Underground Airlines (23 page)

There was nothing left to do, right? This was it.

I shivered, fighting off a wave and then another wave of memory. They called it the shed, but it was more like a chamber. An underground compartment. More like a coffin, really, is what it was, concrete and narrow. Four hours in there for hygiene violations on the kill floor. Six hours for spillage. Overnight for Thoughts Against Good Work. Every hour on the hour a Franklin would crack the lid, shine the light in your eyes, listen for your breathing, close the lid again.

There was nothing to be done. This was it. I leaned forward and hunched my shoulders together, pushed the upper part of my body carefully forward, as a circus performer gingerly places his head into the lion’s mouth. I eased back and forth, back and forth, getting a sense for the width. Jackdaw at five eight and a buck fifty could fit in here, no problem. For a bruiser like Mr. Maris, I thought, it would be tight. But not impossible.

I got in there okay myself. Turned off my light, stuck it back in my jacket, and eased my body all the way into the hole. I splashed in the dirty rush of water, hunched forward, keeping my upper body small and bent. I walked with my hands stretched out on either side, fingertips scraping along the roughly textured walls. I walked a long time that way, bent almost parallel with the ground, genuflecting as I went, until the ceiling tapered back down and I was forced onto all fours and went awhile that way, soaking my kneecaps and my palms.

Time passed, and I didn’t know how much time, either. I just walked, an invisible man moving through the darkness.

That makes it sound like I was cool, cool as the water, levelheaded, nice and easy, but my stomach was clutching at me. This was the part of it I never had to do. This wasn’t part of my job description. My deal was, I tracked him down—him or her or they—I found the lair, and then I called in the cavalry. My job was the following of bread crumbs: I had tracked men across miles of prairie, down crooked Freedman Town alleyways, along boardwalks, out onto beaches. And every time I called Bridge to put the rest in motion, and every time I turned back into smoke and drifted away. The final part I never had to see.

One time I decided to force myself to stay. I must have been in some kind of mood. Some foul place. Because I decided I needed, for once, to force myself after calling it in to hang around and watch the denouement.

It was in Massachusetts. It was in February. A small college in the cold far west of the state, where I had followed the thread of a man to a fraternity house. They’d put him in a room in the attic, had been bringing him beer and dining-hall cereal for three days, trying to figure out a connecting flight. But there were way too many girlfriends and study buddies and drunk pledges wandering in and out of there, too many people brought up to the attic after swearing secrecy, and word was out—all over campus. All over town. Easiest file I ever closed.

But I don’t know. I was down. I was feeling foul. Something about the season, the ease of the work. I forced myself to stay. I made myself up as a professor, bow tie and tweed, sat sipping coffee at a rickety table in the residential quad with a view of that frat house. I prepped a whole story about being an adjunct in the racial history department in case anyone asked, but no one asked. I watched the vans roll up and I watched the men charge in and I watched the milling, baffled, outraged frat boys, watched them watch their charity project bundled and taken hand over hand by the marshals out of the house and van. I saw the boy’s face, his stricken, humiliated, terrified expression, blinking snow-blind in the brightness of the quad, crying out, confused. To have come so far and to be returning—his new friends in their Greek-lettered sweatshirts feebly shouting support, promising aid, announcing in righteous tones that their dads were lawyers, while the USMs shackled the poor peeb’s arms behind him as though he were a madman, strapped him to a gurney inside the van. The last I saw of that boy was his feet, kicking desperately against the reinforced glass of the van’s rear window, a thrashing barrage of kicks as they drove him away.

Eventually the tunnel gained some headroom, and I was able to draw up to full height. My feet echoed with wet clicks on the slimy concrete. I turned my flashlight on and followed the light, the beam wavering into strange patterns on the irregular, parabolic surfaces of the tunnel. Above my head was its thick stone shell and above that there was clay and river rock and then a thin layer of topsoil and then the streets and sidewalks of the living city.

