Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  “Go on, Bernard,” said Peanut, one hand on the butt of his gun, the other calling Elron with his phone. “Grab that bitch.”

  Bernard raised his hands as if to seize me, but he wasn’t quite sure on this thing, not quite yet. I took the moment. I spoke, slow and low and clear. “I would not do that.”

  Bernard’s hands came down. He could hear it, the cold ancient strangeness in my voice, all that cow’s blood and knife heat pulsing in my eyes.

  Peanut Head wasn’t there yet. He lowered his phone and turned back to glare at me. Yanked out the gun. Bernard winced. He didn’t like this at all.

  “Put it down,” I told him. “Put down the weapon.”

  “Or what, slave?”

  “I am no runner. I am no slave.”

  “What?”

  I kept going. I told them the truth.

  “But neither am I a man.”

  “What?”

  “I am a monster in the shape of a man. I am a man with the skin of a snake and the feet of a wolf.”

  “Fuck you talkin’ about?” said Peanut, starting to get a little bit of Bernard’s nervous eyes. His fingers dancing on the gun butt. Bernard, for his part, was done. “Come on, man,” he said, tugging on his boy’s sleeve. “Come on.”

  “I do not walk the world, son, but stalk it,” I said. “With the scent of blood in my nostrils, my flanks a mess of scars.” I started down the street, still talking. “I am not a slave. But neither am I a man.”

  “That ain’t no PB,” I heard Bernard say behind me. “That dude’s just fucking crazy.”

  The problem was that those old bad times, once they got keyed up, were hard to quiet. It was all around me in the air now, all those miserable fucking memories, the terrified lowing of the cattle and the ka-thunk of the bolt gun. The heat and stench of the workroom, my cramped grip on the saw, the cows’ slow turning in the air, bloated and dripping gore. My brother Castle, his big eyes in the darkness. I was trying to go along now and get on with my work, and all these snatches of vision hovered like bits of ash or motes of dust, flickering glimpses of an old world, my old world, floating around me and settling on my skin as I came out onto Central Avenue, breathing hard.

  “All right, now, honey,” I whispered, talking to myself, nice and soft. “All right.”

  It was twilight. Streetlamps blinked to life. I just breathed. Nice and easy.

  Once I got back to the spot, I was fine. I was cool. I ambled slowly up to the community center in a pair of heavy black work shoes and the CIRCLE CITY LAWNSCAPING coveralls I had boosted off the back of Ruben’s truck. The tag above the breast pocket said in cursive letters that my name was Albie, and I liked that name. I murmured it twice, thinking maybe I’d put it to use sometime in the future.

  I stood outside the community center at dusk with my hat tilted back, taking in the building, scratching my head, and I knew exactly what I looked like: I looked like a gardener. Albie the lawn man at the end of the day. Maybe trying to puzzle out the location of the hose connection, maybe going back to pull out this one particular dead rosebush the boss man said to be sure to pull. I had gloves on, tight latex, thin as skin. I walked down the hedge-flanked walkway with a workingman’s purpose, peered in the windows, and tested the handles.

  I hummed and whistled and crouched and took a sounding of that big brass front-door lock, running my fingers gently across its surface, feeling for nicks and scratches that would show that someone else had been here before me. My humming built its way up to a crescendo as I opened my slim black case and found the right rake and the right tension bar and stuck them in there and wiggled and poked at the lock’s invisible insides. As I tested that hardware-store lock I considered which way I would run if this turned out to be the moment when I ran. Highway overpass was one mile west. I would move as fast as I could without running. Chuck the lock-pick kit into the bushes, peel off Albie’s uniform, stuff it into a garbage can, and head away on foot, due west on 38th Street. One mile, then I would hustle up the on-ramp on foot and flag down a car and get myself gone.

  I shooed the idea away. I always shooed it away. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was tethered tight. There was a device inside of me, right up at the place where the top of the spine meets the base of the brain. Screwed in by government doctors, sending out coordinates on me all day every day to Bridge, to whoever sits beside Bridge. Smaller than a grain of rice, that little device, or so they’d told me. Smaller than the head of a pin.

  They also told me I would not feel it, but I could feel it, I always felt it, I always heard it, though it made no sound. When I was too quiet for too long I heard it singing in me: humming, taunting, burning. A hook. An anchor. A leash.

  It didn’t take more than a minute to persuade the lock of Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise to let go. I straightened up, cracked my knuckles, nodded approvingly—nice work, Albie the gardener—and nudged open the door with my foot.

  I moved quickly through the empty quiet of the community center. Most of it was taken up by the one room, a big room, with a dozen beige folding chairs arranged in a circle and a coffee service set up in the back, as if for a meeting of drug addicts or drunks. I crouched down to examine one of these folding-chair seats and found no dust on it at all. I looked for gaps in wallpaper. I looked for loose tiles on the floor. I counted entrances and exits. Doing this part of a job, straight breaking and entering, covering a room, sniffing for holes and hideaways, I really was not a person. I was neither black nor white. Just action. Just work. A machine. I dropped down onto my hands and knees to feel my way across the floor.

  I turned on my flashlight and pointed it one way, then another, watching the line of light pick out stains on the floor, dust balls, a couple of cigarette butts, bent like tiny broken bones. I didn’t imagine I’d be finding the PB himself in here, alone in the darkness, behind a stack of boxes or under loose floorboards. I gave smooth young Father Barton more credit than that. Although it had, at least once, been just that easy. In Buffalo once—or Burlington, or Baltimore, some northern city—the poor son of a bitch I was looking for had been in a child’s tree house in the backyard. Some foolish dilettante abolitionist, a software engineer or some other kind of workaday white man, had volunteered to serve as an attendant on the Airlines, told himself that he could hide a rabbit for six days until the man could get put on a connecting flight to Ontario.

  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 mil
es 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 fucking 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?”

  “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. Embarrassmen
t. 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.

  “So maybe lover boy is married,” I told Bridge. “Maybe he doesn’t want his boss knowing what’s going on in the office after hours. Either way, they’re leaning on this mope to arrange special deliveries.”

  “Do you have a name?” Bridge’s voice had recovered its customary composure.

  “Winston Bibb. He’s the assistant regional manager.”

  “And have you paid him a visit yet?”

  I said no, and Bridge said why not, and I drew in a lungful of poison and said because I was done with this approximation of a human existence, with bending not only my abilities but my real human soul to the sinister will of an authoritarian state, and that one day I would transform my flesh to metal and become a sword aimed at his heart.