by Ben Winters
But the kicker—the part that required me to be most impressed—was the identity of the criminal partner on the American side. This ain’t no small potatoes we’re talking about, was how Cook put it. No mom-and-pop operation. GGSI’s partner was none other than Townes Stores, the single largest retailer in the United States: shops in thirty-six states, selling everything from refrigerators to perfume, from small electronics to coloring books. And clothes, of course—aisles and aisles of cheap cotton clothes.
“You believe that, man?” said Cook, but of course I could. He was a city policeman who was secretly moonlighting for the Airlines; I was a retail site analyst and secretly an enforcer of the FPA. I believe anything. Everything happens.
It was Massachusetts that passed the first Clean Hands law, back in the day. Good old radical Mass., where crazy John Brown had passed the hat for his crusades, where Nell and Morris’s League of Freedom was born in the 1850s and reborn in the 1910s. The hunting ground of the Boston Vigilance Committee, hunting for slave catchers till the slave catchers left town.
In 1927 the commonwealth’s legislature declared that the possession, sale, or consumption of slave-made goods within its borders would thenceforth be a criminal act.
Southern interests—in their genteel and eloquent southern manner—said no fucking way. Why, this was an illegal regulation of trade! Why, this was protectionism! American citizens were being robbed of their God-given and constitutionally protected right to spend their money however they liked! This clash of virtues landed in the Supreme Court in the form of Amalgamated Products v. Hendricks. The attorney general of Massachusetts argued that it was within the police powers of the individual states to safeguard the moral fitness of their respective citizens. Wearing clothing that had been plantation-picked and plantation-sewn did grave harm to the people of the commonwealth. And the Supreme Court, surprise surprise, endorsed this point of view.
Other northern states hurried to pass Clean Hands laws of their own, and Roosevelt’s Democratic majority sealed the deal with the federal version in 1934. If your company wanted to do business in any Clean Hands state, you were required to follow those rules everywhere you operated. Since then, Clean Hands has been an article of faith. All right, says the Righteous North: so we must live with the grievous reality of slavery, we must live with official state racism within our borders. So we are bound up economically and politically with the evil behind the Fence, tied to it and even enriched by it: southern tax dollars go to the national treasury, and southern profits go to Wall Street. And of course Clean Hands only goes one way—there are no laws preventing southern consumers from enjoying the fruits of northern manufacturing.
But at least there is this great conscience-soothing balm: when you go to the store in Milwaukee or Peoria, you are not coming home with blood on your hands.
It was exactly that consolation, that comfort, that Father Barton was intending to tear away.
He had sent in Kevin, and Kevin had come out with evidence of the collusion between GGSI and Townes Stores: a hard drive bristling with incriminating information, six months’ worth of internal data—shipment tracking records, transaction records, the numbers of bank accounts in four different countries. All documenting a commercial connection between a massive retailer and a slave-state factory that would (Barton thought…Barton hoped…Barton dreamed…and Barton had persuaded Kevin to dream, too) scandalize northern sensibilities. It would demonstrate the fecklessness of the federal regulatory scheme. It would prove the whole edifice of compromise to be rotten to its very foundation. It would show northerners who liked to believe, who needed to believe, that they were not personally touched by the cruel hand of slavery that they were in fact touched by it every day. Were wearing it on their feet, were lining up for it the day after Thanksgiving.
He would splash his evidence on the front page of every northern newspaper, deliver it himself to prosecutors in the Southern District of Illinois, which had jurisdiction over Townes’s headquarters, and the world would change.
This was the idea that had so gripped Kevin when first he heard it, the plan he had agreed to with a rapidity that was like a fever. It was this possibility that had persuaded him to take the hideous risk, allow himself to be costumed and tattooed and sold.
Barton thought the world would change, and his lieutenants thought so, and Kevin had thought so, too.
I didn’t believe it for a second. I could see the future. I knew what would happen, and what would happen was nothing.
They’d been talking about freedom in Old Abe’s time, but then they shot Old Abe, and what changed? Nothing changed.
A hundred years later Dr. King was dreaming his dream, telling America it was time to finish its unfinished business. Northerners, black and white, went south for Freedom Summer, crisscrossing the remaining slave states, bearing witness. A huge crowd of abolitionists gathered in newly free Georgia and marched all the way to Selma, Alabama. A brave slave woman in Montgomery refused to eat until conditions were improved, sparking hunger strikes all over the South. The president got on board: the Voting Rights Act, the New Agenda, “abolition in our time.”
And then what? Then the BLP officially condoned the force-feeding of Persons Bound to Labor. Then LBJ got distracted from the New Agenda, drawn deeper and deeper into the swamp of the Texas War. The movement cut itself up, violence versus nonviolence, “rights for us” versus “freedom for them.” The Panthers were declared a terrorist organization. Dr. King, celebrating his great victory—legislated abolition in Tennessee—was shot outside his hotel room.
Nothing changed, not really. The Eighteenth Amendment remained the Eighteenth Amendment. America stayed America.
