Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  Barton would demand that she keep her peace, do as he did in the diner and disclaim all knowledge. But Barton wasn’t there—he was an abstraction, and I was there in her office. Mr. Morton was real, hands knitted together, eyes wide with need.

  “The problem is,” she said slowly, “that I don’t actually know his location.”

  “Look, I don’t want to hurt him,” I said, “or take him or nothing. I just want to see his face. I want to hold him one more time.”

  “You’re not hearing me. I don’t know his location.”

  “But—but you went to him. I thought—you didn’t help him?”

  She nodded minutely, bird head popping down, then up. “Yes. But I don’t know where.”

  Goddamn it. Fucking priest. Shifty, snake-eyed, base-covering little hypocrite.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, okay.” Her hand ran again through her hair. “I never know much with these—these situations. I get a call from someone. I don’t know who it is. It’s a different number every time. Okay? That’s how this goes. I have a phone they give me, and it rings and I answer it and they tell me where to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Downtown.”

  “Where?’

  “The mall. Circle Centre Mall.”

  I nodded. I knew it. Right downtown. You could see its parking garage from the statue of Abe the Martyr.

  “But that’s not where I met him. That’s just where the car picked me up. It was a taxicab, but not—it wasn’t in service. It was just for me.”

  Barton at work: cutout operation, prepaid phones, wheels within wheels.

  “So where’d the car take you? It take you to him?”

  “Yes, but. Blindfolded.”

  They packed her into the car, drove her for at least an hour, drove her around and around in circles, north and then south, until she could have no idea where she was, and then they guided her out of the car and down a path. Rough beneath her feet. Slipping some. Still blindfolded. When they took off the mask, it was dark, totally dark, then someone turned on a flashlight, and there he was.

  “There he was,” I repeated softly, remembering the delicate, intelligent face I had seen in the photograph. Dr. V was remembering it, too, standing before me quiet and thoughtful, reliving the moment when she saw him. She gathered some strength, stepped forward, and laid her small hands on mine. “You should be happy, Mr. Morton. I have never seen anyone like that young man. Never. And now he’s going to be free. He’s going to be fine.”

  No, he’s not, I thought. Because I’m not any damn Mr. Morton, and I’m getting closer. Because I’m a wolf and I’ll find him, today, because Bridge said if you can’t find the man.…I offered Dr. Venezia-Karbach a weak, watery smile. “Is he all right, though? What kind of place is this they holding the man?”

  “I don’t know, really.” She shook her head softly. “It was a room. I don’t know. There was a generator of some kind, but it kept cutting out, and the lights would flicker on and off.”

  “So like a—like some kinda empty building?”

  My mind turned. Sprinted out in different directions—warehouse district, abandoned homes, unfinished building projects. “What about all your things?” I gestured around the room—stethoscope, laryngoscope, tongue depressors, gauze. “What about all the doctor things?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No. My supplies I brought with me. There wasn’t any…no, nothing like that.”

  In her mind, she was there. The place. Lair. Hideaway. I could see her seeing it. Smelling it. I leaned in.

  “What is it?” I asked. Simple and quiet. “What?”

  “There was…” She nodded. Her small bird eyes narrowed, remembering. “Kind of a noise, an odd noise. A whooshing. Like pipes. Like water flowing through pipes.”

  “Pipes?” I said. “So…a basement? Some sort of cellar, or—”

  “Maybe. It might have been. I don’t know. That’s—I think that’s what I know. Okay? I think that’s all I can tell you.”

  The doctor was done. She was casting more and more anxious glances over her shoulder at the door, as if any moment the next patient would come in, or her nurse, or Father Barton himself, glaring with those pale eyes, floating a foot off the floor, leveling a finger at her, denouncing her as a betrayer of the Cause.

  “Well, listen,” I said. “I thank you so much. I really do. If I can just see his face…”

  She nodded rapidly, said, “Yes, yes,” and something in the rapidness of her nodding and the way she darted her lips in and out made me wonder if it wasn’t just guilt she was feeling but fear. Who is this Barton, anyway? What kind of vengeful Old Testament father are we talking about here? I said thank you about a million times. Humbly I thanked her. Humbly I assured Dr. Venezia-Karbach that her confidence would not be betrayed. She smiled sadly, smoothed her lab coat, and put her face back on.

  “Oh, actually, though,” I said, when she was almost out the door, when she had almost escaped me. “I just have one more quick question, if that’s all right.”

  “No, Mr. Morton, I’m sorry. I don’t—”

  “Please.”

  “No more questions.”

  “Ma’am? It’s just—why did he need to see a doctor?”

  I did test the leash one time. Very early on, I tested it. Years ago. I suppose I had convinced myself, staring at some hotel-room ceiling in an insomniac stupor, as I had lain unsleeping so many of those early nights, almost every night in the first year of it, that the whole thing was a hoax, a con. They had drugged me, put me in a thick opioid haze for two hours, then told me on waking about the tiny computer chip they’d injected in my nervous system, right where the spine touches the brain, that it would be singing out my location from there on out.

