agent Carter."
"Whatever," Williams said. "It's the brunette in red."
The woman glanced over Phryne and shook her head. "Not her," she said, scanning the other people in the car. She saw something behind Phryne and her eyes narrowed. She began stalking down the length of the car.
Phryne turned to watch. Her target seemed to be … the mousy knitter. Who was sitting very still, with her back to the newcomer.
Agent Carter stopped a good two feet away from her target and drew a handgun. "Put your hands up, Dottie."
Phryne slid her hand into her handbag and surreptitiously took out her own weapon from the concealed holster in it, sliding the safety off.
The mousy woman turned slowly, and Phryne startled at the predatory grin on her face. "Why, Peggy," she cooed. "How nice to see you again. I wasn't sure I'd have the pleasure. What gave me away?"
"Hands up, Dottie." Carter's voice was tight and sharp.
"Of course, Peggy," Dottie said.
There was a crunch and smoke began billowing out from the seat under Dottie. Carter shot. Dottie was already sliding down into the smoke, and the shot missed. Screams filled the car. Carter grabbed a handkerchief and pressed it over her nose and mouth.
Phryne raised her scarf over her face.
Williams ran past her towards the fight, gun in one hand, handkerchief pressed to his face with the other. Phryne rose and followed.
Dottie shot up from the smoke, grabbing for Carter's gun. Carter kicked her in the gut and shot again, but Williams had grabbed at her to yank her out of his way, and it went wild.
Dottie disappeared into the spreading gas. Morgan shrieked. Carter and Williams were still tangled up.
Dottie appeared again, diving out the door. Phryne shot, but didn't see if it hit.
Carter followed Dottie out the door, Williams hot at her heels.
"Everyone out!" Phryne said, turning for the far end of the car where the smoke was thinnest. There was a mad scramble, and it was fortunate that the car had as few people as it did. One of the servicemen knocked the widow down; another helped her up. The boy was the first to get to the exterior door, and it took him a few seconds to figure out how to get it open.
As she jumped down from the train amidst the other passengers, Phryne looked towards the other end of the car—Carter and Williams were piling out, Morgan half-falling out behind them. Smoke poured from the car's windows, and other agents were converging on their car.
Dottie was nowhere to be seen.
Phryne scanned the endless fields around them. The corn wasn't high enough to hide a full-grown adult, surely? Not in the seconds Dottie would've had. Could she still be on the train?
Agent Carter was giving orders to the other agents. Phryne walked up to where Morgan was still crumpled on the side of the tracks. Another agent was tending his wounds.
"That's not a bullet hole," Phryne observed over his shoulder.
The agent startled and looked up at her. "No, ma'am," he said. "I don't know what it is, though. Narrow entry; if it weren't for all the blood I don't know if I'd have spotted the hole."
"Knitting needles," Phryne said. "She had knitting needles in her hands when the train stopped."
The agent swore and shook his head. "I need help getting him to a car, he needs a doctor."
Phryne stepped back as two other burly men in suits stepped in to wrestle him into a car.
"Hold up!" Agent Carter called before they could leave. She opened the trunk and glanced in, then shut it. "You can leave, now." She had an English accent, Phryne noted. An Englishwoman giving orders to American policemen?
"Do you really think she could have gotten all the way over to the car and into the trunk, without being seen or heard, in the two or three seconds she was out of sight?" Phryne asked, incredulous.
"I've learned not to underestimate her," Carter said grimly. She looked Phryne up and down. "Nice shooting. Thank you for the backup. May I ask your name?"
"You're welcome," Phryne said. She dug out a card and handed it over.
Carter read it. "The Honorable Phryne Fisher, detective."
"Honorable?" Williams asked.
"It means her father's a viscount or a baron," Carter said shortly.
"An English noblewoman playing detective, just what this case needs," Williams said.
"She was more help than you were, Williams," Carter said. "What were you thinking, grabbing me like that? I'd've had her!"
"I was trying to get you safe out of the line of fire," Williams said. "And I needed a clear shot."
"So instead of achieving either goal, you merely ruined my shot and allowed our target to escape," Carter said crisply. "I've more field experience than you, I'm a better shot, and you would have done well to remember it. You can start interviewing the other passengers. I'll handle Miss Fisher's interview."
Phryne smiled brightly at Williams and waved at him as he scowled and stalked over to the other passengers, who were all huddled in a group by the door they'd come out of.
"Now, Miss Fisher," Carter said, pulling out a notebook and pen. "Can you tell me everything unusual you noticed on the train ride?"
