Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  I stood up. The phone was a hard flat square in my hand, a dislocated thing, an alien artifact. It was heavy as a ship’s anchor; it was a barb sunk into the meat of my palm. I imagined what it would feel like to open one of those balcony doors and hurl the thin object out into the rain-flooded parking lot. I imagined it borne away on a rivulet, taken down to the White River, and ending up in the depths of some sewer, some sea. I imagined myself lying on my back, my arms and legs splayed out, carried by the furious current from the blacktop parking lot to the ugliness of 86th Street, making no resistance, until some fierce roll of water turned me over, took me under, swallowed me whole.

  What happened when I called would all be according to procedure, specific steps dictated by statute. I would give my considered opinion as to the whereabouts of the missing man, based on the evidence I had accumulated, and then I in the field and Bridge at his desk would collaborate on a plan of capture. Bridge’s office would file notice with his superiors down the hall in Gaithersburg, and when I was directed to do so I would take a field position, and Bridge would initiate the plan we’d agreed upon.

  The swarm of white vans, the whoop of sirens, the truncheon and the Taser; then a fugitive court, a commissioner, a court-appointed attorney, a comparison of the runner’s features with the features enumerated by the complainant, the fingerprints run against the fingerprints on file.

  I found that I had pressed the button. The phone was ringing. I was making the call I had made already a thousand times in my career.

  (And see what I do? A thousand times in my career, as if the actual number is lost in the blur of memory. I had made the call, before that day, 209 times. Some of those times I had sent a text message. But my conscience was stained with 209 positive identifications.)

  The phone rang in my ear while it rang in Gaithersburg.

  I was ready for it to be over, and it was over. I knew where the man was, and fuck Barton and fuck Cook and fuck Dr. Venezia-Karbach: I was ready. The words were poised on my tongue, ready to be said: It is all done. It is all set.

  “Marshals Service. This is Bridge’s office.”

  It was a woman’s voice, bright and cheerful. It was Janice. Bridge’s assistant. When she answered it meant he was out in the field. In the field or in a meeting.

  Opportunity. It was Castle. Castle whispering in the dark. Opportunity.

  Janice, patient, cheerful: “Hello?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Hello.” There was no voice I could have done better. Cold as steel, flat as dirt ground, a smoky whisper of a southern accent. “It’s me.”

  The rain lashed against the flimsy balcony doors, and they rattled in their grooves. My number would have come up blank—a field number—but so, too, I suspected, would Mr. Bridge’s own cell-phone number, blank, masked, agent-to-base communication, the same as mine. From Janice’s POV, a blank is a blank. It was a wild risk to try out such an assumption in these circumstances. This was just one of many risks I was taking, about to take.

  “Well, my goodness. Are you calling from your meeting?” Janice had a little southern accent of her own, a late-modern southern accent, more Atlanta than Little Rock. I put her in her late twenties. Red lipstick, sensible shoes. A dog at home, something cute and loyal.

  “Yes,” I said carefully. “That’s right. Still here.”

  “And are you checking up on me, sir?”

  Janice’s tone was sugary, chipper, borderline flirtatious. In response I tried out a noise, something I had never heard performed but imagined must exist, a matching of tone with tone: I chuckled. A gruff Bridge-style chuckle.

  “No, my dear. I am not checking up on you.”

  “Well, sir, maybe you should be.”

  I wondered if he ever called her Jan. I wondered if she called him Lou. I wondered if Lou saw Jan at the office Christmas party. I wondered if he brought his wife, sipped eggnog, made toasts, got tipsy, took a cab home, coached soccer, saved for college, took the minivan to the minivan place when the brakes were squealing. I wondered about the whole normal human world.

  “What is it I can do for you, sir?”

  What could she do for me? Having come this far, what happened now? I focused on the voice, the manner, the best way to get what I needed rather than thinking about what I was doing and why. Had I stopped to think, I might have asked myself the very logical question: Was I out of my goddamn mind?

  What was I hoping to get, giving Janice that cold, slow, mild accent, I was not yet entirely sure, nor did I know why I’d done it.

