Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  “What?” said Martha. I pulled her out by the arm. “What did you say?”

  I pulled her down the stairs. “What did she say?”

  I hustled her and her child along the block, her eyes wild. I stuffed her in the car. I drove her away.

  20.

  The TV was on at the Fountain Diner. It played with the sound off, attached to the end of a jointed mechanical arm jutting out over the counter. Everybody in the place was watching or half watching the hearings, the special Saturday session of the Senate finance committee: customers with eyes locked on the screen, ignoring their pancakes, busboys rubbing the same spot of dirty table over and over. Our waitress set down our plates in the wrong spots, gazing up at the TV. Batlisch, unflappable, staring back at her tormentors. Her thumb tucked between forefinger and middle finger, her eyes narrowed and stern, and the crawl below the screen: “If the question, Senator, is do I think that my opinions…or my, my ideology, as you put it, although I don’t think that’s necessarily…no, excuse me. If I may finish? If the question is, do those ideas put me outside the mainstream of American opinion, then I think the answer is no. I think the answer is a resounding no.”

  The busboy at the next table, a young guy, shaved bald, he liked that answer. He nodded to himself with satisfaction and walked back toward the kitchen, smiling.

  Even Lionel, seated across from me at our booth, was rapt: maybe not totally understanding, but thinking somehow, as everybody thought, that this was some big deal. Some kind of watershed moment, as they like to call them. He was coloring on the back of the menu, but he kept stopping, staring for a beat or two at the tough white lady on the screen. I stared at the TV, too, trying to gin up some feeling of excitement, trying to feel what the busboy was feeling, the cooks. Let’s say she did get confirmed. Maybe she does what she says—maybe she brings new vigor to the prosecution of financial firms that trade in blood money. But the firms would find ways around it. The Southern Regional Lobbying Association would send in their K Street shock troops, white papers in hand, and the floors of Congress would ring with the old refrains of popular sovereignty and imperishable tradition. Nothing would change.

  Martha was the only person in the place ignoring the TV. She sat very still, staring straight ahead, steam rising off the cup of coffee that was all she ordered.

  “You all right?” I said, and she exhaled.

  “I guess so.” She shook her head. Her hair had fallen down. The chopstick that had pinned it all together had disappeared, maybe into her cavernous purse, maybe onto Mama Walker’s floor. “I mean, no. This is weird. I dragged you into this thing, and now—I mean, it’s just weird. Aren’t you even gonna ask?”

  “Ask what?”

  “Are you serious?” Martha peered at me, at Jim Dirkson, trying to figure out this good, gentle businessman, too polite or too dense for this universe. “About twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure. Well, I guess I did wonder.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  She’d wanted lunch, asked for us to go, and here she was not eating. She’d picked the restaurant, too, and I was keenly conscious the whole time we sat there of Officer Willie Cook. It was his favorite spot, after all, and right there was the table where he’d been seated with his white partner, I could see it from where we were sitting, and it was having an effect on me. I felt jittery and unsafe. I kept seeing that overfriendly smile, that knowing expression of his. While Martha sat and stared into whatever dark vistas her life gave her to stare at, I wondered how I might explain to Officer Cook what I was doing here, what bereft, wifeless Jim Dirkson was doing enjoying lunch with his new white ladyfriend—and the other way around, of course. “Oh, yes, Martha, this is Officer Cook—he’s a police officer I know and also an agent of the Airlines…”

  On television, Donatella Batlisch finished a point—“considering each issue on its merits, absent any kind of prejudice”—and lifted her water and sipped it and set it down again. C-SPAN then turned the camera on a pair of richly jowled southern senators huddled together, whispering with grave expressions, conscious of the cameras.

  What the hell was I doing, anyway? I was in the middle of a case. I had a man I had to find. I had Bridge biting at my heels.

  “Honey?” said Martha. Lionel had put his head down on the table. He was crying. “Baby—baby, what?”

