“I’m not here for Juice, or anything else. You know Amir? Works for you? Says you give him Favors for certain things he does. Involves kidnapping.”
“Amir dead?”
“Locked up.”
“Shit,” says Charles. He closes his eyes and for a brief spell I believe Death may have touched him. Then he comes back with a gasp and says, “The reason you’re here?”
“Yeah,” says Watson. “Amir gets arrested, now the trail is all gunpowder and blood. How long have you been giving him Favors for?”
“Years. One day I get this letter, says I should help Amir out when needed, and I’d be paid back in kind. Letter didn’t ask for my opinion. Week after that, a runner drops off a package. Juice. Purest I’ve tasted. Shipments been coming every month for as long as I been treating Amir right.” Big Charles takes a deep breath. “I don’t ever question gifts like that.”
“You know anything about 53 Franklyn Rose, in the Outskirts? A plant of sorts? Amir ever talk about that?”
“Don’t know. Never wanted to hear about Amir’s side job. That kiddy shit creeps me out,” he mumbles. His twitching eyes latch onto me, my palms. “You…got blood on your hands, old man.”
“I do.”
Big Charles begins to laugh, but he winces and stops himself. “You…you two after my bogeyman? Ain’t gonna catch him. And if you do, he’ll be replaced by another monster. Plenty of them in this place.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying,” I whisper.
Big Charles’s reply comes in the form of a frozen stare and the halt of his labored breathing.
The skyscrapers and streets dwindle in the rearview mirror. The road carves its way through the Outskirts’ emptiness, a tattered territory of muck and decrepit farms. A roadside billboard reads, You ARE NOW LEAVING THE CITY, COME BACK SOON! and I shudder at the thought of anyone returning on their own terms. Orpheus’ descent to the Underworld was fueled by love and grief, neither emotion tethered to free will. Milton waxed poetic about our freedom to fall, but he was wrong. Vices cling to the soul like morning dew. The car accelerates, heads toward an unlit tunnel. Watson murmurs to himself. I close my eyes as we disappear belowground, led by quivering headlights and memories of a bleak ravine covered in ice.
53 Franklyn Rose has become our last hope. Watson switches the lights off several minutes before we reach our destination. The abandoned plant looms at the edge of the horizon, immense silos left to collapse like the monoliths of a dead civilization, the moon’s light bouncing off the storage domes. Watson stops the car at the edge of the quarry.
“Glove box,” he says.
The gun is heavier than I expected.
“Do you know how to use it?”
“I get the core concept.”
Watson sighs. He snatches the gun from me, unlocks the safety, hands it back. I remove the camera from my pocket and show it to him. No words are needed.
We sneak past dead trucks, bulldozers, and stone piles the size of houses. I have to stop and catch my wheezing breath at one of the domes. I cough into the palm of my hand and, as usual, check for blood. I panic, calm down when I realize the blood is not mine, then panic again.
Watson is peeking around the corner. There’s no sound but for the wind slipping through cracks and gaps in the nearby buildings, and once my lungs stop burning, I nod to Watson and we move once more. We duck under the metallic corpse of a collapsed crane, find an opening in a fence, and approach a fat, square building that could be a warehouse.
“What next?”
“Over there,” Watson says. “Office buildings.”
We trudge through mud and move slower than we already were. Watson stops and scans the ground using his phone’s flashlight.
“Tire tracks,” he says. “Someone’s here. Or left not too long ago.”
We find an entrance. Metallic, heavy, no security, no lock. Weak reddish light leaks around its frame.
Inside, detritus and trash litter the halls, countless beer cans and liquor bottles, monsters and colorful scribbles on the walls. Teenagers and gangs have partied here. We walk past rooms with smashed tables and broken windows. The red glow leads us to a descending staircase.
“Emergency lights?” I say.
“Yes. But this place should have been disconnected from the grid long ago.”
“Maybe someone rewired it for their need.”
“One way to find out.”
