Underground Airlines

1.

We drove south all day Monday, Martha and me.

We drove in a white Toyota with Wisconsin plates, an Airlines junker that had been waiting in a Southside parking lot, just where Cook had said it would be, with the keys duct-taped in the wheel well. The Toyota rattled at speeds over sixty miles per hour, so I kept it at fifty-five all the way through southern Indiana and the western part of Kentucky. Route 65 down there behaved more like a country two-lane than a big interstate, winding and gentle, running like a brook. We drove up and then down the Blue Ridge Mountains, into the clear blue air of Tennessee. The ugly weather burned away as we went. We passed red barns and green fields and acres of swaying corn. The sky was all porcelain blue and gentle white clouds, the whole curve of heaven like painted pottery. Every town had its steeple and its water tower, and the shoulder was dotted with wooden signs advertising pies and antiques.

It all made me weary and anxious. I took it all, all the sugar-sweet beauty of the sky and the charm of the landscape, as a taunt: a haughty sneer from the venerable southland as we drew nearer. Purty down here, ain’t it? Well, come on, now, ’n’ sit a spell…

We listened to Michael all the way down. We started with Thriller, then we jumped back in time, did Ben, MJ with the big Afro on the cover, looking mournful.

His tragedy was always in his face, even from the beginning. You could see it in his eyes.

We listened to “Take Care of Our Brothers,” the charity single that caused poor Michael so much grief. It raised a ton of money for relief, but half his fans called him a sucker, said it was an amelioration anthem-so he disclaimed it, and then the other half of his fans said he was letting himself get pushed around, boxed in, politicized.

Sometimes I think he never recovered from that. Sometimes I think he spent the rest of his life trying to escape from all that shit, from what our country is, but of course he couldn’t do it. Of course you can’t.

God, those songs, though. That voice. It carried us all the way down.

“Evenin’. What can I do for y’all?”

This man wore no name tag. Either this motel, the Rambler’s Roost, did not provide uniforms for its employees or the desk clerk was happier in his rumpled plaid button-down shirt, worn unbuttoned to show off a beer-company T-shirt. He surveyed us warily from behind the desk.

“We just need a room, thanks,” Martha told him.

I hung back, hovered in the shadows of the dark, unpleasant lobby of the Rambler’s Roost, with the mismatched armchairs and the smell of burned coffee.

“Just the one room, eh?” said the old cracker.

“Yes,” said Martha.

“And how many beds?”

His eyes were moving slowly back and forth between the two of us: me and Martha, Martha and me. The Rambler’s Roost was in Pulaski, Tennessee, fifty miles north of the Fence, but of course it got thicker the farther south you went, that coefficient of difficulty involved in doing even the simplest tasks. I think of it sometimes as a pressure in the atmosphere, like walking under water: the extra effort required to get served at a restaurant, make a purchase at a store. Check in to a motel.

“Whatever you got is fine.” Martha spoke through clenched teeth. “Do you have a room or don’t you?”

“Oh, I reckon I might.”

The clerk turned with his hands on his hips to look at the pigeonholes on the wall, nearly every one of which had a key inside. He pulled out number 12 and placed it on the counter, but when Martha reached for it, he put his flat, heavy hand on top of hers and whispered.

“Listen, hon.” Hoarse, plenty loud for me to hear. “Everything all right here?”

Martha didn’t answer. She pulled her hand free from under the old man’s, as though she were escaping from a trap. He shrugged, pushed her the key.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Checkout is at ten thirty.”

Room 12 was no improvement from the lobby. An indistinct and unpleasant smell; tattered curtains over a streaked window; a thin rug spattered with a grim archipelago of stains. There was one bed, a twin, and a rollaway cot on the floor beside it. Martha grimly lifted one corner of the bedspread, looking for bugs, I figured, and I felt a jolt of regret for bringing her here-for bringing myself here-for all this. Martha disappeared into the tiny bathroom, and I watched the door shut. I had no choice. I had a mission here-a goal. But this girl…

There was a mirror tacked to the wall above the dresser. I looked into it. I told myself it was okay. It was all going to be okay. This time tomorrow, Martha would be back in Indianapolis, picking up Lionel from her sister’s place. By this time tomorrow, all this would be a strange dream-in twenty-four hours I would be a dream she had woken from.

Our deal was simple: clean and clear. Money for service.

The money had come from my petty cash, all the unmarked money Bridge provided me with for incidentals, money that-after the next couple days-I would never need again. I’d had twenty grand in a lockbox within the safe of the hotel room. I’d had five thousand in a false bottom of my rolling suitcase. Another $5,200 in the glove compartment of the Altima. Four hundred-dollar bills from one wallet and two hundred-dollar bills from a second wallet; a final two thousand sewn into the lining of a tan sport coat.

From this I’d counted out Martha’s $29,500 and brought it to her in the laundry bag.

I told her the truth-a version of it. A portion, calved off from the whole. I was an agent of the Underground Airlines. I was going down into the Four to recover something that had been lost, a weapon in the battle against the old foe. All true; no lies. All true.

And no black was permitted to travel into any of the states of the Hard Four without a white companion to vouch for his whereabouts and be responsible for his conduct.

I needed a white person.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” I told her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.” I kept going. I spoke quickly.

“I will provide you with a false identification for the border crossing,” I told her. “When we’re across, clear of the border, you will reenter the North with your real ID and burn the false one. Then you’re done. You go back to Indy and get your money and you’re done. You can do what you had intended with it, or you can-I don’t know. Take your boy and get out of the country. Go to Europe. So-”

“Yes,” she said.

She wasn’t listening to what I was saying about Europe. About leaving. I could see the option sliding past her, untouched. She was going to hand my money over to the clown from Steubenville, Ohio, who claimed he could get her into TorchLight, and that was a foolish move, but that was not my concern. She was an adult, and I was making her an offer, and all I needed was for her to take it, and she took it. She was in.

I handed her the laundry bag. She didn’t look inside. She didn’t count the money. She held the bag carelessly by its thin plastic strap, looking with new interest at my face. “I have one condition.”

“What?”

“You have to tell me your name. Your real name. That’s my only condition.”

It took me a minute. I had to fish around to find it. Castle called me honey and Bridge called me Victor. I’ve hung so many names on myself, one after another. And I actually have a name, a real human name that my mother whispered in my ear when I was four years old, before I was taken from the breed lot and put into the school. Sweet and secret private name.

I almost told it to Martha, but then I decided to give her my service name instead. My Bell’s name. That was fine. That was close enough.

“Brother,” I told her. “My name is Brother.”

That was last night. Now here we were, five hundred miles away, and I was staring out the window, standing in my pants and undershirt, watching red taillights stack up in the darkness. Martha came out of the bathroom.

“Whoa.”

“What?”

She was squinting, coming closer, looking concerned. “Your shoulder.” I realized I was holding on to it, clutching the spot where bands of pain were radiating out into my neck and upper back. “That needs to come out.”

I took my hand away, and it was slick and glittering with pus. “Shit.”

“Yeah. Shit. That is definitely infected.” Martha took a step closer and squinted at the wound.

“Let’s get it out,” I said. “Now.”

We had no extra time tomorrow. No time tonight for a fever, no time for the course of illness. A hospital, obviously, was out of the question.

And Martha, as it turned out, a frequent traveler and an unemployed medical assistant, had with her everything she needed, more or less, to pull a piece of battered metal out of my flesh. Suture kit and bandages, aspirin and gauze, even a small scalpel.

“The only thing I don’t have,” she said, “is any kind of anesthetic. But in the morning I’m sure we could get to a pharmacy-”

“No,” I said. “Now.”

She shook her head and looked at me, a wounded stranger in the dim hotel room. A long way from Jim Dirkson.

“All right, Brother. Go ahead and lie down on the bed.”

She fetched ice from the vending machine, and she wrapped some in a washcloth and held it on my shoulder till it was numb.

“Well, that oughta do something,” said Martha, and I couldn’t say if it did or not: her knife slid into my shoulder, and it hurt like hell.

I winced. I held my breath. My shoulder was on fire; my shoulder and my back.

“You’re doing great,” Martha said in the soft, coaxing tone I’d heard her use with her boy. “You’re doing just fine. Just hang tight.”

She breathed carefully while making her careful incisions, and then I felt her fingers working on and in my flesh, burrowing, sentient things, insects crawling around. I clutched the edge of the thin mattress with both hands and squeezed. I wasn’t born for this, I was thinking. I wasn’t born to be any kind of soldier or spy. This was all a mistake.

“I see it,” she said gently. “I see it already. It’s close to the surface. Just hold tight, Brother. Just hold on.”

Martha began to tug, carefully at first, and then quickly, and I felt the bullet wriggling loose, pulling free. I wondered if this was what it would be like with Bridge. Bridge’s doctor, taking out the chip. That was part of it, part of the deal we had made, the deal I had forced him into. It was deeper down than the bullet, of course, deeper down and more tightly interwoven. Tied in to the base of my brain with a million tiny fibers. Tucked tightly between the two upmost vertebrae.

Then, with one last intake of breath, Martha pulled it out. “Got it!” I craned my head around and saw her grinning. “There! Got the little fucker.”

Her fingers in their thin gloves were covered in my blood. Her face was exultant. I smiled, weakly, and struggled up in the bed. She dropped the bullet into my outstretched palm, and it was small and ugly, smeared with blood and tissue, its black copper head flattened by force. When Martha laid it in my hand it was warm, like a grub or the end of a tongue. I put it on the night table, under the shade of the lamp, and lay back down so she could sew me up.

Somehow this hurt less-the stitching. Maybe I was already feeling better from the bullet being gone. Maybe I was getting used to it, another person’s hands inside my body. Maybe being put back together just hurt less than coming apart.

“You’re like a different person,” I told Martha as she finished up, pulled the black thread through me one last time. “Doing this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean-steady.”

“What do you mean, steady?”

My answer was interrupted by a gunshot, outside, somewhere close. Loud and unmistakable. I yanked the bedside light out of the wall, rolled over onto Martha in the darkness and covered her on the ground, lay there panting on top of her, my shoulder throbbing and burning. There was a second shot, then a third.

“What do you think-”

“Stay here,” I said and crawled to the door. I crept, hunched over, down the hallway to the front office, my gun tucked into the waistband of my pants, blood oozing from my wound. I went down that narrow hotel hallway in the middle of the night with the sure dark feeling that something new and terrible had happened. Something bad was happening.

“Well, hey there, boy,” said the cracker at the desk. “You coming to join the party?”

Another gunshot outside, then loud cheering: shouts, applause. A celebration. They weren’t shooting in anger, they were shooting in the air. I glanced at the man’s TV screen, where CNN had put up a still photograph of Donatella Batlisch, a file photo, a head shot, frozen.

“Was she-” I don’t know why I asked. I already knew. “Did she get confirmed?”

“No, and she won’t be. She got taken care of is what she got.” He mimed the shape of a gun, mimed the squeezing of the trigger. “One shot. Back of the neck. Some boy did his mama proud tonight, that’s for damn sure.”

I didn’t have to tell it to Martha. When I got back to the room the lights were still off, but the TV was on, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face bathed in the glow of the bad news.

I closed the door behind me, and she stood up quietly and turned it off.

I stood at the window with my right hand reached across to my left shoulder, my hand tight on the wound. I wasn’t feeling sorrow, not exactly. Not surprise, certainly. I was feeling again like I wasn’t made for all this. That’s what I was thinking. Born into the wrong life, somehow. Wrong body. Blood seeped from my shoulder, drying in the thin cotton fabric of my undershirt. The celebration was growing outside, a crowd of happy Tennesseans clustered in the moonlight around the tailgate of a dull white pickup truck, handing out bottles of beer.

Beyond them, traffic had eased up on I-65, and cars were rushing south toward the Fence.

Martha’s face was set, grim and hard. “Have you ever been down there?” she said.

“Never,” I said. “Never in all my life.”

2.

We cleared the Border House with no problem.

There were six wide lanes of traffic, six guard stations, six mechanical arms rising and falling to let vehicles in one at a time. There was a lane for WHITE (ALABAMA CITIZEN) and a lane for WHITE (OTHER UNITED STATES CITIZEN), and a lane for COLORED IN CAR (ALABAMA PERMIT) and the lane we took: COLORED IN CAR (OTHER UNITED STATES PERMIT).

They’re federal at the Fence, agents of a special division of the Department of Homeland Security called Internal Border and Regulation. IBR is black boots and yellow jackets and mirrored glasses, automatic pistols in shoulder holsters. It was one of these IBR men, deeply tan and sandy-haired, stone-faced and courteous, who motioned for me to roll down the window of the Toyota, who leaned over me to address Martha in the backseat, who flipped cursorily through our papers-papers furnished for me by Mr. Bridge, sterling papers, papers made of solid gold. Who then said politely to Martha, “If you would ask your Negro to step out of the car, please,” who then walked me through a bank of scanners, who ran his gloved fingers under my tongue, passed hands over my scalp, who shined a light up my asshole and lifted my balls, who ran flat palms over all the inches of my flesh. Who removed my body momentarily and completely from my control and then returned it to me with a grunt: “You folks are just fine.” He said it to Martha, not to me. “Go ahead.”