  Because of a dagger on a file? Because of some sloppy grammar? Because of an unusual pattern of fact?

  It was none of those. I had seen messy files before. I had seen strange facts in cases before, and sometimes they had been reconciled and other times not. What was different this time, what had driven me to my unusual action, was Bridge’s voice. The way he had sounded in our last call, tight and tense as a bent wire. His voice on the phone at 9:36, calling early for the first time ever.

  My hand drummed on the desk, as my hands were always doing.

  “I just had a quick question for you. About the case.” I had dropped back into an all-business tone: Fun time is over, Janice.

  “And which case is that?”

  My mind reeled momentarily. How many cases? How many runners? How many Jackdaws? How many of me?

  I gave her the case number, and she said, “What?”

  I gave it to her again. I read it slow, digit by digit, and she repeated it back and said she was sorry but she just did not know which case I was referring to. “That number is just not coming up.”

  “The boy,” I started, and almost gave the name, then I stopped. I held my breath. That number is just not coming up.

  “Should I ask Marlena?”

  “No—no, that’s not…forget it. Forget I called.”

  I didn’t smoke or pace around in tight circles. I didn’t even think, really. I hung up the phone and went onto the balcony and stood and listened to the distant howl of sirens while the rain blew around me in curtains. It was weird how calming it was, how it gave me this—I won’t say peace, not peace, exactly, but a peaceful sense of the irreversible. I was a stone that was falling. I had jumped, and there was no way to jump back.

  That number is just not coming up, she said. Not coming up.

  The thing is, there had to be a file. If there was a runner, there was a file. The service didn’t freelance. That’s how it worked, by custom and by law. Plantation loses someone, they file with a local magistrate who issues a transcript and requests the participation of federal law enforcement. It’s the judge’s chambers that notifies the marshals. That’s how it works—that’s how it’s been working since 1787.

  There had to be a file, but there was no file.

  Mr. Bridge knew facts I didn’t know; he always did. That’s how it worked. But I knew with a sudden certainty that behind every fact of this case there was an unknown fact, felt but not seen, like a kidnapper with his rough arm wrapped around a victim’s neck.

  Now I could feel it, I could feel the storm rain slick and warm against my skin, and now my heart began to race, now it began to slam, now the adrenaline was galloping along in my veins.

  An official case had never been opened. No home-state judge had issued a transcript certifying the claimant’s description. No slave commissioner in the Southern District of Indiana had been put on alert. There was no real hunt. There was no case. There was only a file.

  If the marshals weren’t hunting Jackdaw so he could be returned—if we weren’t hunting him so he could be returned—then why were we hunting him? What would happen to Jackdaw when we found him?

  That was the easiest question to answer.

  I was a monster, but way down underneath I was good. Wasn’t I? Wasn’t I good? Didn’t I have some good part of me, buried deep underground, beneath Jim Dirkson and Kenny Morton and Albie the gardener and whoever and whatever else I was? I was good below it. I was, and I am. Good
underground. In the buried parts of me are good things.

  A still picture, me and Castle, whispering joy, telling stories, cabin by the northernmost fence, making plans, whispering quiet crazy hopeful.

  I started moving quickly. I toweled off the rain I’d let fall onto my head and my face. While the computer was turning on I changed my shirt, then I spent five minutes on basic research, old-fashioned digging, three paragraphs of history, ten minutes of tracing lines on the map with my finger.

  Then I gathered up my flashlight and what all else I thought I might need. Bridge wouldn’t be long in knowing what I had done. I could almost hear the stop-start conversation, Bridge and Janice, Jan and Lou: hey, I went ahead and asked Marlena about it for you after all, and…asked her what…what…

  As soon as I was ready to go, I got going. I knew where Jackdaw was, and I knew I better get down to him soon.

  22.

  By the time I got back to Slim’s roadside fiefdom the storm had spent itself and the clouds had cleared away, but somewhere in there it had become nighttime. Darkness giving way to another kind of darkness. The pale face of the moon, a scattering of stars.