I walked the tunnel murmuring something to myself, some old weird scrabbly lyric from my bone-hard childhood. Somewhere up ahead he was there, Jackdaw gone runner, cocooned in his bandages, waiting to get sent up to Canada. I wondered if anyone was down there with him—a flight attendant, someone to give him comfort, hold his hand in the darkness. Would it be Maris? Big, tough Maris? Or Officer Cook? Or young, pale-faced Father Barton himself?

I shook my head in the darkness. I don’t know why, but I knew that they would not be there with him. No flight attendant. No steward. I was picturing Jackdaw alone.

Alone and swathed and mired in pain. After what Dr. V had told me when I asked her that last question, what she had told me in a quick nervous rush about the extent of his injuries: the usual, she had said—exhaustion and dehydration, scar tissue new and old. And, less usually, symptoms consistent with acute toxicity.

“Now, what is
that?
” I said, playing baffled Kenny Morton, playing him to the hilt. “What does
that
mean?”

“It means he’d ingested some substance or combination of substances,” the doctor told Kenny. “It means he was poisoned.”

I made my careful way along the dark tunnel. I contemplated the man I was coming to see, all that he had undertaken and what he still had to face. What he still had to face was me, the monster coming slowly down the pipe to find him and do…do what, exactly, I still did not know. It was too late to ping Bridge and disappear. Like they say, I knew too much. But I didn’t know enough, either. Not yet.

I’d walked at least two miles. The tunnel was tilting slightly downslope, and it was getting colder, too. The air was heavy and damp, thick with uncirculated oxygen and the dank smell of the water.

I was getting closer. I took out the gun I hardly ever carried but was carrying tonight. Soon I’d find it, whatever it was—the dangling padlock, the walled-off chamber, the rock rolled in front of the mouth of the cave.

But when I got there, when I found the locked door, there was no lock. There was no door, even. I was sliding my palms roughly along either side of the tunnel, feeling for the narrow crack of a hung door or the bulge of a handle, when the left-side wall just opened up. I turned and crouched and held up the flashlight and found a narrow gap in the tunnel wall, like a secret left there for a child to find. I got down on my knees and turned off my light, although of course if he was in there—and I knew that he was, I knew that he was—he’d already have seen me, seen my light bobbling down the tunnel as I came, seen it shining into this hidey-hole on which there was no lock and no door.

They could have gotten in there, if they needed to. Bridge’s men, I mean; the recovery team. They’re ex–armed forces, those guys, big bastards. They’d roll in here with flash grenades, barking orders, they’d pull this shivering boy out and have him bundled in thirty seconds or less. Bridge’s men wouldn’t care what kind of shape he was in. They would come and take him. All I had to do was call. I’d explain myself to Bridge, about calling Janice and borrowing his voice, ha-ha, just having some fun. Maybe just maybe I was too valuable an asset to be thrown in that van next to Jackdaw.

Maybe I should have just turned around. Done my job. The one I had agreed to do six years ago. All I had to do was go back up there and make the call.

I passed into this new chamber, into deeper darkness, and empathy rose up in me. I was him. I was that man huddled in there, waiting, holding his breath, terrified by the small approaching light. My heart hammered, as his was likely to be hammering. I felt the sweat of fear on my brow that was the sweat of his fear.

An investigation feels so permanent, even after only a couple days. It starts to feel like its own state. You almost forget that every search is directed at a goal, and at the end of the search, if you’re good, you find the one you’re looking for. The part is always coming when you open the door or the lid or you unzip the bag or pry open the crate or you yank open the trapdoor or pull down on the tug and let the ladder drop down.

The ground in this narrower passage turned into a short stone staircase, three shallow steps going down. I was both of us. I was myself, and I was also the person at the end of the path, seeing my own shadow grow larger. I was the person hearing me coming. The sound was ancient and reverberant, the click and scrape of heels on stone steps.