Down the stairs. Another ruined hallway, the vestiges of more offices. Emergency lights line the ceiling. Watson moves faster now, and I have a feeling that we haven’t found the core of anything, that evil cartoonish henchmen will not jump around the corner to shoot at us.
One of the office doors is closed. All the other doors were wide open. We share a glance and position ourselves on each side. Watson reaches for the handle, lowers it.
Silence.
The stink of rot overpowers everything and I cover my nose with my shirt, crush my gag reflex. Watson isn’t so successful. He shields his mouth with the sleeve of his trench coat, coughs. He spins around and throws up. If anyone were in the building, we would have been dead by now. I hold my breath, wait for the nausea to pass.
Once it does, I force myself to enter the room.
The office has been refurbished into a cell. The walls are an immaculate white. There are mattresses on the floor, arranged side by side.
Children lie on them. They are all naked.
There is one little girl.
“Oh, God,” I say.
I rush to her, crumble to the floor. I bend over the little girl’s right leg and check her knee. There’s too much grime and I try to wipe it away, hoping for the treasure of a scar underneath. I mumble, no, no, no, still wiping away the dirt, feeling her knee with my fingers, the skin too soft.
Watson removes his phone from his pocket, switches the flashlight on.
“Give me the picture,” he says.
I fumble for it, hands shaking too hard to remove it from my inside pocket. Watson notices and helps. I rock back and forth, repeating, talitha cumi, talitha cumi, little girl I say to you, arise.
Watson shines the light on the girl’s face, then on the picture, and back again. I already know the answer. This girl has blonde hair. Her skin isn’t dark enough.
“It’s not her, Jules.” Watson says. His hand on my shoulder. “It’s not her.”
“That doesn’t make anything okay.”
“I know.”
Watson examines the boys’ corpses, looking for wounds or causes of death. He places his hand on one of the boys’ chests, then closes the kid’s eyes. He takes a moment to wipe his face before doing the same with the others, triple-checking their pulses. They are so skinny I can’t help but wonder if they have simply been left here to die, if they were truly lost and forgotten. Watson’s eyes tell me the boys are dead. There’s that reflex, the one I’ve had for too many decades. I remove the camera from my pocket.
“The fuck are you doing?”
“I refuse,” I say, shaking my head. “I refuse to forget their faces.”
Watson stands back without a word as I snap shots of the boys, the room, the hallway. I try to capture the atmosphere of utter doom that envelops us.
I suspect Watson knows I am lying.
There is more here. The currency we need.
“What happened to them?” I ask.
Watson sighs. “Exposure, maybe starvation. Or they were put to sleep like dogs. In any case it was a rush job. Too much evidence.”
Once I put my camera away, Watson approaches the girl. His fingers dig into her neck. He moves his hand to her ribcage, the other hand feeling around her stomach. He laughs with a sick desperation, the high-pitched tone of shock.
“She’s breathing.”
I carry the child wrapped in my coat. Watson leads the way, pointing his gun at any noise, the wind, the roar of a summer storm raging over distant mountains. We retrace our steps past the domes and silos as quickly
as we can.
I place the girl in the car’s backseat. I put my hand in front of her mouth and wait for exhaled warmth. Watson checks up on her, too. He studies her body for wounds, bruises, signs of internal bleeding.
“Anything?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t see anything critical.”
I hop into the passenger seat. Watson’s smile—pure joy.
The City defies us with its spectral lights and jagged buildings, glowing shards of glass slicing into the skyline. I turn every few minutes to make sure we are not trying to save a ghost. Watson’s eyes do not leave the road.
“Where to?”
“The hospital,” he says.
“Yes.”
“And I have to call the force.”
“I understand.”
“We weren’t supposed to be there. They have no idea we were there. I can only call in so many Favors before they get fed up with my shit.”
“Yes.”
“The Amir bloodbath did not help, you get that.”
“I understand that I made a pedophile feel pain.”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t tell the cops, Watson.”