The IBR is federal, but on the other side of the Fence are three more agencies, each its own brick building, bristling with flags and radio antennae: the Alabama Highway Division, the Limestone County Sheriff’s Office, and the Alabama branch of the Interstate Colored Persons Patrol. Each one of these agencies has the statutory right to stop any of the vehicles leaving the custody of the IBR, but none of them chose for whatever reason to stop us that morning in our white Toyota.

There was a Latin motto on the far side of the Border House-AUDEMAS JURA NOSTRA DEFENDERE-bright white on a lavender background, then a cheerful sign in roadway green: WELCOME TO ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL.

I drove, and Martha rode in the back. They were watching me; I pictured them watching. Bridge in Maryland, Barton and company in Indy, glued to their screens. My dot moving south, crossing the line.

My own eyes were wide open, waiting to see all the ways the world would change now that we had crossed through, past the limit of civilization and into the dark land, where whites keep their rule by savagery and fear. I waited for the sky to darken, for the crows that would wheel across the clouds. But it was the same winding road, the same spreading green countryside, the same taffy-blue sky. Same on either side of the Fence.

“Hey,” Martha said. Was saying. Leaning forward between the seats. “Brother?” I guess she had been talking for a while. I turned slightly toward her, and it hurt my shoulder.

“You all right?” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You did it. You’re done.” I turned back, kept my eyes on the road. Careful driving, nice and easy. “We’re fifty-seven miles now from Green Hollow. We’ll pull up, like we said, in the town square. Then you’re going to turn around. Find a shoulder you can pull off on and burn those papers, like I showed you. Then you get on back to your boy. Park the Toyota in that Townes Stores lot.”

“Southport and Emerson.”

“That’s right. And you know where the money is.”

Martha didn’t say anything. Black highway rushed beneath us; streetlamps passed us; trees.

“Okay,” she said.

“And thank you, Martha,” I said. “Thank you.”

Two hours later I was walking on a sunlit sidewalk with my head down through the bustling small-town square of Green Hollow, Alabama, looking for a man on a horse, looking for the lawyer.

It was as if I had arrived not just in another part of the country but in another part of the century. Men in fedora hats and mustaches, ladies in short-sleeved flower-pattern dresses pushing big perambulators, smiling. Everybody smiling. The gentle ting-a-ting of welcome bells as these gentlefolk pushed into stores under multicolored awnings that fluttered in the wind. Folks tipping their hats, holding the door for one another as they went in and out of a diner called the Cotyledon Café, a tidy little freestanding pink building with a window box full of peonies along its front glass and a sign with proud curly-cursive lettering: THIS IS A PREJUDICED ESTABLISHMENT.

The other restaurant on the square was General Bobby’s, a fried-chicken chain that, I happened to know, was owned by the same conglomerate that owns Hamburger Stand in Indianapolis, where I’d just eaten a few days ago. That’s how they do it, these big chains that don’t want their customers to know how much business they’re doing behind the Fence: subsidiary companies, parent companies, diversified holdings.

I made my way around the square, beneath the sky of daydream blue, the pure white clouds like drifts of cotton. I passed a couple of white men in hats, men of the world conversing in somber tones about what one of them called “last night’s unfortunate incident.”

“What else could be done is the question,” said the other, while both nodded their heads with solemnity, men of the world. “Oh, yes, I know. What else could be done?”

And while they discussed in their somber tones the tragic necessity of ready assassination, their Negroes stood behind them staring at the sidewalk, unseen and unspeaking. And behind a white lady pushing a carriage was a black woman, much older, lugging a diaper caddy and an armful of boutique shopping bags. And there I was, moving through this watercolor world like a ghost. It was like there were two realities out here, overlaid one on top of the other, like transparencies on an overhead projector.

Where was the lawyer, though? Where were the man and his horse?

“So how do we make these arrangements?” I had asked Mr. Maris back in Indianapolis, back at Saint Anselm’s, in the shabby headquarters. After Barton was gone again, when it was just me and the lieutenants. Cook gave me the backstory, and then he and Maris briefed me on the connection I was to make.

“Arrangements?” he said. “No. Listen. Understand.”

“We don’t make arrangements, man,” Cook put in, leaning in the doorway, working at his teeth with a toothpick, listening closely. “We make connections.”

“What does that mean?”

Maris didn’t turn his head. He kept his cold eyes on my face while Cook talked. “What Mr. Friendly Sunshine here is gonna do is tell you where to go and how to find the lawyer. What happens after that is up to you and the lawyer. You understand?”

Maris, then, very slow and very low. “We only know what we know.”

“All right,” I said. “All right. And who’s the lawyer?”

Maris said it again: “We only know what we know,” which wasn’t exactly the same as saying he didn’t know who the lawyer was. Mr. Maris, of all those I had met, was the hardest to read. His sharp features a perfect mask. “The town is called Green Hollow,” he said. “Twenty miles northwest of Birmingham. There you find a statue. In the square.”

“What square?”

“It’s a small town, man,” said Cook. “Just the one square.”

“You go to the square. Weekday. Any weekday. Between eleven twenty-five and eleven thirty-five in the morning. You stand beneath the man and his horse. You wait for the lawyer there.”

So here I was: it was 11:28 in Green Hollow, Alabama, in the one square in town. I was sweating now. My papers were good, solid rock, but there had to be a limit to how long you could wander around in public, unaccompanied, in your black skin, papers or no papers. Law enforcement on the square was in two forms: the friendly neighborhood cop from the Town of Green Hollow Police Department, with his hands behind his back, a bright silver whistle around his neck, smiling at children and nodding to passersby; and up on the rooftops an officer of the Alabama branch of the Interstate Colored Persons Patrol, in all-black, body armor, rifle, and helmet. He was either trying to be inconspicuous and failing up there or, more likely, making absolutely sure that his presence was registered by every person on the square-the black ones especially.

I, at least, had a keen awareness of him as I searched that square looking for a goddamn statue of a man and a horse. The only statues I could find, though, were wrong: the first was an ugly gray statue of a man on the prow of a swift boat, a Texas War veteran, stabbing his forefinger aloft as if commanding unseen troops but receiving only the attention of a flock of sickly pigeons roosting on the brim of his hat. The other statue was of a short bespectacled man in a midcentury suit, waving gaily, trailed by a beagle. I had circled the square three times looking for the man and his horse without finding it.

I took another pass around the square. Outside the Cotyledon was a small crowd of blacks, talking quietly, waiting, I figured, for their masters to finish lunch. And inside, alone at a table for two, was Martha Flowers.

What the hell? I thought, feeling a queer surge of anger and-what? Relief? What the hell?

We had said our good-byes on the outskirts of town, in the parking lot of a Qatar Star gas station. All I said was “Say good-bye to that kid for me,” and all she said was “I sure will,” and then I got out of the car and went around the back to use the colored persons’ restroom, and when I came back she was gone, just as we had planned it.

She should have been at the Border House by now, digging her real actual Indiana driver’s license out of her big messy pocketbook.

Instead she was in there, studying the menu of the Cotyledon Café, legs crossed at the ankles like a proper belle, like her own evil twin. I looked twice, making sure it was Martha, and then I stopped looking, not knowing how many times you could look through the plate glass of a restaurant at a white woman before the patrolman up on the roof noticed you looking.

I took another turn around the square. There was a good film of sweat on me now: desperation, confusion, some sour combination of fury and fear. Martha Flowers was enjoying a slice of pie on the town square, and meanwhile where the fuck is this horse? Where the fuck is this lawyer?

I stumbled on an uneven patch of sidewalk and very nearly bumped into the broad back of a slow-walking white man with a cane. I breathed. I slowed my pace. Passed carefully beneath the oak trees and the black lampposts. Passed the general store, the movie house, the Internet café. I saw that, scattered across the lawn of the park, clustered together, were a dozen or more dark-skinned men and women lying about in small groups, dozing and talking and drinking out of paper bags.

And then, finally, for the third time, I walked around that stupid statue before I decided to read the plaque beneath it: HENRY SMITH, TOWN FATHER, AND HIS LOYAL COMPANION, HORSE.

Horse. A dog named Horse. Somewhere, Willie Cook was having a good long laugh on me.

I leaned against the fence that ran around the statue, then immediately thought better of it and straightened up. The clock on the courthouse said 11:35-was it too late? Had I messed this up already?

I rehearsed in my mind the call and response, the password and echo, that Maris had given me.

“Some fine day, ain’t it?” this mysterious lawyer would say when he spotted me, and I then would say: “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”

Three times we had practiced it. Maris: “Some fine day, ain’t it?”-the country slang made mildly comical by his African accent-and me: “Fine and dandy.”

The lawyer will spot you, Maris said. He will know you by where you stand and when. You will know him by what he says. Now say it again. We practiced it three times, simple as it was: “Some fine day, ain’t it?” “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”

I stood beside the statue and waited for the lawyer. I couldn’t see Martha from here. The diner was on the other side of the square. I thought of my future. I thought of a home in Canada, a small fairy-tale house, smoke coming up from a cookstove chimney. Snow on the eaves and on the branches of maple trees. A view across a frozen lake.

I did not try to calculate how close or far I was from Bell’s Farm, neither as the crow flies nor on the roadways that could be crossed by a transport van.

When I looked up again at the people of Green Hollow, going about their bustling midday business, shopping and eating and chatting, I did not see the white people, only the black: and as I watched I swore I could see fumes rising from their mouths-fumes rolling out of their mouths like exhaust, and I could see that every black person had the same small cloud of angry smoke coming out of his or her mouth and nose, a haze rolling up off the street like exhaust, filling the air, the white people breathing all that and not knowing it.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned. He was black, wiry, wearing overalls, carrying a shovel.

“Some fine day, ain’t it?” said the man with the shovel, and I said, “Fine and-” and he caught me on the side with the handle of the shovel, a hard smash that knocked me right off my feet. I reeled back into the arms of a second man, a man I hadn’t seen, who caught me and held me tightly by the arms.

“What the fuck?” I said, or started to say, but the first man said, “Shut up, boy,” while he dropped the shovel and punched me in the stomach.

I would have doubled over, but I was held too tight. The fresh gash in my shoulder threw up a hot flash of pain, and my guts hurt where I’d been hammered. I kicked my legs out and wriggled like a bug in the air while the first man danced backwards, fists clenched, and the huge man holding me whispered, “Almost done.”

“What?” I said.

“Shut yo mouth, nigger,” the first one shouted and punched me on the side of the head.

Through a haze of pain I saw the Alabama patrolman, up on the roof, watching us impassively.

“Hey,” I said, but then they were all in on me, punching me again, throwing me down, landing their boots in my chest. I convulsed, moaning, closing in on myself like a fetus, and from the far corner of my eye I saw the merry beat cop on the other side of the square taking this all in with mild amusement, shaking his head as though I and the men beating me were rambunctious kids on a playground. I saw two white men in fedoras in front of the pharmacy, murmuring to each other and laughing. I saw all of them, all the good people of Green Hollow, the men and the women and the kids; all the fine folks had stopped to take in the show.

They kicked at me a few more times, though I writhed enough, wrenching my body this way and that, to take most of their shots in the shins or in the back, on the hard surfaces of my spine. I spat pink into the dirt and hauled up onto my haunches, steadying myself on my arms with my hands palm-planted in the scrabble grass. Above me the two men stood with fists balled, staring down.

I wondered if a rumor was flying around town. I wondered if it had reached Martha’s table at the Cotyledon. I hoped she’d have the sense to stay where she was. Not to give herself away, not to rush out and cry my name-Jim, or Brother, any name at all.

“Stay down,” the bigger of the two men hissed, and I did, I stayed down, and the two of them leaned over me glowering and godlike.

The one who hissed at me had a fierce, cold look about him, like he was wrought from iron. I let the strength of my arms go slack and fluttered my eyes shut and the two men heaved me bodily out of that dirt. I was carried between them like a bag of soil, aft and end, my head lolling back to one side. My ears were ringing, and a thick knot of pain was gathering in my stomach where the one man’s boot had first connected.

They bore me that way, body slack and head hanging backwards, across the patchy courthouse lawn toward a big car waiting, pulled up to the sidewalk. A woman fell into the pack, walking along with us, a pace or two behind. Her hair was wrapped in a tight-fitting orange cloth. She had thick arms, a powerful striding body. She scowled at me as we progressed across the lawn, her hands clenched into fists, her eyes like two stones deep in her head.

“Are you the lawyer?” I said to her.

“Do I look like a fucking lawyer to you?”

She stepped close to me. To me, being carried as I was with my head thrown back, she was upside down. With swift, precise movements, she took out a hypodermic needle and a small vial. I struggled, but there was nothing to be done-the men held me tight while she filled the needle and jabbed it into a vein in the side of my neck. My vision swayed. They dropped me into the trunk of the car.

“Welcome to the Hard Four,” said one of the voices, gruff and full of laughter, while the world slipped away from me. “It don’t get a lot better.”

3.

When the world and I found each other again I was swimming through some kind of pink-hued southern sea. I was a gone goose. I was flying, but I was underground, too. I was under the city of Indianapolis, back in Jackdaw’s miserable tunnel, surrounded by dripping clay walls, by darkness and illness and cold. I was in Bell’s Farm; I was in the shed buried underneath the earth, a Franklin’s black government boots just visible through the slit, and I had done something, but what had I done? And I was also at the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, in the basement, where the pool and the gym were, and I was on that planet that Castle used to murmur in my ear, the planet called the future.

