by Ben Winters
“I don’t understand this,” I said to Cook. “What is happening? What is she doing here?”
He blew a bubble, destroyed it with his teeth. “Did you forget?”
“What?”
“Your leash, son. Father Barton’s laptop, tapping into your tracker, keeping tabs.” It was the same laptop on the table in front of him, next to the gun.
“I didn’t forget,” I said. “But it was my understanding that when I had the lost package in hand, I would return directly to Indianapolis and give it to Father Barton.”
“Yep. That was indeed the plan.”
Questions were struggling to the surface of my mind, one by one, then all together, like animals emerging from mud. Had they known the whole time that I was planning to double-cross them, to turn this goddamn envelope over to the marshals? Was it just Officer Cook who had been on to me, or was it Barton also? And what about Morris, who, Cook had told me, knew nothing about his Airlines service—what was he doing running these kinds of errands, not to mention how? How had Morris come by the authority to get a man sprung from the bowels of a megaplantation?
The only question I said aloud, though, was my first one again. “What is she doing here?”
“She’s insurance,” said Cook. “To make sure we get what we need.” He pivoted in his chair, pointed at Martha. “Tell him, honey.”
“They’ve got him,” she said, her voice coming like from under water. “They’ve got Lionel.”
I turned back to Cook, caught him poking his tongue through his gum, stretching it into a thin pink membrane. “Why?” I said. “Why?”
“Settle down, boy,” said Morris, shifting his pistol from Martha to me. “You settle down.”
Martha stood, hands clenched at her sides, and Morris brought the gun back to her. “You, too.”
“Please,” I said to Martha. Trying to calm her down. Calm myself, too. Whatever was going on, I didn’t think these guys were kidding. “Please. Sit.”
This now, for Martha, on top of everything. What she had learned only hours ago, about Samson, and now this. Martha sat on the edge of the bed and tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling, and the moonlight coming unevenly through the blinds washed the side of her face and made her look old and sad.
“I was bringing it to you,” I said to Cook. There was a fresh dark feeling blooming in my stomach, filling me up like internal bleeding, and I heard that darkness come into my voice. “I was going to bring it to you all.”
“Sure you were,” he said. “Sure.” And then, new subject—oh, just by the way: “You know, I don’t think you ever told me what your man’s name is. Your agent, I mean. In the marshals.”
Oh, Martha, I thought. Oh, Martha. This on top of everything.
“Bridge,” I said quietly. “Louis Bridge.”
“Oh. Huh.” Cook snapped his gum. “I was thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if I had the same guy?”
There it was. An answer. A lot of answers, actually, all arriving together, all at once.
“Actually, my man’s a lady,” Cook added. “Deputy United States Marshal Shawna Lawler. I never met her, but she sounds sexy as hell on the phone. If you’re into white women.”
He flicked his eyes toward Martha.
“I don’t…” she said. “I don’t…” She stood up again, and Morris said, “Sit,” and she said, “What does he mean?”
“Me and your boyfriend here, Jim, or Victor, or—what’d you call him? Brother. I like that. Me and Brother, we’re just the same. Same little secret.” He stood up solemnly from that wobbly motel table, pointed a finger at me, slow, and intoned: “Nigger stealer. Soul catcher. Government man.” He lowered the finger, sat back down. “Just like me.”
I waited for Martha to say something else, anything else, but she didn’t. She might have said, I don’t believe you; she might have said, It can’t be true; but from that corner of the room there was nothing.
I didn’t look at her again. I couldn’t look at her anymore.
Cook was done smiling, at least. All the winking and smirking, all the wiseass man-of-the-world business had fallen away in an instant. Without that smile, he looked like a different human being. He sat rigid in the chair, and his face became tired, closed, with sadness behind his eyes, like the shadowy water just visible under the surface of the sea.
I wondered what I looked like now, when at last I wasn’t trying—not pretending anything. I wondered what I was looking like in that small room, alone with Cook’s revelation, with the truth of what I was at last filtering out into the world.
