Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  “They ain’t our people,” Cook said.

  “Your people—”

  Barton shook his head. “We work with various entities—”

  “They left her. Left her behind. So I told them…” He rolled his head backwards, and it pushed against my chest. “I told them, go and get that girl and I tell you where I put your fucking envelope.”

  Silence. The sun was rising. The ugly water lapped at our feet. Barton stood with his eyes closed, some of that spit still making its slow way down his cheek, over an expression of agony and forbearance.

  And then Barton took another step, and I said, “Stop,” but he ignored me. He knelt in the muddy water at our feet, and the brown ripples lapped the hem of his robe, his shoes, his thin brown socks. He spoke with a voice that was soft and charged and urgent, as if he were administering a rite.

  “You must reconsider, Kevin. You must. We are talking here about the fate of three million people.”

  “I don’t care about three million people. I care about one. You go and get her, and I tell you where it is.”

  “We can’t do it,” said Barton. “That plan was years in the making. Years. We can’t just wander into places—”

  “She’s dead,” said Officer Cook suddenly. “Okay? Your girl is dead.”

  Barton turned to look at the cop, and Maris was looking at him, too. There was a long, brutal stillness. None of them spoke, but in the gloom of the sunrise I could read their silent communion—they hadn’t planned to tell him, afraid of how he would react, what he would do, but now there was nothing left. No other choice. The government had arrived, a monster was in their midst, the situation was at crisis, and so he had been told.

  Kevin’s face, meanwhile, had gone slack with astonishment and grief. I felt his narrow rib cage next to mine, felt his grief jump like an electric arc from his heart into mine, and then at last he wailed. The sound that was coming out of poor Kevin was low and long, an animal’s trapped holler. “No,” he was saying, more sound than word. “No…”

  Barton, without expression, watched him scream. His pale eyes were lasered in on suffering Kevin: X-raying, filleting, dissecting. I believe that if he could have he would have cut into that boy and torn his secret out by hand.

  Cook kept going, sighing, sad. “They found out she helped you get out, and they went and put her down. They made it look like an accident. You know how they do.”

  Kevin shook his head, pain evident on his face. Cook’s choice of words was brutal: they put her down. Like a dog—a wolf. Something wild.

  “No, see, no,” said Kevin. “They can’t do that. She can get punished, but—no, capital punishment…no. There’s laws. Laws…”

  Wishful thinking. I thought it but did not say it. There are laws. There are rules. Violent slavery is against the law. But rules are forever being broken. Guards get carried away. Workloads get dangerous. Franklins get bribed; Franklins are sloppy; Franklins don’t give a shit. A surprising number are former guards. When I was ten or eleven years old I knew a PB called Cat’s Eye who used to call a certain working white, whose name was Dickie, he used to call him Dickweed and say, “Oops, sorry ’bout that,” and every time he got punished, and then he’d do it again. Then one time he was working in the tannery, and he fell into the vat. Industrial accident; these things happen. Working whites somehow missed him going in, and so did the guards, and even the Franklins—three yellow jumpsuits in the room and nobody noticed until it was time to fish out what was left of him with the long curved stick they kept hung on the wall in there. The stink of it filled the building so severely that the first three Families who worked that room afterward had to work it with rags tied around their mouths, even after it had been closed for a week for fumigation.

  “Yes,” said Cook. “Sucks, man, I know. It sucks.”

  “Yeah,” said Maris.

  “It is God’s will,” said Barton, “because now you are free…free to tell us—”

  But Kevin had had enough after “It is God’s will.” God’s will was more than he could bear, and he thrashed and brought his knee up into me, which I was not expecting, and maybe I didn’t want to stop him, maybe that’s why he had the chance to twist around, knee me in the side of my leg, grab the gun from my hand, and aim it at Father Barton.

