by Ben Winters
That had been the last thing for Kevin. That’s what had finally done him in, hearing that, when Cook gave that sad report. She’s dead. Okay? She’s dead.
Subdued, then tortured, then killed.
But that was the aftermath. Carnage in the wake. The job itself had gone off without a hitch: Kevin had gotten himself to worker care, the nurses had packed him up in a barrel of blood and gotten him onto a truck, and then they made themselves disappear. The package to the trucker. Everything as planned. So where the hell was it?
“Hey. Hey!”
Marlon was coming out fast, crashing into Ada going in. But he was yelling at me. He took me by both my arms, sudden and fierce. “Hey! Do you know some fucking white girl?”
5.
Marlon had been washing the lawyer’s three old Cadillacs, pulling them out onto the driveway, one at a time, keeping a lookout for lurkers, peepers, anything strange out on the street. And he’d found something: a pink South African hatchback, obnoxiously visible on the sedate and moneyed suburban street, with a white girl in the front seat dozing.
Down in the basement, he insisted on holding Martha at gunpoint.
I said it wasn’t necessary, and Ada agreed with me, but Marlon said, “We don’t know what the fuck this girl is,” and Shai said, very quietly, about me, “We don’t even know who he is,” which I was glad nobody heard. So we sat in an awkward arrangement around the table, back down in the basement kitchen, a very different place in the morning: last night’s dishes were a precarious pile in the sink; thin bars of sunlight found sticky patches on the concrete floor.
It was me and then Martha, her knee bouncing with nervousness, her face bleary with worry or fear. Then Shai, Marlon beside Shai, opposite Martha, aiming his .45 at her while she told her story. Ada stood by the sink, arms folded, listening.
“I saw you getting…I saw these people”—Martha caught herself—these people. She winced. “I saw you getting beat up. I was scared.” Without her cat’s-eye glasses, without any drugstore knickknack in her hair, she looked more like an adult than I was used to. “I followed the car. I tried to be careful.”
“I guess that was a stupid fucking thing to do,” said Marlon.
“I guess we need to be more careful about being tailed.”
That was Ada, from over by the sink, and the reproach didn’t much help Marlon’s mood. He hissed and leaned back, sneering. Shai, very gently, laid her hand on his shoulder, and I saw it work, saw the tension ease out of his body. Love at work.
“All right,” said Ada, impatient. “Look.” She pointed back and forth between Martha and me.
“You know this person?”
“Yes.”
Pointed to me, then back to Martha. “You trust her?”
I hesitated a half beat, and into the hesitation welled up the horror of what I was, what I was doing. It wasn’t Martha I distrusted; it was myself.
“Yes.” I nodded. “I trust her.”
“All right.” Ada shrugged. “You still want to go in there and find that truck driver?”
Ada was a maker of plans—a hatcher of plots. Like Father Barton, like Officer Cook, like me. She came and pulled a chair up to the table and explained what she was thinking. Martha could be of use now for the same reason she had been useful in getting me across the border—because of the color of her skin. While Ada laid it out, walked through the way it could work, I watched Martha from the corner of my eye and could tell how carefully she was listening. Her eyes, which I was used to seeing jump all over the place, were focused and intense. She was getting herself ready.
The plan was crazy. Risky as hell, no question about it. There were a very few things that Ada and her group could tell me about GGSI, about the layout and security arrangements of its headquarters. Most of what they knew was secondhand or thirdhand, and much of it was outdated. Rumors, whispers, gossip about the inside. Of my specific questions, they could only answer a couple: yes, we would be screened in on arrival and checked out on departure. There were cameras, yes, all over the campus, but not in the areas that were restricted to white workers only; Alabama state law forbade the surveillance of employees without cause.
It occurred to me to ask if Ada knew anything about that one building whose identity I could not figure out from the overhead map in the full file—that unlabeled structure jammed in behind the Institute for Agricultural Innovation—but of course I could not ask about it, because then I would have to explain where and how I had seen such a map.
We came to the end of the conversation. The plan was formed, as formed as it was going to get, and still Martha remained quiet. Her hands, too, were still; not fiddling with her rings, not tucking a lock of hair into the corner of her mouth. I had the odd sense of seeing her real self rise up out of the motionless form of her present body: like the person who had been inside the other person all along.
I looked at her when the talking was done. “You don’t have to do any of this,” I said. “You’ve got your money.”
She turned her head slowly and looked at me.
“But what about Steubenville?” she said, and I blinked.
“What?”
“You don’t think it’ll work. The whole crazy business with the man in Steubenville. The guy who said he can get me into that database.”
“TorchLight,” I said, then, “No. No, I doubt it.”
“So?”
“So?”
I knew her expression so well. I saw what she was seeing: opportunity.
“But if this plan—if her—I’m sorry, what—”
“Ada.”
Martha smiled at her. “Thank you. If Ada’s idea works, and we can get in there, then don’t you think there will be a way to access it directly? Once we’re inside? Once we’re in there? Isn’t that right?”
“Right.”
“Right. So. So I can’t miss that chance.”
“But…” I started, but something in her face—in her eyes. I stopped.
