by Ben Winters
“I do understand, believe me. Here, Ms. Reynolds—”
“Jane,” she said.
“Jane.”
Matty Newell was smiling weakly with a dim, hopeful light in his eyes. Martha took the proffered tissues and blotted tears from the corners of her eyes. Real tears. I almost laughed. I was still standing back by the light switch, just inside the door, invisible and quiet. But Jesus Christ, she was good at this.
“I have a very good presentation.” She pointed to the laptop. “I mean it. That is an excellent presentation.”
What she was doing was, she was letting it be his idea. She was walking him along, holding his hand tightly enough to lead him, loosely enough for him to be unaware of it. She was an absolute natural. Or maybe all women could do that to all men, if they wanted to.
“I would actually love to just do it alone, just the two of us,” and she gave that quick, simple, businesslike sentence—“I would actually love to just do it alone, just the two of us”—just enough backspin. Just enough.
“I tell you what, Jane,” said poor dumb Newell. “Let’s head up to the cafeteria, and I’ll buy you some lunch. Okay? We’ll have some lunch and…and you can tell me what you got to tell me. Don’t have to fuss around with all the tech and all that. You just lay it out for me, and we shall discuss it. Would that be all right?”
Her look of abject gratitude—Newell the savior, Newell the gentleman—was a thing of wonder.
“Oh, Matty, that would be so kind of you. And we really do have a remarkable product.”
“Of course,” he said. “And I’d sure like a chance to hear about it.”
He stood up. She closed the laptop, which we had loaded with exactly one slide, and followed him to the door.
“Oh, wait,” she said, glancing at me for just one half a second, just a quarter second to make sure that this was still our play. I nodded, a degree of head tilt well below Newell’s notice, and Jane Reynolds said, “Is there somewhere my boy can wait?”
“Oh.”
Newell stopped, flummoxed. I do believe the man had genuinely forgotten that I was in the room. “Well, he can wait right here, as a matter of fact. This door’ll lock behind me, and it won’t open until we come back. That all right with you?”
He wasn’t asking me, of course. Jane Reynolds said that it would be just fine with her, and he guided her with a hand on her back out into the hallway.
I waited five minutes after the door shut. I stood perfectly still and counted. Three hundred seconds.
While I was counting I stood as Jane Reynolds would expect to find her boy standing—in the corner with my head lowered, touching nothing, like a powered-down robot.
At three hundred I sprang into motion and the beautiful new music appeared in my head, the wild rhythms from the lawyer’s basement. It kicked up in me loud, so as I got to work it was with the urgency of that music. I moved through that small office like a drumroll, like an ascending scale.
I rolled Newell’s chair over to the bookshelf and stood on the seat and ran my finger along the topmost row of binders: dust. Same with the second level, and so on down to the floor: dust, dust, dust, all the thick binders and regulatory volumes so much set dressing.
I rolled the chair back to the desk. I already knew where this was going—I knew I would end up having to get into Newell’s computer. This was the twenty-first century: any kind of important document, anything that mattered, would be on the hard drive or on the server. But I did not want to be hacking if I could help it, so I was praying for a break here; I was hoping like crazy. I tugged open the narrow drawer of the desk, rifled past the stapler and the scissors, then I ducked over to the filing cabinet while I bent a paper clip into a twist.
Martha and I had agreed on twenty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes in Newell’s office to get the two pieces of information we were after, one for me and one for her, plus a five-minute margin on either end.
Nine minutes had already passed, five minutes of silent counting and four minutes of work, as I threaded the tip of the paper clip into the chintzy lock of the filing cabinet. I felt as I had at Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise, seven days ago now, Thursday to Thursday and a lifetime in the past. Break into a building, crack a desk: these were the easy assignments, the small projects outside of thought or contemplation, beyond regret or conscience. A hard deadline, a specific task. I twisted, caught the hook of the child’s-play mechanism, twisted again, and felt it give. The music played, jumping, triumphant, in my head.