  “Monster,” he shouted, and Barton said, “I am not the monster, son, I—”

  A pair of pops, one after the other, pop pop, barely audible over the river rush—pop pop—ricocheting and overlapping each other, and everybody was moving at once in every direction. Barton jerked as if hit, but he had not been hit, only me, a sudden appearance of pain in my shoulder. I saw as I fell backwards with the bullet that it was Maris who’d fired, Maris, with Cook’s gun, scrabbled up from the ground, and Kevin had taken the other shot, right through the chest: I fell, and he fell on top of me, and he was dead.

  He should not have died, but he had died, and there I still was.

  I should have died.

  I should have died in Bell’s Farm in a rainstorm and a swamp of blood, and I should have died on a Chicago sidewalk. I should have fought against the men from the vans until they were forced to shoot to kill.

  And now here beside this gray churning river I should have been the one who got shot, but there I still stood, and still I wanted life.

  The sun continued on its rise. A wash across the scene, blood splatter on the shallow rocks, scuff marks on the scrub. And all the anger and confusion turned upon me. Maris and Cook wheeled toward me, and Maris was still holding the gun.

  “Gimme my gun back,” said the cop. The sun caught his class ring. Class president, homecoming king. All of us just a bunch of people out here, stumbling around down by the river.

  “I will return it to you when I’m through,” Maris said to him, and then to me, steely-voiced, cool: “Stand up.”

  I stood up.

  “Raise your hands in the air.”

  Barton was kneeling in the low run of the water, with Kevin’s head cradled in his lap, praying. Or silently cursing. Or, as he stroked the side of that dead child’s face, trying to bring out the information that he wanted so desperately, bring it up to the surface by conjure or caress. Maris advanced toward me. It seemed wild to me that they would do it here, here with the morning traffic already rumbling past within earshot. Barton was holding the boy, and Maris was coming closer with Cook’s service pistol.

  “Wait; wait.” Cook was in motion, moving fast. Putting himself between Maris and me. “Hold up.”

  The cop crouched down by the priest, and they huddled together, their heads just touching, the two of them an arch spanning Kevin where he lay, in and out of the water. Cook was whispering into Barton’s neck, and the priest began to nod, fire coming into his eyes.

  “What?” said Maris, and then louder. “What?” Impatient, nostrils flaring. Anger fuming off his forehead. This monster, this government man, me—I needed to die, right then. It was so clear.

  But the other two men kept talking, a minute or more, with Maris frozen out and Kevin dead and me just waiting, until Cook pulled back and stood up. “All right?”

  Barton rose also, laid Kevin’s head down gently, and rose slowly, too, saying “Yes” again and again, and I saw how pleased Cook was with himself that he had made this sale, whatever it was. Even as the arrogant priest swooped in to seize his idea, swoop in and take it over: Mockingbird mentality. “Here is what we are going to do.” His voice was steady now, steely. The murmuring priest was gone, the fiery preacher was gone; here now was the field commander, leader of men, decisive and determined. “You will go and make these arrangements,” he said to Cook. “But first you need to deal with the body. Do you have a way to handle it?”

  “Yeah,” said Cook. “I do.” He looked down at Kevin, and so did I, and we saw the water wash over the boy’s face, his eyes staring up at the sun.

  Barton next addressed Mr. Maris. “You will take the government man to the place and wait. Do you understan
d me? You are to wait.” The priest did not wait for Maris’s answer. He turned and walked up the slope to the road, water dripping from the fringes of his cassock. “Now,” he said. “It is Sunday. I’m going to Mass.”

  Maris did as he was told.

  He drove me to Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise, where I had been before, and we sat in that dusty main room, in the circle of fold-up chairs.

  We listened to church bells ringing, listened to the boastful revving of motorcycle engines, listened to the rattle and thump of hip-hop bass lines coming out of SUVs on Central Avenue. I longed for a radio, longed to ask my captor if he might put on something to pass the time. Something sweet and easy. Some Smokey Robinson; some MJ. But there was no engaging Mr. Maris. He sat across from me with his legs spread wide, staring at me evenly, a shotgun between his legs. I sat woozy while my shoulder burned and bled. My hands were tied together behind the back of the chair. I was offered no first aid, no water.

