Underground Airlines(35)

I smiled sadly. “Gotcha.”

“So 1819, for these dickwads, that’s the good old days. See?”

“I see.”

She looked at me head-on, tears standing in her eyes. The people with the flags were reversionists—people who as a matter of politics or personal taste regretted that their state had ever adopted its constitution and thereby abolished the practice of slavery. And it made Slim’s Trailer Court, Slim’s Market, and Slim’s Garage the unlikeliest possible place for Mr. Maris to have landed, the unlikeliest possible place for Jackdaw the runner to be squirreled away.

“Mr. Dirkson, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Call me Jim. And it’s okay.”

“It’s not. My state is a really nice state, for the most part. It really, really is.”

“Oh, I get that. That’s the feeling I get for sure.”

Mr. Bridge would be calling in fifteen minutes. But here was young, kind Martha in her cheap denim jacket and her long brown ponytail tied back with a pink rubber band standing out here in the parking lot suffering whatever it was she was suffering. She reached up to neaten the ponytail, and the motion caused the top of her white dress shirt to open slightly, and I saw just below the root of her neck a black box, inked in all the way. Not a lot of white people got them, but some did. A mark of solidarity or empathy or guilt.

Martha saw me looking, blushed, and brought her shirt collar together.

“God,” she said. “People think it’s far away, but it’s not. It’s here. It’s everywhere. Clouding over everything. Hanging over everything. Don’t you just feel that way sometimes?”

“I do,” I said. “I guess I do.”

With an effort of will, she made herself smile, made her eyes get hopeful. “But you know what? Maybe this thing with Batlisch, you know, the president sticking up for her and all…maybe it’s the beginning of some real change.”

I smiled. I nodded. I’d read the same article. It had been in my own newspaper. “Sure,” I said. Thinking, Shit does not change. Thinking, It will never change. “You never know.”

“Listen, Jim,” she said. “Hey. Would you ever…”

She paused. She looked down at her phone, considering something, gathering some kind of quick courage. My heart was a tight, high knot; there was some keening emotion making itself felt that I had never felt before while I stood in the invisible light of those words, hanging and spinning between us, Would you ever…

Then her phone rang. She opened it, and it rang again, and then we both realized together it wasn’t her phone ringing, it was mine.

I looked at the incoming number and at the time. It was 9:36.

“Mr. Dirkson?”

My phone rang again. Bridge was calling, fourteen minutes ahead of schedule.

“I should get this.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“I need to get this.”

The world was a confused clamor. Bridge ringing in my hand, those 1819 flags flapping in my brain, Jackdaw trembling inside a box, the rifle bucking against my shoulder, and Martha, Would you ever—would I ever what?

“It’s…” She gave a little toss of her head. “It’s nothing. Seriously. Take your call.”

I answered as I turned away, and the doors whooshed open, and Bridge said “Victor,” short and sharp, his voice charged with some energy I did not immediately recognize.

“Oh, yes, hello,” I said, still in Dirkson voice, walking fast, not liking to talk to him out in the bright no-man’s-land of the hotel lobby. It was like I had conjured a demon to rise up out of the patterned carpet, right where everyone could see it. “Hey, could you hang on just a sec?”

I kept the phone pressed against my chest until I was back in the room, out on the balcony, with a cigarette clenched in my teeth.

Would you ever…what? Would I ever—

“Victor.”

“You caught me in the middle of something.”

“And is that a problem for some reason?” A current running through his voice like rogue electricity. “I will call when I call, Victor. Do you understand? I will call when I want to.”

I took the phone away from my ear and studied it. Maybe it had connected me by accident to the wrong man. Some other Victor, somewhere else.

“How’s your progress?”

I skipped the jokes. I gave the man a whirlwind tour of the day’s adventures. I gave him Officer Cook and Maris on the steps, I gave him the pin I had put on Maris; I gave him the name of the doctor; I gave him the printout from Whole Wide World Logistics with the route of escape. I told him about Slim’s, but not about shooting Slim.

The whole time I was providing this debrief, I was measuring the short, cool silences that breathed between my sentences. Something was off—something was way off. Some new weather, a heaviness in the atmosphere, was brooding over our call like a storm system, darkening the color of the sky.

Like a good employee, I wrapped up my report with next steps. Tomorrow morning I would feel out the doctor, try again to pick up Maris’s trail, seek out Cook the cop if I had to, prevail upon him to make another run at the recalcitrant priest.

Another half step of menacing silence from Mr. Bridge. Then he said something that blew a hole in my understanding of the world, like a cannonball smashing through the high wood sides of a ship. “You holding out on me, boy?”