I got up, and I fell down. First onto my knees, and then, after a moment’s consideration, the rest of the way, down onto my back. I felt something alien on my thigh and looked down and it was my dick, flopped over like a scrap of rope. I was bare-ass naked, which was hilarious, and some people were laughing, so I went ahead and laughed, too. My voice was a creepy giggle, unfamiliar to me, so I stopped.

“Get back up on the chair now,” said a woman’s voice, stern but not unkind. A little tremor of humor in the voice. “Go on. Come on.”

I obeyed instructions as best I could. First I put my forearms onto the seat of the chair, then I heaved myself up and twisted myself around. I had to stop halfway through and get a couple breaths in me, paused with my ass in the air, gulping the smell of basement-what the hell basement was I in?-and hearing more laughter swimming all around the corners of my brain.

The jab and the sting. That vial, that stubby little pot full of poison. Someone caught me with a shot of something. Whatever it was had me all cooked up for sure. I was out on the ice-I was out on the dance floor no question.

“Siddown, honey,” said the voice, then the face that belonged to it came into focus-it was the woman from the square there, the one who had poked me. The orange head wrap was gone: her hair was short dreadlocks, a bristle of corks. She was crouching now in front of me. She had cagey eyes and ruby lips and her skin was smooth. She lifted a red bath towel that had fallen off my lap and pooled at my feet. It must have been covering my nakedness while I dozed in the chair-I lifted it up and covered myself up again.

“Now, listen,” I began.

“Shush, man. You’re in no state.”

“Ah, he all right,” called someone else, a man, from the far side of the room, and someone else said, “He’s just fine,” and then a third voice, a woman’s voice: “Fine and dandy,” and then all the voices were laughing. Not me, not this time. “Now, look,” I said, and the woman told me to shush again, firmly, and I shushed again. The kitchen was crowded with people. A kitchen! I was in a kitchen, in a basement, unfinished and unfancy. One of the men was sitting on a counter, swinging his legs. Another was leaning against a refrigerator, with a girl wrapped up in his arms like they were old-time sweethearts.

Everybody was in black. Everybody was wearing overalls, with a logo at the breast. Everybody was either barefoot or in sandals.

There was music playing. It had taken a while to reach me, but now I could hear it, and it was like sugar. Horns. Trumpets. Saxophones? And drums: snares and cymbals. It was fast and sweet, and it rolled around the room. I tasted that music. It was like hard candy.

“Sorry about the violence out in the square,” said the woman with the dreads. “Two black folks slipping in a car together is a conspiracy. Couple black boys beating the shit out of another one, that ain’t nothing. That nobody cares about. Black folks scrapping, cops ain’t looking. Patrol, neither. They turning away.”

“Turning away?” said the man on the counter. “C’mon, Ada. Placing bets, more like.”

“Yeah,” said Ada. She reached forward, touched the side of my head, and I winced. My head hurt. “But anyway. It’s gotta look real. So. Sorry ’bout that.”

“So okay,” I said. Blinking my eyes and trying to get this lady to come into focus. “Are you the lawyer?”

“Damn. You all business, huh?”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said. “I am not.”

Ada stood up. She was a girl, really-twenty-two, maybe? Twenty-three? She was a slave. They were all slaves. Overalls, shoes or no shoes. House slaves. My body was lurching around inside me. The music was rushing, dazzling: high, squeaking horn lines and rat-a-tats on the drums.

“Who is the lawyer?” I said.

“Listen. Shut up,” she said. “That was a pretty heavy kiss of olanzapine I gave you. You in no state yet to be talking business, fella.”

I shook my head, insistent. I started to stand again and wobbled, and the woman called Ada placed me firmly back in the chair. Close up I saw the logo stitched on one strap of her overalls: a gavel wound with a snake. A peach dangling from a bow.

“Sit, all right?” She turned away. “Someone get the poor boy a glass of water.”

“I-”

“I got it, Ada.” One of the others. How many people were down here?

“Listen-”

“Sit.”

It was a party of sorts, down there in the basement, and I sat amid it for an hour, maybe for two hours, people walking past and around me, these beautiful black people in their overalls and sandals, grown-out scruffed-up Afros or dreadlocks, figures in a dream, while my head swam and swam. There were unlabeled boxes of wine stacked beside a tub full of cold water. A plate of cookies was being passed around, and there was a bucket full of peanuts in one corner, another bucket for shells.

I swayed to the music awhile, tried to catch up to its rhythm. Someone put a glass of water in my hand and I drank it and needed more and someone brought me more.

“You should try to relax,” said the girl who brought me the water, looking at me shyly. I laughed-just the idea, the idea of relaxing. It made me laugh. I tried to think of the last time I had done that: done nothing. Acted without purpose. Barton, Bridge, everybody waiting on me. Indianapolis; Gaithersburg. The whole world waiting.

But I did. I relaxed. I spent the next hour, or it might have been a few, trying to count how many other people were in the room. I had an impression of people coming and going, everybody friendly, laughing loud. Slapping palms. Punch lines hollered, good-natured, grooving laughter. Aw, man, you know that’s true. She ain’t say that! She ain’t say that!

It felt like I was among a huge crowd, a happy, bustling infinity of black folks, but it was only five of them in the room-or at least, only five by the time I got my head straight enough to count. Two women, besides Ada: Maryellen, short and puckish, with very long thick hair hanging in one big braid between her shoulder blades. She was the one who brought me the water. And Shai, a little older, narrow-eyed and observant. The bigger of the men was Otis, very dark, heavily muscled. The last of them was Marlon, who wore a scruffy kind of billy-goat beard. He was the one who had hit me, but he was also the one who came over now with a couple pieces of ice wrapped in a thin paper towel, held it tenderly to the bruise above my ear, hidden in my hair. “I’m a hard-hitting dude,” he said, adjusting the ice pack. “Can’t hardly help it.”

“You all don’t have service names?” I asked Marlon, but it was Maryellen who answered, from way over on the other side of the room, where I wouldn’t have thought she could hear. “Oh, we got ’em. We don’t use ’em is all.”

I smiled. I looked at Maryellen, and I found that my mind would not assign her skin a value. Wild honey, light tones, all that shit. I couldn’t even call it up in my mind, the pigmentation chart that had first been thrust before me in Arizona six years ago. If this didn’t work, all this adventuring, and I ended up back in Bridge’s command, I’d be in some difficulty, and to that I said, “Thank fucking God,” and Marlon said, “For what?”

“Nothing,” I said. Gingerly I removed the ice pack from my head and thanked him again.

“You straight?” he said, and I said, “I’m straight,” and he chunked the ice into the sink.

The music stopped, briefly, while someone flipped the tape, and when it came on it got bigger. Multiple voices singing, sometimes words and sometimes just sounds. Rough, uneven melodies with high harmonies, then fast overlapping chopping passages. Big drumbeats, hand claps, and whistles. I had been missing it forever, whatever music this was. I longed to have known it before-I longed to have known this music all my life.

I felt myself come back into myself, drop by drop, like a drained well filling back up. I stood up, and everybody clapped for me, then they died laughing when I offered an ironic bow. I think I may have done some dancing. I politely declined the fat rolled joint that Maryellen offered to me, not wanting to find out how cannabis would interact with olanzapine.

When I was sitting again it was at the kitchen table, and for the first time I noticed a very old white man. I could have sworn he hadn’t been there before, that I would have seen him, but on the other hand he looked like he’d been there forever, for centuries: pulled up close to the table in a wheelchair, dressed for a funeral, dark suit and thin black tie. Everybody else was drinking from cans and bottles, but his crooked fingers were splayed around a rocks glass containing only ice and the last clinging droplets of something dark and brown.

“Is that glass empty, son?”

“Sorry?” I had been looking out the window-the basement had a pair of high garden windows, letting in a peek of dirt-colored sky. I was wondering where exactly I was.

“It is rather dark in here, but I do believe my glass is empty.” His voice was a decayed whisper, still carrying its ancient and decorous southern accent. “I do believe that it is. Would you be so kind as to fill up that glass? You will find a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red in a cabinet beside the icebox.”

His watery eye was fixed on me. I found the whiskey and poured him out his glass.

“I appreciate it, young man. I do very much appreciate it.” The old white man sipped slowly and licked his thin, cracked lips. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure.”

“This man is named Elijah, sir.” It was Ada. She had materialized at my side, one hand on my shoulder. He craned his thin neck around to peer at her.

“Elijah?” he said, looking back at me slowly.

“That’s right, Counselor.” Ada looked at me carefully, and I said, “Yes, sir. Elijah.” And then, because it seemed like the thing to say, I said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“The honor…” He cleared his throat with effort. “The honor belongs entirely to me.”

His body had been incapacitated at some point, probably by a stroke. Half of him was slumped and slurred like a melting candle. He’s a hundred, I thought. He’s a thousand. He had the look of eternal old age, like he had been old forever, sitting pale and wraithlike in his old-fashioned wheelchair.

“Now, Elijah.” He gazed at me, licked the tips of his yellow teeth. “Now. You have embarked upon your journey. You are finding your way to freedom. The bad times are behind you, Elijah, but much uncertainty lies ahead. I cannot imagine…” Another pause, another elaborate throat clearing. “Cannot imagine how you must feel. But please know that here, boy, here in this home you are welcome. Here, there is…” He spread his arthritic fingers as wide as they would go. “Sanctuary.”

“Well,” I said, and then-what else was there to say?-“Thank you.”

“Yes, sir, Counselor,” said Ada on my behalf. “Elijah is on his way. On his way to the promised land.”

“God bless you, boy,” said the lawyer. “God protect you.”

And then just like that he fell asleep: tilted his head to one side, and his eyes clicked shut like a doll’s.

“Sir?” said Ada. “Mr. Russell?”

“Oh, he out,” said Marlon, easing past, a beer bottle in his fist.

“Yeah.” Ada patted the old man on his hand. “Think you’re right.”

“One of these times, you know, he gonna just die.”

“Hush your mouth,” said Ada. She smiled with undeniable tenderness at the lawyer as Marlon wandered away. “He’s right, though. He comes and goes. One of these days he won’t come back.”

The group was getting quieter around us: people talking in low voices, murmuring. Big Otis and little Maryellen had settled into the chair I was in before, she on his lap, cuddling close.

“We just tell him everybody’s named Elijah. Makes things easier is all.”

I scratched my forehead. “I’m supposed to be talking to him. That’s what they told me.”

“Well, go on,” Ada said. “Talk.”

I looked at the lawyer, then at her, and I saw that she was laughing, and I laughed, too.

“Yeah, how about that, huh?” Ada shook her head. She draped a blanket across the old man’s lap, eased a few strands of white hair out of his eyes. “But you try telling the Holy Ghost up there it’s a bunch of Negroes running the show.”

Cook had said much the same thing, laughing but not smiling, as we drove down Meridian Street to the monument: that Mockingbird mentality.

“So he…” I looked warily at the sleeping old man. “He owns you.”

She laughed again. She had a deep, musical laugh. “Yes, he does, Elijah. The house and the yard, everything and everyone in it.”

“You trust him.”

“Oh, we got to. Got to. Him more’n anyone. You heard of something called the Gulliver case?”

I had. It rang a bell. I knew this stuff. I looked at the old man again, trying to find familiar features under the layers of age. For a time I had become obsessed with the history of slavery law, studied all the Supreme Court arguments, memorized long chunks of decisions and dissents. Hospital Corporation v. Mississippi. Schools of Florida. Conroy v. Wilson.

Ada refreshed my memory on the Gulliver case. The PB in question, service name Gulliver, had been a Louisiana slave in service to a small farmer named Peabody, who took him to New York State for the wedding of a Peabody cousin. Gulliver was threatened by some local boys outside the nightclub, waiting for the wedding reception to end, and defended himself-ended up in federal prison on a gun charge. After he served his eight months, a local abolitionist group showed up to claim him before Peabody could, and then they sued for his freedom, making the sly argument that federal prisons were free territory, like national parks and landmarks, and that being housed in one for more than six months triggered the domicile clause: under the law, the boy had relocated, so the boy was free.

The New York circuit court agreed, and the Supreme Court might have, too, if not for the efforts of a silver-tongued lawyer from Alabama. One of these graceful southern gentlemen of the bar, with goatee and white suit and red suspenders-nothing like this haunted old husk across from me at the little table, withered hands clawed around his rocks glass.

“It was looking to be one of the landmark cases, you know?” Ada said. “A major blow to the possessor-travel rules. But then this firecracker lawyer rolls up out of the slave lands, talking about how-ah, what was it, now?-how it’s not the duration of the trip that matters but the…” She snapped her fingers, trying to remember. “Marlon? Hey, what-”

“Intent,” said the lawyer softly, opening one eye. “Not the duration of possession but the intent of the possessor that is determinative under the statute.”

“That’s right. That’s right, Counselor.”

The one eye fluttered shut again. The old man breathed softly, slowly, in and out.

“That did it. Supreme Court liked that,” said Ada. “Gulliver came home in chains. Peabody turned around and sold the man offshore.”

This thought brought me to a blur of sadness, a sour taste of regret. Everybody ends up somewhere. I thought of Martha, sitting primly at the Cotyledon Café. She must be gone by now. Long gone. I hoped so, and I hoped not.

Both of the lawyer’s eyes opened, small and inky and wet. He raised his glass. “To Gulliver.”

