The Baby Merchant

by Kit Reed

  He knows Zorn and the wife are on the mark, ready to travel as soon as he phones with the particulars. He’d planned to call Zorn tomorrow, from the halfway point. No air travel within the continental U.S. on this one, not with hyped security and airport spot searches, he is going by car. He knows the route. Although he usually flies, Starbird knows how to dance ahead of roadblocks. When you are as meticulous as he is, you are prepared for any exigency. Everything in place before you begin. He completed the requisite paperwork before he left New York: an arsenal of forged driver’s licenses and passports, a handful of airline tickets in all those names, you can’t be too careful. Once he signs off on this project he will head south— bound to have an easy time at the border with his bogus passport and credentials. He expected to use the London ticket booked for one Carlos Velasquez one week from today— fly out of Mexico City with his beautiful new Mexican passport, but even here, he has backup reservations in two other names. He always has a backup. His Spanish is perfect, piece of cake.

  Now he’s not so sure.

  He should be bombing across Alabama by this time. He should have made his calls and lined up the next rental car he intended to pick up. Instead, he is here. The business is in shutdown, what little staff he had is gone for good, with bonuses to assure their silence. Nobody to call, nobody to consult, a long trip looming. This is Tom Starbird, proceeding on his own.

  Not only has he interfaced with the mark, he has interfaced with the product, and this is what leaves him hung up in this drab room like a computer frozen in mid-crash. He has made the fatal error of personifying the product. Instead of dealing with calm detachment, he has looked it in the face.

  29.

  Sasha won’t recognize the person she becomes when all her hopes explode and she truly understands that her baby’s lost. She may not even realize that she is changing. She’s moving too fast. At some deep level she may already know she has lost Jimmy, but she refuses to comprehend it. She can’t. She has to believe the disappearance is a puzzle she can solve. One she can and will solve because not to do it is unthinkable. Loss does that to you: stuns the brains out of you.

  The blunt instrument that makes a blind, deaf-mute of Sasha Egan is incredulity. She can’t believe it. She won’t believe he is gone. When it comes, the news will come in dribbles, like a beginning avalanche. Slowly. Until the end when truth thunders down in a rain of boulders and flattens her.

  The first thing she understands without knowing how she knows it is that in spite of her promises, Marilyn never came. None of her little touches in the unit, no signs that Jimmy was changed or fed, which is the first thing she’d do if she came in and found him awake. If Marilyn had come in and found him sleeping, she’d still be here. The bitch left it to Delroy. Did she think a child could do the job! Her first response is anger. Marilyn’s so fucking irresponsible, where is she? Wait. No mother is that irresponsible, something happened that you don’t know about.

  Find him. Then ask.

  Frantic, she starts in the motel room, opening drawers and closets with her blood pounding, calling Marilyn, calling Delroy— calling Jimmy!— calling them long after she understands that there is no one hiding here. There’s a card propped on the phone. A note. Delroy left a fucking note? Furious, she jams it in her pocket. A note. Fool boy, did he think he could take Jimmy out any time he felt like it? She runs out into the parking lot in rising anger, looking here, there, for the little sneak— what was she thinking, trusting him with the baby, he’s not even twelve yet, and where the fuck was his mother? A car starts up— pizza man; she glances his way but her vision stops at the lit-up Domino’s sign on top of the car. Nobody. Everything in her is focused on her baby. “Delroy,” she shouts as the Domino’s delivery car pulls out of the parking lot. She goes running along the ornamental border, shouting, “Delroy? Delroy, where are you? I brought your stuff!”

  That ought to bring him out.

  Sasha can’t know yet that it won’t.

  Nothing does. Not the food, not the threats. OK, she thinks, Delroy and the baby aren’t here but they’re nearby, they’re here but hiding. If Delroy thinks it’s a game, well. I’ll game him. Jimmy’s OK— he’s fine, she tells herself because loss destroys thought, sweeping logic before it; they’re here somewhere, all I have to do is figure out where. Wherever they are, it’s for a perfectly good reason; when I find them Delroy will explain what happened or Marilyn will and we’ll all laugh. If I don’t throttle him.

