Underground Airlines (33 page)

“Where did the boy get out of the truck?”

“That’s not my part of it. That’s the driver.”

“Where does the driver give him the package? How does he get the rest of the way north, after he’s off the truck?”

“You don’t listen, man. I’m telling you, I don’t know.”

My coffee cup was empty. I stood up. I looked out at the lawn, the sunlight. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t close to enough. I looked down at Ada, still sitting on the patio chair.

“I want to talk to the nurses.”

“Well, that’s gonna be hard, because they don’t exist.” She smiled. “They never existed.”

I was agitated. I was unhappy. Get to the lawyer, Barton had said, and he will point you in the right direction. So here I was, and what did I have? The sun was slowly rolling out across the lawn, brightening the green of the grass inch by inch. Closer every moment.

“All right, then, the driver. How do I get in touch with the driver?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ada. Please.”

“I’m telling you straight, man, I don’t know. The nurses came from a guy Marlon knew, a guy from Atlanta, and the nurses got to the driver once they were already working there.”

“How?”

“Two pretty nurses? How you think? Listen. Okay? I got no connect with the truck driver. I don’t have a name or number. You’d have to walk into GGSI and ask.”

“How do I do that?”

She barked a laugh. Looked at my face and stopped laughing.

“We help people
out
of these places, son. Not in.”

Ada stood up. We were done. She yawned, spilled the dregs of her coffee onto the ground around one of Counselor Russell’s flowering trees.

“And what about the girl?” I said quietly.

Ada waited before she answered; waited so long that when she said, “What girl?” I knew it was a lie.

“Luna.”

This time the answer came too fast. “I don’t know that name.”

“You do. She’s the one who got hold of the package in the first place.”

I didn’t know how, and Ada sure as hell didn’t know how, but Luna had done the hard part.
She was the one who got your precious evidence.
Jackdaw, weeping, standing in the river.
She took all the fucking risks.

Ada, though, was shaking her head, setting her chin. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.”

I closed my eyes, thinking of Jackdaw, of Kevin, his life flown out of him.

“And I think you know,” I said to Ada, “that she thought she was getting free.”

“Yeah, well,” said Ada, and it was a kind of miracle, because even though she said she didn’t know who I was talking about, and even though she said she had never heard the name before, she said, “Well, it wasn’t her time.”

“I guess not.”

“Whatever promises were made to that one, they were not made by me, you understand?” Her face now was downright defiant; the face of the woman I’d seen on the square, the one who had scowled and stared while the others were beating me into the car. “Those promises were not made by me.”

She went toward the door, and I followed her, and now all I could think of was Luna—I bet Kevin had told her what they had told him; I bet she had taken some poison, too, some chemical or cleaner, gotten herself sick and gotten herself taken to worker care, and then she woke to find that Jackdaw was gone and she was still there. Left behind. The only thing worse than a lifetime of slavery: that taunting instant of hope, gone in a flash. And I knew of course what happened to her next. When the package was discovered missing and Luna was found to have helped in its disappearance, she was tortured then, Bridge had said; tortured and killed—that piece of it from Cook.

That had been the last thing for Kevin. That’s what had finally done him in, hearing that, when Cook gave that sad report.
She’s dead. Okay? She’s dead.

Subdued, then tortured, then killed.

But that was the aftermath. Carnage in the wake. The job itself had gone off without a hitch: Kevin had gotten himself to worker care, the nurses had packed him up in a barrel of blood and gotten him onto a truck, and then they made themselves disappear. The package to the trucker. Everything as planned. So where the hell was it?

“Hey. Hey!”

Marlon was coming out fast, crashing into Ada going in. But he was yelling at me. He took me by both my arms, sudden and fierce. “Hey! Do you know some fucking white girl?”

5.

Marlon had
been washing the lawyer’s three old Cadillacs, pulling them out onto the driveway, one at a time, keeping a lookout for lurkers, peepers, anything strange out on the street. And he’d found something: a pink South African hatchback, obnoxiously visible on the sedate and moneyed suburban street, with a white girl in the front seat dozing.

Down in the basement, he insisted on holding Martha at gunpoint.

I said it wasn’t necessary, and Ada agreed with me, but Marlon said, “We don’t know what the fuck this girl is,” and Shai said, very quietly, about me, “We don’t even know who
he
is,” which I was glad nobody heard. So we sat in an awkward arrangement around the table, back down in the basement kitchen, a very different place in the morning: last night’s dishes were a precarious pile in the sink; thin bars of sunlight found sticky patches on the concrete floor.

It was me and then Martha, her knee bouncing with nervousness, her face bleary with worry or fear. Then Shai, Marlon beside Shai, opposite Martha, aiming his .45 at her while she told her story. Ada stood by the sink, arms folded, listening.

“I saw you getting…I saw these people”—Martha caught herself—
these people.
She winced. “I saw you getting beat up. I was scared.” Without her cat’s-eye glasses, without any drugstore knickknack in her hair, she looked more like an adult than I was used to. “I followed the car. I tried to be careful.”

“I guess that was a stupid fucking thing to do,” said Marlon.

“I guess we need to be more careful about being tailed.”

That was Ada, from over by the sink, and the reproach didn’t much help Marlon’s mood. He hissed and leaned back, sneering. Shai, very gently, laid her hand on his shoulder, and I saw it work, saw the tension ease out of his body. Love at work.

“All right,” said Ada, impatient. “Look.” She pointed back and forth between Martha and me.

