Zwerfster Chic

by Billie Kelgren

  I become frantic. I really need to calm down, to slow down, to think. I start to say something — a comment, a plea, I don’t know what — but the server returns with the receipt and she promptly signs it away. She moves to collect her bags.

  I ask her to hold on, putting a hand up, but it offends her. She pauses, only because she’s looking for the words to say in return.

  I glance around to make sure no one’s listening and then lean over the table to tell her that I have another passport — a South African passport. This isn’t entirely true. Actually, at that very moment, it’s not true at all. Still, it causes her to sit back and smile again, though she’s not smiling out of kindness.

  She’s intrigued.

  Mia takes a phone from her purse and after a moment tells me that a South African passport can get me into the Republic of Ireland without a visa.

  Holy shit, I hadn’t even thought about that.

  She then asks me how far away I live, how long it will take for me to get home, pack a small bag, and return, and I tell her that I live less than a mile away, there in East Boston, pointing needlessly over my shoulder as if I know where the dump is relative to where we’re sitting. She goes back into her purse and pulls out several twenties, telling me to take a cab there and back, have it wait for me as I pack. While I’m gone, she’ll see about getting me onto her flight.

  Shit. Shitshitshitshitshit.

  Shit!

  When we’re back out on the main floor of the terminal, in front of the long line of airline counters, she stops me before I head down to the cab stand. She appears amused with me again, smiling. How does it look, the both of us with our dark skin? Even though she’s of Cuban blood and my Dad is black, almost everyone else around us at that moment is either white or Asian, so they probably can’t tell the difference. She’s wearing jeans, a pair of white walking shoes, and a pink peasant top with ruffles around the collar. Her hair’s pulled behind her ears, held back by one of those bands that I can never use in my own hair because I would need scissors to get it back out. She’s also a good half-foot taller than me, because I am that small, so even though there’s only a ten-year difference in our ages, I probably look much younger with my clunks, my skirt, my leggings, my oversized top, with my hair all in my face.

  She tells me to hurry back, to call if I’m held up, sounding very much like the mother. I try to present myself as the dutiful child, but I’m pretty sure I simply look pitiful — pitiful and scared. I’m scared shitless inside. What the hell am I doing to myself?

  I then give a small start when Mia pushes the hair back on my left side. She reacts when she sees it — the terrible rip that comes out from under my collar, follows my jaw, and then spreads out behind my ear, over the side of my face, and around my eye.

  “A little skittish there,” she says.

  She’s embarrassed herself and now she’s trying to appear unfazed. She leans down and kisses my other cheek.

  “Don’t be too long, bokkie.”

  Little doe. It’s what Ma used to call me, before I came to this country.

  2

  East Boston — Terminal E, Logan Airport

  There’s been a hum, inside my head, since the attack. Not an actual humming — not one I can go and have checked out by a doctor — but a sensation that I will notice when my thoughts are otherwise calm. I don’t know when it really started, but I first became aware of it while lying in the hospital bed shortly after I came off the heavy pain meds. It doesn’t drive me crazy, like a ringing in the ears would, but it does get in the way sometimes, when I’m trying to think my way through something from beginning to end. It wasn’t helpful during the trial, as you can imagine.

  Usually, when I’m active, I don’t notice it at all, but it’s made quiet contemplation difficult. It’s become common to feel muddled and uncertain about things. People have commented that I will often appear preoccupied and thoughtful, but the reality is, I’m trying to maintain a coherent sense of awareness. I will often lose things, lose myself, inside my head, and it has made me feel somewhat unwelcome there.

  I call Bouchard as soon as the terminal’s no longer visible out the back window of the cab. The cabbie’s muttering to someone on his own phone, maybe in English, maybe not. Probably letting someone know where he’s going, in case he’s not heard from again. He was hesitant to even drive me, seeing the way I’m dressed, and then outright refused when I told him the address on the shitty end of Border. I had to show him that I had the money before he would start the engine, and even now, I’m pretty sure he’s worried that he’s being set up to be robbed.

  Bouchard answers immediately. Usually I leave a voice message and he’ll call back, but he knows that things might be happening today, so he’s ready. I tell him that I need the new passport, at my place, within fifteen minutes. He tells me that he has it going out the door as we speak, that it’ll be there in ten. He has me go over the meeting in as much detail as possible during the remainder of the ride. It’s more than he had hoped for, he tells me, being invited to go along with Mia. He praises my abilities. The fact that I’m about to break early release doesn’t seem to bother him at all.

  It bothers me, though. I’ll be the one going back to prison.

  There’s a wiki category: FBI Agents with Criminal Convictions. You’ll find me listed there, under the name Elise McNeil, alongside Hanssen, Liddy, and hometown favorite John Connolly. (I attended the same college as Connolly: BC, where Mom was a professor of minority and gender studies, though I don’t think that’s an actual major there.) So anyone in the world could know about my convictions.

  Bouchard originally reached me through Al — Alfonso, my PO, the best any woman can possibly hope for. I had heard all the horror stories when my time drew short from the repeats who had shitty POs who would demand money, or sex, or both. Some were so bad that the repeat went ahead and broke release as a way to escape. Prison, they said, was far preferable to the feeling of isolation and entrapment they were experiencing on the outside. Those feelings are usually linked directly to the quality of your PO.