  As she runs along calling, Sasha checks the ice machine, looks under parked cars and with her heart stopped cold, into the murky lozenge of a swimming pool and— oh, God— the Dumpster. Her voice is high and wild. “Delroy. Delroy Steptoe, answer me!”

  It’s OK, Delroy’s a responsible kid. He didn’t just take off, he left a note. TELL NO ONE. That means he hasn’t taken Jimmy to the office, why would he, when the very sight of him makes Marilyn mad enough to rip his ears off? The last thing he’d do would be take a crying baby to her. Denial prompts a series of desperate scenarios. Jimmy wasn’t crying when she left, but with babies you never know— it was only for two minutes!— just a stopgap until Marilyn stepped in, that’s all, the bitch! Delroy, I got held up, you keep care of that baby until I get there. No wonder he’s hiding. He’s out here somewhere, walking Jimmy to sleep; he can’t answer because he’s scared of waking him. She’ll round the next corner and bump into him with Jimmy in the Snugli, dutifully trudging around the building, good boy. Unless Delroy took him up in the woods so Marilyn wouldn’t hear the crying and tear into him.

  What do you expect from a kid? She should have stayed, she should never have trusted Delroy, she should have left more money, better instructions, she never should have left. But what if Jimmy woke up hungry tonight, bawling, what if he started squirting again— the rain, Jimmy’s fever, she couldn’t take him out, she had to buy his things!

  Maybe Delroy carried her baby uphill to the mall to show him to his cracker friends. The thought of them peeling the diaper—look at here— is infuriating. If those prurient little weasels so much as touch her child … That’s where they are, that must be it. Lazy, indifferent Marilyn doesn’t know it, but Delroy and his mall rat friends ditch school most afternoons. They hang in packs, hocking loogies into the mall fountain and sock-skating on the terrazzo mezzanine; she’s seen the cheap thrill kids circling food court tables like vultures around a dying man, waiting for him to stop moving. If Delroy Steptoe hurts one quarter inch of her baby she’ll murder him. Sixth grader or no, she’ll beat him with her fists until he is the one who stops moving.

  Brooding, she doubles back on the unit. Where did they go, how long have they been gone, did he take off as soon as she got in the car? Or did he hang in faithfully until Jimmy started to cry? How long ago was that? There’s no bottle cooling in the microwave to tell her; the spot in the crib where Jimmy slept is cold. When did Delroy Steptoe give up on this? God, if the child took off in the extra ten minutes it took her to get his rotten fried chicken she’ll never forgive him.

  No. She’ll never forgive herself.

  Two minutes. She sold her only baby down the river for two minutes. Like Marilyn was ever going to come when she said. She should have known! Marilyn was never coming down in two minutes and she wasn’t coming in twenty, either, in spite of her promises. Sick with it, Sasha understands that Marilyn didn’t even bother to check. If she had, she’d be out here in the parking lot right now, explaining, or beating Delroy to a pulp. Instead all the curtains in her place are drawn. She has a guy in there with her, they are having gross, unimaginable middle-aged sex, and even when she doesn’t have a man around to distract her, Marilyn is not reliable. She’s done a lot of things Sasha never asked for and didn’t want, brought in gaudy shirts and crap lamps, sticky food, but she never did anything she promised. So this is Sasha’s fault for trusting a woman nobody can trust. No, it’s her fault for trying to buy an eleven-year-old, it’s …

  It’s her fault for being
such a shitty mother— oh yes oh God, like it or not this is what Sasha Egan is now and will be from now until she dies and maybe after. She is a mother. She will never give away this baby. He’s part of her.

  Missing.