So what was he thinking now, this zealous priest, this radical child, wild with self-delusion? All of them, Maris glowering and righteous, Cook talking about the new era that they were about to bust loose. I knew better. I knew what would happen. Of course it would be shocking if all those Iowans and Idahoans found out that the cheap T-shirts they’ve been buying have blood on them. It would grab some headlines. The chairman of Townes would give a press conference, shake his head and purse his lips and say, “I accept full responsibility.” GGSI would be shuttered—maybe, maybe not, or maybe just temporarily—while an inspection could be undertaken. Townes Stores would pay a big fine, and they’d have a bad quarter.
In time, people would go back to Townes, because their shit is pretty cheap, wherever it’s coming from. It’s pretty cheap, and it’s pretty good. Nothing would change. People shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders, slaves suffering somewhere far away, the earth turning around the sun.
And that, honey, is how I justified what I did next. That’s how I thought it through to myself as I drove back to the Capital City Crossroads, even then, even with Kevin’s broken, bleeding body lying fresh in my memory like a chastisement.
I believed—I truly believed; I allowed myself to believe—that if I found that envelope filled with stolen data and turned it over to Father Barton, that not a goddamn thing would change. The three million would not be set free.
But there was a way that envelope could get one person free, and that one person was me.
I went out onto my hotel-room balcony and lit a cigarette. And then I called Mr. Bridge.
25.
“I don’t know what you thought you were doing, son. I don’t know what you thought you were up to.”
Mr. Bridge spoke slowly but firmly, projecting control. I listened to him, standing out on my balcony, smoking my cigarette, waiting for him to get it out of his system. I thought about other things. I saw the streetlamps blink on. I gazed at the faded twilight ghost of the sun.
“By placing that call to my office, and by playing false with a federal law enforcement official, you have committed a serious violation of the law. Not to mention a serious violation of our agreement.”
Mr. Bridge, scolding a wayward child. Mr. Bridge, enumerating my sins. Federal law enforcement off
icial took me a second. Janice—he meant Janice.
“Impersonation of an agent. Illegal possession of classified information.”
This bill of indictment I didn’t even bother to answer. I didn’t even take the time to say, “Fuck you.” Sunday sunset had brought something like a peaceful calm to the gray city, a wan beauty. I was exhausted. The pain in my shoulder was a buried throb. I still had dirt on my boots, on the palms of my hands, on my knees—the mud stains of the underground.
Poor Bridge was assuming that I was a couple of steps behind him, trying to keep up. But I was way out ahead. I was so far out ahead that he could barely see me.
“Quiet, man,” I said finally. “Hush up a minute.”
“What?”
“I said hush. Listen. Okay? Because you’re a dead man.”
“Are you—” A silence I hadn’t heard before: genuine shock. “Was that a threat?”
“Nope. It was a statement of fact. True fact. I’m not telling you nothing you don’t already know. You’re fucked, but I’m gonna help you. We’re gonna help each other out. Okay?”
“I…”
Mr. Bridge let the word dissolve into silence. A silence that was easy to read. Slow and thick, gummy with fear.
“Here’s what’s next,” I told him, and he didn’t even bother with another stammering interruption: he just listened. I told him to hang up, leave his office, and call me back from the pay phone just inside the baggage claim area, door 7, at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The pay phones, I told him, were across from the bank of courtesy phones that got you a rental car or a motel room.
“Write this down,” I told him, and I gave him the number of a new phone, a disposable phone I had purchased for this purpose, at a place on 38th Street, on my way from Saint Anselm’s. “Forty-five minutes.”
There was one more silence while he considered whether to lodge a fresh objection, but then he clicked off.
I stood in the stillness of the balcony, watching spotty Sunday evening traffic go down 86th: first one car, then two, then one more. If I had misread Bridge’s last silence, if he had been grinning cruelly in that last instant, relishing the last time he’d ever have to take bullshit from this smartass nigger, then the vans would be screeching up any minute.
They did not. He was reading the situation correctly: he was in a bad spot, and if anyone could get him out of it, I could.
I pictured him, middle-aged Bridge, hustling down the stairs of the Marshals Service building to the parking garage, pushing the speed limit in whatever poky American four-door he could afford on his government pay, all the way to BWI.
This, for me, at the end of a long and difficult twenty-four hours, should have been a moment to relish. Cherish, even. Slowly showing Bridge what was going to happen. After so many years in his power, forcing him inch by inch to do what I wanted. Clawing out from under Bridge. Lifting him up, shaking him upside down.
But the moment of Kevin’s death kept on ricocheting through my body. Over and over again. Flying backwards, and he flying backwards on top of me. The blood from my shoulder mingling with the blood of his chest. That had changed everything—a bell that rang in me. A crack in the firmament of the world.
I should have felt good, but I only felt weary. I only felt sad. My shot shoulder sang with a low hurt, the bullet in there burning, a smoldering fire buried inside a pit.