The slaves all raised their bottles, too, all together, and spoke in unison. “To Gulliver!” Then they drank and went right back to their conversations while the lawyer’s eyes slipped back closed.

“I gotta say, Ada, I don’t get it,” I said, watching the old man, his chin slipping slowly forward onto his chest. “I don’t quite understand.”

“Let me guess.” Ada laughed. “You don’t understand why we don’t get the fuck out.”

“Yeah. I mean…” I pointed at the shrunken figure of the lawyer, half drunk, half sleeping. No dogs around, so far as I could see. No guards.

“Get out and do what?” She patted the lawyer on top of his head, went over to the counter, and started to fix coffee. “Go north? Put my life in the hands of that crazy-ass priest of yours? Get followed around in stores the rest of my life? Otis, baby, we got milk?”

Otis lumbered over, cracked open the fridge, while Ada scooped coffee into the machine.

“Get pulled over every time I’m driving? Get shot by some cop, walking down the street?”

“Or in your house,” said Otis.

Ada nodded. “Y’all hear shit about down here,” she said. “We hear shit about up there.”

She flicked on the coffeepot, and it bubbled away, doing its thing. Ada leaned on the edge of the counter. “Listen: of all the lives I could have led, all the places I coulda been born? Born here, into this household? Massa, this deaf old cracker, a hundred years old already when I got born, so sick with guilt he can’t sleep one sober night. Shit-ton of money, big old mansion, perfect hideout for runners on the way. Yeah, man, yeah. We could walk anytime. Any one of us. Right, Otis?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, stirring sugar into his cup. “That’s right.”

“But we’re doing some good work down here, okay? Some real good work.”

When we had our coffee I followed Ada to the stairs, passing Marlon, who was wheeling the old judge away from the table, wheeling him past Shai and Otis and Maryellen, past the empty boxes of wine piling up on the counter-a tottering cardboard skyscraper threatening to fall onto the sticky tile of the floor.

4.

“Listen. My cousin says you are to be trusted. My cousin says, this man coming down, you let him know what you can.” Ada talked fast. She didn’t look at me while she was talking. “So what I’m gonna do is, I tell you what I tell you. You don’t ask any questions.”

“All right,” I said. “Who’s your cousin?”

“Didn’t I just say don’t ask me questions?”

“Yeah.”

“So? I tell you what I tell you, you listen.”

Ada and I outside the house as the sun came up. The mansion at our backs was sparkling white, gabled and turreted, with polished glass doors sliding open onto the slate patio, where we sat drinking coffee. After the cramped raucousness of the night, the big quiet morning world was soft and cool. A rolling valley of a backyard, the grass true green, dew-dappled, endless.

“Now. You’re wanting to know about this contract, completed a week ago now, week ago Sunday. You’re wondering what went wrong.”

“What do you mean, a contract?”

Ada scowled. “Are you fooling? Are you still doped up? I said stop asking me questions.” She hissed, shook her head. But she couldn’t help herself. “Goddamn right it’s a contract. What do you think we’re playing at down here? We’re doing the good Lord’s work, but we’re no dummies. Cash on the barrel. Pay in advance or no one going nowhere.” She sipped coffee, ran her tongue over her teeth. “But this one now, this one…thing is, nothing went wrong with this one. This one went just exactly right. Everything how it was clocked.”

“Something went wrong,” I said.

“Listen: shut up. Okay? Listen.”

I loved Ada’s face. It was wide, with a strong African nose and a broad forehead. She had hidden her short dreadlocks again under the orange kerchief. I wondered if that was for the benefit of the neighbors. A line of high thick hedges shielded the lawyer’s property, but those neighbors would presumably be dismayed if they caught a glimpse of two black people on his patio, sitting on his tasteful outdoor furniture, talking urgently about a runaway’s route.

“This boy. The one you after. He did what we told him. We got a message in to him four months ago. Told him the night, told him how to do it. Told him get sick. He did it.”

I had more questions, but I held on to them for now. Ada was rolling now, talking fast. Word had come from the northern friends about a boy who needed to come out along with a package he was working to obtain. Payment was arranged.

“And we had the bay, see.”

“The bay?”

A sharp glance-No questions, dummy-then she answered my question. “Sick bay. Two girls are assigned to western section worker care on Sundays, and that night both of them were us.”

Monica Smith, age twenty-four, and Angelina Croth, age twenty-seven. Two working-class girls in starched nurse’s whites, fighters in the Cause-willing to take a job in a plantation, pass whatever tests they had to, get the necessary permits from the American Medical Association to do medical care on a PB population. Work down there for however long was required to earn trust, sweeten the scheduling person in HR, get on duty on the preappointed night.

“That boy came in to worker care, puking his guts out, like we told him to, and our people had him.”

This time I made my question into a statement. “Must be hard to get yourself sent to the infirmary on a plantation.”

Ada nodded. “Not hard getting sick. The trick is to get sick enough. They see a lot of injuries in these places. You’re working with needles, band knives. You fall; you get a sleeve tangled in a drive shaft. I knew a man who had his face burned with a hot iron: they sent him down to worker care and turned him out again in an hour. Most injuries they handle in population or on the floor. They wrap you up, maybe a steroid shot, and you’re back on the floor.

“The thing you want, you want to get sent down, is poison. At a garment factory, you know, you’re working the floor, there’s a lot of industrial strength lying around. Sealants. Chemicals and cleaners. You smart, you don’t overdo it, you can get yourself real bad, get it so you almost die. Then they take you down for sure.”

That sent me back down, back into the tunnel, down below Indianapolis with that boy. The pallor of Kevin’s skin. Chemicals and cleaners. Oh, that boy. That beautiful broken boy.

Not to be thought of now. Work to do now.

“All right, so he comes in. He’s sick as hell; he’s got this package.”

Ada winced, moved her head back and forth. “I don’t know. Some of these details I never had, you know? But the way I understand it, the package went to the driver direct. Never came into the bay. But you’d have to ask one of them nurses, which you will never be able to do. And don’t ask me, by the way, what the fuck was in that envelope, because I do not know, and I do not care.”

So there’s Jackdaw in the sick bay. The clock is ticking; the delivery is scheduled for 8:49 p.m. onto a forty-five-foot tractor-trailer. Forty-two hundred raw bolts for export, and all the rest of it crated and palleted and headed for a route along the Red Highway.

The boy is there, and somehow or other the package is, too. It goes into the jacket of the driver. Maybe the driver is playing out a crush on one of those sweet young nurses, Monica or Angelina, and maybe he stops by with flowers and it’s a quick thank-you hug to slip it in his pocket.

Or maybe one of our nurses junks it out the window while the driver happens to be out for a stroll around the campus, stretching his legs before climbing in the rig.

Ada doesn’t know all that. Ada says if I want to know how the package got from the girls to the driver, I’d have to ask one of them.

“Which I’ll never be able to do.”

“You got it.”

And as for Jackdaw, Jackdaw’s body, precious cargo: he went out in a barrel.

The trucks are loaded in a secure area, of course, and plantation security checks and double-checks every single item: they open every crate, shine their lights into every box on every pallet. But see, the good guys are smart, too; the good guys are always working, too. There’s a workshop down in the Great Dismal Swamp, a Panthers-funded research center, with honest-to-God engineers down there, building all kinds of crazy shit, looking for those golden-ticket ideas: how to slide people past all those checks and double checks. Turns out one thing that doesn’t get opened up for a final check after it’s packed is medical waste. So what about a man-size rubber bladder fitted with a thin reed, like the one a scuba diver wears, so a person could survive in there, down in all that waste? What about you get a man to the infirmary, make it look like he burst loose and leaped out a window when really he’s coming out in a barrel?

Ada described it, and that was a feeling you could feel. A feeling that I could feel. Wrapped up tight and clammy in some kind of rubber suit, folded over and jammed in a bucket, entombed. Rolled end over end, helpless, banging against the sides, the darkness and the heat and the stink. And then with the poison sloshing in your guts, cleaners and chemicals…and add to it the terror, the certainty as you were wheeled out of worker care toward the loading dock: capture was coming. This could not and would not work.

“So that’s it,” Ada said. “That’s the hard part. Boy’s in the truck, truck clears the gates, clears the Alabama border. Freedomland.”

Ada clapped her hands together as if knocking dust off of them-like, Mission accomplished.

“That’s what happened?”

Ada looked at me sideways. “That was the plan, I’m saying. Far as I know, yes, that’s what happened. We know the truck came out. We know the nurses did their part. That’s what we know.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

But it wasn’t okay. Not even close. I had learned nothing that I needed to know. Kevin leaves in a barrel, and the package is in the driver’s pocket. What then?

“Where did the boy get out of the truck?”

“That’s not my part of it. That’s the driver.”

“Where does the driver give him the package? How does he get the rest of the way north, after he’s off the truck?”

“You don’t listen, man. I’m telling you, I don’t know.”

My coffee cup was empty. I stood up. I looked out at the lawn, the sunlight. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t close to enough. I looked down at Ada, still sitting on the patio chair.

“I want to talk to the nurses.”

“Well, that’s gonna be hard, because they don’t exist.” She smiled. “They never existed.”

I was agitated. I was unhappy. Get to the lawyer, Barton had said, and he will point you in the right direction. So here I was, and what did I have? The sun was slowly rolling out across the lawn, brightening the green of the grass inch by inch. Closer every moment.

“All right, then, the driver. How do I get in touch with the driver?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ada. Please.”

“I’m telling you straight, man, I don’t know. The nurses came from a guy Marlon knew, a guy from Atlanta, and the nurses got to the driver once they were already working there.”

“How?”

“Two pretty nurses? How you think? Listen. Okay? I got no connect with the truck driver. I don’t have a name or number. You’d have to walk into GGSI and ask.”

“How do I do that?”

She barked a laugh. Looked at my face and stopped laughing.

“We help people out of these places, son. Not in.”

Ada stood up. We were done. She yawned, spilled the dregs of her coffee onto the ground around one of Counselor Russell’s flowering trees.

“And what about the girl?” I said quietly.

Ada waited before she answered; waited so long that when she said, “What girl?” I knew it was a lie.

“Luna.”

This time the answer came too fast. “I don’t know that name.”

“You do. She’s the one who got hold of the package in the first place.”

I didn’t know how, and Ada sure as hell didn’t know how, but Luna had done the hard part. She was the one who got your precious evidence. Jackdaw, weeping, standing in the river. She took all the fucking risks.

Ada, though, was shaking her head, setting her chin. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.”

I closed my eyes, thinking of Jackdaw, of Kevin, his life flown out of him.

“And I think you know,” I said to Ada, “that she thought she was getting free.”

“Yeah, well,” said Ada, and it was a kind of miracle, because even though she said she didn’t know who I was talking about, and even though she said she had never heard the name before, she said, “Well, it wasn’t her time.”

“I guess not.”

“Whatever promises were made to that one, they were not made by me, you understand?” Her face now was downright defiant; the face of the woman I’d seen on the square, the one who had scowled and stared while the others were beating me into the car. “Those promises were not made by me.”

She went toward the door, and I followed her, and now all I could think of was Luna-I bet Kevin had told her what they had told him; I bet she had taken some poison, too, some chemical or cleaner, gotten herself sick and gotten herself taken to worker care, and then she woke to find that Jackdaw was gone and she was still there. Left behind. The only thing worse than a lifetime of slavery: that taunting instant of hope, gone in a flash. And I knew of course what happened to her next. When the package was discovered missing and Luna was found to have helped in its disappearance, she was tortured then, Bridge had said; tortured and killed-that piece of it from Cook.

That had been the last thing for Kevin. That’s what had finally done him in, hearing that, when Cook gave that sad report. She’s dead. Okay? She’s dead.

Subdued, then tortured, then killed.

But that was the aftermath. Carnage in the wake. The job itself had gone off without a hitch: Kevin had gotten himself to worker care, the nurses had packed him up in a barrel of blood and gotten him onto a truck, and then they made themselves disappear. The package to the trucker. Everything as planned. So where the hell was it?

“Hey. Hey!”

Marlon was coming out fast, crashing into Ada going in. But he was yelling at me. He took me by both my arms, sudden and fierce. “Hey! Do you know some fucking white girl?”

5.

Marlon had been washing the lawyer’s three old Cadillacs, pulling them out onto the driveway, one at a time, keeping a lookout for lurkers, peepers, anything strange out on the street. And he’d found something: a pink South African hatchback, obnoxiously visible on the sedate and moneyed suburban street, with a white girl in the front seat dozing.

Down in the basement, he insisted on holding Martha at gunpoint.

I said it wasn’t necessary, and Ada agreed with me, but Marlon said, “We don’t know what the fuck this girl is,” and Shai said, very quietly, about me, “We don’t even know who he is,” which I was glad nobody heard. So we sat in an awkward arrangement around the table, back down in the basement kitchen, a very different place in the morning: last night’s dishes were a precarious pile in the sink; thin bars of sunlight found sticky patches on the concrete floor.

It was me and then Martha, her knee bouncing with nervousness, her face bleary with worry or fear. Then Shai, Marlon beside Shai, opposite Martha, aiming his.45 at her while she told her story. Ada stood by the sink, arms folded, listening.

