On Wednesday, August 5th, 1932, you and eight other passengers boarded a three-day express train from Bombay, India to Lisbon, Portugal. Unfortunately, one did not survive the journey. It is now up to you and the seven passengers left to decide who killed the eighth.
This is your story. It details your background, your current position in life, and your actions on the fated three-day express liner. Read carefully, because you have many key pieces of evidence that must be used in combination with the knowledge of other passengers to unmask and convict the murderer.
You will also find a map of the train, which includes any structure that a visitor to the train would notice upon cursory inspection.
Ground Rules
Do not show this script to anyone else at any time.
Please refrain from reading directly from the script when presenting evidence to others, unless you find it absolutely necessary.
Play your character to some modest degree. You need not go to great efforts to mimic the character's personality - although it would be much more fun if you did - but at least speak as though you were your character (i.e. “I saw such-and-such an event” instead of “my character saw...,” and so on).
If someone asks you a basic question about your character that you should know (e.g. your age), but the information was not provided in your story, you may make something up - just as long as it's consistent with the rest of your story.
This story contains historical falsities and devices of science fiction. Take them for granted (but not anything else).
Lying
Lie with caution. Your story interweaves with the stories of many other people who may know things about you that you might not think they know.
You may not lie about the following things:
• Something you heard someone else say.
• An action you saw someone else doing.
• Something that you saw someone else carrying.
• A piece of background information about someone else, unless you are involved in their background story.
You may lie about the following things:
• Something that you said or did.
• A piece of background information about yourself, or about someone else if you were involved in their background story.
i
-Locomotive
Locations of chairs, mirrors, and various other items are not given. Fill in the blanks using your story.
Closet Closet
Desk
The setup is different in each person's room. The pricetags of each room are also different, but it's up to you to guess the relative cost of each.
Map of Three-day Express Liner from Bombay to Toledo
Bathroom
The Peasant
An Arab soothsayer – as both the Arabs and soothsayers are inclined to do – once waxed poetic on the beauty of love. He told you a pretty little tale of pretty boys with pretty locks picking pretty pears from pretty trees. There was an ugly boy too though he died about midway through after succumbing to a terrible bellyache from a stolen pear after he had refused to till the ground and cultivate the seed like the pretty little boys with the locks. The last line of the tale was “Love, like a pear, must be sowed before it can be reaped.”
The Arab was narrow-chested, wide about the hips, and with the small tuft of brown hair stemming from the center of his bald scalp, much resembled the fruit of his didactic tale.
You followed him down the cobble-stoned roads winding your way to his flat as you told him a tale of your own. It involved a tea farmer from Ceylon whose appetite was larger than his harvest. A man who could only augment the latter to sate the former by stealing women to sell to lonely British men whose tastes far exceeded their looks. The last line of your tale was “Love, like a wad of chewing tobacco, must be purchased before it can be enjoyed.”
He opened the door to his flat. The Arab’s wife and their dimple-cheeked son were seated across the table from each other ladling a meal that smelled to you like burnt tundra. The woman would sell high on the market to a man who puts tremendous value in thin noses and full lips. The child was still quite young – tractable – and at ninety-or-so-pounds of sinewy tissue worth every ounce in gold.
“I foresee a life of endless toil and lonely nights for a man of such sentiment as you have mentioned,” the soothsayer lisped in an inflection hovering between prophecy and curse.
You pulled a sickle from out your frock and placed it deftly in the Arab’s back – a little left-of center and a little south left-of shoulder – the presumed whereabouts left-of his heart. The presumption was confirmed with a grunt and silent collapse.
The woman and her child were easily corralled and you tied them – separately – with the rope you carried around for such occasions. They howled like a pair of hyenas and the sound afflicted your acoustic tastes, but that was also to be expected under the circumstances. A greasy rag in each mouth restored the silence you desired.
The Arab’s eye unblinkingly stared up and seemed to follow you though the pupil did not move. You covered it with a large golden doubloon – there was no need to be cheap about the morbid matter considering the one would soon be replaced by many – and you walked the back alleys towing with sharp tugs of rope your precious cargo.
The boy never looked you in the face from start to finish. “I am only doing the Barman’s work,” you told him.
You sent the boy on a train up to Russia and some childless Russian family sent a bag full of rubles down to you.
The woman was sold to a man with a peg for a leg and a tumor on his cheek. She died within days and you never got your money. The sick man skipped town and presumably found a hidden niche somewhere to salve his ulcerated face and gratefully await the onset of death.
The Arab had, through a variety of dealings – some dirty some clean – accrued a sizeable debt with the Barman, a debt supported by the pretty faces of his wife and son.
You split the bag and sent half – maybe a few rubles short – to the Barman. The Arab’s debt was repaid and the Barman was satisfied.