There were five drawers to the filing cabinet. I worked from the top to the bottom.
Purchase orders, record keeping, maintenance logs—one thick folder with the details of a hundred different trucks and trailers. My forefinger ran along the spines of hanging folders. Forty-five seconds per drawer: pull open, quick examination, push it closed. Accident reports, insurance documents, vehicle registrations. The bottom drawer was financials: purchase orders and invoices, summaries of fuel expenditures quarter by quarter, reports on cost for overall fleet maintenance.
Buried on the bottom of the bottommost drawer, hidden beneath the thickness of the hanging files, was a curled bundle of papers wrapped in a rubber band.
What I was looking for would not be hidden, but I reached for this rolled-up sheaf anyway, tugged it up from its hiding place. It was a manuscript, typeset, dog-eared, with nervous doodles around the edges. I Love You, Too, Sir: A Tale of Forbidden Romance, by Matthew R. Newell.
“Jesus Christ, Matty,” I muttered and slipped it back where it had been. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
I turned back to the desk and moved Newell’s mouse to make the computer blink out of its standby sleep. I cracked my knuckles. I did not sit. I hovered over the desk, back bent, and got to it.
Once, in Chicago, someone had slipped me the URL for the US Marshals Service open cases page. I sat in horror in a library carrel, blocking the screen with my body, blocking from the world the sight of my own five-year-old file photo. Is that what I look like? I remember thinking. I clicked on the thumbnail picture to make it large. Those eyes—those eyes—I drew back from the picture of myself on that screen as if from a picture of the devil himself. Had that really been me?
My knowledge of computers, my ability to hack a database, to punch through firewalls, all that came later. That was all Bridge’s people. Four months of training in Arizona, plenty of that time in dark rooms navigating databases, penetrating secure servers, learning to follow the traces of men across the Internet.
I didn’t have to breach any firewalls to get to sweet dumb Matty Newell’s desktop, because he’d written his passwords in scratchy pencil on the back of the picture of himself with his wife and his dog. I trawled his hard drive. I entered search terms; I refined them; I found a spreadsheet, living on his desktop but cloned on an intranet server, called Contract Drivers Database, updated most recently ten days ago.
The truck drivers were identified here with four-character codes, and from Angie at Whole Wide World Logistics I had HR59, and now I was able to give HR59 a name: William Smith.
William Smith. I stopped, staring at the screen, my hands at rest on either side of the keyboard. The clock on the upper right corner of Newell’s screen gave me nine more minutes. There was no phone number listed for William Smith. No e-mail. No evident means of communication whatsoever.
I stared at the name, feeling time slip out from under me, hearing the mad acceleration of the music in my head, wondering how many fucking William Smiths there had to be in the state of Alabama. How many Willys and Billys and Bills were we talking about in the Birmingham metro area alone? In lieu of a phone number for Mr. Smith was a six-digit number that had to be a driver’s license number, and, after a couple of slashes, more indecipherable coding: FWH 9, B8. Numbers and letters. William Fucking Smith.
I made a fist and pounded it down onto the desk, and the computer jumped and shivered. Easy, Victor. Easy, Brother. Easy, now.
If I couldn’t find my
man, I could find Martha’s. Fulfill my other responsibility—the other reason I was here. I memorized William Smith’s tangle of identifying numbers and closed out the spreadsheet, tunneled back into the hard drive, typing furiously, breathing hard. I had seven and a half more minutes, and it took me just three of them to find what Martha had been prepared to drop almost thirty grand on—the infamous TorchLight database: every person in bondage, all across the Four. The three million, listed by service name, by PIN, by marks and scars, all organized and straightforward and user-friendly.
Here he was; here was Samson. Martha’s love and Lionel’s father. The man and his fate, in black and white on the screen before me. I hovered there, hunched forward, eyes wide, frozen for a minute’s contemplation.
“Well, damn it,” I said quietly.