  “Were it me,” said Maris at one point, very softly, still staring, “I would make it hard for you. Slow. Do you understand my meaning?”

  I didn’t answer him. I was thinking about Kevin.

  Thinking about his old neighborhood: Brightmoor, in Detroit.

  Thinking about his parents: Charles and Chandra.

  Thinking about what he had done, what he had tried to do, and how he had died. I yearned for music, to separate me from these thoughts.

  “Were it me,” said Maris, “it would not be pleasant. Do you understand?”

  Still I said nothing. Maris was not done. He scraped his chair out of the circle, moved it closer to mine, keeping the shotgun between his legs. I considered ways I might have disarmed him, even with my hands tied to the chair as they were. Things I had learned.

  “How many has it been? How many have you brought in, in your hunt? How many?”

  When still I said nothing, Maris flared his nostrils, narrowed his gaze.

  “You do not even know. Is that it? More than you can count? More than you think of?”

  Two hundred ten. I could have told him if I wanted to. Two hundred ten since Chicago, since Bridge in the basement of the federal building, since my training in the Arizona desert. Two hundred ten, including this most recent: Jackdaw. Kevin. Son of Charles and Chandra.

  Kevin of the Brightmoor section of Detroit, Michigan.

  I held my hands and felt the blood creep out of my shoulder.

  It was nearly nightfall before the door of that old abandoned community center creaked open and Barton came in, with Cook behind him.

  Barton, out of clerical costume and in jeans and a shirt, carried a laptop under one arm. Cook leaned against the wall and chewed his gum while Barton pulled a chair out of the circle and dragged it by the back until he was sitting across from me.

  He opened the laptop and turned it so I could see the screen. Maris stayed where he was, the shotgun balanced across his knees.

  Barton clicked on a familiar icon, and a map opened up on his screen. The map showed the world, then it zoomed in, a sickening, rapid descent, until it showed the United States, then Indiana, then the city. There was a red dot, midcity, and it flashed on and off, on and off.

  “Do you know what that is?” said the priest.

  “I do.”

  “Tell me what it is.”

  I stared at the dot. I was transfixed. “It’s me.”

  “Correct.” He shut the computer and stood up. “It’s you.”

  “How is this possible?” I said, as if that mattered. As if that were the important thing. I was trying to figure out what was happening here—what was next.

  “As you know, this man is a law enforcement officer. There are certain channels to which he has access.”

  Cook waved his hand. “A man owed me a favor.”

  I took a new look at Officer Cook, and he returned my gaze steadily, slight smile, eyebrows raised. No big deal, his face was saying, but we both knew—if perhaps Barton did not—that this was a very big deal indeed. I imagined Mr. Bridge’s reaction if he were to discover this pinhole leak in the steel sides of the US Marshals Service Information Technology Division.

  Barton kept his eyes on me.

  “You are a tracker, and you are an investigator. What you are going to do now is track and investigate. The package Kevin was supposed to bring us, containing items of crucial importance, is still within the Four.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Barton grimaced, and Cook answered for him. “Well, it ain’t here, is it?”

  “The point is”—Barton again—“you are going to find what Kevin left behind and bring it to us.” He pointed to the laptop. “We will be watching where you go. We will watch you go south, watch you come north again. When you do, you will come here directly and hand over what you have found. If you do not do this, we will find you.” Again, he gestured to the computer. “And we will kill you.”

  There was no use pretending I didn’t understand. No use asking why. Barton understood exactly what I was, exactly how this worked. I had no fingerprints. I had no permanent identity. I had the training and the resources of the United States government behind me. And of course if I was caught, if I was tortured or beaten, if I were to be murdered or sold south, then no one would miss me. No one would care. An invisible man is an expendable man.

  I let my eyes rest a moment more on the blinking dot on the screen.

