Sliver of Truth

21

When I look back on some of the mistakes I’ve made in all this, I think probably dropping that phone in the tunnel beneath Five Roses had the direst consequences. Like I said, at the time I probably couldn’t have even said why I did it. I told myself it was the only way to Max, that he’d never fall into such an obvious trap as the one the CIA had set. But I wonder if that was really the reason. I wonder if, on some level, I was suicidal.

I don’t mean that in the truest sense. I wasn’t looking for a bottle of sleeping pills or a dive off the Brooklyn Bridge. But maybe I was looking for a death of self. Maybe I was looking to burn Ridley Jones to the ground, in order to see what might rise from the ashes. It never occurred to me that there might not be a resurrection. That dead was dead.

In the dark warehouse, with Dylan’s breathing the only sound in my ears, I could see how the next few hours would play out with sickening clarity. I knew in a while they’d come to get us. We’d be taken somewhere desolate in the back of that van. When we reached our destination, we’d be killed. There was simply no other way for things to go. Once they had Max, or if he didn’t come for me, they’d have no use for us, and we’d make the awkward shift from assets to liabilities.

“They’re going to kill us,” I told Dylan, who’d been conscious and lucid for a while.

“Probably,” he agreed. “You’re bleeding. Stop struggling.”

My hands were numb. But the bindings on my ankles felt looser. They’d used only rope to tie my ankles to the chair. But that plastic thing on my wrists would not come free. It just slowly ratcheted tighter and tighter and I didn’t think I was getting any blood to my hands. It hurt terribly at first, then I stopped being able to feel my hands at all, except for a terrible burning around my wrists where I imagined the hard plastic was cutting into my skin. I felt the sticky warmth of my blood.

The door opened then, a rectangle of light at the far end of the space. Dutch and his associate approached us. The scarred man pointed a thick, flat gun at us as Dutch moved toward me with some kind of nasty-looking tool in his hand. He was behind me before I could even react. I saw Dylan crane his neck and, grimacing in pain, try to move his chair.

“I knew a man who very nearly severed both of his hands struggling against those bindings,” said Dutch as he used whatever he had in his hand to release the plastic on my wrists. I felt the blood start flowing back to my hands and it was actually painful. I held them out in front of me; they were paper white and didn’t even feel as if they belonged to me. Both wrists had nasty gashes.

“Now you tell me,” I said. My pending death was making me bold and sarcastic.

Dutch chuckled softly. “I always did like you so much, Miss Jones.”

I thought he’d go on to say how sorry he was that it had come to this, but he spared us the farce of that. Here was a man who didn’t care about anything except hiring out his services to the highest bidder. He didn’t seem inclined to pretend otherwise—which would have been refreshing if it wasn’t so terrifying.

He handed me the tool, which looked like a pair of thick wire cutters. “Free your friend and help him to his feet.”

I did this and Dylan leaned heavily on me, almost falling. I was able to support his weight but not easily. It took me a second to realize that the near-fall was a ruse to drop something in the pocket of my jacket. From the weight and feel of it, I determined it might be a pocketknife. I couldn’t imagine that the small knife in my pocket was going to be much help. Dylan and I locked eyes. I didn’t see fear in the expression on his face, not at all. It was something like defiance. His look asked me to be brave and to have hope, two things that had abandoned me a while back. I tried to dredge them back up from within. I had been an optimist once, a lifetime ago. I tried to remember what it felt like as we moved slowly through the heavy metal door and down the staircase toward the waiting van.

THERE IS NO more desolate or despairing a place on earth than Potter’s Field. Located on Hart Island in the Bronx, it’s a ferry ride across the Long Island Sound from the piers on City Island. It is home to the City Cemetery, where New York’s destitute and anonymous are buried, one on top of the other in numbered graves dug by inmate labor. It is a barren, ugly island with only a few scattered trees and winding concrete paths. The grass grows high. In summer, blue asters bloom. On the island, there are several buildings—a hospital, a reformatory, a dilapidated old house—all once having had various functions for the city, now abandoned.

I’ve always had a fascination with the place and its million nameless dead; I’m not sure why. I’d read that unknowns were photographed and fingerprinted, then interred with all their clothes and belongings and death certificate, so that should anyone ever come to claim them, they could be identified. I’d found this piece of information unspeakably creepy and sad; it stayed with me.

For some reason, I’d always wanted to visit the cemetery, just to say I had. I even tried to get access in order to write about it back in college. But city morgue workers, inmates, and corrections officers are the only living people to ever set foot on Potter’s Field, no exceptions.

“It’s not a curiosity,” said the public relations woman to whom I’d pleaded my case. “We must have respect for the unbefriended dead.”

I remember being frustrated and annoyed at being denied. Her phrase, “the unbefriended dead,” came back to me now. Be careful what you wish for, I thought as we stepped from the van onto the docks.

“Then Judas, which had betrayed Him, saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests…and they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field to bury strangers in,” said Dutch with an unfriendly smile.

I’d heard this before, from the Gospel of Saint Matthew, as the probable origin of the term potter’s field. I imagined that he was trying to be scary. It was working, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response.

I helped Dylan from the van. I suspected that he was acting more out of it than he was—at least that’s what I was hoping. His eyes were lucid and he was carrying more of his weight than I think it appeared to the two other men. Still, one or the other of them kept a gun on us at all times.

“Are you a religious person, Miss Jones?” asked Dutch, slamming the van doors behind us. The air smelled of low tide and somewhere a halyard was clanging in the wind. I could see a white speedboat tied off at the end of the dock. I felt the cold air through my too-thin leather jacket. It seemed to leak into my jeans and boots as well.