  It was just the maze, though. He’d been trying to work the maze on the back of the menu, a sea-creature theme, and he couldn’t crack the fucker, and it was making him weep. This was right—this was good. With all that was happening in his mama’s world, all that was happening in the whole world, he was stymied by the maze. A baby octopus, trying to find the way home to his cave.

  I leaned across the table and pointed, and he started, hesitated. I put my finger beside his and showed him.

  “Oh,” he said. “Duh.”

  “This is a tricky one,” I said. “Just take your time, now. Take your time.”

  He went slowly, cautiously, started down a path following the line I proposed, and wound his way out. He circled where it said END a couple times, and I said, “There you go,” and we took a look at each other for a second or two.

  “What do you say, Lionel?”

  “Thanks, Mr. Jim.”

  “Well, you’re very welcome.”

  There was no question that I was feeling something toward Martha and her son, some softening. But there was a sense of danger, too, a caution flag whipping way in the back of my mind. I could have gotten up anytime, said it was nice to meet y’all, and gotten back to work. What was I doing?

  “There is this man I met,” said Martha, looking through me—past me.

  “What, now?”

  “A man in Ohio. Steubenville.” She said the town name one syllable at a time, as though it were make-believe. “Steubenville. I didn’t meet him. I met him on the Internet.”

  Her voice was distant, quiet, but full of force. She needed to be telling this to me—to someone. The whole rest of the restaurant was watching TV. Lionel was back in Lionel world, drawing a castle in a blank space on the menu.

  “He said that for twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars, this guy, he could…well.” She took a deep breath, looked at me head-on. “So apparently there’s a…like a, a database.”

  “A—what, now?”

  But I knew immediately. Immediately, much had become clear.

  “A database. It says where they all are.” She leaned across the table. She was fidgeting with her fingers, twisting them together. “All the slaves, you know? And this guy says if I pay him, he can—he can get into that for me.”

  “Huh,” I said, soft and uncertain, as if I didn’t know precisely what she was talking about.

  The database was TorchLight, a comprehensive listing of every person who is or who has ever been held by any of the plantations, factories, mines, “working prisons,” home systems, oil rigs, all the endless variety of places where Persons Bound to Labor are bound. All slaveholding corporations and individuals are obligated under the laws of their various states to report to TorchLight every purchase or sale or escape, every birth and every death, every injury resulting in a scar. Every piece of data to be stored and cataloged.

  All the information crucial to the southern man-owning class—those with the vested interest in the health, current value, and projected depreciated value of their workforce.

  I was profoundly skeptical of Martha’s mysterious database hacker from Steubenville. I had tried over the years, on various assignments, to find my way into the TorchLight database. It would have been handy for all kinds of reasons. But TorchLight was protected by law, protected by internal security, protected by proprietary software. You damn near had to be sitting at a computer in some whiphand’s back office to open the thing up.

  “But who—” I started, and Martha turned her gaze very quickly to her son, then back to me, and even old Jim Dirkson understood. And just at that moment, of co
urse, the lady came, my sandwich and the boy’s pancake platter and the carafe to refill Martha’s coffee. Martha said “Hey, Liney? You want to hear something crazy?”

  “What?” Lionel looked up. “What’s crazy?”

  “You want to listen to music while you’re eating?” She dug out from her pocketbook a pair of big headphones, and she plugged him in to some sort of thin handheld device, no bigger than a slice of bread, one of the marvelous new Japanese imports—her sister had gotten it for him for his birthday. When he was inside the cocoon, when I was eating, she told me about his father.

  “His name was Samson. Sam.”

  “That’s an unusual, uh, what do they call it? An unusual service name.”

  Martha’s eyes flashed darkly. “That wasn’t his service name. He had one, but we don’t need to talk about it. He wouldn’t have—he doesn’t like to talk about it. His name was Sam, okay? Sammy, sometimes. He had been on a shrimp boat.”