“I saw you getting…I saw these people”-Martha caught herself-these people. She winced. “I saw you getting beat up. I was scared.” Without her cat’s-eye glasses, without any drugstore knickknack in her hair, she looked more like an adult than I was used to. “I followed the car. I tried to be careful.”

“I guess that was a stupid fucking thing to do,” said Marlon.

“I guess we need to be more careful about being tailed.”

That was Ada, from over by the sink, and the reproach didn’t much help Marlon’s mood. He hissed and leaned back, sneering. Shai, very gently, laid her hand on his shoulder, and I saw it work, saw the tension ease out of his body. Love at work.

“All right,” said Ada, impatient. “Look.” She pointed back and forth between Martha and me.

“You know this person?”

“Yes.”

Pointed to me, then back to Martha. “You trust her?”

I hesitated a half beat, and into the hesitation welled up the horror of what I was, what I was doing. It wasn’t Martha I distrusted; it was myself.

“Yes.” I nodded. “I trust her.”

“All right.” Ada shrugged. “You still want to go in there and find that truck driver?”

Ada was a maker of plans-a hatcher of plots. Like Father Barton, like Officer Cook, like me. She came and pulled a chair up to the table and explained what she was thinking. Martha could be of use now for the same reason she had been useful in getting me across the border-because of the color of her skin. While Ada laid it out, walked through the way it could work, I watched Martha from the corner of my eye and could tell how carefully she was listening. Her eyes, which I was used to seeing jump all over the place, were focused and intense. She was getting herself ready.

The plan was crazy. Risky as hell, no question about it. There were a very few things that Ada and her group could tell me about GGSI, about the layout and security arrangements of its headquarters. Most of what they knew was secondhand or thirdhand, and much of it was outdated. Rumors, whispers, gossip about the inside. Of my specific questions, they could only answer a couple: yes, we would be screened in on arrival and checked out on departure. There were cameras, yes, all over the campus, but not in the areas that were restricted to white workers only; Alabama state law forbade the surveillance of employees without cause.

It occurred to me to ask if Ada knew anything about that one building whose identity I could not figure out from the overhead map in the full file-that unlabeled structure jammed in behind the Institute for Agricultural Innovation-but of course I could not ask about it, because then I would have to explain where and how I had seen such a map.

We came to the end of the conversation. The plan was formed, as formed as it was going to get, and still Martha remained quiet. Her hands, too, were still; not fiddling with her rings, not tucking a lock of hair into the corner of her mouth. I had the odd sense of seeing her real self rise up out of the motionless form of her present body: like the person who had been inside the other person all along.

I looked at her when the talking was done. “You don’t have to do any of this,” I said. “You’ve got your money.”

She turned her head slowly and looked at me.

“But what about Steubenville?” she said, and I blinked.

“What?”

“You don’t think it’ll work. The whole crazy business with the man in Steubenville. The guy who said he can get me into that database.”

“TorchLight,” I said, then, “No. No, I doubt it.”

“So?”

“So?”

I knew her expression so well. I saw what she was seeing: opportunity.

“But if this plan-if her-I’m sorry, what-”

“Ada.”

Martha smiled at her. “Thank you. If Ada’s idea works, and we can get in there, then don’t you think there will be a way to access it directly? Once we’re inside? Once we’re in there? Isn’t that right?”

“Right.”

“Right. So. So I can’t miss that chance.”

“But…” I started, but something in her face-in her eyes. I stopped.

“I will call my sister. She will hang on to Lionel another day.”

“Yeah. I know. Martha…”

I stopped.

“It’s dangerous,” she said, speaking very slowly. “It is very risky. I understand. But. But-if there is a way to find out what has happened to that man.” This was in the form of a question, but her voice had no questioning in it. “Then that is what I am going to do. I have to.”

“You gotta understand, though-”

“I know.”

“I can’t promise anything.”

My protests were halfhearted. She was firm, but I could have talked her out of it. I could have told her there was some other way. I could have opened myself all the way up, torn off the blank mask, and shown her my face. I could have told her to forget the whole damn thing.

But this was my chance, and I knew it. I told her that if this was what she wanted, I wanted her to have it. I told her that if she helped me get in, I would try to get her what she needed. I told her that because I needed her. I had to have her. My empathy was woven, as ever, with cunning.

We spent the rest of that day cosseted in the lawyer’s house and with the lawyer’s people, refining and fine-tuning, building our story. Shai went up and down the stairs, collecting articles of clothing from the closet of the lawyer, from the closet of the lawyer’s dead wife. I ended up in a peach-colored sweater and in pants of Marlon’s, black pants without pockets. “There, that’s right,” he said. “That’s good. Trust me, man: down here they don’t like niggers having places they can stick shit.”

We did not see the old man himself again, but I heard him-three or four times I heard him-from an adjoining bedroom, moaning in his sleep.

6.

Thursday morning. Vivid and clear. Me and Martha, decked out and ready to go. Closing the doors of her sedan in the wide parking lot of Garments of the Greater South.

Martha, showered and shining, in a sharp red professional skirt and blazer, a piece of green jewelry pinned at her breast; timeless pieces from the collection of the lawyer’s long-dead wife. Martha in good old fancy-white-lady drag, and me in the peach sweater and pocketless pants, already wearing the servant’s smile, already rolling in the bashful gait. Lifting the black rolling suitcase out of the trunk, loaded with the tools of the trade.

I eased the bag down onto the asphalt while Martha waited. I pulled out the handle of the suitcase. She started, and I followed. I was in charge of the bag. This was the South. She glanced back and I looked up and we looked at each other, just for a second, one last human look to go in on.

The plantation had not been hard to find. Coming off State Route 4, we saw a big green sign, a dedicated exit, as for a university or military base or theme park. The exit sign went so far as to proclaim the company motto-AMERICAN GROWN, SOUTHERN SEWN!-along with the logo I had seen previously on Jackdaw’s collarbone, the proud uppercase G with the other letters tucked safely inside. The logo that was supposedly waiting for me somewhere, somewhere in the endless South, emblazoned on that envelope, the needle in the haystack I was going to find.

That same logo was on each of the three buildings that together formed GGSI headquarters, three glass-walled skyscrapers standing lordly above the parking lot, blinking back the sun. The logo was on one of the flags flapping above the concrete plaza in front of the buildings. There were three altogether-one flag for the company, one for the state, and one for the United States of America. Flags and recessed concrete and a handsome fountain. There was a statue, a giant abstract bronze, rounded and swooping, which as you got closer turned out not to be abstract at all: it was a boll, a simple boll made heroic, a cotton boll like a triumphal arch.

I had seen corporate plazas. Corporate plazas in Manhattan, in Boston, in Washington, DC. This was no different. Exactly the same.

I held tightly to the grip of the rolling suitcase. I came up alongside Martha, but her sunglasses were on. Her human eyes were hidden now. She stopped just outside the door of the center building, and I rushed past her to open it. She walked past me and did not say thank you. Deep in her character, ready to go.

The lobby was vaultlike and chilly after the early-autumn warmth of the parking lot. The words GARMENTS OF THE GREATER SOUTH, INCORPORATED were six feet high on the back wall, cotton-white letters on a wall of blue-sky blue, alongside a gigantic photomontage of happy Asian children kicking soccer balls, turning cartwheels, shouldering their sturdy backpacks in their brightly colored cotton clothes.

“Yes?” The receptionist was waiting at a desk big as a spaceship between two banks of elevators. Red lipstick, blond hair, blue eyes, a tasteful gold necklace. “How can I help y’all?”

I ducked my head while Martha smiled.

“How are you this morning? My name is Ms. Jane Reynolds, from Peach Tree Management Systems. I am here to see Mr. Matthew Newell.”

“O-kay,” said the woman behind the big semicircular desk, lingering on the kay, teasing the word out into a question while she typed, pulling up a calendar. “And did you have an appointment?”

“Well, yes and no,” said Martha, and my head was still down, eyes down, but I could hear in her voice that she winked as she said it. “We met down at the CSO, back in June? And Matty-I’m sorry: Matthew; Mr. Newell-he was sweet enough to say that if I was ever in the area I should feel free to stop by.”

“Oh,” said the blonde. “I see.”

CSO was the Conference of Slaveholding Organizations. It was a safe bet that a plantation the size of GGSI would have sent a sizable contingent; it was an open question whether Matthew R. Newell, assistant vice president of transport operations, would have been among them. We were out on the wire here, me and Martha. Out there together.

“So would you mind just ringing up, see if he’s around? Of course I should have called first-I just had an appointment right down in Blessing, and I thought…”

The blonde was already in motion, offering Martha an empty smile and a wait-just-a-moment forefinger. She tucked the telephone receiver under her ear and pressed a button on her console. The elevator doors opened on the far side of the lobby, but no one got out. We had gone over everything on the way, discussed every detail, various contingencies and possibilities, but Martha was in charge now-she would have to be. My job was to walk with my eyes pointed downward at about forty-five degrees. My job was to smile and keep smiling.

There was no security in the lobby. No powerfully built men with keen eyes and bulges at their hips. Probably a panic button under the woman’s desk or a panic switch at her feet. Maybe a gun down there, too. And there were cameras, unhidden: one above the reception desk, angled down; one above each bank of elevators. Cameras in the public spaces, Ada had said, but not in the private areas. Not in the executive offices. That was as far as she knew; that was according to the latest reckoning. We were counting on it, but we didn’t know.

The receptionist cupped one palm over the mouthpiece. “Excuse me? Hi. Where did you say you were from again?”

“Peach Tree, ma’am,” I said. “Peach Tree Management Systems.”

“We’re consultants,” said Martha, flicking an irritated look at me, servant speaking out of turn. “Workplace efficiency. But like I said, it’s as much a personal call as anything. I just wanted to say hi.”

I pressed my hands together while the blonde said “Hmm” a couple more times and went back to murmuring into her phone.

I stood and waited and grinned and looked at the floor, fighting back against the simple, sick, vertiginous awareness of where I was, where exactly. I was tottering on the rim of it. Through those doors. Up those elevators. Behind these three towers…

I was breathing very slowly. Martha stared into the expanse of the lobby, and I could not guess what she was thinking. We were deep in character, and I’d taken us into this place, and I could feel the terrible weight of it pressing my flesh, and when the receptionist looked up again and smiled, her red-lip smile was the wide, burning grin of the devil.

“You’re in luck,” she said to Martha. “He is here, and he’ll be right out.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” said Martha. “That’s just perfect.”

“Yes.” She sniffed. “Your Negro will need to be cleared.”

Again, as at the border. Scalp and armpits, teeth and tongue; pants down, shirt up. They had a room for it, just off the lobby, and an attendant, a tired-looking free black man who scowled and said nothing as he ran his clumsy fingers over my body. I stood absolutely still. I held my arms out. It would have been the school at Bell’s, the first time, the first of such searches I had endured in my life. Lesson 1: your body is not your own.

This place, this plantation, was on a different order from Bell’s. Physical size and scope of work, a different universe of slavery from the little three dozen acres where I’d been raised. Green grass, farm country, pig lots, cattle pens, silos. The world I was about to enter was a twenty-four-hour operation, ultramodern and ultraefficient, with computerized inventory tracking and comprehensive worker-control protocols. There was a camera in the upper left corner of the room, bearing cold witness to the man and me. I was here and I was there at the same time, feeling this tired guard’s hands on my chest at the same time as I was feeling the rough hands of the guards at Bell’s, a lifetime ago.

This is so much worse, I thought, and immediately thought, No, no, nothing could be worse. But it’s a waste anyway, isn’t it, the idea of comparison, just in general. Holding up one kind of horror against another.

“All right.” The bored security man broke his silence, straightening up, pulling off his gloves and chucking them into a bin. “Bag now.” Quickly he opened the rolling suitcase I was hauling, rifled through that, too-a change of clothes for Martha, change of shoes, and a laptop turned off, which he opened and closed uninterestedly.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re clear.”

But then before I could lower my arm he wrapped something around the wrist, a thin strip of paper, bright green, which secured to itself, tight as hell, tugging at the small hairs of my arm.

“That is an identification bracelet,” said the man. “That identifies you as a Person Bound to Labor and a member of our staff.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll come back through here again on your egress from this facility. But every dark-skinned person is required to wear a band while on the grounds.” He showed me his own bracelet, which was a cool red.

“But don’t you have a color for folks like me? Negroes like me, just-just here for a visit?”

“No, man, we don’t.” His voice was dry, humorless. “We don’t actually get too many of those.”

Martha was waiting for me in the lobby, laughing with her hand on the arm of a short, fat white man in a sport jacket, who was laughing, too. This was Newell-instantly recognizable from his picture on the company website, where we’d found him yesterday afternoon on an old laptop belonging to the lawyer’s people, making our plan.

It was Martha who pointed to him-to his weak-chinned, sappy, smiling head shot, his sad-sounding title and anemic history within the company. There’s the guy. There’s the guy we want.

And now here he was, the guy we wanted, dumpy and thin-haired and pink-cheeked, in casual slacks and polished shoes, with one of Martha’s hands on his forearm, the both of them laughing like old pals.

“Well, of course I do,” Matty Newell said hopefully. “You’re not the kinda gal a fella’s gonna go and forget.”

“I do like to think so,” said Martha, her laugh a tinkling falsehood. “I surely do.”

“You caught me in a good mood, too, I must say. A good week for us, darn good week.”