“Please believe me, man. I’m not happy about this,” said Cook, his voice low. “About none of this. But you’re my chance. Okay? You’re my chance.”
He stood up again at the table, leaned forward while he talked. While he explained—while he tried to explain. “All I’m supposed to do is get Barton’s secrets. That’s the job: get the man’s secrets, and they set me free. That’s my deal. Two years I been at it, and two years he’s been keeping me low on the pole. Errand boy, muscleman, bullshit. Two years.” He put up his hand and spread apart two fingers.
He turned abruptly to Martha. “Then here comes your friend.” I did not look at her. I couldn’t. “Sad little mush-mouth Jim Dirkson. Talking about this wife in the mines. Here’s my chance. I push you on the priest, let’s do this one, let me quarterback it. Tutor me, Padre, you know? Here’s my chance to learn some secrets, get into the inside. Agent Lawler keeps saying, get what we need and you’re done. You’re free.”
Every time he said that word, free, I felt sick. Lord, what they had done to this man. What they had done to me. The monsters they had made us into, prowling along, sniffing for chances.
“But then you”—he pointed one finger at me, wagged it—“you go and turn out to be what you are. Turn out to be like me. And I was like, whoa, whoa. Wait. This is even better.”
Morris belched, long and loud. Settled in the armchair, coasting through this dull guard duty with the bored confidence of a white man lording it over a black and a woman. I stared at Cook, remembering his excitement that morning on the banks of the White River. Kevin lying dead, Maris furious, Barton grieving, Cook seizing the moment. I was having my realization in that moment, and he was having his.
“I explained to Barton that he should send you to go and get this thing. I told him how we could tap your chip, how I had me a solid connect in the marshals. Then I called up Agent Lawler.”
Me on the phone with Bridge, sending him to BWI airport, and Cook—or whatever this man’s name was—on the phone with Lawler. Phones ringing off the hook in Gaithersburg.
“I said, listen, baby, remember this evidence Barton’s been so hot on? What about I get that for you? Illegal collusion. Major federal lawbreaking. Well, she liked that a lot. She loved it.”
There was no point in explaining to Cook that his agent wanted her hands on the evidence for the same reason mine did: to get rid of it.
“And better than that, I said to her, I said, what if I can get you one of me, a nigger-catcher soul-stealer motherfucker like me—except this one’s gone to the dark side? He’s working freelance for the Airlines. What if I get you all that? If I get you all that, you gotta let me go, right? Then you gotta set me free.”
He lifted the envelope off the table, and I was surprised at the sudden pain I felt. I felt it in his hands like it was a part of my body, like it was my heart he was holding. The idea of that thing going back to Maryland, getting buried by the marshals, after all Kevin had gone through to get it, all that Luna had gone through. Even me. But that’s where it was always headed anyway, wasn’t it? I was never really going to bring it to Father Barton so he could announce it to the world.
But somehow in the wake of Cook’s revelations, I was mourning that alternative future, longing for a victory I had never really contemplated.
“So here’s what’s up, man,” said Cook. “We’re going to take out this hard drive, hook it into the laptop
here.” He gestured to the computer on the table. “Just to make sure you didn’t pull a fast one, like my pops used to like to say. Make sure we got what we think we got. And then I’ll call Agent Lawler.”
He tore the envelope open at the top. I held up my hands, the chains rattling.
“Wait, though. What if Barton’s right?” I said. “What if there really is information on here that could”—what were the words, all those hopeful, lunatic words?—“shake the foundations? Change the world? Just—what if?”
“Come on, now,” he said. “Barton’s full of shit.”
“Yeah, I know. I know.” I took a step toward Cook, aware of Morris in the corner of my eye. “But we’re talking about the future. The future of the country. Talking about three million slaves.”
Cook said something familiar; something I had thought to myself—and not long ago, either. “I ain’t thinking about the three million” is what he said. “I’m thinking about me.”