1
-The Peasant
The sickle caught the imagination of the tabloids and headlines from Istanbul to Cairo read
“Rogue Peasant Reaps Death” or some variation of that. The headlines died and the investigation faltered. But the name stuck. Since then, you have introduced yourself as “The Peasant” a tribute to your first and most memorable dealing with the Barman.
All those thoughts had been hidden under a decade or so of dust and had only reemerged when you heard the serpentine lisp of the Magician. It reminded you of the Arab soothsayer and the pretty tale he lisped.
The time is 1:55 PM. The Magician is sitting with the Businessman in the Cigar car. They are sharing smoke and stories as they puff on their cigars and flip through a stack of photos. You glance at the stack and spot a topless girl with a rope forever frozen in a sultry pose.
Synapses fire and connect in your brain. You hide a smile though it is not the girl for whom you are smiling. It is the rope. You walk quickly through the car -- but not so quickly as to walk suspiciously.
In the bar car the Barman is hunched over the counter reading a paper, some Catholic publication no doubt. He adheres strictly to Catholic doctrine and insists on selling his victims only to Popish families.
“The Tennis Star?“ he asks.
“By tonight,” you answer.
The Businessman’s suite is empty though it feels full with the thick scent of Murphy’s Oil Soap. His mahogany desk shines its approval.
You enter the Doctor’s car and ascend the stairs to the Magician’s room. As you had suspected, the rope – each end capped with black rubber – is lying unattended on his bed. You pick it up and hide it under the heavy folds of your coarse jacket.
A rope is necessary to the furtherance of your trade especially when dealing with such an athletic piece of cargo as the Tennis Star. Only a thick rope can subdue those lusty thighs of hers.
You reenter the Businessman’s suite but it is no longer empty. The Tennis Star skips through the car like a head of cattle ready to be lassoed, corralled and sent to market. As she skips by you, your hand slips under her skirt and grabs her rear. It is firm with just enough give for your hand to establish a tight hold. The right cheek alone could sell for a bucket of doubloons to a man with a bucket, doubloons, and an abominable physical abnormality.
She giggles fetchingly. You show her the rope and gesture towards the Businessman’s bed.
As soon as she is successfully tied down, she should be easily transported into the Bar car for safekeeping.
She calls you Mr. Peasant and baby talks you about train civility all the while bending over and showing you a healthy pair of fertile udders. Fertility is a premium in the market for wives and you grab at her chest solely to feel for defects. You do not mix business with pleasure.
Air is all you squeeze. With a few spry steps she is at the door and entering the Doctor’s suite.
You make note of her agility like a rancher observing the movements of a fine steed. As she twisted around, she exposed her right flank and dangled her left arm, you think, two weaknesses exploitable by the lasso.
The Peasant
The smell of rich mahogany draws you to the Businessman’s desk where his gold-tipped fountain pen and gilded notepad lie. Although the glittering tip catches your eye, you are decidedly not a thief and you pick the pen up only to use and not to steal.
“Meet me in the caboose at eight,” you write on the top sheet of the notepad. “I’ll bring the rope.”
You place the pen back on the blotter where you had found it and tear the top sheet off the pad. The Businessman’s pen is inordinately sharp. The letters have not only been written onto the paper, but have been cut through. While folding the note, you can see through the words small glimpses of your hand on the other side. It needs to be washed.
You walk into the Bar car where the Barman is still hunched over the counter reading. You drop the note onto the counter near enough to his paper that he should notice, but far enough away that it does not become mixed in and discarded.
The Barman does not remove his eyes from his reading and you return to your room. On the way, you pass by the Businessman and the Magician still viewing photos in the Cigar car. “No, no. In the end, she lives,” the Magician says to his friend. “It is what we call a trick.” The Businessman frowns with sadistic disappointment. You ponder the terrible deeds the Magician has done with a rope and your pride hopes that he has not surpassed you in either number or ferocity.
You quickly peek at his hands and judging from the shortness of nail and trimness of cuticle, decide he is a man whose penis is less attended to than his pinky. Five dollars, a couple shots of whiskey, and a night in Ceylon would change all that. Ceylon is a place where a man can use his wallet to fuck and his penis to think.
You return to your room and sit at your table. You think of the most efficient and least suspicious means of luring the Tennis Star into the caboose this evening so she can be properly tied and sent to market. Your synapses fire but they feel as if they have been stocked with blanks. You pull lice from your hair and chew the crunchy critters slowly and thoughtfully hoping to restore potency to your mass of misfiring gray matter. It doesn’t seem to work.
It is 2:20 when you remove the third and fourth floorboard from the starboard wall and gather a few stacks of gold coins you had laid hidden there. You carefully replace the loose floorboards and step along the edges to seal them shut. On a train with a Magician, a Businessman, and a member of royalty, a man must undertake great precaution if he wishes to protect his personal effects.