  Ain’t no way, I told myself. That shit’s impossible, and I’m a fool to believe it. So I refused to believe it.

  I remember it was the first time that Bridge put me on to a woman. The service name was Darling. I traced poor Darling to goddamn Idaho City, Idaho, and I was supposed to be staking out the home of a relative, a second cousin, I believe, and instead I shoplifted a change of clothes from a department store and boarded a bus to Oregon, with a vague notion of hitching north to Port Angeles, stowing away on the ferry to Victoria. But when I got off the bus in downtown Portland, what did I see but three men in dark suits drinking coffee. All three stood up at once, and I turned around and got back on the bus and went back to Idaho and finished that job and the one that came after it. Mr. Bridge never mentioned it. Never said, “How was your trip?” That was not his way.

  The chip was no joke. No hoax. Everything is possible. Everything is real.

  That woman Darling, in Idaho, she wasn’t a woman. She was just a girl. She was all of twelve years old.

  I remember them all.

  18.

  A curl of smoke was coming up out of my car. I could see it from across two lanes of 12th Street, between the spreading leafless arms of an elm tree and the bent trunk of a streetlamp. A tendril of smoke, rising from somewhere in the hood, rising and spreading and dissipating into the wan daylight like an exorcised spirit. I hustled across the street, thinking for one crazy second that something had happened inside the engine of the sweet little Altima—it had given out and burst into flames and now was sitting there smoldering.

  But no, of course not. Halfway across the potholed street I slowed up. Cigarette smoke. That’s all. Of course. Someone was leaning against the car on the opposite side, smoking a butt, waiting on me.

  Had to be Maris. He’d done some digging, or Barton had; they’d pushed through my backstops and figured out that there was no Gentle in Carolina, no Dirkson at all. I looked up and down the street—was it too late to run? I looked for witnesses and hiding places. I was in the middle of the street. I willed myself some courage, willed myself a gun, imagined the heavy loose weight of a Colt in the front pocket of my overcoat, jostling against my hip like a deck of cards.

 
; It was the girl, the white girl. Martha. She had a chopstick in her hair, holding it together. She looked hesitant, half hopeful.

  I was so relieved I almost laughed. It was almost good to see her—and the kid, too, Lionel in a tracksuit a size or two too big, athletic stripes on top and bottom, plugged into his music, grooving his head back and forth like a snake, bouncing on his heels beside the car. He didn’t see me coming, but Martha did, and she gave me a funny self-knowing wave and a cringing sort of smile. She was smoking one of those ugly little hand-rolled hipster cigarettes, “sourced” free-labor tobacco and all that.

  “My goodness,” I said. “How are you?”

  “This is crazy,” she said. “I know. I know this is crazy.”

  “What’s crazy?”

  “Well. Okay. So—I need to ask you a favor.”

  What could I say? What would Dirkson say? What did I want to say? I said sure. She pulled out a booster seat from the backseat of her boxy pink SA hatchback, which we left parked on Meridian Street. Away we went, Lionel settled in the backseat and Martha up front beside me, her fingers laced in her lap.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “Uh, this way, I guess,” said Martha softly, and I went the way she pointed, straight south down Meridian Street.

  “So,” I said, and she smiled, bright but quick.

  “So,” she said, as if this was all perfectly normal, as if we did this every day. “You had a doctor’s appointment?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I did.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, yes, thank you. Just fine.” I was Dirkson. I had my glasses on. I held my hands at ten and two on the wheel. “Just a little thing. Slipped is all. Out last night working, and I just plumb slipped on the sidewalk and twisted my ankle. Not a big deal, but the folks in Jakarta, you know, any little thing…insurance and all…”

  I was talking too much, polishing my stupid lie until it practically glowed. She’d stopped listening anyway. She gazed out the window. She had on cheap sunglasses, cat’s eyes, which went perfectly, somehow, with the plastic chopstick in her hair. A vintage day dress, paisleys against midnight blue. Martha also had on this ring, a cheap little shopping-mall band of fake gold, and while I drove she was twisting it on and off, on and off, moving it restlessly from finger to finger, like she was running a shell game on herself. One thing I was used to seeing from young white people, it was confidence, an easy sense that the world belonged to them. This Martha, she had that, too—even now she was going through my glove compartment, examining my tapes, no big deal—but it was only a thin layer, only on the top. Underneath was all kinds of nervousness and fear.

  “Do you mind?” said Martha, the tape already half pushed into the player.

  “Not at all.”

  The Jackson 5 sang “Who’s Lovin’ You,” MJ out front, his four older brothers doing tight, high harmony in the back.

  I glanced at Martha, her head turned to look out the shotgun window, and I saw it again, the black box tatted on her neck, and below it a glimpse of cream-white skin and pale pink bra. I flushed, confused and obscurely angry. Lionel danced his head like a robot in the backseat. Storefronts rushed past the window. Medical supply; Oriental rugs; buildings available for lease.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess at some point I’ll need to know where it is we’re going.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Yeah.”

