Underground Airlines(15)

But then this software man had gone and stuck the hapless runner in his kid’s damn tree house. I guess a secret attic was too risky. Or maybe, however righteous he was, he didn’t care for the idea of a dark-skinned stranger actually living in his house for a week.

That slave, whatever his name was, never knew what happened to him. I spotted a candy wrapper, fluttering down from that tree like a shining silver leaf, and I took pictures of him up there with a telephoto lens and put the pictures on the secure server, and Mr. Bridge made his calls. I never even got out of my car.

It wasn’t going to be that easy this time. Barton was too smart a customer to have his runaway slave squirreled away on church property.

I was looking not for a man but for information, a broken twig in the underbrush, some scar-barked tree that would turn me in his direction. And that’s what I found. I had known that I would, and I did. There was a small kitchen behind the meeting room, and in the small kitchen a small refrigerator, and hidden behind the small refrigerator was a small door. There was no point in getting my rakes and tension bars back out, not for the chintzy lock that secured that secret door. I found a paper clip on the ground, and I unfolded it and bent the edge and hummed to myself, eight bars, twelve bars, then I had that lock open, and in I went.



The PB in the software engineer’s tree house, that man’s service name was Hand. A common-enough slave name. He had fled, like Jackdaw, from a textile factory—Clearwater Cotton Products, somewhere in eastern Mississippi. And the tree house I dragged him out of wasn’t in Buffalo or Burlington or Baltimore. It was in Monclova, Ohio, nineteen miles outside of Toledo.

I do it even now, you see? I play false, I dance and dance. I murmur the stories in shadow or half shadow; I pretend to myself that I don’t remember the names, the details, when in fact I do. I did and I do—I remember all their names.

I left Saint Anselm’s and walked back to the car, not even checking for my new friends on the porch. All around me, all inside me, was a feeling of unease, of incipience. A murky sky, holding the possibility but not the promise of rain.





9.



“She’s fine, thanks,” I said, stepping out onto the cold and narrow balcony, frisking myself for cigarettes. “How’s your mother?”

Mr. Bridge gave me his patient, neutral silence, as he always did. He had called precisely at 9:50, as always, and asked after my progress, same as always.

“My progress is good,” I told him. “But first I got some questions about this file.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” I lit a Baba and talked through clenched teeth. “File’s a goddamn mess.”

Mr. Bridge didn’t agree or disagree. He breathed evenly, waiting for me to explain. I did it without thinking, after all these years, measured Bridge’s silences, held each one to feel its specific weight and texture, each silence a certain kind of stone. This one here, this was tolerant silence. He wasn’t interested in my questions and certainly not in my feedback, but he would suffer them to get the goods.

“Let’s start with these nurses,” I said. “They find their bodies?”

“I do not know.”

“Might be worth finding out.”

“I agree. And I will find out.”

I sighed, my sarcasm sliding off of Bridge like water parting around the prow of a battleship. “Do that. Bodies don’t disappear. They don’t disintegrate. And there’s gotta be accomplices—they know that, right?”

“I presume so.”

“You presume so?”

“What I need for you to do, Victor, is to focus on your end.”

“Oh, all right, then. That’s great. Let’s look at my end. You got the file open over there?”

I knew he did. I heard his fingers clicking on the keys, scrolling through the pages while I talked. “Okay, so on page nine. We get the date and time of GGSI’s statement, we get the judge’s order, but not the judge’s name. All it says is”—I spoke from memory; the papers were inside the room, spread out on the bed—“all it says is, ‘So ordered by a judge of the Alabama district court.’”

“And?”

“What judge is it?”

“What judge?” Bridge’s tolerant silence was darkening now with irritation. “The owner attests to an escape and gives a detailed description of the escapee. The judge records the proceeding, orders a transcript produced, and issues his writ.”

“His or her.”

“Fine.”

“His, her, or its.”

“Victor. Why does it matter?”

I hissed out smoke, watched it spread over the parking lot. Mr. Bridge was right—as far as our side of the thing was concerned, as far as running the man down was concerned, it couldn’t matter any less what f*cking judge it was. It only bothered me because it was sloppy work, and sloppy work never felt right, not when a man’s life hung in the goddamn balance. Still, I pressed on. The shadows of impatience were growing longer over Bridge’s silence now, and I was aware that there was a limit to how much of this pushback he would tolerate. I leapfrogged to the part that was bothering me most, the part that really did matter.

“How do we even know this boy’s in Indianapolis?”