My mind jumped to Donatella Batlisch, to the footage from the motel TV: the woman flying forward suddenly with the gun blast, collapsing, limp. Good news for the southern interest, happy days at GGSI. But no, no. Newell just meant the late frost. “We’re coming up on Halloween, and here we still got acreage coming into flower. Don’t see that every year; no, ma’am.”

And for a second as I approached them across the lobby, my fake smile was real, a smile of appreciation for Martha. I watched her nod admiringly. I watched her touching Newell’s elbow. Jesus. She was a natural.

“Oh, Mr. Newell-”

“Please, please, Jane. Make it Matty.”

“All right, then. Matty.” She made it sound like “Hercules.” He beamed. “Matty, this is my associate.”

Newell peered at me, confusion in his small eyes. He had a lanyard around his neck, dangling an ID card in a plastic sheath. His face was soft, his hairline retreating, just as it was in the picture. Since sitting for the corporate head shot, though, he’d grown one of those little Tommy Jefferson ponytails, and it didn’t particularly suit him.

“Your, uh, associate?”

“Associate, assistant.” She winked at him, mouthed the word servant. “Whatever you want to call it. He does what he’s told.”

Matty sized me up, smiling weakly.

“Just seems like…” He shrugged. “Well. Funny work, for a nigger.”

Grin grin grin. Smile smile smile. “Oh, I know, sir, I know.” I glanced at Martha, at Ms. Jane Reynolds, making sure it was okay to talk. “I guess I’m a funny kind of nigger.”

Matty Newell gaped for a second, then laughed, a nervous, throaty chortle, shaking his head at this strange old world of ours. The flags snapped sharply outside in the brisk wind. The Asian children in the photomontages were frozen in their happy cartwheels.

“Well, come on up to the top floor,” said Newell. “Have a good look at the joint. Then we can talk about whatever it is y’all are selling.”

The whole building had that same pleasing color scheme, easy white and gentle blue, and every wall was lined with more of the glossy enlarged pictures. On the way to the elevator was a housewife of some indeterminate Southeast Asian ethnicity, reaching into her closet for a stack of towels-while reaching through the closet wall from the other side was a black slave, grinning, servile and unseen, as he provided the stack of sturdy cotton towels.

I did not blanch. I did not slow. I walked past, sticking close behind Martha, noticing things.

I noticed the pattern of the light fixtures in the long hallway: a bank of two, then a bank of three, two and then three. I noticed the pants of the slaves in the photographs, black like Marlon’s pants, like the ones I was wearing along with my inoffensive peach sweater. I noticed the lushness of the white carpet. I noticed everything.

The elevator raced us soundlessly upward fast enough for my ears to pop, and I stood clenching and unclenching my jaw, standing in quiet self-erasure at the rear of the car. I looked anywhere but up at the camera mounted in the high corner of the elevator. I studied the button plate on the elevator doors: MURDOCK ELEVATORS, it said. Murdock, Louisiana. Martha laughed and flirted with Mr. Newell.

“No, sir,” she was saying. “Oh, no. We’re up from the Birmingham office, but the company is headquartered in Georgia.”

“Georgia, huh?” said Newell. “And how are things in the State of Surrender?”

“Oh, stop,” she said, and slapped him on the arm.

He laughed, eyed her nervously, hoping not to have offended, and rushed to reassure her. “I’m only teasing, of course. Bygones be bygones and all that. Every state free to choose its own path. The American way.”

While Newell mouthed these wooden platitudes I had another quick flash of Batlisch, flying forward, arms out, the panic of the crowd. I wondered what Martha was thinking about. The elevator dinged, and we stepped directly out into sunlight; the whole top floor was taken up by one room with windows for walls, the sun streaming in gloriously on a bright open penthouse with marble floors.

“This is my office,” said Mr. Newell, and immediately snorted and waved his hands. “Just kiddin’, of course. This is the observation deck, what we call the perch. I love taking folks up here. Just gives a real strong sense of the place.”

He walked up to the glass and gestured for us to follow-well, for Martha to follow. My presence he had more or less forgotten: I was the rolling suitcase. I did what I was told. I was not worth thinking of.

He stood at Martha’s elbow. “Really something, huh?”

“It sure is.”

From inside my cloak of invisibility, I looked, too. Most of the buildings were like the one we were in, made of glass, beaming and winking at each other across wide green lawns. The buildings were gathered in clusters, divided into regions, separated by winding walkways and black-paved service roads and high chain-link fences. I was in both places at once. I was back there in the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, staring at the satellite image from the full file, and I was here for real on this plantation, in the presence of the real thing. Everything getting realer and realer, the closer you get to it, like flesh on bones.

I got busy correlating, matching up the buildings I was looking at with the blurry images I’d seen in the file: the offices, the outbuildings, the shipping and receiving center, the machine shop. The five brick towers of the population center, gathered around a tall tower with a glass cupola.

My mind saw that something was missing before I knew what it was. Where were all the people? At Bell’s the yards were always full of us, hustling and hollering, singing sometimes, yelling at each other or getting yelled at by the guards and the working whites. Down there on the green lawn of GGSI, I saw not a soul. Everybody inside, I figured. Shift in progress. Slaving away. And yet…

“Now, okay, so those right there are the garment factories,” said Matty Newell, pointing down at industrial buildings as big as football stadiums, scaffolded with exterior piping and drums, sending up streams of dark smoke. “That right there is kind of the heart of the place.”

Newell was looking down at the pristine lawn and the handsome facilities with clear satisfaction, giving us his overhead tour with almost proprietary pride, as though GGSI belonged to him instead of the other way around.

“Inside there are the ginning operations,” Newell added. “The cleaners and the dryers and so on. We’ve got the largest set of high-capacity round-base cotton gins in the state.”

“Well, I’ll be,” said Martha. “No kidding.”

My eye, meanwhile, had found it, that one abstract rectangle, shaded by the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, the small dark building that bore no number or name on the aerial picture.

I couldn’t ask Newell what it was, of course. I couldn’t ask Martha to ask. I was black. I wasn’t there.

“Now, this is a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, just by the way,” Newell was saying, Martha still nodding, eyes big with amazement. “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We run in shifts here, morning, afternoon, night, and late night. Never a dull moment. Sabbath comes every day for one-seventh of the population, so we never have to stop the plants. We got seven Easters, too. Seven Christmases. Only thing shuts us down is a bad accident, and”-he made a fist and knocked gently, ha-ha, on his bald forehead-“none of those in twenty-nine months.”

He grinned, nice and broad, and gave me a wink. “None of your cousins got a thing to complain about down here, son. And I mean it.”

It seemed he wanted me to respond, so I responded. “I bet you right, Mr. Newell. I bet you right.”

Newell laughed nervously, inside his throat.

“I mean it, son. This is not the slavery of fifty or even ten years ago. People think about slavery, and they still think-still!-about the whips and the dogs and the spiky neck chains, all of that nasty business. But this is now. This is the twenty-first century. You see there”-pointing again with that fat finger, a gold ring between the second and third knuckles, forcing me to look-“that there is the population center. Four thousand head in those buildings right there. We got a rec center in there, gymnasium equipment that every one of our team members is not just encouraged but also required to use. And you see that building in the center, with the turret-looking thing on the top? From up in there the guards can see into every single cell, and every single cell can see the guards, too. So everybody knows they’re safe. Everybody’s looking after each other. That goes back to Jefferson, by the way, that design. So you’re looking at a proud tradition here.”

He had fixed his hand on my arm all of a sudden, tight and congenial, like a fraternity brother.

“Forget about whips, okay? Forget about Tasers. The BLP allows it, you probably know that, but I can tell you-because I know the folks down on the sixth floor-I can tell you that we do not use Tasers here. Once in a blue moon, maybe, is it thought to be necessary. Because this here is an incentive-based facility, okay?” His fingers were tight as a shackle on my bicep. “And I tell you, you hear folks saying, what do they feed those poor boys? Then I go home on meat-loaf night at my house, I’m thinking, gee, I wish I was over in the mess hall with the peebs!” He snorted. “I only wish! Just don’t go telling my wife!”

I laughed, good and loud. Come on, Victor. Come on, Brother. Get it done. Find this fool trucker, find out what happened to that envelope. Bring the damn thing home. That was all I had to do. I laughed and laughed.

Newell, encouraged by my laughter, in full booster mode, turned his attention back to Martha. “Can I tell you something crazy?” He leaned in toward her earnestly. “If Garments of the Greater South were its own country, we would have a gross domestic product bigger than that of Rhode Island!” He leaned back, goggle-eyed, red-faced. “Now, ain’t that a hell of a thing?”

“It sure is,” said Martha. “It sure is.”

One thing that you could see from up here that hadn’t been included in the satellite imagery from the full file were the cotton fields themselves, the unending acres of them, rolling out from the campus in all directions like the moonscape beyond a space station. And I could not see them, not from this height, but I knew they were out there, hundreds of Persons Bound to Labor too small to be seen, lost in among the long white lines of cotton. For a second or two I stared out into those distant fields, stared at the fact that when this was over, once I talked to that driver and he pointed me to the next place I had to go, I would walk out of here, and those people I could not see but knew to be suffering, they all would be here forever.

What do you do with that fact? Do you hold it like a stone in your hand? Pitch it away from this great height and watch it fall? Do you swallow it and feel it in your throat till the day you die?

The elevator dinged. “All right, now,” said Newell. “Let’s head on down.”

Martha really was a goddamn natural.

We filed into Matty Newell’s small office on the fourteenth floor, past a hallway of air-conditioner chill and the faint smell of coffee, the three of us crowded in there with the filing cabinets and his smooth black desk and computer. She and I had practiced it, going around and around, back and forth, in the lawyer’s basement, and as soon as Newell closed his door behind us, away she went. Off to the races.

“Well, as long as we’re here, visiting,” she said, and he grinned, gave her a tsk-tsk.

“Here it comes, huh? Here comes the sales pitch.”

Martha winked. “You caught me. It’ll be painless, Matthew, I promise it will.”

“Matty.”

“Matty. All I want to do is ask you a simple question.”

“All right.” His brows were knitted. His fingers were laced together. I could read his thoughts-from back by the door with my eager smile, a good boy, an obedient boy, I could see what he was thinking: I’ve got no juice anyway. I can’t say yes or no to anything. He had given us the tour. That was what he had to offer. His smile was preapologetic-soon she would find out, this pretty lady from Peach Tree Management Systems who had dropped from the sky into his little life, that he had no juice. We’d chosen him well.

My eyes flitted to the four corners of the room, one by one. Nothing. Not that a camera couldn’t be small, of course. Buried in the plaster; screwed into the lights. But nothing that I could see.

“All I ask is that you answer one question,” said Martha. “And it’s a darn easy question, too.”

“Okay…”

“This question is like, you know”-she palmed her forehead-“duh.”

“Okay.” Mr. Newell laughed. “Sure. I getcha.”

“So here’s the question. What is it that y’all are selling here?”

Newell puffed out his cheeks. Opened his hands. “Cotton? Cotton goods?” he said, tentatively, shyly, like a kid getting a trick played on him. Waited to see if that was right, then tried again. “A brand? A, uh…” He fumbled for the buzzword. “A lifestyle?”

“No, sir,” said Martha, shaking her head slowly, exuding confidence. I could have applauded. “What you are selling is time.”

She launched into it then, good and confident, the whole Music Man business, while I made my comprehensive survey of his office, moving only my eyes: two squat filing cabinets; a floor-to-ceiling tiered bookshelf, lined with binders and regulatory manuals; a sturdy industrial desk with a metal frame and a glass top, with three pictures arranged neatly (Mrs. Newell, Mr. and Mrs., Mr. and Mrs. and a handsome chocolate Lab). Hidden from view, not visible but certainly present, was the fingerprint danger button: on the underside of the desk, most likely; under the seat of the chair, second choice. Behind and to the right of where Newell sat was a single interior door. Not to any kind of executive washroom, surely. Our Mr. Newell wasn’t pulling those kinds of perks. A closet, more likely. Storage.

While I crawled through his tidy junior executive’s lair with my eyes, Martha was giving it to Matty with both barrels: “You got yourself four thousand, two hundred and thirty-two folks out there”-pausing, just barely, a quick sly acknowledgment that she had the figure, she’d done her homework-“and it’s their time that you all are selling. Every hour of good work they give to the company, every darn minute of it, that is the product.

“Now, let’s say we take one Person Bound to Labor,” she said, “and pop him anywhere on the flowchart. Okay? He’s splitting open bales. He’s a loom operator. Doesn’t matter. He’s top-level, he’s a trusty, he’s punching code on a pattern maker. Okay?”

“Okay…”

“Let’s say he works one hour. How many minutes are in that hour?”

Newell hesitated-he knew there was some smart answer here, but he couldn’t figure it. “Sixty?”

“No, sir,” said Martha, said Jane Reynolds, saleswoman of the year. “Maybe it’s fifty. Maybe thirty. Maybe a hundred! It all depends on what’s going on in that man’s head, what’s going on with that man’s body. What we sell at Peach Tree, what we do is, we sell minutes. With our system of incentives and corrections, we add minutes to the hours that your PBLs are putting in, and you know what that does?”

“Uh…” He was afraid to answer. Afraid to be wrong. “It makes better clothes?”

“It makes money, Mr. Newell!” She spread her hands. “It makes more money.”

Newell chortled. “Well, we sure hope so!”