“I will call my sister. She will hang on to Lionel another day.”
“Yeah. I know. Martha…”
I stopped.
“It’s dangerous,” she said, speaking very slowly. “It is very risky. I understand. But. But—if there is a way to find out what has happened to that man.” This was in the form of a question, but her voice had no questioning in it. “Then that is what I am going to do. I have to.”
“You gotta understand, though—”
“I know.”
“I can’t promise anything.”
My protests were halfhearted. She was firm, but I could have talked her out of it. I could have told her there was some other way. I could have opened myself all the way up, torn off the blank mask, and shown her my face. I could have told her to forget the whole damn thing.
But this was my chance, and I knew it. I told her that if this was what she wanted, I wanted her to have it. I told her that if she helped me get in, I would try to get her what she needed. I told her that because I needed her. I had to have her. My empathy was woven, as ever, with cunning.
We spent the rest of that day cosseted in the lawyer’s house and with the lawyer’s people, refining and fine-tuning, building our story. Shai went up and down the stairs, collecting articles of clothing from the closet of the lawyer, from the closet of the lawyer’s dead wife. I ended up in a peach-colored sweater and in pants of Marlon’s, black pants without pockets. “There, that’s right,” he said. “That’s good. Trust me, man: down here they don’t like niggers having places they can stick shit.”
We did not see the old man himself again, but I heard him—three or four times I heard him—from an adjoining bedroom, moaning in his sleep.
6.
Thursday morning. Vivid and clear. Me and Martha, decked out and ready to go. Closing the doors of her sedan in the wide parking lot of Garments of the Greater South.
Martha, showered and shining, in a sharp red professional skirt and blazer, a piece of green jewelry pinned
at her breast; timeless pieces from the collection of the lawyer’s long-dead wife. Martha in good old fancy-white-lady drag, and me in the peach sweater and pocketless pants, already wearing the servant’s smile, already rolling in the bashful gait. Lifting the black rolling suitcase out of the trunk, loaded with the tools of the trade.
I eased the bag down onto the asphalt while Martha waited. I pulled out the handle of the suitcase. She started, and I followed. I was in charge of the bag. This was the South. She glanced back and I looked up and we looked at each other, just for a second, one last human look to go in on.
The plantation had not been hard to find. Coming off State Route 4, we saw a big green sign, a dedicated exit, as for a university or military base or theme park. The exit sign went so far as to proclaim the company motto—AMERICAN GROWN, SOUTHERN SEWN!—along with the logo I had seen previously on Jackdaw’s collarbone, the proud uppercase G with the other letters tucked safely inside. The logo that was supposedly waiting for me somewhere, somewhere in the endless South, emblazoned on that envelope, the needle in the haystack I was going to find.
That same logo was on each of the three buildings that together formed GGSI headquarters, three glass-walled skyscrapers standing lordly above the parking lot, blinking back the sun. The logo was on one of the flags flapping above the concrete plaza in front of the buildings. There were three altogether—one flag for the company, one for the state, and one for the United States of America. Flags and recessed concrete and a handsome fountain. There was a statue, a giant abstract bronze, rounded and swooping, which as you got closer turned out not to be abstract at all: it was a boll, a simple boll made heroic, a cotton boll like a triumphal arch.
I had seen corporate plazas. Corporate plazas in Manhattan, in Boston, in Washington, DC. This was no different. Exactly the same.
I held tightly to the grip of the rolling suitcase. I came up alongside Martha, but her sunglasses were on. Her human eyes were hidden now. She stopped just outside the door of the center building, and I rushed past her to open it. She walked past me and did not say thank you. Deep in her character, ready to go.
The lobby was vaultlike and chilly after the early-autumn warmth of the parking lot. The words GARMENTS OF THE GREATER SOUTH, INCORPORATED were six feet high on the back wall, cotton-white letters on a wall of blue-sky blue, alongside a gigantic photomontage of happy Asian children kicking soccer balls, turning cartwheels, shouldering their sturdy backpacks in their brightly colored cotton clothes.
“Yes?” The receptionist was waiting at a desk big as a spaceship between two banks of elevators. Red lipstick, blond hair, blue eyes, a tasteful gold necklace. “How can I help y’all?”
I ducked my head while Martha smiled.
“How are you this morning? My name is Ms. Jane Reynolds, from Peach Tree Management Systems. I am here to see Mr. Matthew Newell.”
“O-kay,” said the woman behind the big semicircular desk, lingering on the kay, teasing the word out into a question while she typed, pulling up a calendar. “And did you have an appointment?”
“Well, yes and no,” said Martha, and my head was still down, eyes down, but I could hear in her voice that she winked as she said it. “We met down at the CSO, back in June? And Matty—I’m sorry: Matthew; Mr. Newell—he was sweet enough to say that if I was ever in the area I should feel free to stop by.”
“Oh,” said the blonde. “I see.”
CSO was the Conference of Slaveholding Organizations. It was a safe bet that a plantation the size of GGSI would have sent a sizable contingent; it was an open question whether Matthew R. Newell, assistant vice president of transport operations, would have been among them. We were out on the wire here, me and Martha. Out there together.