  Al’s a man overworked, over-stressed, over-worried, and over-loved by his five daughters, one son (poor thing), and wife of forty-something years. He has a soft spot for us female charges because he sees in each one of us the potential for a better life for his own girls. He believes he’s collecting up karma points or something with every act of kindness he provides. He sometimes practices on us — adult women, some older than fifty — the words and speeches he will use with his daughters, asking us for feedback as to how we think his girls will respond. He told me that he has difficulty understanding the female psyche, something he’s trying to fix, but personally, I think he’s a great father already.

  Not that my own Dad is anything less than great, but he gave up trying to understand us long before we even hit puberty, because there was no way that he would be able to compete with Mom. He was perfect when it came to helping us with things like homework, or some insane idea that involved wire, string, electricity, and open flame, but he’s no Al when it comes to dispensing the advice.

  I suggested once that Al should hire himself out to the panicked fathers of the world, to step in when it comes time to make important speeches. Laughing, he said that he might think about starting a blog and commended me for my insightful idea, making me smile. Shit, I’m forty-five years old, but I felt like his proud daughter.

  Anyway, Al was apparently called — out of the blue — by Bouchard and he was asked about me specifically. Al called that night and told me to meet with him the next morning, and even though he assured me that I wasn’t in any sort of trouble, I spent the night thinking about everything I could’ve possibly said or done recently that might be taken in the wrong way by someone. I sat on my mattress, with my back to the wall — it was the only piece of furniture that I owned, if you can call a mattress on the floor furniture. I always sit with my back against the wall when I can’t sleep, to ensure no one’s c
oming up from behind to grab me, though I worry sometimes that someone might come through from the neighboring room. I figure I’ll have time to respond, but I don’t know how I’ll respond if someone comes clawing through a wall. Scream, I guess. Jump out the fucking window.

  I’ve slept very little since getting out. I’m really something of a mess.

  I met Al at the Dunkin’ Donuts down across from Central Square there in East Boston, which was odd in itself because he usually has us come to his office. He called that morning to change the location and I wished he had done that the first time he called because I was pretty sure there’d be no marshals waiting to collect me at a Dunkin’. Something strange was up.

  He had been trying to help me find a job, work that fit my background, but given the felony conviction, my entire résumé and all my experience is kind of worth shit. So, as you might imagine, he was pretty damned excited when he told me about the phone call from a Director of Security of some company known as CSRMi — Corporate Security & Risk Management (or something like that) Incorporated. It all sounded kind of hinky to me, because when I was in Baltimore we heard all about these bullshit, fly-by-night security firms that had popped up everywhere in the past couple of decades. Shady companies that did things that would make us cringe.

  Al was pretty enthusiastic, though, and I agreed to let him give this Bouchard my number. And then not five minutes after I was back in the shitty eight-by-ten room I was renting on the second floor of a dumpster-decker there on Border, I received my first call from the guy. Was I being watched?

  The voice sounded oddly casual, as if he knew me, and he repeated what Al had already told me about his being a director for the company, CSRMi. When I looked them up on the internet later, at the new library down near where I-90 ends (which is pretty and all but it closed the library on Meridian that was like five fucking minutes from my place), all I could find was a single-page website and a mention in an article in Forbes about these private security companies used by the ultra-obscenely-wealthy. Companies that are rarely in the news, that never accept new clients except by reference.

  Bouchard asked whether I would come to the Embassy Suites across from Logan, to talk with him about a potential job. He told me that they had been waiting for my release for some time, and that I was in a particularly unique position. I asked him if he spoke with anyone at the Bureau about me and he said he had not, that he wanted to keep it that way.

  Nothing good could come from this. I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  Then he offered me five thousand dollars to simply show up and speak with him.

  Holy shit! What do you think I did?

  Undercover work is really fucking hard. You’re scared pretty much twenty-eight hours a day because you never really know you screwed up until you feel that piece of lead cracking open the back of your skull.

  Think of that during your next performance review.

  When I was working undercover, my “in” with one group in central L.A. was my six years in the Army as a 35F — Intelligence Analyst. A new organization was forming, still pretty low on the street, led by an outsider named Byrone Towers. (Yes, some of the graybeards in the office referred to him as Tyrone Powers.) He was also Intelligence, except instead of spending his time locked up in a stinky, cluttered little room in Wiesbaden, Byr allegedly traveled around the world doing…stuff. The story on the streets of L.A. was that he was some kind of Special Operations super-spy who single-handedly overthrew governments and led indigenous forces against those the U.S. deemed “destabilizing” to a region. It was all bullshit, of course, but it allowed Byr, along with some of his military pals, to set up shop and begin running entire blocks of the city.

  They had a great advantage when they came in — they were already highly disciplined.