For a surreal half a moment I became excited at the prospect of making a sale. Ms. Reynolds and I would return to the office in Birmingham and report on our success, log it in the system, get high fives from the other sales teams, arrange a meeting with the tech guys for follow-up. Jane Reynolds would be employee of the month. I’d get-what? What reward would a freedman associate receive? Alternate universes, other worlds.

“I tell you what,” said Martha. “I’ll show you. Can I show you?”

“Sure,” said Mr. Newell. He stood up, as though maybe she was going to lead him somewhere. “Show me.”

“Albert?”

I popped out of the back corner like a jack-in-the-box. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Can we get set up, please?”

She said it with mild irritation, like she couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it already. I saw the small look she gave to Newell, the small look he gave back: these people. I opened the bag, opened up the laptop, and pressed a few buttons. Newell scurried out of my way, stood awkwardly in his own office, hands behind his back, ponytail jutting out over his pink neck.

“Okay,” said Martha. “Away we go. Albert, would you mind hitting the lights for us?”

“They’re just there,” said Newell and pointed, and I hopped over to the light switch.

“What I’m going to show you,” said Martha, calling up the first slide-the logo for Peach Tree, clipped off their website-and beaming it onto the window shade of Newell’s office, “if you’ll bear with me, is just a taste of the proprietary technology that Peach Tree is offering. Just a sense of it. So…”

The slide blinked off, and no second one came.

“What…” said Martha in the darkness. “Albert?”

“What is it?” said Newell.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “Oh, boy.”

“Albert!” Her voice transformed. Sharp as broken glass. “Albert, would you be so kind as to turn on the lights, please?”

I did, and fast. Martha was standing, flustered, with her hands on her hips. Newell was bemused, uncertain. “Ms. Reynolds-Jane, is everything okay?”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Newell.”

“Matty. Please.”

“Matty, it’s just, you know, they send me out here to do this, and they don’t send me with equipment that actually functions. Or a…a…” It was the sole flaw in her performance; the only half a moment’s hesitation. Jane Reynolds would have said “nigger,” of course. “A helper who can do his darn job.”

Newell didn’t notice her skipped beat. He wasn’t noticing anything but a chance to be some kind of man. He was rushing around from behind his little desk. He was handing her tissues.

“I do understand, believe me. Here, Ms. Reynolds-”

“Jane,” she said.

“Jane.”

Matty Newell was smiling weakly with a dim, hopeful light in his eyes. Martha took the proffered tissues and blotted tears from the corners of her eyes. Real tears. I almost laughed. I was still standing back by the light switch, just inside the door, invisible and quiet. But Jesus Christ, she was good at this.

“I have a very good presentation.” She pointed to the laptop. “I mean it. That is an excellent presentation.”

What she was doing was, she was letting it be his idea. She was walking him along, holding his hand tightly enough to lead him, loosely enough for him to be unaware of it. She was an absolute natural. Or maybe all women could do that to all men, if they wanted to.

“I would actually love to just do it alone, just the two of us,” and she gave that quick, simple, businesslike sentence-“I would actually love to just do it alone, just the two of us”-just enough backspin. Just enough.

“I tell you what, Jane,” said poor dumb Newell. “Let’s head up to the cafeteria, and I’ll buy you some lunch. Okay? We’ll have some lunch and…and you can tell me what you got to tell me. Don’t have to fuss around with all the tech and all that. You just lay it out for me, and we shall discuss it. Would that be all right?”

Her look of abject gratitude-Newell the savior, Newell the gentleman-was a thing of wonder.

“Oh, Matty, that would be so kind of you. And we really do have a remarkable product.”

“Of course,” he said. “And I’d sure like a chance to hear about it.”

He stood up. She closed the laptop, which we had loaded with exactly one slide, and followed him to the door.

“Oh, wait,” she said, glancing at me for just one half a second, just a quarter second to make sure that this was still our play. I nodded, a degree of head tilt well below Newell’s notice, and Jane Reynolds said, “Is there somewhere my boy can wait?”

“Oh.”

Newell stopped, flummoxed. I do believe the man had genuinely forgotten that I was in the room. “Well, he can wait right here, as a matter of fact. This door’ll lock behind me, and it won’t open until we come back. That all right with you?”

He wasn’t asking me, of course. Jane Reynolds said that it would be just fine with her, and he guided her with a hand on her back out into the hallway.

I waited five minutes after the door shut. I stood perfectly still and counted. Three hundred seconds.

While I was counting I stood as Jane Reynolds would expect to find her boy standing-in the corner with my head lowered, touching nothing, like a powered-down robot.

At three hundred I sprang into motion and the beautiful new music appeared in my head, the wild rhythms from the lawyer’s basement. It kicked up in me loud, so as I got to work it was with the urgency of that music. I moved through that small office like a drumroll, like an ascending scale.

I rolled Newell’s chair over to the bookshelf and stood on the seat and ran my finger along the topmost row of binders: dust. Same with the second level, and so on down to the floor: dust, dust, dust, all the thick binders and regulatory volumes so much set dressing.

I rolled the chair back to the desk. I already knew where this was going-I knew I would end up having to get into Newell’s computer. This was the twenty-first century: any kind of important document, anything that mattered, would be on the hard drive or on the server. But I did not want to be hacking if I could help it, so I was praying for a break here; I was hoping like crazy. I tugged open the narrow drawer of the desk, rifled past the stapler and the scissors, then I ducked over to the filing cabinet while I bent a paper clip into a twist.

Martha and I had agreed on twenty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes in Newell’s office to get the two pieces of information we were after, one for me and one for her, plus a five-minute margin on either end.

Nine minutes had already passed, five minutes of silent counting and four minutes of work, as I threaded the tip of the paper clip into the chintzy lock of the filing cabinet. I felt as I had at Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise, seven days ago now, Thursday to Thursday and a lifetime in the past. Break into a building, crack a desk: these were the easy assignments, the small projects outside of thought or contemplation, beyond regret or conscience. A hard deadline, a specific task. I twisted, caught the hook of the child’s-play mechanism, twisted again, and felt it give. The music played, jumping, triumphant, in my head.

There were five drawers to the filing cabinet. I worked from the top to the bottom.

Purchase orders, record keeping, maintenance logs-one thick folder with the details of a hundred different trucks and trailers. My forefinger ran along the spines of hanging folders. Forty-five seconds per drawer: pull open, quick examination, push it closed. Accident reports, insurance documents, vehicle registrations. The bottom drawer was financials: purchase orders and invoices, summaries of fuel expenditures quarter by quarter, reports on cost for overall fleet maintenance.

Buried on the bottom of the bottommost drawer, hidden beneath the thickness of the hanging files, was a curled bundle of papers wrapped in a rubber band.

What I was looking for would not be hidden, but I reached for this rolled-up sheaf anyway, tugged it up from its hiding place. It was a manuscript, typeset, dog-eared, with nervous doodles around the edges. I Love You, Too, Sir: A Tale of Forbidden Romance, by Matthew R. Newell.

“Jesus Christ, Matty,” I muttered and slipped it back where it had been. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

I turned back to the desk and moved Newell’s mouse to make the computer blink out of its standby sleep. I cracked my knuckles. I did not sit. I hovered over the desk, back bent, and got to it.

Once, in Chicago, someone had slipped me the URL for the US Marshals Service open cases page. I sat in horror in a library carrel, blocking the screen with my body, blocking from the world the sight of my own five-year-old file photo. Is that what I look like? I remember thinking. I clicked on the thumbnail picture to make it large. Those eyes-those eyes-I drew back from the picture of myself on that screen as if from a picture of the devil himself. Had that really been me?

My knowledge of computers, my ability to hack a database, to punch through firewalls, all that came later. That was all Bridge’s people. Four months of training in Arizona, plenty of that time in dark rooms navigating databases, penetrating secure servers, learning to follow the traces of men across the Internet.

I didn’t have to breach any firewalls to get to sweet dumb Matty Newell’s desktop, because he’d written his passwords in scratchy pencil on the back of the picture of himself with his wife and his dog. I trawled his hard drive. I entered search terms; I refined them; I found a spreadsheet, living on his desktop but cloned on an intranet server, called Contract Drivers Database, updated most recently ten days ago.

The truck drivers were identified here with four-character codes, and from Angie at Whole Wide World Logistics I had HR59, and now I was able to give HR59 a name: William Smith.

William Smith. I stopped, staring at the screen, my hands at rest on either side of the keyboard. The clock on the upper right corner of Newell’s screen gave me nine more minutes. There was no phone number listed for William Smith. No e-mail. No evident means of communication whatsoever.

I stared at the name, feeling time slip out from under me, hearing the mad acceleration of the music in my head, wondering how many fucking William Smiths there had to be in the state of Alabama. How many Willys and Billys and Bills were we talking about in the Birmingham metro area alone? In lieu of a phone number for Mr. Smith was a six-digit number that had to be a driver’s license number, and, after a couple of slashes, more indecipherable coding: FWH 9, B8. Numbers and letters. William Fucking Smith.

I made a fist and pounded it down onto the desk, and the computer jumped and shivered. Easy, Victor. Easy, Brother. Easy, now.

If I couldn’t find my man, I could find Martha’s. Fulfill my other responsibility-the other reason I was here. I memorized William Smith’s tangle of identifying numbers and closed out the spreadsheet, tunneled back into the hard drive, typing furiously, breathing hard. I had seven and a half more minutes, and it took me just three of them to find what Martha had been prepared to drop almost thirty grand on-the infamous TorchLight database: every person in bondage, all across the Four. The three million, listed by service name, by PIN, by marks and scars, all organized and straightforward and user-friendly.

Here he was; here was Samson. Martha’s love and Lionel’s father. The man and his fate, in black and white on the screen before me. I hovered there, hunched forward, eyes wide, frozen for a minute’s contemplation.

“Well, damn it,” I said quietly.

I read it again, as simple a story as it was. Preparing myself to explain it to her. This is what she wanted to know, and now she would know. Worst-case scenario.

Two beeps from the hallway. I jerked my head toward the door as it slowly pushed open.

Three minutes early.

There was no hiding. I had no weapon. I made my hands into fists as the door came open and saw Newell in the doorway, his loafers on the carpet, his big belly, his thick right hand frozen on the handle. His eyes wide with confusion, trying to make sense of what he could see: a black man upright at his desk, fingers on the keys of the keyboard; to Mr. Newell I might as well have been an ape or a horse, upright and clacking away. Martha was in the shadow behind him, still in the hallway, eyes flashing, pleading apology-I held him as long as I-

“What…” he said. “What-what on earth are you doing?”

“Stay,” I said, hard and flat. “Stay,” but Newell followed some ridiculous manful instinct and put his body in front of Martha’s, protecting his guest from the one-man slave uprising in his office. But Martha, thinking quickly herself, had stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She made a gun of two fingers and jammed them into his back, and Newell fell immediately for the oldest trick in the goddamn book. He stuck his hands up in the air.

“My God,” he said to her. “You’re…” A pink flush came into his thick neck. His eyes were wet with confusion. “Are you a part of this? What is this?”

Martha didn’t answer. I kept talking to Newell as though he were in obedience school.

“Step forward slowly,” I said. “Your arms raised.”

He obeyed. He raised his hands higher, bending his poorly tailored sport coat out of shape, tugging the hem of his dress shirt out of his waistband.

“Just…I never-I never did anything to hurt any Negro,” he said. “I never did.” Sincerely he said it. Believing it.

“Get down on your knees. Lace your hands behind your head.”

He lowered himself down, a series of ungainly motions, a fat, scared, graceless man trying to move unthreateningly. Down on his knees Mr. Newell risked a longing glance at his desk, at the panic button, at the telephone. He knew that he was dead. He had known for all his life in that dire, dark, late-night-fearful part of his bourgeois brain that this moment was coming, was always coming. This was the terror that was the underside of mastery. He worked in a multimillion-dollar company, economy as big as Rhode Island, built on the backs of black people kept in cages, and so there had to be a reason they were in cages-it couldn’t just be because their suffering sowed the cottonseeds and ran the bundling machines; how could it be so? It had to be because under their skin, under the smiles GGSI had painted on their faces, they were monsters.

Now here, at last, the moment had come. I stared down at him, just me, no weapon in my hand, and he literally trembled, his moon cheeks and the thickness of his neck quivering.

“Listen, Matt,” I said, calm as calm could be. “What does FWH mean?”

Newell blinked. “What?”

He was sweating; a heavy sweat on his forehead like a glaze. Martha looked from him to me, from me to him.

“FWH,” I said. “It’s an abbreviation. From your roster of contract drivers. Please tell me what it means.”

“It’s-that’s…it’s Free White Housing.” His voice quivering like a ribbon. “That’s-our white people. They live here…FWH just means-that’s where they live.”

He was here. The truck driver. Working white. William Fucking Smith lived here.

I got down closer to Mr. Newell, down on my heels. I made my eyes wide and clenched my teeth. I was not going to kill Matty Newell, but his fear was of value. I used it as a gun, as a hundred-dollar bill, as the bent end of a paper clip to spring open a lock.

“FWH nine,” I said. “B eight.”

“Free White Housing area nine. Unit B eight. It’s…it’s like-an apartment complex. I don’t know.”

“Any reason a slave would go there?”

“Go-where?”

“To Free White Housing.”