“What?”
“The trail is already getting cold. Amir’s arrest triggered something. Everything vanishes. We’re too late. Maybe by minutes, maybe days. We’ve always been too late. We’ve been late for three years. Big Charles was right.”
“Meaning?”
“Even if we catch this bogeyman, another monster will take his place. We can’t play by the same rules. We’re going to lose this.”
“What do you have in mind?”
I consider my angles, stack my jumbled thoughts in a stable pile.
“Don’t tell the cops. Not tonight.” I point at my camera.
“You’re not serious.”
“Give me your contacts. Newspapers, blogs, TV channels. You know everyone. It’s been your life. I email the pictures. Send it out there. Tonight. Create a media blitz for the morning. Attach details about the plant’s location.”
“Christ. You’ve lost it.”
“When was the last time journalists had proper access to anything in the City? The public hasn’t been shown the full truth in a decade, or more. What’s known about the organ trade, Juice, corruption, children and sex slaves, fucking everything, is just a speck of our world.”
“You’re going to start a riot. A blood hunt.”
“Good. The law, or the media, will find the corpses by noon. Maybe they’ll find the girl’s DNA on the mattress. They’ll assume she was moved to another location, confirm the existence of another human trafficking ring. Citizens will not let this slip. Things can change. And what would have happened if we hadn’t gone to the plant tonight?”
Watson already knows the answer. He knows about the death of journalism. He has seen the ineffectiveness of bureaucracy and policy in the face of urgency. Paperwork stacked to the ceiling, limited budgets, overworked squads and teams trading sleep for nicotine and caffeine. Information loses itself in the hierarchical labyrinth, or crawls up the ladder at the pace of a diseased snail, reaching its destination only on the luckiest of days.
“You fucking know,” he finally replies.
“Enlighten me.”
“We would have told the cops what we heard from Amir. His next delivery, the location, how he receives orders. Assuming you hadn’t beat the shit out of him, that is. They would have wanted to track him, use him as a tool. It would have lasted days, if not weeks.”
“Yes,” I say. “And that little girl would be dead.”
“What about your girl,” says Watson. “What about Amelie?”
“Three years is a long time to be hunting for a ghost. Why do you still help me? When was the last time any progress was made on my case? How many parents walk in my shoes? Amelie has become another number in a bottomless file. Don’t look at me like that. We both know it.”
I point at my camera, tap the lens.
“This means everything. One picture to trigger a storm. If I have to bring down every single fucking flesh salesman and organ dealer in this hellhole to find my daughter—I’ll do it without a blink.”
Watson loses himself in thoughts for several minutes, taking apart my plan. I stretch my arm over to the backseat. I leave my hand on the girl’s chest.
“You’re forgetting something,” Watson says. “Her. We need to get her checked out, treated, scanned, and brought back to her family.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“The family and the hospital will ask questions.”
“You’re telling me you don’t know any unregistered doc wired to the governmental network? Please.”
Watson grunts. “And then?”
“Once we check her address in the database, we bring her back to her family ourselves. Knock on the door, vanish. Two angels brought me home, Mommy.”
“You are fucking insane.”
“I thought we had established that.”
“What if I say no?”
“How could you?”
At the next exit ramp, Watson makes a sharp turn and as we put the City to our backs, I grin like a jackal.
Watson parks the car in front of a house covered in vines and leaves—the only one in the neighborhood without boarded-up windows. He takes out his phone, presses a few buttons, and brings it to his ear. Inside the house, lights turn on.
“It’s me. Emergency.”
He hangs up. We wait and listen for the child’s breathing. Then the front gate opens, along with the garage door.
“You trust this guy?” I say.
“Not one bit.”
