Underground Airlines (27 page)

There was one more silence while he considered whether to lodge a fresh objection, but then he clicked off.

I stood in the stillness of the balcony, watching spotty Sunday evening traffic go down 86th: first one car, then two, then one more. If I had misread Bridge’s last silence, if he had been grinning cruelly in that last instant, relishing the last time he’d ever have to take bullshit from this smartass nigger, then the vans would be screeching up any minute.

They did not. He was reading the situation correctly: he was in a bad spot, and if anyone could get him out of it, I could.

I pictured him, middle-aged Bridge, hustling down the stairs of the Marshals Service building to the parking garage, pushing the speed limit in whatever poky American four-door he could afford on his government pay, all the way to BWI.

This, for me, at the end of a long and difficult twenty-four hours, should have been a moment to relish. Cherish, even. Slowly showing Bridge what was going to happen. After so many years in his power, forcing him inch by inch to do what I wanted. Clawing out from under Bridge. Lifting him up, shaking him upside down.

But the moment of Kevin’s death kept on ricocheting through my body. Over and over again. Flying backwards, and he flying backwards on top of me. The blood from my shoulder mingling with the blood of his chest. That had changed everything—a bell that rang in me. A crack in the firmament of the world.

I should have felt good, but I only felt weary. I only felt sad. My shot shoulder sang with a low hurt, the bullet in there burning, a smoldering fire buried inside a pit.

Like moving through the tunnel—you only keep going. Whatever happened next, it was going to happen quickly, and it was either going to work or it wasn’t.

Thirty-four minutes later the phone rang.

“Hang up,” I said.

“What?”

“Go upstairs,” I said. “Call me back from the phone between gate B13 and gate B14. By the men’s restroom.”

“If you want me to call you from a gate area, then I’m going to have to buy a ticket.”

“Well, then, you better buy a ticket.”

Mr. Bridge called back right on time, from the phone between gates B27 and B28. I didn’t say hello. I just started talking.

“This boy Jackdaw, this slave we been following, he was a mule. When he—”

 “Where did you get this information?”

“Don’t interrupt. When he left GGSI he took something with him. An envelope.”

I didn’t tell Bridge what was in that padded envelope, because I didn’t know if he knew what it was. I didn’t say to Bridge that Jackdaw the slave was actually Kevin the college boy. I didn’t know if he knew that, and if he did know, I didn’t know if
he
knew that
I
knew, and anyway, fuck him. I wasn’t handing Bridge any piece of information he didn’t already have unless it would be beneficial to me.

I skipped to the meat of it. The pivot point of my discourse. The wedge that I was going to drive between him and me.

“This material the boy is carrying, you all are mixed up in it. Right? I mean the marshals. If this comes to light, what he’s got, your agency is implicated. Is that right?”

I waited. There was a strange quality to the silence, and I realized it was because I was holding my breath, keeping myself totally still. I exhaled.

“Bridge?”

“Yes?”

“Are you not answering because you don’t know the details, either, or because I told you not to interrupt?”

A thread of silence, then: “Both.”

I was making him sweat—that was good; I needed him nervous—but in truth it didn’t matter how the marshals were implicated, it only mattered that they were. Maybe the marshals were acting as facilitators or as muscle, or maybe they were just looking the other way at some crucial juncture in the customs approval process. It was one of the above. It was all of the above. What mattered to me was that Bridge’s ass was in the fire, and so were the asses of whoever was further up the chain of command.

All that mattered was that he wanted what was missing—what Kevin had hidden. For whatever reason, the marshals wanted it as badly as Barton did, and I was now in a position to deliver it.

Bridge remained quiet, and I heard the burble of the airport behind him. Gate announcements; a baby yelping; the muted beep beep of some kind of small vehicle in reverse.

I kept talking. “So when this man escaped, it created a special problem. For the Marshals Service. He couldn’t just be caught, because if he’s caught, whatever he’s carrying ends up in Canada or in front of a judge.”

More silence.

“You still not interrupting because I’m right, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, well, now you gotta answer. Now I got a question.” I didn’t really. I actually knew the answer. But I needed to hear him say it.

“Where it said Jackdaw was
known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis
…that’s torture. Right? That little ‘known to have’? That’s some Franklin who’s persuaded to look the other way while Jackdaw’s accomplice got hung up or buried till she told what she knew.”

Silence.

“Answer me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

I had to hold the phone away from me. I bared my teeth. I tilted my head back. Tortured, then, before she was killed. Of course. I knew there was something behind it all along, and what’s always behind everything? When you scrape away the sticky cobweb of euphemisms like
known to have intended to remove himself,
you always find something hiding underneath it, and it is always violence. It’s always some kind of violence.

I said the girl’s name to myself, the name Kevin had called out to the sky. Luna. The sun was all the way gone now. The sky was dark, and the moon had crept up, shrouded in clouds.

“The one thing…” Bridge started, then stopped.

“What?”

“I didn’t know.”

“What didn’t you know?”

“Anything. When I delivered that file to you, I thought it was real. I promise you that, Victor.”

Jesus Christ. He wanted me to care. He wanted me to know that he cared, for God’s sake.

“I agreed with you from the beginning about the quality of the file. I also felt there was something off there. I told you to do your job because that’s
my
job. But you had—numerous concerns, and you were vocal about them. You were persistent about those.”

“I told you to look into it.”

“And I looked into it.” He cleared his throat. “Correct.”