I read it again, as simple a story as it was. Preparing myself to explain it to her. This is what she wanted to know, and now she would know. Worst-case scenario.
Two beeps from the hallway. I jerked my head toward the door as it slowly pushed open.
Three minutes early.
There was no hiding. I had no weapon. I made my hands into fists as the door came open and saw Newell in the doorway, his loafers on the carpet, his big belly, his thick right hand frozen on the handle. His eyes wide with confusion, trying to make sense of what he could see: a black man upright at his desk, fingers on the keys of the keyboard; to Mr. Newell I might as well have been an ape or a horse, upright and clacking away. Martha was in the shadow behind him, still in the hallway, eyes flashing, pleading apology—I held him as long as I—
“What…” he said. “What—what on earth are you doing?”
“Stay,” I said, hard and flat. “Stay,” but Newell followed some ridiculous manful instinct and put his body in front of Martha’s, protecting his guest from the one-man slave uprising in his office. But Martha, thinking quickly herself, had stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She made a gun of two fingers and jammed them into his back, and Newell fell immediately for the oldest trick in the goddamn book. He stuck his hands up in the air.
“My God,” he said to her. “You’re…” A pink flush came into his thick neck. His eyes were wet with confusion. “Are you a part of this? What is this?”
Martha didn’t answer. I kept talking to Newell as though he were in obedience school.
“Step forward slowly,” I said. “Your arms raised.”
He obeyed. He raised his hands higher, bending his poorly tailored sport coat out of shape, tugging the hem of his dress shirt out of his waistband.
“Just…I never—I never did anything to hurt any Negro,” he said. “I never did.” Sincerely he said it. Believing it.
“Get down on your knees. Lace your hands behind your head.”
He lowered himself down, a series of ungainly motions, a fat, scared, graceless man trying to move unthreateningly. Down on his knees Mr. Newell risked a longing glance at his desk, at the panic button, at the telephone. He knew that he was dead. He had known for all his life in that dire, dark, late-night-fearful part of his bourgeois brain that this moment was coming, was always coming. This was the terror that was the underside of mastery. He worked in a multimillion-dollar company, economy as big as Rhode Island, built on the backs of black people kept in cages, and so there had to be a reason they were in cages—it couldn’t just be because their suffering sowed the cottonseeds and ran the bundling machines; how could it be so? It had to be because under their skin, under the smiles GGSI had painted on their faces, they were monsters.
Now here, at last, the moment had come. I stared down at him, just me, no weapon in my hand, and he literally trembled, his moon cheeks and the thickness of his neck quivering.
“Listen, Matt,” I said, calm as calm could be. “What does FWH mean?”
Newell blinked. “What?”
He was sweating; a heavy sweat on his forehead like a glaze. Martha looked from him to me, from me to him.
“FWH,” I said. “It’s an abbreviation. From your roster of contract drivers. Please tell me what it means.”
“It’s—that’s…it’s Free White Housing.” His voice quivering like a ribbon. “That’s—our white people. They live here…FWH just means—that’s where they live.”
He was here. The truck driver. Working white. William Fucking Smith lived here.
I got down closer to Mr. Newell, down on my heels. I made my eyes wide and clenched my teeth. I was not going to kill Matty Newell, but his fear was of value. I used it as a gun, as a hundred-dollar bill, as the bent end of a paper clip to spring open a lock.
“FWH nine,” I said. “B eight.”
“Free White Housing area nine. Unit B eight. It’s…it’s like—an apartment complex. I don’t know.”
“Any reason a slave would go there?”
“Go—where?”
“To Free White Housing.”
“Yes. I mean, yes. Not—not usually, but yes. Niggers—I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sir. Slaves—I’m sorry…black persons…I’m sorry. Oh, Lord.” He licked his lips. Snot ran from his nose. When Matty Newell told this story later, he’d say I had a shotgun, at least. Machine gun, maybe. Martha with a pistol in each hand. The both of us dripping with knives.
“Slaves go there? It’s not unusual?”