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry," Phryne said. "Being on vacation I wasn't paying particular attention to anything or anyone." Still, she dredged her memory for every detail she could remember of the last day and a half, listing off everything she had noticed. There wasn't much, and very little of it had to do with the person Agent Carter was most interested in; Dottie had mostly slid under Phryne's radar, which was an impressive feat in itself.
"You have quite the eye for detail," Carter said when she'd finished.
"What did this 'Dottie' do, Agent?" Phryne asked. "You've roped in quite a lot of manpower; it must have been quite important."
"I'm afraid the details are classified," Carter said. "But I can tell you that she is a foreign agent, and has left a trail of dead bodies behind her."
"That makes no sense," Phryne said. "A spy would want to blend in, wouldn't she? Killing people would only draw attention."
"It depends on who she killed and how much people in power would care about their death," Carter said. "And if long-term infiltration is the goal, or something more short-term. Where will you be staying, in Chicago?"
"At the Blackstone Hotel," Phryne said.
"For how long?" Carter asked.
"Until I get bored of the Chicago night life," Phryne said.
Carter dug a card out of a pocket and handed it over.
"Agent Peggy Carter, SHIELD," she read. "What's SHIELD stand for?"
"Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division."
"What a mouthful." And honestly a bit ridiculous, but Carter got it all out without a bit of humor or eye-roll at it. Carter was certainly impressive, but she seemed deadly dull, so focused on her duty. Then again, she'd thought the same of Jack when they first met, and that had turned out to be untrue, and as a woman in a masculine job Carter would be penalized for any sign of frivolity. She might be much more fun off-duty. Phryne, being outside—and often atop—any such masculine hierarchy had always had more freedom.
"Please call the number on the card if you remember anything else," Carter said.
"Of course," Phryne said. "Then you're not expecting to catch her?" She gestured around at the agents scouring the train and the fields around them. "She can't have gone far." There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide except the train itself and possibly the vehicles the agents had arrived in, and any movement would be spotted miles away.
"Dottie Underwood—not her real name, by the way, though I've no idea what her real name even is—is extremely slippery," Carter said. "There's a reason we chose such a deserted spot for the ambush, but … I wouldn't put it past her."
"I see," Phryne said.
Carter left to direct the search, and Phryne stood watching for a few minutes. They didn't seem to be missing anything obvious, from what little she could tell, and when they did, Carter was there to straighten them out fairly quickly. It was an impressive show of capability which Phryne appreciated. Unfortunately, it left very little for her to do.
The awful, simple secret of what made her so good as a detective was that most people—and certainly most policemen—were not very good at noticing things, or at following through to investigate what they did notice. When you added a habit of noticing things to a refusal to be shamed into social acceptability, you ended up with, well, Phryne.
Phryne tried following a few of the agents around and asking questions and being as cheerfully impervious to hints as she could, but learned little else. (This would have been easier twenty years ago; she was still quite an attractive woman for her age, but men who would have tripped over their own tongues at a glance from her in her youth were now merely attentive.)
Finally, Agent Carter turned up with Williams to escort her back to her compartment. "Please remain in your compartment and stop interfering in our search," Carter said. "You are slowing us down, and the longer it takes, the longer you will all be stuck here."
"I'm sure I shall be quite lonely," Phryne said to Williams with a smile as they walked down the train to the proper carriage. "Couldn't I go to the lounge car, or somewhere else?"
"The lounge car where you were is now a crime scene, and whatever smoke that Russian used got into the upholstery and the smell has lingered. They won't be letting people back into it on this trip," Williams said.
So the spy was Russian, not German as Phryne had assumed. Apparently the wartime alliance with the Soviets was fast crumbling. "The dining car, then?"
"I'm sorry, Miss Fisher," Williams said, "that's closed until you get back underway, too; we're trying to keep people as still as possible to make it easier and quicker to search. We don't want to detain you any longer than necessary. Please remain in your compartment until the train is back on its way."
Phryne pouted, but went along with it; aside from the tidbit that the spy was a Russian, all her pestering had been terribly fruitless.
She sat in her carriage and thought the case over, what little she knew of it. Assuming that this 'Dottie' did manage to escape, presumably she would change her name and appearance; even if she continued on to Chicago, it was a large city with which Phryne was mostly unfamiliar. Her chances of finding one woman in disguise in such a place was practically nonexistant. And without further knowledge of what Dottie's aims were or what she had been doing, she had nothing to go on. It was galling, but there didn't seem to be anything else she could do.
The train's whistle blew, and with a lurch the carriage jerked into motion. Phryne wondered if it was because they'd caught their spy, or because they'd given up.