I didn’t answer him. I wasn’t in the mood for small talk.

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would be.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant.

We walked toward the end of the dock. The island sat black and ominous in the distance across the Sound. It seemed like a perfect place to dump a couple of bodies. I held on to Dylan even more tightly. He squeezed me hard, and that’s when I knew for sure that he was with me. I felt a little better.

“Why here?” I asked Dutch as I handed off Dylan to the other man. Dutch gallantly helped me onto the boat, taking my hand and supporting my arm. It was all very polite, very civilized.

“Myriad reasons,” he answered. “I like the poetry of it, first of all. There are other, more practical reasons, of course. It’s easy to see if we’re being followed, easy to see if your father comes alone.”

“And it’s a good place to dispose of bodies,” I said.

“Your fate is in Max’s hands, not mine,” he said.

“So if all goes well, then you let us go home tonight?” I said in a tone that I hoped conveyed my total disbelief.

He declined to answer as the other man took a seat behind the wheel and powered up the boat. The engine was unpleasantly loud, filling the night with a deep, watery rumble and gas fumes.

“So who are you working for?” I yelled above the din.

No answer.

“What was in the envelope?”

No answer.

You can see I hadn’t learned my lesson. And I could tell I was truly starting to get on Dutch’s nerves, like a precocious child who seems cute at first and then just gets really annoying. But I couldn’t help myself. I was wired with nerves and fear, aggressive with anger at our situation, and just bold as hell because I figured we’d die one way or another on Potter’s Field. It made me crazy that I might never know what was in that envelope. I thought about grabbing Dylan and throwing us both into the water. But it looked black and thick like tar, not to mention deadly frigid. Frankly, I just wasn’t that brave.

After an unpleasantly rocky and freezing voyage, we came to the island. It was a sloppy landing and the boat knocked hard against the dock. Dutch almost dropped his gun, cursed at his associate. The man had no reaction except to tie the boat up quickly and to drag Dylan up onto the dock. Dutch assisted me with a gun in my back. I guess the time for niceties had passed. It was all business from here on out.

A HAUNTING IS a subtle thing. Nothing proves that like a cemetery island at night. No moaning specters, no hands reaching up from fresh graves. In the case of Hart Island it was the strange absences that made it so terrifying. The silence was the first thing that I noticed: the silence of acres of dead, nothing living. There’s a heaviness to it, this lack of ambient noise. It causes every sound you make to seem a hundred times as loud; my own fearful breathing was a turbine engine.

Then there’s the darkness. The moon hid behind thick cloud cover, only the slightest gray glow lighting the night. In the modern world, especially for urban dwellers, there’s no such thing as a truly dark night. Streetlights, headlights, marquee lights, television screens, building lights, come together and create an eternal flame, forever banishing real darkness. The city is always lit; it shines its light into the sky so brightly, we can barely see the stars. Here on Hart Island, the only lights were far off in the distance. Darkness made a home here, settled deep into shadows, painted every strange shape pitch black.

We walked along a barren path. The abandoned buildings hulked menacingly in the distance. Our footfalls seemed to reverberate in the night as we turned a corner and took a steep slope uphill toward a large building—the abandoned reformatory I’d read about. It seemed to sag in its center. Dutch held up a hand suddenly and we all came to a stop.

“Something’s not right,” he said.

He turned in a circle, narrowed eyes scanning the night.

“What made you think he’d come for me?” I said. “What made you think he’d sacrifice himself to save me? You’ve made a mistake.”

He didn’t answer, but I could see from the look he gave me that he wouldn’t have any problem killing me when the time came. The minutes slogged by in the dark and the cold. Dylan started to feel heavier and my back was aching with the effort of supporting him. I didn’t like the look in his eyes, spacey and far away.

“You’ve overestimated his love for me.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, a slow smile splitting his face. He nodded toward the building. Standing there was a dark, slender form, leaning on a cane. My heart started to pump hard, adrenaline making my throat dry and my hands shake.

“Max,” Dutch said loudly, moving toward him. “Good to see you.”

The other man grabbed me hard away from Dylan, who collapsed to the ground without me to help him. The man wrapped a thick arm around my throat and held his gun to my head. My hands instinctively flew to his arm. I clawed at him and began to struggle as my airways constricted.

“Hold still,” he whispered fiercely. Then I remembered the knife in my pocket. I reached inside and flipped open the small blade, keeping it hidden there. In my memory of what happened next, time seemed to slow and yawn.

From the dark form on the hill: a muzzle flash and the sound of gunfire. I saw Dutch stagger back, teeter forward, and then fall heavily to his knees, where he stayed strangely for a moment before falling on his side. I took the knife from my pocket and jabbed it with all my strength into the throat of my captor, feeling nothing but fear and a terrible desire to draw air into my lungs. He released me with a girlish scream and moved back, blood gushing horribly through the fingers he raised to the wound. I felt sick as I watched him.

Dylan, who I’d thought was down for good, was immediately on him. He grabbed the gun from his hand and used it to put his lights out with a hard blow to the skull. The sound of it, metal on bone, was awful. I saw Dutch’s gun lying on the concrete path and moved for it, took its cold heaviness into my hands. I stuck it in the waist of my jeans.

I looked up toward the dark form on the hill and yelled, “Max!”

He turned and moved away quickly. I started to follow.

“Ridley!” I heard Dylan call. I looked back and saw him limping after me. “Let him go. Just let him go.”

I started to run.