Underground Airlines(96)

Very slowly I let him go. There was blood all over me, blood on my hands and up my arms and on my naked chest. I stood up. The room was full of red.

“Okay,” Martha was saying. She was trembling. I was trembling, too. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”





2.



The steps of the monument were gray and slick with rain.

I stood beneath the Martyr with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t tilt my head up to feel the drizzle on my cheeks. I didn’t move. I stood beneath Old Abraham, quietly fiddling with the green bracelet I was still wearing on my arm. Doing nothing but waiting.

The streets were empty, more or less. Laughing voices, now and then, carried over from Georgia Street, the blocks of bars a quarter mile or so away. I saw a couple leaning into each other, climbing unsteadily into the back of a cab, way down on Market Street.

But the ring of shops and office buildings that wreathed Monument Circle were all closed this late at night. Here in the bull’s-eye of the city, at this hour of night, it was just me out here, just me and the likeness of Lincoln. Both of us likenesses.

And just what was Victor feeling, anyway, as he stood there waiting? What about Old Victor—what was going on inside his mind?

I don’t know. I was drained of emotion, washed out by the rain. I suppose there’s a version of this story in which I’m standing there crackling with joy. Maybe I should have been crying, tears carving rivulets in my stone cheeks. Monumental. There might even have been, in some other reality, knives of regret scything away at my insides.

But none of that, not for me. Just standing, just waiting, coat shrugged close around me, my hands jammed in the pockets of my coat.

In one pocket was the gun, a loose heaviness in the pocket’s depth.

In the other pocket, my right hand was clasped on one corner of the envelope, folding and unfolding one ragged corner.

Up in the sky was the dim, grubby outline of the moon. Abraham Lincoln’s giant disapproving features in shadow above me, staring at the city, the country, all this unfinished business.

“Victor?”

“Yeah. Come on up.”

There was Mr. Bridge, coming carefully up the steps, one step at a time, not wanting to slip, and despite myself I felt the tiniest prickle of disappointment. There must have been some part of me hoping for a surprise. What if Deputy United States Marshal Bridge had turned out to have about him the smoldering air of a secret agent? What if he’d been six foot six and thin as a rail, wearing Loyal Texan cowboy boots and a battered Stetson? What if he wore a yarmulke? What if he were black?

Alas. Bridge was Bridge. A bushy gray mustache and a sloping forehead below a receding hairline. Tan slacks and brown dress shoes, poorly chosen for rainy late-autumn Indiana. He stood before me, me and my Abraham, a supplicant before the prince and counselor. He was the puffy, dull-eyed middle manager of my most contemptuous imaginings. This, my tormentor.

I raised my hand as I came closer, and he raised his in return. Bridge’s tie was brown and plain.

I fidgeted with the envelope’s dog-eared corner while Bridge came up the steps.

Bridge was alone, per my instructions. I could see down Meridian Street the car from which he’d climbed. He’d emerged from the driver’s seat, and I couldn’t tell if there was someone in the back or not, but it didn’t matter. Here at the steps it was just me and him, Bridge approaching, no bag or case, his hands raised as instructed. I had thought through all these details, got the setup straight: a public place, but a public place wreathed in darkness, a dead downtown in the middle of the night. It was 1:00 in the morning, Sunday morning. Two days since Martha and I returned to the North. Almost two weeks since Kevin was stuffed into the barrel, rolled onto the truck. Eleven days since I checked into the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, just down the hall from Martha and her son.

I ducked my hand into my other pocket, and Bridge stopped abruptly and raised his hands higher. I smiled. A glimmer of feeling reached me, distant but clear: it felt good to be in charge, even of one man, one small moment, one instant.

I wasn’t reaching for my gun. It was the envelope I took out.

Mr. Bridge’s eyes flooded with relief. He was easy to read, easier than ever, now that not even a phone line separated us. He was just here, ten feet in front of me, his features as open and plain as a child’s drawing. He reached out, as though I was just going to hand it over, and I could see it all in his face, the pressure that had been applied on him from wherever it had come.

I dropped the envelope back in my pocket, and he darted out his tongue quickly, licked his lips.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, licked his lips again. “I must hand it to you, Victor. That was well done. I don’t know how you did it, but that was well done.”

“I’m a professional.”

“Yes.” He nodded: yes. “Well, I hope you will not be surprised to hear that I am prepared to live up to my end of the bargain as well. If you would just…”

He took one more step up the stairs, and now my other hand came up, the gun hand. He stopped.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s in there?”

He stopped. “Have you opened it?”

Bridge. Question with a question. I went back on him: “What do you f*cking think?” His eyes above the gray mustache were growing fretful. He didn’t like my tone. “Of course I opened it.”