Baccano! - Volume 3 - Chapter 2

PROLOGUE VII

THE WOMAN IN COVERALLS

That day, Rachel had put on her coveralls and gotten ready for a long-distance trip.

This time, the target was a special, privately managed train, the Flying Pussyfoot. It was traveling directly to New York’s Penn Station, so once she was aboard, there would be no danger of a check along the way. After that, it would just be a question of how to stay hidden from the conductor.

In a word, she was a habitual ride-stealer. By now, she’d boarded more than a thousand trains without a ticket, and she’d gotten away with it every time.

She didn’t feel a shred of guilt about this. After all, it was for work, and it was also revenge.

She worked as a gofer for an information broker, and she made her living by collecting information from all over America and selling it to him.

The president of the brokerage, who was located in New York City, paid his highest prices for “live information”—information that was communicated directly from the various cities. In addition, he preferred hearing tips in person rather than over the telephone. Apparently, this was because he could watch the other person’s eyes, which made it easier to determine whether they were lying. He was an odd fellow, but she didn’t dislike him. The offensively obsequious man at the reception desk was irritating, but she’d built friendships with everyone else. In the first place, it was weird that the brokerage was structured like an organization in spite of being an info dealer. It was probably only natural for its president to be a bit eccentric. That was what Rachel thought, and she’d continued to stay on good terms and do business with the company.

The president of the brokerage routinely asked Rachel all sorts of questions. He’d make her answer unrelated questions about a particular city one after another; he said he was analyzing information that couldn’t be seen, as a rule. She didn’t really get it, but as long as he paid for the news, she didn’t care what he did.

Rachel was constantly shuttling between various cities. No ordinary information brokerage would have gone that far. In fact, it was rare for one to want information from other cities at all.

In the first place, under normal conditions, the train fare would be ridiculously expensive. If, on top of that, they didn’t get any good information, not only would they not make a profit, they’d go out of business immediately.

However, at least with Rachel, this wasn’t a concern: All the trains she used to get around, she rode for free.

“This is revenge.”

That was what she’d once told the president of the information brokerage.

Rachel’s father had worked as a maintenance technician for a certain railway company.

It was an extremely common story. One day, a damaged component had caused an accident, and the company had pushed all the blame for the error onto Rachel’s father…even though the actual fault lay with the board of directors, who’d ignored the voices from the field that had requested new parts.

Her father, who had told them that not changing the component would be dangerous, had been blamed for the mistake. How utterly ridiculous. Even if he’d wanted to take them to court, he hadn’t had proof, and his fellow technicians had kept their mouths shut, afraid of losing their jobs.

It was a laughably common story in any era. Rachel had grown up seeing her father burdened with that agony.

Loathing for one railway company had grown to include the railways themselves.

However, it was also true that her father had loved trains more than anyone. She vacillated between the idea of someday getting revenge on the railway and respecting her father’s passion—and in the end, she’d chosen ride-stealing as her method of revenge. That way, she could damage the railway companies without harming the trains or the passengers. That said, she couldn’t do any substantial damage, and it was nothing more than an act of simple self-satisfaction. In fact, if you considered the risk she ran in breaking the law, it wasn’t self-satisfaction, it was sheer self-harm.

Even so, in order to keep her own anger in check, she kept right on stealing rides. She might even have been trying to find a reason for living in ride-stealing.

On hearing this, the president of the brokerage had smiled quietly and said, “That’s a good thing. Well then, once you’ve found it, you can begin buying tickets. Buy enough tickets to cover the rides you’ve stolen so far as well. Just imagine you’ve paid the money to your father instead of the railway companies.”

Buy tickets for her father. Would that day ever come for her? As she swayed back and forth on trains, the thought was always on her mind.

Today, all sorts of information had flown around Chicago. Stories of the trouble surrounding the Russo Family and the explosion at the factory outside town swept through the underbelly of society with the momentum of surging waves.

When she’d reported these stories by telephone, the information broker had said he absolutely wanted to meet with her and hear the stories in person.

The Flying Pussyfoot was scheduled to depart for New York that evening. It was a pleasure train built by some rich man. The type of train Rachel hated most.

It wasn’t that she had no money. She simply refused to pay to ride. Today, in order to live out that warped conviction, she made for the station again.

She checked the cars of the Flying Pussyfoot carefully, particularly the areas around the freight room. When Rachel was stealing rides, these were the cars she used most.

However, at that point, she heard something unpleasant.

An orchestra from somewhere or other was going to put a guard in the freight car. As she thought of ways to cope with that, she checked the connecting platforms: In a pinch, she could climb up onto the roof or down under the cars from there. The undersides of the cars on this train were built to be slightly more spacious than those on an ordinary one. Thinking, If it’s like this, I should be able to get underneath with no problem—something no normal person would think—Rachel gave a small sigh of relief.

Just then, she encountered a strange man and woman in black. They were dressed like orchestra members, but they had extremely sharp eyes, and no matter how you looked at them, they didn’t seem like respectable people. For the moment, Rachel opted to make herself scarce, but she felt the woman’s eyes boring into her back for a while afterward.

I think I’ll steer clear of them.

As she thought this, she waited for the departure bell. Once she’d seen the conductor board, she crept up to the train, staying in the station employees’ blind spot. Then, in a truly splendid motion, she leaped on board and crawled down under a connecting platform.

And then the departure bell rang out.