Underground Airlines(16)

“Because it says so.”

“Well, no, it doesn’t.”

I stepped back inside the room. I left the balcony door open, and the room was just small enough for me to leave my cigarette hand back out on the balcony while I craned my neck to look down at the pages on the bed.

“What it says is, ‘The subject is known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis, Indiana.’”

“Exactly.”

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“I mean—what?”

“Listen.” I took an irritated drag, and ash tumbled down on the bedspread, snowing gray onto the pages of the file. Damn it. Sloppy. “It doesn’t say he’s in Indy. It says he is known to have intended to remove himself there. Now, what does that even mean?”

I could hear his inhale. He was about to answer, but then he didn’t; instead he gave me a new silence, one I’d never heard before. Something hesitant in it. Something uncertain. I slipped back outside.

“You there?”

“It says what it says. It says he’s in Indianapolis.”

I read the sentence to him again, struck—as I had been the first time I read it and each time since—by its obscurity, the ugliness of the construction. Even for government grammar, it was a nasty and clotted run of words. The subject is known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis, Indiana. And then, at the end, there was a strange little mark. A dagger.

“You see that it’s footnoted?” I asked Bridge. “Is it footnoted on yours?”

“It is.”

“So?”

“I don’t know.”

I stared at that sentence. At the footnote marker. There wasn’t any footnote at the bottom of the page to go with it. No amendments or addenda at the end, either, no page of notes the dagger was telling the reader to go and look at. I heard Bridge’s fingers clicking away, so I knew he was looking, so I asked him, and he said yes, it was the same in his copy: a reference with no referent, a dagger pointing to nothing.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”

“All right. Good.”

“Victor. How is your progress?”

That was it: question time was over. I lit a new cigarette with the end of the old one, and I gave Mr. Bridge what he was waiting for.

“I followed Barton’s bread crumbs to a church facility in a colored neighborhood on the west side of the city,” I said. “Place is all closed up, but the good father is coming and going, probably other folks, too. Someone at the diocese level had it shuttered a few months ago, but there’s a new lock on the place. My money says this is the new temporary HQ for an ongoing operation. Permanent floating craps game.”

“Okay. And?”

I sighed. Mr. Bridge did not give pats on the back. No chucks on the chin.

“Victor?”

“I cracked the lock in about a minute.”

“And?”

“I had a look around.”

“Did you find the runner?”

“Yeah, Bridge. I got him. He’s here. We got fried chicken and watermelon from room service.”

But you couldn’t get a rise out of Mr. Bridge. You couldn’t make him jump. So I just went on, staring down at the cars in the lamplit parking lot. I pried away for Mr. Bridge the plywood panel over the hidden doorway at Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise; I led him into Father Barton’s crawl space, and showed off for him a variety of distinctly nonclerical objects I had discovered therein. Six guns of a variety of manufacture and caliber, none with serial numbers; three bulletproof vests; a shoe box full of driver’s licenses, displaying a wide array of black and white faces, issued by the states of Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. A locked chest that had yielded to the attention of my picks and rakes and turned out to be full of money—small and large bills, rolled up in tight circles, the better to be passed into waiting hands.

What was most interesting, though, was a single photograph, which I had found taped to the underside of a small wooden schoolboy desk, pushed up against the wall in one corner of the crawl space. The photograph was of excellent quality, seemingly the result of high-quality macro-lens photography. The faces of the two causasian gentlemen in the photograph were crystal clear, and there could be no doubt as to the activity in which they were vigorously engaged.

“Fucking?” said Bridge.

“Yes, sir. Fucking.”

Discomfort. Embarrassment. A rare species of silence, to be prized. I smiled.

“Are you suggesting,” said Barton at last, “that Father Barton is a pornographer?”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. No worldly sense on Bridge at all; a desk man, right down to the floor. “Not a pornographer. A blackmailer.”

I spelled it out for poor, dense Bridge. Of the two gentlemen captured in the photograph, one was in his socks, but the other had had the poor judgment to remain in his green work shirt, the corporate logo of which was displayed to the lens: a purple-and-green globe emblazoned with speed lines. Visible behind the happy couple, painted on a gray tiled wall below a row of clocks, was the same logo. Before Bridge’s call I had figured out where they were: Whole Wide World Logistics, a third-party transport company, short haul and long haul, mostly small freight, with a regional headquarters and “client relationship center” in Indianapolis.