“So would you mind just ringing up, see if he’s around? Of course I should have called first—I just had an appointment right down in Blessing, and I thought…”
The blonde was already in motion, offering Martha an empty smile and a wait-just-a-moment forefinger. She tucked the telephone receiver under her ear and pressed a button on her console. The elevator doors opened on the far side of the lobby, but no one got out. We had gone over everything on the way, discussed every detail, various contingencies and possibilities, but Martha was in charge now—she would have to be. My job was to walk with my eyes pointed downward at about forty-five degrees. My job was to smile and keep smiling.
There was no security in the lobby. No powerfully built men with keen eyes and bulges at their hips. Probably a panic button under the woman’s desk or a panic switch at her feet. Maybe a gun down there, too. And there were cameras, unhidden: one above the reception desk, angled down; one above each bank of elevators. Cameras in the public spaces, Ada had said, but not in the private areas. Not in the executive offices. That was as far as she knew; that was according to the latest reckoning. We were counting on it, but we didn’t know.
The receptionist cupped one palm over the mouthpiece. “Excuse me? Hi. Where did you say you were from again?”
“Peach Tree, ma’am,” I said. “Peach Tree Management Systems.”
“We’re consultants,” said Martha, flicking an irritated look at me, servant speaking out of turn. “Workplace efficiency. But like I said, it’s as much a personal call as anything. I just wanted to say hi.”
I pressed my hands together while the blonde said “Hmm” a couple more times and went back to murmuring into her phone.
I stood and waited and grinned and looked at the floor, fighting back against the simple, sick, vertiginous awareness of where I was, where exactly. I was tottering on the rim of it. Through those doors. Up those elevators. Behind these three towers…
I was breathing very slowly. Martha stared into the expanse of the lobby, and I could not guess what she was thinking. We were deep in character, and I’d taken us into this place, and I could feel the terrible weight of it pressing my flesh, and when the receptionist looked up again and smiled, her red-lip smile was the wide, burning grin of the devil.
“You’re in luck,” she said to Martha. “He is here, and he’ll be right out.”
“Oh, isn’t that nice,” said Martha. “That’s just perfect.”
“Yes.” She sniffed. “Your Negro will need to be cleared.”
Again, as at the border. Scalp and armpits, teeth and tongue; pants down, shirt up. They had a room for it, just off the lobby, and an attendant, a tired-looking free black man who scowled and said nothing as he ran his clumsy fingers over my body. I stood absolutely still. I held my arms out. It would have been the school at Bell’s, the first time, the first of such searches I had endured in my life. Lesson 1: your body is not your own.
This place, this plantation, was on a different order from Bell’s. Physical size and scope of work, a different universe of slavery from the little three dozen acres where I’d been raised. Green grass, farm country, pig lots, cattle pens, silos. The world I was about to enter was a twenty-four-hour operation, ultramodern and ultraefficient, with computerized inventory tracking and comprehensive worker-control protocols. There was a camera in the upper left corner of the room, bearing cold witness to the man and me. I was here and I was there at the same time, feeling this tired guard’s hands on my chest at the same time as I was feeling the rough hands of the guards at Bell’s, a lifetime ago.
This is so much worse, I thought, and immediately thought, No, no, nothing could be worse. But it’s a waste anyway, isn’t it, the idea of comparison, just in general. Holding up one kind of horror against another.
“All right.” The bored security man broke his silence, straightening up, pulling off his gloves and chucking them into a bin. “Bag now.” Quickly he opened the rolling suitcase I was hauling, rifled through that, too—a change of clothes for Martha, change of shoes, and a laptop turned off, which he opened and closed uninterestedly.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re clear.”
But then before I could lower my arm he wrapped something around the wrist, a thin st
rip of paper, bright green, which secured to itself, tight as hell, tugging at the small hairs of my arm.
“That is an identification bracelet,” said the man. “That identifies you as a Person Bound to Labor and a member of our staff.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll come back through here again on your egress from this facility. But every dark-skinned person is required to wear a band while on the grounds.” He showed me his own bracelet, which was a cool red.
“But don’t you have a color for folks like me? Negroes like me, just—just here for a visit?”
“No, man, we don’t.” His voice was dry, humorless. “We don’t actually get too many of those.”
Martha was waiting for me in the lobby, laughing with her hand on the arm of a short, fat white man in a sport jacket, who was laughing, too. This was Newell—instantly recognizable from his picture on the company website, where we’d found him yesterday afternoon on an old laptop belonging to the lawyer’s people, making our plan.
It was Martha who pointed to him—to his weak-chinned, sappy, smiling head shot, his sad-sounding title and anemic history within the company. There’s the guy. There’s the guy we want.
And now here he was, the guy we wanted, dumpy and thin-haired and pink-cheeked, in casual slacks and polished shoes, with one of Martha’s hands on his forearm, the both of them laughing like old pals.
“Well, of course I do,” Matty Newell said hopefully. “You’re not the kinda gal a fella’s gonna go and forget.”
“I do like to think so,” said Martha, her laugh a tinkling falsehood. “I surely do.”