I was him, seeing that light cutting into his world. I was me, and I was him, struck with terror at the sound of this invader. I felt my own fear increase. I felt not the keen anxiety of the predator but the panicking fear of his prey.

The flashlight beam struck a wall and made a pale radius, started to creep across a small room.

I’d call out now. I wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore.

“Who’s that?” he said, a desperate small rasp. “Who’s here?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I moved the beam around the room and found him staring back at me. Huddled under a blanket, staring up at me with quavering cheeks. The little concrete room he huddled in was lit by one emergency-exit light, gleaming dully against the slickened packed-mud walls. He moaned and I kept coming, and it grew stronger, this dissociated feeling of watching myself approach, a looming menace in the darkness, the reaching evil hand. I saw myself as he saw me, coming in slow, step by step, my sidearm in my fist; him cornered and terrified, treed like a wounded bear, cocooned in blankets, lost in shadow.

Jackdaw looked like shit. Sallow and unwholesome, bunched up on the ground, a discarded thing. Someone had left a bottle of water beside his bed with a straw poking out at a steep angle; in the other corner of the room was a bedpan, a dribble of piss at the bottom of it. Jackdaw’s eyes were half closed, squinting from the dim light, like moles’ eyes; his skin was marked by lesions, yellow halos of bruise and discoloration. He was crumpled atop some sort of cot or pallet, covered in blankets, and—there—Mr. Maris’s blazer, one added layer against the underground cold, no doubt with my butterfly knife still in the pocket. The kid was twisted up in all those damn layers, half in, half out, like a child who’s not sleeping, like Castle, like me. It was only later, when I saw the place again in my mind, that I recalled the semicircle of candles beside him, blown out or burned out, drowning at their bases in their own spent wax.

Beneath his miseries he looked just as he did in the picture: handsome and fine-boned, a movie star trapped in a nightmare. No one who ever killed any two nurses, that was for sure, no one who ever battered them to death and leaped out of a window to run. A thin face and delicate eyes, face bruised and worn, but still, still he was a beautiful child. Too beautiful for this world for sure.

I stood in the dark staring and saying nothing, and then it was Jackdaw who started us talking.

“So you him, huh?”

I stayed back against the wall. In the shadow.

“Who?” I said. “Who am I?”

“Come on.” Jackdaw shifting his body under his mass of sheets, drawing himself back till he had pulled up against the wall. He made his delicate face tough: squared off his jaw. Jutted out his lower lip. “Go on, then. Let’s go. Where’s it start? Fingernails or what?”

“What?”

“You work on the legs, that it? You got a bat? A blowtorch. I know how y’all do. I seen the movies. Y’all with the bats and the pliers and shit. Listen. I ain’t telling you where it is, so you do what you have to do.”

His voice was like his face, grim and terrified and strained with the effort to be strong.

“What is it that I have to do?” I said, doing my own pretending, pretending I knew what was going on. I was baffled. The darkness was between us.
I ain’t telling you where it is. I seen the movies.

“What movies?” I said. “What movies have you seen?”

“What?”

The truth was washing through me, phrases and scraps, small ideas, understanding—Cook:
A special kind of kid;
Janice:
That number is just not coming up
—and I drew in breath and came over and knelt beside the shivering boy. “You’re not a real slave.”

Jackdaw coughed, looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m not, and you know I’m not.”

“I don’t know anything,” I said, and I meant it. Jesus, did I mean it.

“I’m a free man, you asshole.” He gathered up some spirit in his eyes, and he stared at me and declared it: “Free man. Born and raised.”

23.

I picked
him up, and I carried him away.

Half-dead boy, he weighed nothing at all. However long behind the Fence and nearly a week down here, buried alive by his rescuers. Worn and tired as I was, I still could carry him with no trouble, and that’s what I did—threw him over my shoulder like he was a troublesome child. He struggled, but not much. He was weak. I moved as fast as I could.