  The grocery store was closed up and shuttered, and the body shop, too. All right by me. I parked across the street and hustled across the parking lot in the gloom, walked swiftly under the copper arch and down the shadowy little lane, head down, heart beating, man on a mission, going to the creek.

  I had barely noticed it before. And if I did, I guess I figured it was drainage: a hole in the foot of a small hill, just barely visible between and behind the cluster of motor homes, dribbling overrun out into the shallow brown creek that wound behind the trailer park.

  I moved swiftly past the tin-can palaces with their tribal flags, ignoring the sure, strong sense I had of dozens of eyes watching me, small beady eyes in pink piggy faces, peering from behind slat blinds, staring at my dark body moving unfamiliar and unwelcome through their cloister. Any one of those pigs could come out with a shotgun, and I wondered what I would do, but no one did.

  I cleared the trailer park and passed a jumble of picnic benches and playground equipment and stepped carefully down the slope of the ravine and swung the heavy beam of my flashlight along the creek. Now it was clear, with the water swollen by the rains, the direction the brown water was flowing. The black mouth in the base of the shallow hill was an entrance, not an exit. This low little trickle of mud water was a kind of rivulet, a poor cousin of a creek, and this spot behind the motor court is where some long-ago engineer had diverted it.

  This creek was called Pogue’s Run. I’d found it on the map. I’d looked up the story. This small waterway was discovered at the turn of the century—the eighteenth turning into the nineteenth—discovered and named and recorded, penciled in on early maps, when the city was not yet a city—when it was a gathering of huts, a stopping place on the way to other places. The small river was inconvenient for the city fathers and the grid they’d drawn. So they did just as Mama Walker said: they ran it underground.

  I walked up to the creek, my shoe heels making slippy track marks in the muck.

  Mr. Maris had never, after all, discovered he was being traced. He’d never found Jim Dirkson’s clunky butterfly knife in his pocket and tossed it overboard. He’d gone down to the creek, that’s all. Disappeared into a tunnel. He’d gone underground.

  The water in the creek was shallow, but it was rushing, pulsing a little as it rose with the rain. I walked slowly, picking out individual rocks to stand on, till I got to the mouth of the tunnel. There I got down on all fours, feeling the creek water rush around me, swallowing my hands up to the wrists and surging around my knees and feet, and looked with narrowed eyes up that infinite darkness of pipe. A cold, wet animal smell breathed back out at me.

  There was nothing left to do, right? This was it.

  I shivered, fighting off a wave and then another wave of memory. They called it the shed, but it was more like a chamber. An underground compartment. More like a coffin, really, is what it was, concrete and narrow. Four hours in there for hygiene violations on the kill floor. Six hours for spillage. Overnight for Thoughts Against Good Work. Every hour on the hour a Franklin would crack the lid, shine the light in your eyes, listen for your breathing, close the lid again.

  There was nothing to be done. This was it. I leaned forward and hunched my shoulders together, pushed the upper part of my body carefully forward, as a circus performer gingerly places his head into the lion’s mouth. I eased back and forth, back and forth, getting a sense for the width. Jackdaw at five eight and a buck fifty could fit in here, no problem. For a bruiser like Mr. Maris, I thought, it would be tight. But not impossible.

  I got in there okay myself. Turned off my light, stuck it back in my jacket, and eased my body all the way into the hole. I splashed in the dirty rush of water, hunched forward, keeping my upper body small and bent. I walked with my hands stretched out on either side, fingertips scraping along the roughly textured walls. I walked a long time that way, bent almost parallel with the ground, genuflecting as I went, until the ceiling tapered back down and I was forced onto all fours and went awhile that way, soaking my kneecaps and my palms.

  Time passed, and I didn’t know how much time, either. I just walked, an invisible man moving through the darkness.

  That makes it sound like I was cool, cool as the water, levelheaded, nice and easy, but my stomach was clutching at me. This was the part of it I never had to do. This wasn’t part of my job description. My deal was, I tracked him down—him or her or they—I found the lair, and then I called in the cavalry. My job was the following of bread crumbs: I had tracked men across miles of prairie, down crooked Freedman Town alleyways, along boardwalks, out onto beaches. And every time I called Bridge to put the rest in motion, and every time I turned back into smoke and drifted away. The final part I never had to see.