You stroke the coins feeling the silky smoothness of gold currency and think of how many of these coins the Tennis Star will fetch from a man who feels her right cheek. Drool uncontrollably floods your mouth and drips in a string formation from the corners, down your chin and onto the table where a puddle reeking of stale tea and partially digested liver forms. It smells to you like last night’s dinner.
The smell of riches comforts your nostrils and your salivary glands increase their production. You sniff the coins – it is not them. They smell metallic with the pungent undertones of sweat and oil.
You look up. The Lord looks back at you. He must have entered while you were contemplating the great worth of his wife, the Tennis Star. Self-conscious, you wipe the spittle from your chin with the back of your hand. You do not wish to disgust the man who purchases your tealeaves.
3
-The Peasant
“I knew you were here, Lord. I just knew it. You know how I knew it? I could smell it.
The air took on that smell of royalty. It’s a rich smell. If I could ever figure it out, I’d bottle it and make every man a Lord.”
“Don’t waste your time, Peasant. It’s called Magi’s Gold. They sell it at Harrod’s for a couple of those coins.” The Lord points at your stack of money and you worry for a moment that he has been pilfering them to support his expensive tastes in cologne. Or even worse, that he has doused away the money intended for the purchase of the Violinist.
You look about and check each door at either end of the car for pairs of unwanted ears.
You pull a chair out for the Lord to make him comfortable and he sits. Comfort is an important, yet much overlooked lubricant in the machinery of business.
“Do you still want her?” you ask, cutting directly to the crux of the deal.
“Does she still play violin?”
The interrogative in place of a declarative catches you by surprise and all your synapses fire at once momentarily decimating the subsection of your brain that generates rational responses to rhetorical questions. You laugh with pupils floating for answers until order between neurons has been restored.
“Of course, of course. One does not forget such a thing as the violin,” you say. “Here, I’ll bring her in. You should become acquainted with your new daughter before you…”
You feel your coins with the happiness of a man who knows that more will shortly follow.
“Later,” he says. “Right now I am searching for my wife. I believe she is rather tardy.” He looks at his pocket watch in the manner of a commuter who incessantly checks the time more to motivate the train forward than to be informed of its lateness.
You know it is 2:35. The wall clock across from you tells you so.
You toss a pack of cards on the table and ask the Lord to join you for a couple hands of whatever it is lords play. Bridge, you assume. It has enough fancy conventions to make a Lord feel as if he’s at Windsor.
“You and me,” you tell him. “Just you and me.”
The Lord fiddles his soft fingers in concern over his wife’s tardiness, and you pounce on the opportunity to acquire some pertinent information regarding her personal hygiene. You recall
“Busty Betty” a feisty girl who had to be sold at discount on account of the clap to a man so overridden with disease that you heated his money an hour in a kiln before accepting it as payment.
You do not wish to make the same mistake again with this sexually inclined star.
“Don’t worry about it,” you say to the Lord. “I just saw your wife and there were no problems I could see. She would sell for a pretty pot on the market unless she has some sort of…”
You sour your face, bug your eyes, and grab your damp crotch like a man who has just had a first-hand encounter with the aforementioned disease.
The Lord seems less than amused by your antics and your implications. “But I’ve always known you to be a clean man,” you tell him while slapping him on the shoulder like a college buddy you met on the eighteenth hole at St. Andrews. You drag your hand across his shoulder rubbing it clean of the sweat and incontinent leakage accrued by the crotch of your pants.
The Lord takes the cards, shuffles, and deals each of you a pair -- eleven cards short of a proper Bridge hand. You raise your brow inquisitively.
“Texas Hold ’em, if you please,” the Lord says with a hint of drawl on Texas.
The Peasant
“Funny, I would have pegged you a Bridge man myself,” you tell the Lord while trying to reconcile such brusque sounding interests as Texas Hold ‘em with the soft hands and rosy cheeks of the Lord. All in all, he looks more doughboy than cowboy, you decide.
The Lord rambles on senselessly about Napoleon’s affinity for grimy hands and Americans.
Though you never much cared for those cattle-ranching yahoos, you hide your disdain behind a succession of vacuous head bobs. You have suspected the Lord might secretly be one of them ever since he switched his tea order form Earl Grey to Lipton a couple years back, and you do not wish to offend the only customer supporting both your licit as well as illicit endeavors.
“I’ve never held a thing against Napoleon either,” you say. “We’ll play a game for those rotten doughboys. But only because you say we must, Lord.”
You are unsure of the rules dictating the play of this game or the determination of the winner. In Ceylon, it is very simple. About midway through shots are fired until a fou-hand game
You are unsure of the rules dictating the play of this game or the determination of the winner. In Ceylon, it is very simple. About midway through shots are fired until a fou-hand game