“You know this person?”

“Yes.”

Pointed to me, then back to Martha. “You trust her?”

I hesitated a half beat, and into the hesitation welled up the horror of what I was, what I was doing. It wasn’t Martha I distrusted; it was myself.

“Yes.” I nodded. “I trust her.”

“All right.” Ada shrugged. “You still want to go in there and find that truck driver?”

Ada was a maker of plans—a hatcher of plots. Like Father Barton, like Officer Cook, like me. She came and pulled a chair up to the table and explained what she was thinking. Martha could be of use now for the same reason she had been useful in getting me across the border—because of the color of her skin. While Ada laid it out, walked through the way it could work, I watched Martha from the corner of my eye and could tell how carefully she was listening. Her eyes, which I was used to seeing jump all over the place, were focused and intense. She was getting herself ready.

The plan was crazy. Risky as hell, no question about it. There were a very few things that Ada and her group could tell me about GGSI, about the layout and security arrangements of its headquarters. Most of what they knew was secondhand or thirdhand, and much of it was outdated. Rumors, whispers, gossip about the inside. Of my specific questions, they could only answer a couple: yes, we would be screened in on arrival and checked out on departure. There were cameras, yes, all over the campus, but not in the areas that were restricted to white workers only; Alabama state law forbade the surveillance of employees without cause.

It occurred to me to ask if Ada knew anything about that one building whose identity I could not figure out from the overhead map in the full file—that unlabeled structure jammed in behind the Institute for Agricultural Innovation—but of course I could not ask about it, because then I would have to explain where and how I had seen such a map.

We came to the end of the conversation. The plan was formed, as formed as it was going to get, and still Martha remained quiet. Her hands, too, were still; not fiddling with her rings, not tucking a lock of hair into the corner of her mouth. I had the odd sense of seeing her real self rise up out of the motionless form of her present body: like the person who had been inside the other person all along.

I looked at her when the talking was done. “You don’t have to do any of this,” I said. “You’ve got your money.”

She turned her head slowly and looked at me.

“But what about Steubenville?” she said, and I blinked.

“What?”

“You don’t think it’ll work. The whole crazy business with the man in Steubenville. The guy who said he can get me into that database.”

“TorchLight,” I said, then, “No. No, I doubt it.”

“So?”

“So?”

I knew her expression so well. I saw what she was seeing: opportunity.

“But if this plan—if her—I’m sorry, what—”

“Ada.”

Martha smiled at her. “Thank you. If Ada’s idea works, and we can get in there, then don’t you think there will be a way to access it directly? Once we’re inside? Once we’re in there? Isn’t that right?”

“Right.”

“Right. So. So I can’t miss that chance.”

“But…” I started, but something in her face—in her eyes. I stopped.

“I will call my sister. She will hang on to Lionel another day.”

“Yeah. I know. Martha…”

I stopped.

“It’s dangerous,” she said, speaking very slowly. “It is very risky. I understand. But.
But
—if there is a way to find out what has happened to that man.” This was in the form of a question, but her voice had no questioning in it. “Then that is what I am going to do. I have to.”

“You gotta understand, though—”

“I know.”

“I can’t promise anything.”

My protests were halfhearted. She was firm, but I could have talked her out of it. I could have told her there was some other way. I could have opened myself all the way up, torn off the blank mask, and shown her my face. I could have told her to forget the whole damn thing.

But this was my chance, and I knew it. I told her that if this was what she wanted, I wanted her to have it. I told her that if she helped me get in, I would try to get her what she needed. I told her that because I needed her. I had to have her. My empathy was woven, as ever, with cunning.

We spent the rest of that day cosseted in the lawyer’s house and with the lawyer’s people, refining and fine-tuning, building our story. Shai went up and down the stairs, collecting articles of clothing from the closet of the lawyer, from the closet of the lawyer’s dead wife. I ended up in a peach-colored sweater and in pants of Marlon’s, black pants without pockets. “There, that’s right,” he said. “That’s good. Trust me, man: down here they don’t like niggers having places they can stick shit.”

We did not see the old man himself again, but I heard him—three or four times I heard him—from an adjoining bedroom, moaning in his sleep.

6.

Thursday morning.
Vivid and clear. Me and Martha, decked out and ready to go. Closing the doors of her sedan in the wide parking lot of Garments of the Greater South.

Martha, showered and shining, in a sharp red professional skirt and blazer, a piece of green jewelry pinned at her breast; timeless pieces from the collection of the lawyer’s long-dead wife. Martha in good old fancy-white-lady drag, and me in the peach sweater and pocketless pants, already wearing the servant’s smile, already rolling in the bashful gait. Lifting the black rolling suitcase out of the trunk, loaded with the tools of the trade.

I eased the bag down onto the asphalt while Martha waited. I pulled out the handle of the suitcase. She started, and I followed. I was in charge of the bag. This was the South. She glanced back and I looked up and we looked at each other, just for a second, one last human look to go in on.

The plantation had not been hard to find. Coming off State Route 4, we saw a big green sign, a dedicated exit, as for a university or military base or theme park. The exit sign went so far as to proclaim the company motto—
AMERICAN
GROWN
,
SOUTHERN
SEWN
!
—along with the logo I had seen previously on Jackdaw’s collarbone, the proud uppercase
G
with the other letters tucked safely inside. The logo that was supposedly waiting for me somewhere, somewhere in the endless South, emblazoned on that envelope, the needle in the haystack I was going to find.