  I turned back to Cook. “I don’t understand something here. You’re tracking me, but my handler—my boss—he’s tracking me, too. So—”

  Cook started to answer, but Barton raised one hand, palm out, gesturing him to silence, as he had done to me at the Fountain Diner. Then he lowered his voice, cocked his head, and dropped into an impression of me, of someone like me, the cool, tough undercover agent calling in: “Hell of a thing,” he said, “but what I’m hearing is, this runner never made it past the Fence. He’s still down there, it looks like. If I’m gonna find him for you, that’s where I gotta go.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded. This was my life; this was my destiny—to be someone’s tool, someone or other.

  “When you have found what we are looking for,” added Cook, “you call and tell boss man no luck. You couldn’t find the boy.”

  “Hell of a thing,” I murmured.

  “Then you bring us our package,” said Barton. “And that’s it. We’re done.”

  “Done?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Cook. “Done.”

  This was too much for Maris. “No,” he said. “No—” but now it was his turn to be hushed by Barton’s imperious hand. “Yes,” said the priest. “Succeed in this. Make this right. And we will arrange a connecting flight to Canada for you.”

  Maris stood and laid his shotgun on the ground and stomped out of the circle of chairs, took a sullen distance on the far side of the room, leaning in the doorjamb with arms crossed. Barton did not move. Kept his glowing eyes on me.

  “All right,” I said. “So what am I looking for?”

  “It’s a package. Small. An envelope, padded and sealed. Kevin’s instructions when he had it were to mark it on the back with his initials, so we would know it for sure. We do not know if he did that or not. But on the front it will bear the insignia of Garments of the Greater South. Do you know that insignia?”

  I nodded. I knew it. I knew it from where it had been emblazoned on the collarbone of Jackdaw the slave, Kevin the sophomore. I knew it from the full file.

  “So it’s a sealed envelope from GGSI. Thick envelope. Marked on the back.” Barton nodded. “But what’s inside?”

  “Evidence. Powerful evidence that will bring down the very foundations of slavery.”

  I almost laughed: the willful obscurantism, the curtain of mystery. “So I go down into the Four, I chase down this thing, I don’t even know what it is?”

  “You will do,” said Maris from his new remove on the far side of the room, “as we have told you to do.” And for once, he and Cook were in ag
reement.

  “Or,” said the cop, “we’ll kill ya.”

  But Barton looked at me thoughtfully as he rose. “No, we’ll tell him. We will tell you. Mr. Maris and Mr. Cook, you will tell our friend how to make contact with the lawyer. And you will explain to him what it is he is recovering.” He laid his hand on my head and let it rest there a moment. “Let him understand why it matters so much that he succeed. Not just for his life but for the lives of us all.”

  Barton bowed his blond head toward me. “This is a hard situation we are putting you in. But you must see it”—he emphasized the same word he had used with Kevin, that soft and powerful word, must, soft and hard at once, like a hammer wrapped in velvet—“you must see this as your opportunity to undo the evils that you have done. To put a mark in the other column. Here you can be a soldier—you can be good, my son. You can do good.”

  24.

  It was another hour that I sat there with the Underground Airlines, in the cold company of Mr. Maris and Willie Cook.

  I was told everything I would need to know. Told me about the lawyer, where and how to find him, everything I needed to get started chasing down what Kevin had left behind.

  They told me all about it, too, the shocking evidence, what was going to shake the very foundations. And I had to work hard, pretending to be impressed with it all. With the enormity of the crime, with the scandal that was to be exposed.

  It was Cook who broke it down; Maris was still angry, seething at me from the back corner of the room like lurking death. Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, was in violation—long-term, systematic violation—of the Clean Hands laws.

  Beginning as early as 1994, GGSI had set up a cluster of shell companies in Kuala Lumpur through which they were annually channeling millions of dollars’ worth of cotton goods. Their Alabama plantation exported finished textiles to the Malaysian companies; the companies changed the labels and resold them to a stateside retailer. Even after the shells took their cut, even after the costs of shipping, even after the costs of bribery and permit forging and logistical workarounds, this operation was massively profitable for both sides.