  “Louisiana?”

  “Alabama. Bayou La Batre.”

  I had no experience of shrimp-boat slavery, only the stories: hot work, sweat work, the boiling sea, and the roll of the waves.

  “There was some kind of crazy rescue,” Martha said. “The Mexicans. With the boats. I forget what they call them.”

  “Los emprendedores, I think,” I said as if I didn’t know for sure. As if I didn’t have in my head a catalog of every kind of South American or Central American or Canadian partisans, all the alien freelancers. There had been a movie called Los Emprendedores, actually, and I happened to have seen it—it came out during my Chicago years, and I snuck into a theater on Halsted Street and watched it twice in a row. Edward James Olmos as the pirate jefe, Denzel Washington as the stoic peeb. James Woods, maybe, someone like that, as the noble but conflicted Coast Guard captain running them down. There’s a famous scene at the end, the two exiles leaping overboard, choosing to face the sharks.

  Martha told me that Samson had been a tackle-box rescue, belowdecks, tumbled by waves, washed up in Jacksonville, fetched up somehow in New Albany, where she had been living at the time, as arbitrary a locale for him as it had been for her.

  A UPS driver, a thick-armed white man who delivered to the outpatient clinic where Martha was working, had whispered to her after work one day: We’re tryna get help together for this boy. Can you help? “I thought he was hitting on me,” Martha remembered. “The UPS guy!” She went to the meeting, though, and there was this boy—this man. With all the marks of his journey: fingers blistered from the mast, his back a mass of half-healed scars. One eye burned out from six sun-bright weeks at sea.

  “He was so beautiful,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what I was expecting. I didn’t know what to expect. Some, like, skinny, ignorant, bald…thing. Like, not a human. Like a monster or something. But he was…” She shivered a little, a shiver of memory, a shiver of awe. “He was beautiful.”

  “Did you know?” I said softly. “It is illegal for peebs to be shaved bald.”

  “Oh?” Absent. Lost in memory.

  “Yeah. State law. All four. Without hair, sometimes, it’s hard to tell who is black and who is white.”

  “Oh.”

  She turned and looked at her son, who was ignoring his pancakes, dancing back and forth with the headphones on. She mouthed to him: “Eat, honey. You gotta eat.”

  He gave her a thumbs-up, kept on grooving.

  Martha and Samson fell in love, she and the runaway. It’s so cheesy, she told me now. It’s so stupid. But it wasn’t even love, she said. It was: whatever is next up from love.

  “I mean, just, straight up. Hard-core. Love, love, love. Have you ever been in love?”

  Castle. Big eyes in the dark, his long arm thrown across my chest. My brother.

  And Alix. One woman. In Chicago, during the good years. Alix. A stock girl at Townes Stores. Complicated, gorgeous black woman, fierce and political and romantic. I never told her the truth about me. Never even came close.

  “No,” I said. Jim Dirkson was a lifelong bachelor. A mama’s boy. “Not really. Nothing to speak of.”

  Martha’s coffee was cold. On TV, the hearings were on a break. Pundits were huffing at each other in a studio, the DC skyline behind them.

  Dirkson was listening to Martha with warmth and kindness, his head tilted and his eyes wet with empathy, and I was listening, too, in there under Dirkson, alert and anxious, my heart beating rabbit fast. Waiting for Officer Cook to come in and take his favorite seat, waiting—absurdly—to spot Mr. Bridge in the spectators’ gallery at the Batlisch hearing, although why would he be there? And how would I know his face?

  While I listened attentively to the story of Samson’s recapture—how a very clever hidey-hole had been constructed for him above a public men’s restroom, how Martha and the UPS man and the UPS man’s roommate were so, so, so careful to bring Samson food without being seen, how they worked with utter discretion to find a connecting flight—I thought of the faceless man who had been working the file. A man in a New Albany hotel room, listening to phone conversations on headphones, tracking data points from satellite software, a man with no face but my same heart.

