Underground Airlines(10)

When that sort of BS happened I had no choice but to submit. I had no badge, no ID. I was true undercover, right down the line. If you saw the way I traveled, if you went through my suitcase or the trunk of my car, you’d think I was a thief, some kind of con man.

Which I was, of course. Really, that’s exactly what I was. I was a thief. I was some kind of con man.



When I got back outside, I found a police car parked right alongside my Altima, just outside the cemetery gate. I stopped and I stared at it for a second: an IMPD black-and-white, with the stenciled letters on the side and the sirens on the roof and the long radio antenna sticking up stiff and proud from the rear. I glanced up and down the street to see if the owner was around, but it was just as quiet as it had been before. Even the sky, still gray and cool, the clouds right where I had left them. Everything same as it was, except for the marked car.

I bounced on my heels a couple times, as if my body were getting ready to take off running. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, looking at the rear bumper of that police vehicle, looking at the gravestones, at the houses down the street, an uneasy feeling gathering and drifting in me like mist.

I was thinking that there had been two cops in the Fountain Diner last night, a black one and a white one, a couple tables over from the priest and me, looking at something on one of their phones, laughing and carrying on. Slowly I approached the parked police vehicle, listening to the distant, indistinct sounds of the city. Someone honking somewhere. A doorway gate rattling up, maybe Steak & Lemonade or The Big & The Tall opening for the day.

I committed the number to memory. Car number 101097. Big city, I was thinking. Big city, full of cops. That’s all.





7.



“What is this? What is this, now?”

I was standing on the hotel room’s rickety wooden chair so the top of my head grazed the ceiling. I had a halfway decent printer, government-issue and portable, but it worked just fine, and when a file came in it was my practice to print it and lay the sheets out on the hotel bedspread in a grid and study them from above, as though I were doing helicopter surveillance on a city block.

The full file was a goddamn mess, and I was not pleased. I hate mess. I hate unevenness and uncertainty, and that’s what the full file was—it was uneven and uncertain.

It was midafternoon already. The file had appeared on the second server by noon, as promised, and I’d been staring at its ugly sheets since then, scowling at them, drinking water from the cheap hotel-room tumbler, puzzling over the nine pages of closely typed text and illustrations, and thinking the same thing: What a goddamn mess.

The first three pages of the file concerned Father Barton and his cell of the Underground Airlines, and this section was short on details and long on conjecture, pure search-engine bullshit. Some intern in Bridge’s office had strung it together from old arrest warrants and radical abolition chat rooms: Barton’s birth date, town of origin, known and suspected associates. His close ties to the International Canaan Organization (ICO) and Les Bénévoles Blackburn, his loose ties to the Black Panthers and two other “domestic terror organizations.” His name in connection with a nasty incident twenty-two months ago: a body found in a crate in a Cincinnati FedEx routing center, never delivered, substantially decayed. This corpse was eventually ID’d with a PIN and a service name—a runner from Boone County, Carolina, who’d gotten himself crated and sent to “Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, Indiana.” The FedEx employee who’d facilitated this Hail Mary maneuver, an abbo sympathizer working freelance, was in federal prison but could not be persuaded to admit he’d been acting on Barton’s behest—at least, that is, not according to this useless, messy, bullshit file.

All these first few pages did was tell me what I already knew—that despite his claims of innocence, the parish priest was a prolific smuggler of runaways, directly or indirectly responsible for dozens of illegal manumissions over the last several years. Bridge or Bridge’s intern had “a high degree of certainty” (whatever the f*ck that meant) that it was Barton and his group who’d pulled Jackdaw off the plantation and/or gotten him across the Fence. They were equally certain it was Barton’s people shielding the boy till he could be moved across the 49th parallel to permanent freedom.

I scowled. I shifted my weight. My eyes flickered past the hole in my grid, a gap like a vacant lot in a row of homes. That was page 7, and I hadn’t printed it. I wasn’t ready to look at it. Not yet.

The section about Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, wasn’t much more useful. Nothing that any mope couldn’t have pulled from public records. Total acreage; acreage devoted to production; total annual yield; yield of upland, yield of American pima. Gross annual revenue, gross annual profit, projected future revenue. Every time I read about one of these places, they’d gotten bigger, more modern, larger in scope, and more sophisticated in their operations. This one, this GGSI, boasted of having customers in seventy-two countries around the world for its “durable, high-fineness fibers” and its “premium-rated seeds and seed oils.” GGSI housed the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, with support from the state of Alabama and the American Cotton Council, performing “cutting-edge research on new technologies in the production of pest-and drought-resistant cotton strains.” GGSI had 4,232 Persons Bound to Labor on its sprawling campus—in its fields, in its factories, in its offices.