“Wait…”
“Hey. Hey!” He had the package open. He pulled out what was inside. He looked up at me. “What the fuck?”
Motion from the other side of the room, Morris rising from the chair. “What is that?”
We were all staring at what was in Cook’s palm, then suddenly Martha was moving. She was off the bed just as Morris was off the chair, quick as choreography. She grabbed Morris’s beer bottle and smashed it on the edge of the table, making a weapon that caught Morris in his rush, so it was really his own running that drove the broken edges into his belly.
He screamed while Martha turned the bottle deeper, and I lurched my body forward, overturning the table into Cook, knocking him against the wall and banging his head hard into it, sending a small burst of plaster out onto the both of us.
“Goddamn it,” he said and reached for his gun where it had skittered on the tabletop, but I put my hands on top of his hands on top of the weapon, and we were struggling for it when over my shoulder I heard Martha shouting, “Shit! Asshole!” I jerked up, hard, bringing all four of our hands up off the table, Cook clutching the pistol and me clutching his fingers, both of us yelling. Morris was holding his wounded guts with one hand, but the other hand held his automatic, and he was trying to get a bead on Martha, who had just rolled behind the bed.
I wrenched Cook’s finger, and the shot was an explosion in the small room. Morris fell but got off one shot at me as he was falling. I did not feel the bullet—didn’t feel it because it had caught not me but Cook, and a geyser of blood erupted from the center of his throat, and his eyes went wide and white, wide like Castle’s eyes. His eyes in the darkness. Pleading eyes, wide in the rain. Castle wanted to go back and help Reedy, and I said no we couldn’t go back, and I was scared, too, but there would be no more chances, not like this one. Reedy was dying and the rain was pounding and that fence post was loose, I had seen it come loose, and this was the only opportunity we were going to get, the only one we would ever get. I told Castle what he’d told me, so many times he’d told me, that we were different, that there was more for us, but he said not if we died! Not if we got caught running and they put us down or sold us offshore! And he was scared, I understood that, goddamn it, I was scared, too, but standing out there in the rain arguing made no sense, we had to go, we had to fucking go. I grabbed him by the neck and told him we were going and he said no again, fighting and pushing back at me, and I squeezed his throat and his eyes went wide and wider till he stopped fighting and then I ran, I ran away alone. Rain washed the blood from me while I was running, and everything I’ve gotten since I have deserved.
“He’s dead,” Martha was saying. Yelling. “Victor! Brother! He’s dead. It’s too late.”
Cook was under me. We were on the ground. I had my hands on his neck, trying to hold back the blood, push it back in. I was trying to heal the man, but his eyes were open, staring, white.
Very slowly I let him go. There was blood all over me, blood on my hands and up my arms and on my naked chest. I stood up. The room was full of red.
“Okay,” Martha was saying. She was trembling. I was trembling, too. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
2.
The steps of the monument were gray and slick with rain.
I stood beneath the Martyr with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t tilt my head up to feel the drizzle on my cheeks. I didn’t move. I stood beneath Old Abraham, quietly fiddling with the green bracelet I was still wearing on my arm. Doing nothing but waiting.
The streets were empty, more or less. Laughing voices, now and then, carried over from Georgia Street, the blocks of bars a quarter mile or so away. I saw a couple leaning into each other, climbing unsteadily into the back of a cab, way down on Market Street.
But the ring of shops and office buildings that wreathed Monument Circle were all closed this late at night. Here in the bull’s-eye of the city, at this hour of night, it was just me out here, just me and the likeness of Lincoln. Both of us likenesses.
And just what was Victor feeling, anyway, as he stood there waiting? What about Old Victor—what was going on inside his mind?
I don’t know. I was drained of emotion, washed out by the rain. I suppose there’s a version of this story in which I’m standing there crackling with joy. Maybe I should have been crying, tears carving rivulets in my stone cheeks. Monumental. There might even have been, in some other reality, knives of regret scything away at my insides.
But none of that, not for me. Just standing, just waiting, coat shrugged close around me, my hands jammed in the pockets of my coat.
In one pocket was the gun, a loose heaviness in the pocket’s depth.
In the other pocket, my right hand was clasped on one corner of the envelope, folding and unfolding one ragged corner.
Up in the sky was the dim, grubby outline of the moon. Abraham Lincoln’s giant disapproving features in shadow above me, staring at the city, the country, all this unfinished business.
“Victor?”
“Yeah. Come on up.”
There was Mr. Bridge, coming carefully up the steps, one step at a time, not wanting to slip, and despite myself I felt the tiniest prickle of disappointment. There must have been some part of me hoping for a surprise. What if Deputy United States Marshal Bridge had turned out to have about him the smoldering air of a secret agent? What if he’d been six foot six and thin as a rail, wearing Loyal Texan cowboy boots and a battered Stetson? What if he wore a yarmulke? What if he were black?
Alas. Bridge was Bridge. A bushy gray mustache and a sloping forehead below a receding hairline. Tan slacks and brown dress shoes, poorly chosen for rainy late-autumn Indiana. He stood before me, me and my Abraham, a supplicant before the prince and counselor. He was the puffy, dull-eyed middle manager of my most contemptuous imaginings. This, my tormentor.
I raised my hand as I came closer, and he raised his in return. Bridge’s tie was brown and plain.
I fidgeted with the envelope’s dog-eared corner while Bridge came up the steps.
Bridge was alone, per my instructions. I could see down Meridian Street the car from which he’d climbed. He’d emerged from the driver’s seat, and I couldn’t tell if there was someone in the back or not, but it didn’t matter. Here at the steps it was just me and him, Bridge approaching, no bag or case, his hands raised as instructed. I had thought through all these details, got the setup straight: a public place, but a public place wreathed in darkness, a dead downtown in the middle of the night. It was 1:00 in the morning, Sunday morning. Two days since Martha and I returned to the North. Almost two weeks since Kevin was stuffed into the barrel, rolled onto the truck. Eleven days since I checked into the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, just down the hall from Martha and her son.
I ducked my hand into my other pocket, and Bridge stopped abruptly and raised his hands higher. I smiled. A glimmer of feeling reached me, distant but clear: it felt good to be in charge, even of one man, one small moment, one instant.
I wasn’t reaching for m
y gun. It was the envelope I took out.
Mr. Bridge’s eyes flooded with relief. He was easy to read, easier than ever, now that not even a phone line separated us. He was just here, ten feet in front of me, his features as open and plain as a child’s drawing. He reached out, as though I was just going to hand it over, and I could see it all in his face, the pressure that had been applied on him from wherever it had come.
I dropped the envelope back in my pocket, and he darted out his tongue quickly, licked his lips.
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, licked his lips again. “I must hand it to you, Victor. That was well done. I don’t know how you did it, but that was well done.”
“I’m a professional.”
“Yes.” He nodded: yes. “Well, I hope you will not be surprised to hear that I am prepared to live up to my end of the bargain as well. If you would just…”
He took one more step up the stairs, and now my other hand came up, the gun hand. He stopped.
“What is it?” I said. “What’s in there?”
He stopped. “Have you opened it?”
Bridge. Question with a question. I went back on him: “What do you fucking think?” His eyes above the gray mustache were growing fretful. He didn’t like my tone. “Of course I opened it.”
It was still open, as a matter of fact, and it was in my pocket with the open end up. I took it out and held it up in the dim rain-flecked moonlight. A small flask of sturdy plastic or polystyrene, full of clear liquid, secured with a screwed-on cap. Still floating in there, after all this time—after Luna smuggled it out, got it into William Smith’s coat, after Billy panicked and stuffed it in his fridge, after I had it and Morris had it and Cook had it and I had it again—still floating inside that thin flask was something else. Something microscopically small.
“Well?”