Underground Airlines(25)

And meanwhile I had my map application open and was keeping one eye on it, watching a blue blip move block by block through the city. That was Mr. Maris, still carrying my butterfly knife in his pocket. Embedded in the handle of the knife was a tidy little GPS tracking unit, throwing up location signals to some satellite, which was then throwing them back down to me.

I watched Mr. Maris drive south on Meridian Street away from Abraham the Martyr, then cut right on West South Street, then left on Capitol.

Planting the bug on Maris was an old trick. An easy one. I had done four months of training after they picked me up, in a desert in Arizona, before they sent me out on my first file. I had learned picks and rakes, footprints and fingerprints, fighting and following, database infiltration, encryption and de-encryption.

And then after all that, a doctor with no name and a cold room, two unconscious hours. The hook, the anchor, the leash.

It was funny to think about. Not that funny. Me tracking Maris, Gaithersburg tracking me.

MJ was doing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” and I took that as a good sign. I just listened to that a second, just that, shoo-bop, shoo-bop, swelling strings in the chorus. After that there was a James Brown song, which made me smile—they didn’t play a lot of James on the radio. He’d been the leader of one of those god-awful “family bands” that toured the North in the fifties and sixties, talented slaves brought north to sing to sold-out northern audiences, living proof of how happy everybody was down there. But James defected—snuck out of his Buffalo hotel room and turned up in Quebec City, making beautiful music and touring the world, except for America.

“Just look at me!” he used to crow from European concert stages, palming his pompadour, braggadocious in his spangled cape and boots. “Look at what they robbin’ themselves of!”

Sort of thing used to happen all the time. There was an Olympic gold medalist from Alabama, boy named Jesse Owens, who took a mess of world records in Berlin in 1936 and then defected to the Soviet Union. For the next half century he was one of the evil empire’s prize possessions, turning up in Pravda every once in a while to denounce degenerate slave-state capitalism.

When I felt ready, I got back into it, making notes on Maris’s route, jotting it all down, toggling back and forth between his journey and my slow search-driven encircling of the mysterious Dr. V.

After I was satisfied with my initial list of doctors, I closed out the pages full of hospitals and clinics and started opening the donor rolls of every abolitionist organization active in the city and state. There were local organizations called Total Freedom Now! (pure abolitionist) and Indy FreedomWorks (gradualist); there was a central Indiana chapter of the Fire Bell Society, and there was the Indianapolis chapter of the Black Panthers. The membership rolls and the donor lists were all public information, except for those of the Panthers, which was officially classified as a terrorist organization, but I got their names by hacking the IMPD.

Maris, meanwhile, had gotten on the highway. He moved south by southeast on 465, tracing the city’s outskirts. While I watched him I rehearsed his distinctive African cadences in my mind, replayed what he had said to Cook about the “old business.” No, it is not yet…it is not yet put to bed.

Seized by an impulse, I said the words out loud, drew myself up to stand at full height, as Maris did, making my face solemn, as he had. “No, it is not yet…” I said to myself, to the computer, to the cracks in the wall. “No, it is not yet put to bed.”

Then I eased back down into the chair, relaxed my limbs, grinned to show my teeth. What had Cook said, Officer Cook, complicated Cook? How is he adjusting to his freedom? I said, and what was the officer’s reply? I spoke it in his smooth voice: “He’s a special case, that one. A special kind of kid.”

Then I was myself again. As much myself as I ever was. I popped out of the chair, pulled out the full-file pages from their locked box, and read again my favorite part, my least favorite part, the baffling run of words: Known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis.

There was something in all of it. What was it? Something buried in all those bits and scraps, scratching to get out.

I did the next piece. Cross-referenced names with names, circled some, and crossed out the others. When I was done I had a list of four complicated surnames written carefully in pencil on the hotel notepad: Vasilevsky, Vorshonsky, Venezia-Karbach, and Vishaparatham. Ten minutes later I was reading a magazine profile, two years old, from a special issue of Indianapolis Monthly celebrating “Indy’s Unsung Heroes,” about a lauded general practitioner who had closed a thriving suburban practice to open a storefront clinic in Haughville, a historic working-class African American neighborhood north of Freedman Town. This doctor accepted all health plans and dedicated one-third of her appointment slots to the uninsured.

“Health care,” declared Dr. Elizabeta Venezia-Karbach in the article, “is a basic human right.”

“All right,” I said, toggling back over to my other screen. “All right, all right.”

Mr. Maris, it seemed, was still on the move. His blue dot had come off the highway on the near east side. I watched him cruise 42nd Street, past the fairgrounds, then turn right to come south on Keystone.

I was still watching him while the phone rang, but then when Dr. Venezia-Karbach’s receptionist answered I stood up and found my voice, said, “Yes, ma’am, how are you, sweetheart?” A little growly and weary, a cough in the back of my throat, a man in need of a doctor. My name, I said, was Kenny Morton—sliding open the balcony doors now, staring again at the parking lot—and yes, I would be a new patient, that’s right, ma’am, and no, ma’am, I had no health insurance at this time, and I had to confess I was of limited means, but if there was some way I could—yes, tomorrow morning would be fine—Saturday, right, I know, that’ll do for me just fine, and oh, my, thank you so much, that’s just wonderful, ma’am, and I really do appreciate it so much, and thank you, and while I turned in this small, workmanlike performance, leaning into the balcony threshold, growling over the phone, I could see the memories coming for me, swelling over the horizon, charging across the parking lot between the cars like bloody horses.