A sensation welled up in me, of tenderness. Empathy. This feeling I strangled. I tightened my grip on the phone. I focused on sorting out the timeline.

“So you called your boss and asked him about the file.”

“Her.”

“Fine. Her. And she called you back when? Friday morning?”

“Yes. And she told me there was nothing to be concerned about. But that—I was not satisfied with that. I pushed her. She hung up. She called me back Friday night.”

“Seven thirty.”

“Yes. Right. She told me…” A fumbling half-second silence, a search for language. “She gave me the backstory on this.”

“She told you that members of your agency have been participating in a massive fraud on the American people.” I was in a mood now to have my suspicions explicitly confirmed. “Bridge?”

“Yes.”

“And she told you the real job here was to find this kid so he could be killed and this evidence could be collected and destroyed.”

Silence. Total silence. Dead and sad.

“Bridge? She explained to you that the real job here was to find this kid so he could be murdered and his magic envelope tossed on a fire. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“And why didn’t you tell her to go fuck herself?”

“It’s just…that’s not—that wasn’t an option for me.”

Not an option for him. I marveled at the phrase. I wondered in shades of furious red what the shackles were that he imagined himself to be wearing: loyalty? Some tawdry piece of information she was holding, this boss, maybe about some malfeasance of
his
some years ago? Was it—the word choked in me—love? Were they
fucking,
Bridge and this mysterious
her?
I held the phone down to my stomach for a second, twisted the cheap piece of plastic like it was someone’s neck, and then I put it back to my ear.

“—you want, Victor?”

“It’s very simple. That boy is dead.”

“Dead…how—”

“They killed him by accident.”

I didn’t give him time to be happy about it. I ground my teeth. I bore down. “But the package never made it out of the Four. He left it behind. Somewhere.”

“Why?”

“Just listen. He left it behind. He felt betrayed by the Airlines, and he stashed it. It’s still behind the Fence. And no one can get it. And they are sending me there to get it. Do you understand? I have been subverted. I am a double agent now. I work for the enemy.”

At last Bridge did not ask why or say, “What?” At last he simply understood.

“You work for the enemy, except you are telling me that you do.”

“I’ve got layers, Mr. Bridge. I go way down.”

Darkness was rising all around me like black water. Darkness was subsuming me; darkness
was
me. I focused instead on the distant light, high and far above me, the glittering promise I had glimpsed when Barton set me to my new task.

“I’m going to go get this thing for these people,” I told Bridge. “And then I’m going to bring it to you. And in exchange, you’re going to give me what I want.”

“Which is?”

“Which is freedom. I bring it back, and you pull out my pin. You unclip me, and I go to Canada, and I never hear from you again.”

I caught up to Martha coming out of her room, halfway down the first-floor hallway, a duffel bag strung over her arm. I was holding a bag, too, the thin plastic bag they give you for dirty laundry.

“Martha,” I said, and she turned around, and I didn’t have my glasses on and my clothes were a rumpled mess. There was blood on my sleeve, blood down the length of my arm.

“Jim?” she said, but even as she said it she knew that Jim was gone—I had left Jim behind; he had melted into mud in the bed of the White River.

“My name’s not Jim,” I said. “It’s Victor.”

“What?”

“And it’s not even Victor.”

“What—what’s in the bag?”

We went into her room, where we could be alone. The same as my room, but with two double beds instead of one king. One of the beds, Martha’s bed, was spotless, made, and Lionel’s was a mess of kid stuff—comic books, small garbagey plastic toys, spacemen and soldier-men and superheroes. Lionel was waiting in the lobby, she said, while she packed up the car. Except I told her that she couldn’t go.

“No. What? We’re—I checked out. We’re leaving.”

I took her hands—I squeezed them.

“Listen,” I said, and goddamn it if I wasn’t crying—crying for Kevin, crying for me, for Castle. “I need help,” I said. “I need a lot of help.”

I had never been on the blood sump because the blood sump was not a station. In your first two years inside they moved you every three months, and in two years I had worked the lairage, the chiller, hooves and horns, the downpuller, every stop along the rail. But the blood sump was not a regular station because it did not need to be tended regularly.

It tended to itself. Excess blood from the kill floor guttered through the drain and filled up the sump outside, and two times a year a truck came with a pipe and sucked it out.

But it was raining. The Chinese were on-site, that was the first thing, and the second thing was the rain, and then there was fat Reedy getting sick like he did.

Opportunity came like that: one, two, three. Castle had been telling me it would come, and it came like that, like horseshoes ringing on the pole, one, two, three. Did Castle know that opportunity would come, or did opportunity come because Castle said it? Anyway, it came.

I had heard about the Chinese before but never seen them. On this day in the morning we got woke before even the rooster, and the Old Men had all been woken before that, and they were all clapping and shouting: Tianjin Jiachu! Tianjin Jiachu! That was the name of the company, our biggest customer, but to me then those words were just like magic words, and all the Old Men and the guards were fussy or furious, barking orders, and all the working whites were walking double-time, talking loud. Get down to work. Eyes on the ball. Do it for each other. For Mr. Bell.

I was cutting out intestines on that day, pulling out the thick ropes of stomach and winding them into careful piles, and I was at it but fifteen minutes when they swept in, a crowd of curious Chinese, appearing on the floor all together and then scattering into every corner: bowing, peering into stations. I kept on working. Everybody did. The men and women from Tianjin Jiachu had knee pads on, and they crawled under the machines and murmured. They had clipboards tucked neatly under their arms. The Franklins made way for them, and so did the working whites.