Like moving through the tunnel—you only keep going. Whatever happened next, it was going to happen quickly, and it was either going to work or it wasn’t.
Thirty-four minutes later the phone rang.
“Hang up,” I said.
“What?”
“Go upstairs,” I said. “Call me back from the phone between gate B13 and gate B14. By the men’s restroom.”
“If you want me to call you from a gate area, then I’m going to have to buy a ticket.”
“Well, then, you better buy a ticket.”
Mr. Bridge called back right on time, from the phone between gates B27 and B28. I didn’t say hello. I just started talking.
“This boy Jackdaw, this slave we been following, he was a mule. When he—”
“Where did you get this information?”
“Don’t interrupt. When he left GGSI he took something with him. An envelope.”
I didn’t tell Bridge what was in that padded envelope, because I didn’t know if he knew what it was. I didn’t say to Bridge that Jackdaw the slave was actually Kevin the college boy. I didn’t know if he knew that, and if he did know, I didn’t know if he knew that I knew, and anyway, fuck him. I wasn’t handing Bridge any piece of information he didn’t already have unless it would be beneficial to me.
I skipped to the meat of it. The pivot point of my discourse. The wedge that I was going to drive between him and me.
“This material the boy is carrying, you all are mixed up in it. Right? I mean the marshals. If this comes to light, what he’s got, your agency is implicated. Is that right?”
I waited. There was a strange quality to the silence, and I realized it was because I was holding my breath, keeping myself totally still. I exhaled.
“Bridge?”
“Yes?”
“Are you not answering because you don’t know the details, either, or because I told you not to interrupt?”
A thread of silence, then: “Both.”
I was making him sweat—that was good; I needed him nervous—but in truth it didn’t matter how the marshals were implicated, it only mattered that they were. Maybe the marshals were acting as facilitators or as muscle, or maybe they were just looking the other way at some crucial juncture in the customs approval process. It was one of the above. It was all of the above. What mattered to me was that Bridge’s ass was in the fire, and so were the asses of whoever was further up the chain of command.
All that mattered was that he wanted what was missing—what Kevin had hidden. For whatever reason, the marshals wanted it as badly as Barton did, and I was now in a position to deliver it.
Bridge remained quiet, and I heard the burble of the airport behind him. Gate announcements; a baby yelping; the muted beep beep of some kind of small vehicle in reverse.
I kept talking. “So when this man escaped, it created a special problem. For the Marshals Service. He couldn’t just be caught, because if he’s caught, whatever he’s carrying ends up in Canada or in front of a judge.”
More silence.
“You still not interrupting because I’m right, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, well, now you gotta answer. Now I got a question.” I didn’t really. I actually knew the answer. But I needed to hear him say it.
“Where it said Jackdaw was known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis…that’s torture. Right? That little ‘known to have’? That’s some Franklin who’s persuaded to look the other way while Jackdaw’s accomplice got hung up or buried till she told what she knew.”
Silence.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
I had to hold the phone away from me. I bared my teeth. I tilted my head back. Tortured, then, before she was killed. Of course. I knew there was something behind it all along, and what’s always behind everything? When you scrape away the sticky cobweb of euphemisms like known to have intended to remove himself, you always find something hiding underneath it, and it is always violence. It’s always some kind of violence.
I said the girl’s name to myself, the name Kevin had called out to the sky. Luna. The sun was all the way gone now. The sky was dark, and the moon had crept up, shrouded in clouds.
“The one thing…” Bridge started, then stopped.
“What?”
“I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“Anything. When I delivered that file to you, I thought it was real. I promise you that, Victor.”
Jesus Christ. He wanted me to care.
He wanted me to know that he cared, for God’s sake.
“I agreed with you from the beginning about the quality of the file. I also felt there was something off there. I told you to do your job because that’s my job. But you had—numerous concerns, and you were vocal about them. You were persistent about those.”
“I told you to look into it.”
“And I looked into it.” He cleared his throat. “Correct.”
A sensation welled up in me, of tenderness. Empathy. This feeling I strangled. I tightened my grip on the phone. I focused on sorting out the timeline.
“So you called your boss and asked him about the file.”
“Her.”
“Fine. Her. And she called you back when? Friday morning?”
“Yes. And she told me there was nothing to be concerned about. But that—I was not satisfied with that. I pushed her. She hung up. She called me back Friday night.”
“Seven thirty.”
“Yes. Right. She told me…” A fumbling half-second silence, a search for language. “She gave me the backstory on this.”
“She told you that members of your agency have been participating in a massive fraud on the American people.” I was in a mood now to have my suspicions explicitly confirmed. “Bridge?”
“Yes.”
“And she told you the real job here was to find this kid so he could be killed and this evidence could be collected and destroyed.”
Silence. Total silence. Dead and sad.
“Bridge? She explained to you that the real job here was to find this kid so he could be murdered and his magic envelope tossed on a fire. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“And why didn’t you tell her to go fuck herself?”
“It’s just…that’s not—that wasn’t an option for me.”