But with the train back in motion, the dining car would presumably be open again. Phryne headed out to get some sustenance and see what she could find out in the process.
A man in a suit was standing in the gap between cars, smoking a cigarette. She didn't recognize him, but his suit had the tell-tale bulges of a shoulder-holster under a suit not tailored to conceal it. So they hadn't caught their woman, then. She nodded at him and walked through.
In the dining car, Agent Carter was sitting at a table in the corner, back to the wall, sipping a cup of tea and surveying the other passengers. She watched as Phryne walked over to her. "May I join you?" Phryne asked.
"Be my guest," Carter said, waving a hand at the seat across from her.
"So," Phryne said, picking up the menu and perusing it, "I take it that the mysterious Dottie managed to slip through your fingers after all?" At Carter's raised eyebrows she went on. "Otherwise, I doubt you'd be here—you'd be back in your cars driving off the way you came. And there certainly wouldn't be so many hulking young men in badly-fitting suits with poorly concealed shoulder-holsters smoking in between cars."
Carter sighed. "I wish I could tell you differently, but yes." She sipped her tea. "I didn't check under the car that took Morgan to hospital; I wouldn't have thought she could squeeze herself under it without being dragged half to death by the car as it drove off, but it's the only thing I can think of that we didn't check—and recheck."
Phryne thought that one through. Dottie had been tall, but slender; the car's ground clearance was not high, but possibly, if she'd only needed it to get herself away from the search, and dropped off once they were out of sight, it might have been done. "I suppose," she said doubtfully. "Any word on the agent she stabbed?"
Carter made a face. "No; we weren't carrying radios. I hope he's still alive, but I doubt it; Dottie doesn't strike to wound."
"How do you know her?" Phryne asked. "The way she spoke to you, you've dealt with each other before."
"Classified, I'm afraid," Carter said.
"And if I asked you how an Englishwoman ended up in the middle of the United States, in charge of finding a Russian spy on American soil?"
"Also classified," Carter said.
Phryne leaned forward and gave Carter the full power of her smile. "I'm sure the story must be fascinating."
"It is," Carter said. "But if I told you the interesting bits, I'd be in contravention of several anti-espionage laws in both England and America."
Phryne tisked. "Such a pity," she said. The waiter came, and she ordered a meal and a cocktail. That was one thing America did right; the meal service on their trains was excellent. Carter only asked for another cup of tea.
"I suppose I shall have to be the one telling the stories, then," Phryne said, and proceeded to tell some of her most interesting—and subversive—cases in her usual entertaining style. Sure enough, Carter proved to have a sense of humor underneath her brusque, business-like manner, and wasn't scandalized by hardly anything, which Phryne appreciated.
With a bit of prompting, Agent Carter was willing to share a few stories from her wartime experiences, and while Phryne thought they were probably heavily edited, they were entertaining. By the first time the agent had to leave to patrol the train, they were on a first-name basis, and by the time the train reached the outskirts of Chicago, Phryne had invited Peggy to call her at the Blackstone Hotel if she had time for an evening off while trying to track down her spy.
"I doubt I'll be here long," Peggy said. "If we can't pick up a trace of Dottie soon, it'll be back to the New York office for me. It isn't the first time she's slipped past us, and once she's in the wind, it's almost impossible to pick up her tail again. But surely I'll have at least one evening free for a bit of R&R, and I'd be happy to join you."
"Good!" Phryne smiled. "And you have my card already, you can write to me if you have any interesting stories that aren't classified—or just to complain about your boorish coworkers."
Peggy raised an eyebrow. "What makes you think I have boorish coworkers?"
"Because I know men, and I know a lot of women who don't confine themselves to the typical women's jobs," Phryne said. "When you're lucky, you get to work with thoughtful and intelligent men who treat you with the respect you've earned. But most of the time, you're not that lucky."
"I was … very lucky, during the war," Peggy said, looking down.
"I hope you'll be that lucky again," Phryne said. "The trick to it is to cherish the good ones—and always be on the lookout for interesting women to be friends with. I hope you'll be one of them, long-distance as it must be."
"I'd like that, too," Peggy said with a smile. "And if your trip takes you through New York—"
"It does," Phryne said.
"—then you should call upon me there, and you and my roommate Angie and I can paint the town red."
"I'd like that," Phryne said, and then the train was pulling into the station and it was time to disembark.
As the porters dealt with her baggage, Phryne kept a sharp eye out for anyone who might be Dottie in disguise leaving the train and heading through the station. But as Peggy had predicted, she saw nothing.
"Ah, well," she consoled herself on the taxi ride to the Blackstone Hotel, "at least there was a bit of excitement on the trip."