“It’s not.”
Okay. Okay. I had what I needed, almost. The music had kicked up again, tightening my chest. There was a sickening feeling of excitement getting going in me as I realized what was going to happen. What I was going to have to do. The man was here. William Smith. He was here. I pulled open the top drawer of Newell’s desk and started to rifle through it, thinking quickly. “Okay.”
“What…” said Mr. Newell. “What are you doing?”
“Stay there, man. Stay.” He stayed down on his knees, his hands behind his head.
Mr. Newell looked to Martha, but she did not even see. She was at the desk now: she had found the page I had been looking at. She was staring at the screen. Oh, Martha.
I took the scissors out of Newell’s desk, and his eyes bulged. “No,” he said, his voice rising. Waddling backwards on his haunches, hands behind his head, repeating his refrain, “I never did any harm to any Negro person.”
“Quiet, please.”
I was unbuttoning my shirt. I was stepping out of my shoes. I held the scissors in my right hand and pointed at Newell with them. “How do I get to Free White Housing area nine?”
He told me what I needed to know. While he was talking I turned the scissors to my neck and began to carve, bringing up a deep well of blood, hacking away. Right where I had my inked-in tattoo, right at the root of my neck. I needed blood. I needed a fresh wound. You had to be very sick, puking and shitting sick, to be brought to a doctor’s attention around here, that I knew. A bad cut, though, was not the end of the world. Steroid shot and a bandage, you’re on your way.
“Martha,” I said, “there’s a first-aid kit on the bottom shelf over there. Can you get me some gauze, please?”
She was still at the computer. Transfixed by the screen. Martha was not watching us anymore. Her attention was wholly on that computer screen, where Samson’s face and fate were still displayed. She had taken a step forward; she had reached her hand halfway up toward the screen, a small gesture full of grief.
I got the bandage myself. Worked it slowly around and around my neck. When I was wound up, three thick layers of gauze covering my fresh, credible wound, covering where I would have borne the sheltering G of GGSI, when I had what I needed from Mr. Newell to get across campus, I pulled the cords from the printer and from the computer, one by one. Martha kept looking at the screen, even as it went blank.
I had a couple more questions for Mr. Newell, but when I had all of them answered I pushed him all the way to the ground.
“I never…” he said, sobbing. “Never…”
“I know,” I said. “You never did any harm to any Negro person. But I’m going to tie you up now,
bind your hands and feet, bind your mouth to keep you quiet, and put you in the closet.”
I got to it. I did it fast. When he was in there, far from his panic button, far from his phone, I gently guided Martha away from the desk. I took her by the hands. Got her to look at my eyes.
“Here’s what’s happening. You take the elevator down. You walk briskly across the lobby and say thank you to that blond girl and get in your car and drive north.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
“Are you listening?”
Her eyes were not on the screen anymore, but that’s where she was. She was with him, she was with her Samson, far away. I squeezed her hands between mine, squeezed each individual finger, trying to gather her attention, get her here with me.
“You go and get Lionel from your sister’s house and get that money I gave you and drive to Canada. Or fly overseas. Go anywhere. Go somewhere good. You got it?”
“I do.”
“That’s enough bread to start a new life, and that’s what I want you to do, okay? Get that boy out of America. Get him out.”
“You…” She looked at me. Shirtless, shoeless. Wrapped with gauze. The simple black slacks now looking dingy, pathetic. Slave garb. “What are you doing?”
“I gotta finish this up.”
“And then how are you going to get out?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
Her eyes at last were back in focus. She was back in the room.
“How? How are you going to figure it out?”
7.
Poor Mr. Newell, inarticulate with fear though he was, had managed to answer my questions one by one, even the one question I hadn’t known to ask—what is the line around the property, the broken black line that had puzzled me when I first got a look at the full file? It was a train. A subway. Not an electric fence or a utility pipe, but an underground train. Delivering Persons Bound to Labor from the population center to their shifts.