  Martha took a quick look at Lionel—tuned out, grooving to Michael, a world of his own—and launched in. “Okay, so what I need,” she said, “is, like, like a—an escort, I guess. Like…just—a friend, I mean. I gotta do this errand, kind of meet this lady…it’s—just this thing I gotta do. I thought she was gonna come up to the hotel, but now she said I need to come down to her.”

  Straitlaced Mr. Dirkson frowned a little bit. “Is this in relation to a health-care position?” and Martha said, “No, not exactly,” while my mind clicked through possibilities. Drugs? Guns? Easy to imagine Martha, single mother in thrift-shop clothes, lugging around some wagon of debt she was trying to get shed of.

  Martha still wasn’t telling me where we were going; we were just going. I turned right on 16th Street. I stopped for a red at North Capitol.

  “And I’ve been advised—God, Jesus, that sounds so fancy.” Martha made a fancy voice, uptown lawyer, mock snooty. “I have been advised not to go by myself. You know, as a…” She looked over at me. The light turned green. “As a girl.”

  She didn’t say as a white girl, but there it was with us in the car anyway. I nodded.

  “But—so…you just…you’re a helper. You’re obviously one of the good guys. So I thought…”

  I said nothing, and my silence I knew she would attribute to shyness or modesty when in fact I was muzzled by the horror of it, the dark, grieving irony of the idea that I would be a good person—that I would obviously be such a person. I blinked back to life and turned left on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street. I had an idea already of where we were going. I could feel it coming. Michael came into the last chorus, soared right up into it like a little angel.

  “I am not going to even offer to pay you. I have, like, zero dollars. But I could owe you. I’ll pay you—maybe even later today. Maybe even after the meeting.” She took a breath. She looked at me, plucky and anxious, over the rims of the cat’s eyes. “So what do you think?”

  The only logical answer was no. I was hot on my case. I was within sight of the finish line. I had Bridge breathing down my neck, I had old ghosts making howling circles in my mind.

  “So?” I asked. “Where to?”

  She had it on a piece of paper. She dug it out from the pocket of her jeans. She had the address on the silver foil of a gum wrapper. “Here. Uh. Tenth and Belmont.”

  I nodded. Yeah. I was already on my way. “Freedman Town.”

  I knew what it was like to get a person to do something and they’re not sure why. To coerce. Give over some information; help you find an address. I did it all the days of my life. I didn’t know what I was stumbling into here, doing some kind of downtown deal or maybe bringing money to some rough boys so they’d teach a lesson to an ex-boyfriend. None of that seemed likely, just from my read on this girl, but people have layers in them. People go down deep. They go all the way down.

  We got to the bridge to Freedman Town, a shabby two-lane span running over the slow brown churn of the White River. I was glad to be running Martha Flowers’s mysterious errand. All we do all day long is deal with our own problems, handle our shit some way or other. It felt nice, for a little while, to be dealing with someone else’s shit instead of my own.

  “Wow,” said Martha. “God.”

  I drove carefully through the streets down here—you had to. Potholes wide as craters, rocks and bottles in the street. The blasted apocalyptic acreage of Freedman Town.

  Lionel craned up in his booster seat and peered with wonder out the windows.

  I’d been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I’ve been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City’s got a few, and Chicago’s got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn’t give them a lot of options. The details are different—some of ’em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling.

  Martha, I could tell, had not been here before. Martha had never seen anything like it.

  “Here,” said Martha. “Will you just—can we just stop here?”

  “Are you okay?”


  “Yeah.” She gnawed at her pinkie. We were a block, still, from the address she had given me. “Just give me one sec, I think.”

  Her anxiety was a living thing, thrumming in the air between us, traveling through the recycled air of the Altima. She fiddled with the nearer stem of her sunglasses, sort of snapping it along the side of her head. A kid rolled slowly past the car on a skateboard, balancing a bucket on his head, while another kid taunted him not to drop it—“Careful, boy…careful, now…nice and easy”—then brayed laughter. There was a woman pushing a stroller, somehow keeping it in motion though she was on the phone and smoking a cigarette; the two- or three-year-old in the stroller was playing happily with a closed bottle of soda. A knot of tough boys sat on a stoop, smoking and staring hard at the street—the real thing, what my friends in Mapleton–Fall Creek had been aspiring to. As we watched, a man approached at a shuffle, opened a shoe box to them, offering whatever was in it for sale, and they shooed him away like they were kings.

  A big nasty dog, tall as a wolf, wandered zigzag from side to side, trailing its leash.

  “You can’t believe it,” Martha said darkly. “You can’t even fucking believe it.”

  “Watch your mouth, Mama.”

  “Sorry, bear.” She reached into the backseat and patted her boy on the knee, but Lionel was off on his own trip, staring out the window, tapping his nose with his finger, like a kid concentrating on a math problem.

  I didn’t feel it anymore. I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in the twenty-first century, in such a grevious state of disrepair. An invisible city, floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization.