The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  “And now Syria, the ultimate catastrophe. Against my advice, the administration shelled out half a billion dollars to train five Syrians. That dumb bastard who got drummed out of the company suggests we arm Syrian insurgents, just as if that tactic isn’t a clusterfuck disaster that always comes back to bite us in the ass. And now Russia piles in, which is a whole other level of fuck-me-in-the-ass.” He shook his head. “Administration says no, but what we have in Syria now is war by proxy. Age of Destruction, brother. Age of Destruction.”

  Perry White stared hard out the blacked-out window; the passing lights dimmed, as if about to be shut down permanently.

  “My predecessor committed suicide. He couldn’t take it,” Perry White went on. “‘They’re like a dozen clowns piling out of a VW,’ he’d say to me. Until he couldn’t say anything more, not with the barrel of his pistol in his mouth.”

  “Then why do you continue doing this?” Richard asked.

  “Why?” Perry White turned his head back to stare at Richard. “Because someone with brains has to. Because I can’t let the clowns win. And because we’re between Scylla and Charybdis. ISIS wants us to respond, wants us mired deeper and deeper in its caliphate. And if we back off—if we, God forbid, withdraw from the region entirely? Their caliphate grows and grows until it has encompassed Egypt, Iran, Saudi, and even Turkey. Then the sewer we’re in will be too deep to climb out of.” He grunted, as if suddenly becoming aware of what had just taken place. “As previously outlined, your job is to ID the elements overseas who are in contact with the radicalized sleeper agents right here in America so we can take ’em out. You in the hunt?”

  “More than ever.” Richard realized that he meant it. There was respect now where before there had been only a blank slate, a tabula rasa.

  “And by the way,” Perry White said, “don’t worry about your wife.”

  A slight quiver in the pit of his stomach. “What d’you mean?”

  “The vetting process, of course.” Perry White tried a smile that did not quite fit. “We know what happened. We’re leaving her alone.”

  At the terminal, while they remained in the SUV, still under federal sovereignty, Perry White handed him a packet of instructions. “You have two hours before your flight to Detroit. Lock yourself into a cubicle in the men’s toilet. Read up on your first assignment. Memorize it. Then tear each sheet into tiny pieces and piss on them. Flush at least three times. No floaters to be left.”

  Richard nodded. As he opened the door to step out to the curb where the driver had lined up his luggage, Perry White said, “Good luck, Clark.”

  What do you know—he had a sense of humor after all.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Jimmy Self suspected Helene Messer wouldn’t leave the city until she had undergone another physical transformation, just as he knew he couldn’t look for her on any transportation manifests as Angela Chase. Angela Chase was dead and buried; he had no doubt of that. Clean slate, odometer regressed to zero. He also suspected that Helene Messer had had help in disappearing. She couldn’t have managed it so neatly and completely on her own.

  All of this informed him that he had some time, while she changed identities once again. His focus was on discovering how she would leave New York for Dearborn. The airports were a no-go. Even with new papers there were the CCTV cameras to think about. She might take a bus, but he didn’t think so. The Port Authority Bus Terminal was a cesspool of junkies and streetwalkers. As such, it was crawling with cops; the less she saw of them, the better. Also, more security cameras than you could count. Rental cars required too much ID, left too definite a trail. What remained was the train.

  Consulting Amtrak, he discovered the most direct route to Dearborn. The 49 Lake Shore Limited, departing Penn Station at 3:40 p.m., arrived in Chicago tomorrow at 9:45 a.m. After a couple hours’ layover, the 352 Wolverine got them into Dearborn at 6:16 p.m. There were other options, but they all required two trains followed by a bus ride of several hours. The 49 Lake Shore Limited it was.

  He had learned never to leave anything to chance. As such, even though he considered the bus a long shot, he roused Stinking Man, took him for lunch, bought him a cheap burner phone, shoved photos of Helene Messer and Angela Chase into his fist.

  “She’s gonna look different,” he said. “But underneath the same.”

  “Different but the same,” Stinking Man said. “Gotcha, Chief.”

  “Don’t call me Chief.”

  Jimmy Self sent him over to Port Authority. It was a far from ideal solution, but at his end-of-days career, it was all he could scrape up. He tried not to think about what that meant for him as he headed to Penn Station. Stopping at a deli, he bought a pastrami on rye, a double order of sour pickles, and a pair of Cokes from Mexico in bottles. No high-fructose corn syrup in Mexico, only good old sugar. And about the glass bottles: people didn’t realize that the Coke recipe had to be rejiggered to compensate for the aluminum cans and the thin plastic bottles.

  Descending into the bowels of Penn Station, he bought a ticket all the way through to Dearborn. Then he settled in to wait for 3:15 p.m. or so, the time he expected her to show. If he was right. I can’t afford not to be right, he thought as he sat himself on a wooden bench worn smooth by a hundred thousand pairs of buttocks. He pulled his trench coat closer around him.

  Penn Station, at any hour of the day, was not a place to hang. Now, after the morning crush had flushed out its tsunami of humanity, the place was positively ghastly. Worse than the lobby of his office building. A seemingly endless line of automated ticket sellers, dead sentinels. The Acela waiting room dark and deserted, its small detail of redcaps reading the papers or chatting among themselves. These hollow echoes of the morning gave the sense of being in a dark place where time was the only accepted currency. The leftover stench of humans on the run added to the atmosphere of a close and stifling underworld. The denizens of the station were thin and humpbacked, fat and greasy, shapeless in their layers of filth. Shifty characters who no longer felt comfortable on the streets of Manhattan—and that was saying something. They were human rats, scuttling around, hugging shadows to avoid the smattering of bored cops staring threateningly at everyone in sight, just for a giggle. When they could, the rats cadged a Snickers or a PayDay from a newsstand, picked a pocket here or there. Once he saw a band of them working in concert, but that was rare. For the most part, these creatures were loners like Stinking Man: homeless, nameless, forgotten by a society that never had use for them in the first place. Every so often one of the bolder ones would eye Jimmy Self. He’d pull his lips back from his teeth and clack them together, and they’d cringe away. One time, though, an Artful Dodger, thinking himself cleverer than the rest of his ilk, approached him from behind. Catching the movement out of the corner of his eye even before the vile smell hit him, Jimmy half turned, right hand around the grips of his suddenly revealed .38. That was the last time any of them tried to come near him.

  And so he sat, certain that Stinking Man wouldn’t call him, as the minutes and hours ticked by. Why had he put any faith at all in Stinking Man? Was it simply out of necessity? Stinking Man did not carry the air of the professional homeless. Surely he had been someone once, someone with a name, a job, a home, perhaps a wife, maybe even kids. Someone who wasn’t lost. What had happened? Who knew? Jimmy Self scarcely knew what had happened to him, to be cast up on this bleak and desolate shore. But there seemed little doubt that he felt some strange kinship with Stinking Man. It was why he kept him in food and juice. Looked after him. Jimmy Self suspected that in keeping Stinking Man alive, he was also keeping himself from slipping all the way down. Eating his police special.

  Jimmy Self stretched. He’d been on plenty of stakeouts back in the day, but he was older now and sick. His feet hurt, his arches fallen further than a hooker; his back ached, forcing him to get up once every ten minutes or so and travel in a small circle like a rotating watering head, with about the same amount of consciousness.

&nb
sp; At three o’clock he got himself some black coffee. To his refined coffee palate it tasted like battery acid, but it was full of caffeine, which, at this stage of the stakeout, was all that mattered. At three ten, he bought two candy bars and stuffed them in his maw. Sugar. More caffeine. If he drank another cup of coffee, his bladder would be full when he needed to move.

  Three fifteen passed. He was standing in sight of the gate to the Lake Shore Limited. His cell buzzed. He checked the number and exhaled; it wasn’t Stinking Man. At last the favors he had called in were bearing fruit. He read the attachments while keeping one eye out for Helene. The news was bad. In fact, very bad. Worse than he had suspected.

  Pocketed his cell and looked up. Three twenty, three twenty-five. The gathering of strangers had begun: a suit steering a young woman in stilettos, her ripe thighs sprouting from a short skirt; a pair of clearly drunk businessmen, laughing like loons; a tattooed, Rasta-haired teenager carrying a guitar case, nascent career on his back; a mother, sleeping baby in her arms, trailed by her husband, awkwardly lugging their suitcases; an old woman with a cane, her back as erect as a soldier’s. A sorority of girls, giggling over their night in the big city, passed him by, vanished down the narrow stairwell. Their bell-like laughter floated up like comic book sound-effect balloons. How girls that age loved and loathed themselves, Jimmy Self thought. Everything at the extreme of emotions.

  Still no sign of her. He tried to murder the thought that he had been wrong. What if she had taken a bus, and Stinking Man had missed her? Had fallen asleep or been rousted by the cops? He had been an idiot to enlist Stinking Man. Or maybe he had misjudged the time it would take for her to be made over; she had already taken another train, one that left before he arrived. Or maybe she had had someone rent the car for her, and right about now she was hurtling down the New Jersey Turnpike, whatever highway she needed to take to get to Dearborn. But for any number of reasons—mostly that no one he knew would set out on such a long car trip after an overseas flight—that didn’t make much sense.

  The worst thing a detective could do was to undermine himself. Being assailed by doubts was just about the best way to lose his quarry—or, worse, not to find them at all. All this he knew, and yet he bit his nails, tearing off slivers, spitting them out like cracked sunflower seeds. His stomach roiled.

  Three forty. Where the fuck was she?

  His cell buzzed, and so did his heart rate. It was Stinking Man.

  “She there?” Not taking his eyes off the track entrance a flight down, but ready to move if—

  “No-show, Chief. Should I—”

  “Go home. Get some sleep,” Jimmy Self said. “And don’t call me Chief.”

  Shitshitshit. The evil scent of being wrong started to come off him like BO. Dim the lights; the party’s over.

  And then, and then at three thirty-one . . . Holy mother of Jesus, he thought. There is a God.

  A moth fluttering in the pit of Laurel’s stomach gave birth to an entire host, a soft bomb, as she headed toward the stairs down to the track where the 49 Lake Shore Limited was waiting to take her to Chicago. Along with giving her a vinyl airline bag of food and drink, Gael had outfitted her in a long granny dress—oxblood with tiny yellow, blue, and white flowers and a collar of white lace enclosing her neck—Dr. Martens two-tone Nightosphere’s Looking at You boots, a black knitted jacket that looked as if it had come from a thrift shop.

  “Why are you dressing me this way?” she had asked Gael. “I look like a molting peacock.”

  “The more people gawk at your clothes, the less they’ll pay attention to your face,” he’d told her. A face that, when she had regarded herself in the mirror just before she’d left Gael, looked at least a decade older than her real age. Gael’s expertise with theatrical makeup and prosthetics was legendary among the discreet group of his clients.

  “Don’t you think these buck teeth are a little over-the-top?” she had asked.

  “Over-the-top is what we’re shooting for,” he’d told her.

  Then there was her hair, which was now a lustrous deep red, the cut, sweeping down over one eye, entirely European. “I look like someone imitating a Parisian street waif,” she’d cried.

  “Bingo!” Gael had kissed her on each cheek, in the European style. “Go with God,” he had said as if he were a priest.

  Carrying the airline bag and a battered suitcase with brass snaps and hinges that had gone out of style in the fifties, she kept her vision focused on the stairs down to the track. “Walk at a normal pace,” Gael had said. “Not too fast but not too slow either. And keep your eyes on your goal. Don’t go looking around for trouble, the way they do in the films—it’s a dead giveaway.”

  Which was precisely what she did. She passed Jimmy Self without registering his presence, but then the terrified part of her was on the lookout for reporters, paparazzi, stringers, bloggers. She had no eyes for a detective, and even if she had, she never would have recognized him as one.

  Down in the depths the train sniffled and sighed as if shaking off a cold. Amid a cloud of like-minded passengers, she found her car, boarded the train, and looked for a seat. Though she would have had no trouble doing it herself, a heavyset man in a well-traveled trench coat helped place her suitcase on the chrome rack above her seat. He smiled when she thanked him. It was a kind smile, an easy expression that seemed to her guileless. He took a seat more or less on the opposite side of the aisle and was immediately lost to view behind the New York Times he unfolded like gull’s wings.

  With a lurch, the train began to roll out of the station. Laurel sat back, deep breathing her pulse back to a semblance of normal. She was home free now; the gauntlet had been successfully traversed. But even so her mouth was dry, her breathing more rapid than she would like.

  Go to a happy place, she ordered herself. Which would it be? Orfeo’s apartment? Crete? The pathetically short list caused a sinking feeling in her stomach.

  Unbidden, her thoughts settled on her father. Like a ghost, her father haunted her, sliding through her memories, slippery as an eel. While her mother had still been with them, how many nights had Laurel sat at her window, willing him to turn the corner onto their street, falling asleep without ever catching sight of him? But more often than not, there he was, sitting at the kitchen table when she came down to breakfast in the morning. He’d look up from his paper, grinning like a Toon. “Hey-ya, Rabbit,” he’d say.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  Putting the paper aside. “How ’bout it?” Holding out his arms.

  She’d skip around the table before burying her nose in the hollow of his shoulder as he squeezed her tight. “How’s my Rabbit. How’s my Rabbit,” he’d say in her ear, his blue stubble scratching the side of her forehead.

  Why are you always working? she’d wanted to ask him while inhaling the smell of him, forever after her paradigm of a man’s scent.

  “Sit down now, Laurel,” her mother would say from her station at the stovetop. “Time to eat. You don’t want to be late for school.”

  Her father was always late. Sometimes that was all he was; she never actually saw him come home. Once, she had taken her pillow and curled up on the stairs to make sure she wouldn’t miss him, only to wake up in her own bed, the morning light streaming in through her window. Unsurprising, then, that she was reluctant to let go of him, until he’d say in his best imitation of a movie cowboy, “Git along, lil Rabbit. Eat the grub ya momma fixed fer ya.”

  Laurel’s mother would turn from the stovetop, spatula in hand. “Eddie, why d’you insist on talking to her like that?”

  “Because she likes it.” Eddie would grin. “Dontcha, Rabbit?”

  She woke with a start, unsure for a moment where she was or what was happening. The train car rocked gently back and forth; the muffled clickety-clack of the rolling wheels brought her the information she needed. She was on the 49 Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, where she’d change for the train to Dearborn. She glanced across the aisle. The heavyset ma
n who had helped her was still behind his gull wings of print. She sighed, turned back to stare out the window at the passage of nighttime buildings, local stations, black clumps of those trees hardy enough to subsist on a steady diet of diesel particulates. The stations were dark and deserted, but here and there like pockmarks, the buildings’ windows were lit by the blue light of TVs or computers. Night owls or insomniacs hard at work passing the endless hours before sunlight flooded in again.

  These lonely people made her think of Richard’s dead wife, Maggie. What kind of a marriage could he have had with her? She had to assume that they had been in love when they had married. What had happened between them to sour that love, to turn it to indifference—no, more than indifference. A kind of silent warfare. Was that what had finally led Maggie to kill herself? She recalled her talk with Richard on the boat about how illusions kept us sane, and his response: For others, it’s as if they never existed at all.

  Richard, who was so closed off to Bella and, she surmised, to Maggie. And yet he hadn’t been hard to read, not for her, at least. No, she decided, whatever the problem between them, it wasn’t all Richard’s doing. He wasn’t into destruction; of that she was certain. Her brief time with him on the boat, the experience they’d had there, had revealed more of who he really was than the entire six previous weeks. She saw him as he really was and, as a daughter loves her father, loved him all the more for what his actions revealed.