  Guilt collects, swarming her like a cloud of gnats as she tries this, then that, searching, plagued by an inner monologue that will run in her head nonstop for the rest of her life until or unless she finds him; it will play in her head forever even if she does. Should-haves roll into might-haves and could-haves. Hoping, Sasha spins futile best-case scenarios as she taps on the doors of deserted units and runs along the gully behind the motel, flailing at the overgrown azalea bushes that hide the air conditioned back windows, stumbling along in the dark looking for anything— a pink starfish hand waving or a scrap of blue blanket, whatever the uneducated heart expects when it goes looking for a baby.

  The last thing that comes in before you run out of hope is the last hope.

  Wait, she thinks. Maybe Delroy took him up to Marilyn after all. He needs her even though he is scared shit of her. That’s it, she tells herself, pleased and relieved. That’s where they are. The minute Jimmy started crying he ran to the office and handed him off to Marilyn, the woman is probably sitting in the back booth in the diner right now with my baby in her lap, giving him gooshy kisses with that smug Revlon lipstick smile of hers. Don’t you dare put that fat red mouth on my Jimmy.

  That’s it. It has to be. Sasha can’t know why she is so angry. When I go running in she’ll be all superior and hostile: “What’s the matter, Sashie, don’t you know how to take care of a baby?”

  She heads for the diner with every line in her body angled forward, plowing through the unnatural light that pollutes Savannah nights. She’s on the herringbone brick walk that leads up to the door when a hand clamps down on her shoulder.

  “There you are!”

  Startled, she shrieks.

  “Don’t do that,” Marilyn says. “You’ll scare the people.”

  Sasha whirls. An expanding universe of fears clots in her throat. She cries in a little explosion of breath: “Where is he?”

  The big woman stands under the ornamental lamppost with the squirming Delroy. She claps both hands on his shoulders and turns him around so he is facing Sasha too. The sodium vapor light turns Marilyn’s magenta mouth black and her turquoise pants black and makes ominous black squiggles of the design in her nylon top, like words in a message Sasha is too distraught to read. She looks like a painting of a big dead person. Delroy’s grown so huge in Sasha’s imagination that she is startled by the disparity. In this light he is anxious and small. “Shh shh.” Marilyn shoves Delroy forward. Her full voice is trembling when she says, “OK, Del honey. Now.”

  Squinting, Delroy opens his mouth but he’s been crying so hard that he can no longer speak. All she hears is his breath bubbling.

  Marilyn’s musical voice hits a series of flat discords. “Honey, I feel really bad about this.”

  Sasha throws up a hand as if to fend off what is coming.

  “Hold still, honey,” Marilyn says. The monolithic face fissures in an unexpected collapse and tears run down in all the crevices. “Delroy has something to tell you.”

  Not all the shaking in the world will shake any more information out of the miserable Delroy. By the time Sasha is done trying they are both wrung dry. There is no truth the boy can give her, no real explanation, nothing on what happened to her baby after he walked out on him. He walked out on her baby! Jimmy was sleeping so nice, he only left him for a tee-ninetsy little minute, and the baby went where? He doesn’t know, he wasn’t there, he says, and she has to believe him because try as she does, running at the question from every possible direction, it’s all she can get out of him. No matter how cleverly she re-phrases, Delroy recites the same sparse, dismal details over and over. Hungry, he was just hungry, that’s all. Baby was fine, he wouldn’t of left except it was totally asleep, all he did was run uphill to find the Good Humor truck but it was gone so he had to go inside the mall for a Klondike Bar, so what if the time got away from him? It won’t matter how long Sasha works on the boy, questioning, probing, grilling him with carefully controlled anger, that’s all he has, the poor, ignorant little shit. Let the police try to get more out of Delroy Steptoe, if they ever fucking come. He has told her everything he has to tell. She’s wrung him dry.

  Of course she has called the police. It’s the first thing she did. Now she is done with Delroy and sick of Marilyn’s guilty sniveling and the Savannah P.D. still haven’t showed up. Jiggling with remorse, Marilyn begs her to wait for the cops up in the office with her so she can help— make coffee, maybe, cookies to get her blood running and perk her up, she says, when she means, to make up for it. Marilyn is desperate to make it all right but Sasha refuses. She can’t bear to look at the woman’s face.