  One time I decided to force myself to stay. I must have been in some kind of mood. Some foul place. Because I decided I needed, for once, to force myself after calling it in to hang around and watch the denouement.

  It was in Massachusetts. It was in February. A small college in the cold far west of the state, where I had followed the thread of a man to a fraternity house. They’d put him in a room in the attic, had been bringing him beer and dining-hall cereal for three days, trying to figure out a connecting flight. But there were way too many girlfriends and study buddies and drunk pledges wandering in and out of there, too many people brought up to the attic after swearing secrecy, and word was out—all over campus. All over town. Easiest file I ever closed.

  But I don’t know. I was down. I was feeling foul. Something about the season, the ease of the work. I forced myself to stay. I made myself up as a professor, bow tie and tweed, sat sipping coffee at a rickety table in the residential quad with a view of that frat house. I prepped a whole story about being an adjunct in the racial history department in case anyone asked, but no one asked. I watched the vans roll up and I watched the men charge in and I watched the milling, baffled, outraged frat boys, watched them watch their charity project bundled and taken hand over hand by the marshals out of the house and van. I saw the boy’s face, his stricken, humiliated, terrified expression, blinking snow-blind in the brightness of the quad, crying out, confused. To have come so far and to be returning—his new friends in their Greek-lettered sweatshirts feebly shouting support, promising aid, announcing in righteous tones that their dads were lawyers, while the USMs shackled the poor peeb’s arms behind him as though he were a madman, strapped him to a gurney inside the van. The last I saw of that boy was his feet, kicking desperately against the reinforced glass of the van’s rear window, a thrashing barrage of kicks as they drove him away.

  Eventually the tunnel gained some headroom, and I was able to draw up to full height. My feet echoed with wet clicks on the slimy concrete. I turned my flashlight on and followed the light, the beam wavering into strange patterns on the irregular, parabolic surfa
ces of the tunnel. Above my head was its thick stone shell and above that there was clay and river rock and then a thin layer of topsoil and then the streets and sidewalks of the living city.

  I walked the tunnel murmuring something to myself, some old weird scrabbly lyric from my bone-hard childhood. Somewhere up ahead he was there, Jackdaw gone runner, cocooned in his bandages, waiting to get sent up to Canada. I wondered if anyone was down there with him—a flight attendant, someone to give him comfort, hold his hand in the darkness. Would it be Maris? Big, tough Maris? Or Officer Cook? Or young, pale-faced Father Barton himself?

  I shook my head in the darkness. I don’t know why, but I knew that they would not be there with him. No flight attendant. No steward. I was picturing Jackdaw alone.

  Alone and swathed and mired in pain. After what Dr. V had told me when I asked her that last question, what she had told me in a quick nervous rush about the extent of his injuries: the usual, she had said—exhaustion and dehydration, scar tissue new and old. And, less usually, symptoms consistent with acute toxicity.

  “Now, what is that?” I said, playing baffled Kenny Morton, playing him to the hilt. “What does that mean?”

  “It means he’d ingested some substance or combination of substances,” the doctor told Kenny. “It means he was poisoned.”

  I made my careful way along the dark tunnel. I contemplated the man I was coming to see, all that he had undertaken and what he still had to face. What he still had to face was me, the monster coming slowly down the pipe to find him and do…do what, exactly, I still did not know. It was too late to ping Bridge and disappear. Like they say, I knew too much. But I didn’t know enough, either. Not yet.

  I’d walked at least two miles. The tunnel was tilting slightly downslope, and it was getting colder, too. The air was heavy and damp, thick with uncirculated oxygen and the dank smell of the water.

  I was getting closer. I took out the gun I hardly ever carried but was carrying tonight. Soon I’d find it, whatever it was—the dangling padlock, the walled-off chamber, the rock rolled in front of the mouth of the cave.