  “And…” I had to clear my throat. “What happened to him?”

  Martha glanced at Lionel before she answered, but he was eating in earnest now, bobbing his head while he shoveled in mouthfuls of pancakes. “I was at the clinic; I was working, you know.”

  I could see how this killed her, that she had been at work. She’d been spending every extra moment with Samson, but this wasn’t an extra moment. She was at work, and the UPS man called, talking fast, crying on the phone: there was this van, this white van, and they were dragging him…

  I put my hand on her hand.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, Lord.”

  It is a very specific skill, pretending to be okay. Pretending to behave as one ought to in a particular situation, leaning forward, giving a small smile of earnest empathy, hiding, meanwhile, a storm of terrible feeling, patting the hand of a friend. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  No, not mine, I thought. Not mine personally.

  And meanwhile, all the while, my mind was alive. I could not stop it. I was thinking about one or maybe two things I had noticed during the last three days. Thinking about Mama Walker’s apartment, what Dr. V had said about water. Retracing my steps. The whole time she was telling her story, there I was, I was working my case. I was in my world.

  Lionel screamed—“Ah!”—and I jumped. Martha shrieked, turned to him. “Ah!” he said again, but he was laughing and laughing, pounding the table. They had used strips of bacon and two strawberries to build a smile and eyes on Lionel’s pancakes, and he was lifting the features up one by one, de-facing the pancake man. “Ah! My face!”

  “Come on, honey,” said Martha, halfhearted, tender. “Be good…”

  Lionel ate at last and, having eaten, fell promptly asleep in the car, smudges of maple syrup on both his cheeks. I drove us back to Martha’s car and unbuckled the boy, lifting him up carefully so as not to wake him. Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger’s sentence, a green, impossible vision—the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.

  The real world was a trap, though, and I couldn’t escape it. I knew this, and because I knew this I knew where Jackdaw was. I had worked it out. Not on purpose, but that’s how it happens a lot of times—my mind does the work while I’m busy with something else.

  I’d always known I would crack it, because I always do, and I had.

  “Jimmy?”

  I don’t know where the nickname came from. Lionel’s face had appeared at the driver’s-side window, a
nd he was looking right in at me, concerned, peering at my face as if through aquarium glass. “Are you okay?”

  I guess maybe I had been moaning or something. I don’t know what all I was doing, but I was doing something. But he said it, like, three more times, instead of good-bye, suddenly racked with anxiety: “Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?”

  21.

  The rain had started. Fat dark drops, relentless out of a dark sky. I watched it come down from the balcony of the room.

  It would have been nice to be able to say Sorry, boss, no idea. I can’t crack it. Move me on, I guess, or make good on your threat and send a van to pack me up and haul my ass back home to Bell’s.

  But I knew. Goddamn me, I did.

  The photograph was locked away with the rest of the file, but I could see it clear as looking at it: the delicate face, bemused expression, grief-stricken, scared. Oh, Jackdaw; oh, son; oh, poor lonely boy.

  The rain was rushing down outside. Making up for all its timidity and teasing over the last few days. Coming down in sheets, in crashing torrents, pounding down onto the parking lot outside. Thunder rippled in a distant corner of the sky.

  I took out my cell phone and took off Jim Dirkson’s glasses and folded them arm over arm and put them away, then I settled on the edge of the bed, holding my phone between my hands. One phone call.

  The rain was a wall of gray.

  This case had been building up in me, pushing against the barricades like rushing water, not only the case but the town, the girl, the memories, all these red-and-black memories, crashing in and pushing in on me since I got here, too. And why were these visions returning now, my old story flashing back to life, coming down out of the gray Indiana sky? Why now? Why—

  I told myself I didn’t know, but I did; I had some inkling. I had some idea.

  And now all of it would be over. One call to Maryland. Just make the fucking call.