  Marilyn calls, “They’ll be here in just a little minute.”

  It takes them forever to come.

  When they do come the police are courteous, efficient, suspicious. Southern gentlemen in their neat summer uniforms— short sleeves because summer comes to Savannah before the north even sees spring. It occurs to Sasha as they begin their polite Southern inquiry that they think she and not Delroy lost track of the baby. She is so innocent in terms of what they are thinking at first that this is as far as she can take it: lost track of the baby.

  Then the detectives come. Polite. Genteel, but probing. They are at the beginning of a long night of questions and Sasha is too stupid with worry to see what they are really driving at.

  Questions, she has to answer their questions. She doesn’t know anything but she has to tell them everything, in these things there’s no telling which details count. She needs to keep her head clear, be precise. Say exactly when she left the DelMar. Where she went. Stunned, she rehearses the details like a chronic A student trying hard to come up with the answer that will ace the test. They are like a pair of harriers, following each answer with another question—why she left. Where she was in the interim. What she found when she came back. Anything suspicious, did she see anything suspicious, does she want them to contact her family?

  Family? No!

  The two who are tag-team questioning her exchange significant looks.

  Why aren’t they out searching instead of sitting in here harassing her? She rummages for the exact detail that will move the police out of her bland, dismal motel room and into the woods, onto side roads or up into the mall, wherever her baby is. Anything to jump-start the search. Nuances, she thinks, looking at the empty crib, the Teddy she bought for her boy even though he isn’t big enough to see the expression on its brown plush face, the little blue quilt she bought neatly folded on the rail unused, because Savannah nights are warm. How can I get them on the case?

  God, this is what it is now: a case. With her heart turning inside out she hears the detective in charge assign it a number.

  Even though he is still polite the chief investigator is losing patience. “Ma’am, if you don’t know what happened, is there anybody you can think of who would?”

  Why does it take her so long to think of Gary? Was he that big a cipher in her life? Her hand goes to her mouth: “There’s a boy.”

  “We know.”

  “Not a boyfriend, but the baby’s father.”

  “We know.”

  Better not to ask them how they know. She scrambles for the little she knows about Gary. Pathetic: it isn’t much. Gary, does she really think that dumb, genial Gary from UMass in suburban Brookline would break in and steal her child? She tells them about Gary anyway. She describes the day he showed up at Newlife, their ugly little encounter; the night, with him circling the building; it’s why she had to run away. Just when she thought she was safe he confronted her in the baby aisle of the Food King. That was the last she saw of him. Cargill, his last name is, Lieutenant. Gary Cargill.

  “When did you see him last?”

  “It’s been days. I never saw him after the
supermarket.”

  “Yes Ma’am,” they say, “that’s what the lady in the office said.”

  This comes as a surprise. Of course there is another team questioning Marilyn and Delroy. What made her think this investigation only touched on her?

  Gary Cargill. A techy at the precinct does a search and supplies the details. Moving violation in Boston, that’s all. Family’s from Iowa, we’re waiting to hear from headquarters in Des Moines. Now, Ma’am, when this Gary Cargill came to see you, did he make any threats?

  No, she tells them. But I heard something in the bushes the other night, you don’t think he …

  We don’t conjecture, Ma’am. Would you call it stalking.

  It could have been stalking. No, he didn’t make any threats. The more she tells them the more she thinks Gary is a bungler but he means well enough; he would never do a thing like this because whatever else he is, Gary Cargill is an ordinary guy and the person who would steal a baby is not ordinary. He is nothing like. Corrupt, she thinks, sick with the implications. He would have to be corrupt. Or deranged. This makes her shudder. She can’t stop. Don’t think about what a thief may do to your baby, Sasha; don’t go there or you’ll never come back. You have to stay here because Jimmy needs you. She won’t know it until much later, but she is in shock. She can’t think about what’s happening to her baby and go on sitting here talking to the police. She can barely keep from screaming. It’s all she can do to go on breathing out and in, in and out.