My wife killed herself roughly a year after Amelie went missing. The ongoing investigation hadn’t moved in months, Watson’s info led to nothing but dead ends. I had been off on a weeklong bender. I dared myself to see the bottom of as many bottles as possible, slept in an alley where a bouncer sang to himself in a language full of sea and pepper. Sought remnants of the God particle in crooked lines of snow. I scared passing children by falling to my knees and weeping, calling them by the wrong name. I stumbled home when I grasped the implications of my stop-motion death and when I opened the door, Mathilda was swinging by her neck.
I never forgave her for that.
It doesn’t mean I didn’t love her but I sat by myself at her funeral and wondered how Amelie would react when she’d come back to a motherless home. On Mathilda’s tombstone, I asked for some words by her favorite poet to be inscribed.
Because grief unites us
Like the locked antlers of moose
Who die on their knees in pairs
The doctor meets us in the basement. Bushy gray beard, wrinkles, glasses thicker than bulletproof windows. He wears a black bathrobe with dubious stains and no shoes. His yellow toenails are long enough to be called claws. An urban shaman. He nods at Watson, at me, doesn’t introduce himself. Watson opens the car door and the doc sighs.
“You already moved her too much,” he grumbles. “Bring her upstairs.”
He guides us through rooms that smell of mothballs and ashes. The child moans in my arms and I hold my breath until she stops squirming. Past the living room with one leather chair and rows of bookshelves in lieu of a television, then into the guest bedroom. The doc heads upstairs. I place the girl on the sheets and wonder how long it has been since someone last slept here.
“Go,” says Watson.
“What about her?” Then, “What about him?”
“I’ll handle it. Do what you have to. It’ll be dawn in a handful of hours. Take the car. I’ll forward my contacts to your mail. Come back when you’re done.”
I grab the keys and Watson offers his second honest smile. I dismiss the urge to use my camera and instead lean over the child, brush a lock of hair away, whisper nothings, fade.
Back in my cave, I stand on the bed and unpin the pictures, maps, and news clippings from my walls. I flip some of the photographs over, inspect the faded handwr
iting. CORPSE FOUND BY FEDS, SIX OTHERS, 2010, UNMARKED GRAVE, MUTILATIONS. I flip through pictures of prepubescent ghosts and lost souls, double-checking them, until I find two on which I scribbled THIS IS YOUR DAUGHTER and remove them from the pile.
Boot the antique desktop computer, shake breadcrumbs out of the keyboard. Let the scanner warm up, plug my camera in, drag and drop the needed snapshots, make certain none of them feature the girl we found. I chain-smoke and scan all my pictures and newspapers, craft the most hellish of virtual parcels. I add various pictures collected over the years—too ugly to keep on my walls, too important to erase. By the time I’m done my pack is empty and I open a new one. I scroll through Watson’s list of contacts, trying to establish who to trust, who may have been left uncorrupted by the system, but give up on the idea, copy-paste all of them. Every email address he has used in the past decade. I tunnel through a half-dozen proxies I haven’t touched in years, use a disposable mail account, attach the files.
Subject: anon tip. urgent. dead children found.
Body:
(high-resolution pictures of the dead boys in the cement factory)
Text: what are our leaders doing? why did they die? what are we doing?
Address: 53 Franklyn Rose, Cement plant, Outskirts.
Attachment: thecity.zip
I hit send.
Throw a couple of T-shirts and boxers into a sports bag, pictures of Amelie, her favorite toy, her clothes, cameras, physical objects roped to memories I couldn’t recreate. When I’m done I check the computer. Two hundred and thirty-eight mails sent. I disconnect, shut it down. Unplug the hard drive and toss it into the bag. Once I’m certain I am not forgetting any precious reminders of my life, I leave.
The first rays of sunshine claw away at the clouds by the time I return to the doctor’s house. Watson opens the door and the look on his weathered face screams clusterfuck.
“No,” I say.
“She’s fine. She needs rest.”
“What is it, then?”
“Come see for yourself.”
Past the closed door where the girl sleeps, up the stairs, into the doc’s computer room. The doctor leaves as soon as I enter, mumbling to himself.
“Did you do what you set out to?”
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