  Bouchard had me sign form after form before he would even tell me what this was all about — an NDA, a contract, an employment agreement, even papers to set up a bank account and direct deposit for my wages, which were to be twenty-five hundred a week, whether I actually did anything or not. Holy shit, this was a lot of money, even when I was in the Bureau, so you can imagine what it seemed like to someone who’s been stripped of basically everything she owns when she was handed over to the Fed-BOP — the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

  Not that I could spend any of it. I know the game; I’ve worked the field. You can’t suddenly move to a nicer place, or buy decent clothes, or even a POS car like the rusty old Vega I used to own because all that will do is raise suspicions. I had to maintain the image of desperation, enough so that I would be willing to cold-call the sister of a woman I once met in prison to set up a meeting with another woman the one in prison once mentioned to me while passing the time. It has to appear that, having nothing, I’m willing to try just about anything. It’s my tenuous connection to Pookie, plus my background in undercover, that led Bouchard to call Al in the first place.

  It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, you know.

  But how often is the who someone doing twenty-to-life for a Class C because Pookie’s considered a “persistent felony offender” by the court?

  Anyway, Bouchard was tall, with a messy tousle of brown-blonde hair and a goatee that always looked as though he had forgotten to shave that morning — just threw on a tailored Hugo Boss and came on in. His startlingly blue eyes shimmered when he smiled and he was always smirking like a mischievous boy. He often had his hands in his pockets, never threatening, exuding this casual cool that made me think and act rather stupidly around him sometimes. The first time me and my sisters saw Butch Cassidy, when we were too young to really understand, Mom made the off-hand comment to Dad that Paul Newman is not a white man I’d kick out of my bed.

  Bouchard’s very much a Newman.

  But meeting a man in a hotel suite scared me, reminded me too much of other times. Bouchard, though, kept his distance, always in front of me, always something between us, never putting me in a corner or in some position where I felt threatened or trapped. He was kind and sympathetic and spoke with a calming tone, at a measured pace, until my nervousness was finally soothed. He was carefully asking me to have faith, to listen to what he had to offer.

  But then, I’ve accepted offers from a pretty man before, and all it bought me was a whole truckload of hurt.

  I got to know Byr pretty well. I worked for him, acting as his agent for subs he deemed “non-threat.” He thought that sending a woman on his behalf gave the perception of his organization as a business, controlled by the self-interests of everyone involved, not by ultimatum.

  But then he also had Kelvin, or Kel, another former military type who was the scary one — the one Byrone sent out to deal with the more problematic subs. If Kel showed up, you did what you were told or you were replaced. There was no such thing as demotion in this organization. Very few survived to get a second chance.

  In reality, Kel was something of a sweetie. At least, he was with me. He and I were both mixed-race muppets, as he would put it — his father Nigerian and his mother Salvadorian. He liked to joke around when there was no one else about, and he was funny, always kept me laughing. But I had the chance to see his other side on a couple of occasions, so yes, he also scared the shit out of me. He had an almost dry, amused sense of brutality that made it all the more shocking — things that left me shaken for days.

  When I reported on them, warned my supervisors about them, no one really seemed to care about this shit anymore. The Bureau was busy hunting terrorists, defending its turf, fighting for a larger piece of the homeland security pie.

  Why would they give a shit about another black man on the streets of L.A.?

  This kind of left me on my own, which is an uneasy feeling when you hang out with people like these.

  “It’s pronounced el-sha.”

  I’m standing in the long, snaking line of TSA with Mia behind me, examining the green booklet. Bouchard has done an amazing job with it. It has an issue date about nine years
old, around the time I left the hospital but not yet involved in the trial, so it still has almost a year’s use. Its edges are worn and rounded and it smells faintly of mold, as though it was pulled from a damp cardboard box found in the back of a closet somewhere.

  “Elsja deVries,” she reads, a faint expression of amusement on her face. She hands it back, using it to motion me forward. I find that we’re suddenly at the front, a gap between us and the officer at the podium. My heart jumps immediately, causing me to drop the passport as we approach, so that he’s focusing on me as I fumble to pick it up. Like the line of people behind us, he’s now annoyed with me.

  After scanning, he spends an inordinate amount of time shifting his gaze between the photo and me. It’s the same photo used in my American passport, taken before the attack, when I was in my thirties and trying to not smile for the camera, though you can plainly see the smile in my eyes. I begin to worry that I might start panicking, that my scars will begin to itch, but then, without a word, he closes it and hands it back, motioning me on to one of the lines. He gives me a look, but it’s not the look I’m expecting, the look of suspicion — it’s something worse.

  I can see what he’s thinking.

  Too bad. You were kind of cute.

  3

  Dublin — Belfast

  We meet Beverly — Bev — on the flight from Boston. She’s in her sixties with long silver hair that she keeps in a fat braid that falls down the middle of her back. She was on the aisle and I was beside her, in the middle seat of a row so far to the back that the smell of the lavatories is becoming something of an issue. On my other side, against the window, was a man in a suit that he had bought when he was a few pounds lighter. I now sit in his seat because after a strangely long amount of negotiation, Mia finally convinced the guy to switch with her so that she can sit with me. Strange because Mia’s ticket is for up in Business Class but this guy didn’t seem to want to believe her, as though he might lose his place in the stinky Economy row.