“Yes. I mean, yes. Not-not usually, but yes. Niggers-I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sir. Slaves-I’m sorry…black persons…I’m sorry. Oh, Lord.” He licked his lips. Snot ran from his nose. When Matty Newell told this story later, he’d say I had a shotgun, at least. Machine gun, maybe. Martha with a pistol in each hand. The both of us dripping with knives.

“Slaves go there? It’s not unusual?”

“It’s not.”

Okay. Okay. I had what I needed, almost. The music had kicked up again, tightening my chest. There was a sickening feeling of excitement getting going in me as I realized what was going to happen. What I was going to have to do. The man was here. William Smith. He was here. I pulled open the top drawer of Newell’s desk and started to rifle through it, thinking quickly. “Okay.”

“What…” said Mr. Newell. “What are you doing?”

“Stay there, man. Stay.” He stayed down on his knees, his hands behind his head.

Mr. Newell looked to Martha, but she did not even see. She was at the desk now: she had found the page I had been looking at. She was staring at the screen. Oh, Martha.

I took the scissors out of Newell’s desk, and his eyes bulged. “No,” he said, his voice rising. Waddling backwards on his haunches, hands behind his head, repeating his refrain, “I never did any harm to any Negro person.”

“Quiet, please.”

I was unbuttoning my shirt. I was stepping out of my shoes. I held the scissors in my right hand and pointed at Newell with them. “How do I get to Free White Housing area nine?”

He told me what I needed to know. While he was talking I turned the scissors to my neck and began to carve, bringing up a deep well of blood, hacking away. Right where I had my inked-in tattoo, right at the root of my neck. I needed blood. I needed a fresh wound. You had to be very sick, puking and shitting sick, to be brought to a doctor’s attention around here, that I knew. A bad cut, though, was not the end of the world. Steroid shot and a bandage, you’re on your way.

“Martha,” I said, “there’s a first-aid kit on the bottom shelf over there. Can you get me some gauze, please?”

She was still at the computer. Transfixed by the screen. Martha was not watching us anymore. Her attention was wholly on that computer screen, where Samson’s face and fate were still displayed. She had taken a step forward; she had reached her hand halfway up toward the screen, a small gesture full of grief.

I got the bandage myself. Worked it slowly around and around my neck. When I was wound up, three thick layers of gauze covering my fresh, credible wound, covering where I would have borne the sheltering G of GGSI, when I had what I needed from Mr. Newell to get across campus, I pulled the cords from the printer and from the computer, one by one. Martha kept looking at the screen, even as it went blank.

I had a couple more questions for Mr. Newell, but when I had all of them answered I pushed him all the way to the ground.

“I never…” he said, sobbing. “Never…”

“I know,” I said. “You never did any harm to any Negro person. But I’m going to tie you up now, bind your hands and feet, bind your mouth to keep you quiet, and put you in the closet.”

I got to it. I did it fast. When he was in there, far from his panic button, far from his phone, I gently guided Martha away from the desk. I took her by the hands. Got her to look at my eyes.

“Here’s what’s happening. You take the elevator down. You walk briskly across the lobby and say thank you to that blond girl and get in your car and drive north.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

“Are you listening?”

Her eyes were not on the screen anymore, but that’s where she was. She was with him, she was with her Samson, far away. I squeezed her hands between mine, squeezed each individual finger, trying to gather her attention, get her here with me.

“You go and get Lionel from your sister’s house and get that money I gave you and drive to Canada. Or fly overseas. Go anywhere. Go somewhere good. You got it?”

“I do.”

“That’s enough bread to start a new life, and that’s what I want you to do, okay? Get that boy out of America. Get him out.”

“You…” She looked at me. Shirtless, shoeless. Wrapped with gauze. The simple black slacks now looking dingy, pathetic. Slave garb. “What are you doing?”

“I gotta finish this up.”

“And then how are you going to get out?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

Her eyes at last were back in focus. She was back in the room.

“How? How are you going to figure it out?”

7.

Poor Mr. Newell, inarticulate with fear though he was, had managed to answer my questions one by one, even the one question I hadn’t known to ask-what is the line around the property, the broken black line that had puzzled me when I first got a look at the full file? It was a train. A subway. Not an electric fence or a utility pipe, but an underground train. Delivering Persons Bound to Labor from the population center to their shifts.

It explained why I’d seen no actual people at work from way up there in the perch, where Newell had taken us so he could crow. The slaves were way out in the far-flung acreage of the cotton fields; the slaves were laboring in the high floors of the stitch houses; the slaves were transported belowground, where they couldn’t be seen. Not past the headquarters buildings full of happy Matty Newells, meeting in conference rooms and making calls, doing no harm to any Negro person.

You’ll take the service elevator, Newell had said. The door will open directly onto the platform. So down I went. Shirtless and shoeless, disguised in my five feet of bandage and bright green wristband and my own black skin, I rode the service elevator down from Newell’s fourteenth-floor office with my head slightly lowered, my brain on fire.

As it descended I began to hear music, loud and martial music, and when the elevator door opened I was in a gigantic room full of men singing.

The men were shirtless and shoeless, as I was, and they were facing away from me, just backs and heads, rows and rows of backs and heads, hundreds of men standing totally still, their voices raised.

“These strong hands belong to you,” they sang in chorus. “Hands and back and spirit, too.” The melody was simple, a childish four-note singsong. “Every day in all I do”-I shouldered my way forward, finding a spot in the crowd-“GGSI, my heart is true.”

Now I was in among them, and nobody looked at me, nobody said who the fuck are you: I was one more shirtless man with a wristband and black pants, with mummy strips of bandage covering my neck and shoulder.

“As Thou hast done in days gone by…” I listened to the lyrics. I got it by heart. “Oh, Lord, protect GGSI.”

That was it. After that the song just started again, and now I sang it, too. “These strong hands belong to you…”

I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones…and then there was another, and another-all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold.

“These strong hands belong to you…”

They sang-we sang-with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell’s, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn’t understand. This, though-this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.

Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.

There were no women. The women were somewhere else. Where were the women? Things were coming loose in me, being down here with all these men. Things were coming loose. I felt like I might fall down, but I could not do that-none of these men was wavering. They stood completely still, staring straight ahead, only singing.

What I did was, I focused on the room. Focused on noticing things. I was in a subway station, a platform, a kind of place familiar to me from New York, from Washington, DC, from a hundred different hunts. A cavernous room lit dimly by overhead fixtures hanging from a high domed roof. A concrete floor ending like a cliff edge above the sunken well of the tracks. I focused on the room and the sound of my own voice, singing along. “These strong hands…”

I kept it in, I kept it all in, I had to keep it in, so I kept it in, made my face like their faces, expressionless, only the mouth moving. But I was too close, too close to their faces. For my whole career under Bridge I had always dreaded the page of the file that showed the photograph, the real human face of the man I was seeking, and now here I was among them-none of this peeb shit, none of this “Persons Bound,” no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people-human fucking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had.

The music stopped in the middle of a line-“and back and spir”-and we stopped singing.

“Arms out.” A voice came through from on high, burred and flattened by the intercom. “Hands up.”

Everybody did as instructed: extended their arms, raised their hands. I did it, too. This was it. My rushing emotion was subsumed in a sudden heat of panic. Newell had untied himself somehow, stumbled, screaming, into the carpeted hallway. Or it was Martha-they’d stopped her in the lobby. They’d stopped her in the car. She was in no shape…

“Heads back.”

We tilted back our heads. Stared at the ceiling. The men around me followed the instructions dully, robotically. This seemed to be an everyday occurrence. This was protocol.

On my left hand was the green wristband the guard had fitted me for. In my right hand was a piece of paper that Newell had filled out and stamped under my command. Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. Permission slip. Travel papers. Some of the men around me, I noticed, carried similar passes; others had none. Some wore, along with the green band, other bands of different colors in various places up and down their arms. A whole world of systems, of rules and regulations.

The intercom voice again: “Hold pose.” A frozen moment. A room cramped with shirtless men, all of us with heads tilted back, arms up and out. People like trees.

“Forty-five and under, hands down.”

Most of the men lowered their arms to their sides. I did, too. The older men kept their arms up.

There was a man moving through the platform. The slaves parted to let him through. He was black, as we were, but wearing a shirt and boots. He came within a few feet of me but did not look in my direction, did not see me, the infiltrator, where I stood with my eyes lowered like everybody else. The train was coming-I felt the familiar stale breeze being pushed forward along the tunnel-but nobody moved.

This guard or trusty, whatever he was, moved from man to man, all those with their hands still up, checking for something in their mouths. Push his index finger between their lips, force open their teeth, then worm his finger around, upper palate, lower palate, then out. His face was set; mean; like Harbor, the hard boy who’d haunted my childhood at Bell’s. Thinking of Harbor, I thought of Castle, and I felt a dizzy sense of the world collapsing, of my lifetimes flattening together into one plane-and meanwhile this overseer type appeared to have found who he was looking for among the forty-five-plus men. He took his finger from the man’s mouth, had him bend over, and began to pat down the length of his body.

The train pulled into the station, and its doors pulsed open. Nobody moved.

“Up,” said the overseer or trusty to the man. “Let’s go.”

The forty-five-plus nodded and lowered his hands and allowed himself to be led through the crowd, toward the exit at the end of the platform, and his face remained as impassive as all the other faces. But his eyes: I saw it, a flickering in his eyes-I saw it-a slight widening. Absolute and abject terror. I had read about the up-to-date disincentive programs that were run in plantations now; all that shit that had come online since my days at Bell’s. They were permitted now to tie you to a plank, pour water in your mouth to simulate drowning. They were permitted now to employ electric shocks; the science was in place to precisely measure out the voltage. All the uses of darkness. Of noise. Everything was carefully regulated, of course, BLP officials on hand at all times.

That man, that forty-five-plus, they took him away. At no clear signal, we all got on the train.

It was twenty-four men to a train car, twelve on either side. There were no seats. We stood, staring straight ahead. The train pulled away from the station, and we all began to sing again: endless choruses of the same song, no variation. There were no windows on the train. The man across from me was barrel-chested, with a thick bull neck and deep-set eyes. The train was loud in the tunnel, rushing and roaring through the darkness. It was hard to think with the singing and the rattle of the train.

The train ran in a simple circle around the plantation, fourteen stops in all, but I just had to make it through four of them: headquarters to facilities maintenance; facilities maintenance to stitch house 1; stitch house 1 to stitch house 2; stitch house 2 to Free White Housing. I looked past the big barrel-chested man. Behind him, in small letters, where one metal plate of the car’s structure met the next, were the words STIPELY FABRICATING SERVICE, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY. Just beneath the word Kentucky, one tiny machine screw was coming loose-I saw its head, a flat silver insect, poking like a secret from the surface of the train wall. I watched the screw as we juddered along.

At the first stop, facilities maintenance, a middle-aged white woman got on in the bright orange jumpsuit of the Bureau of Labor Practices. The singing stopped, but the train began to roll again, and she made her way down the center aisle, counting heads, clicking a small handheld clicker, one click for each of us. She did this while whistling slightly to herself distractedly, the way you might move through a crowd of chickens in a pen. Nobody looked at her. Nobody looked at anybody else. We just kept singing. I stared at the tiny loose metal screw. “All right, folks,” she said brightly. “Thanks very much,” and she moved through to the next car. At stitch house 1 nine slaves got off, and nine new slaves took their places. I did not look at the new faces.

I was going to find William Smith, and I was going to ask him my questions. Find out where that package was, get the fuck out of there-How? How are you going to figure it out?-and go and get it.

I should have felt something. I should have been excited, I should have been reveling in a moment, an opportunity that had at long last arrived.

But there on the train car, surrounded by men who would ride this train forever, I did not feel shit. I just wanted to get this done. Get it over with and get out.

Between the third and fourth stations the train stopped again.

“Hands in,” said an intercom voice, and before I could wonder what that meant, a pair of shackles dropped and dangled in front of me and in front of everybody else on the train car. One pair per passenger, they appeared and hung there like oxygen masks coming down when a plane has lost cabin pressure. I followed the others. Did what they did. Raised my hands and stuck them through the holes. The manacles tightened automatically, biting into my wrists. I still had my pass, my Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. It was tight between my forefinger and thumb.

The doors opened at either end, and two men came in, one at each end, black men, like the one from the platform who’d led off the forty-five-plus. Petty authorities, whatever they called them here. One of them had a dog. They wore uniforms, the same color scheme as the one worn by the guard who’d gone over me in the lobby, the same as the carpeting in Newell’s office: cotton white and blue-sky blue.

“All right, y’all,” said the first, from the forward end of the car. “Who’s feeling good today?” The man talking was the taller of the pair, with a broad chest and dark shining eyes. His voice had a rousing, rolling cadence. “Who’s feeling good?”

Everybody answered together. “I am.”

“Good. Who’s feeling strong?”

This time I was ready. I joined in. “I am!”

He nodded again, beaming. “Now, you all know this: GGSI loves you.”

Every man on that car spoke it in unison: “Thank you, GGSI.”

“Now, GGSI is here to take care of you.”

“Thank you, GGSI.”

The other overseer, down at the back end, was nodding heartily at everything, mouthing the answers, too. He stood there holding the dog’s leash. His attentive expression matched the dog’s.

“Let me ask y’all something.” The overseer who was running the show here, he licked his lips. He bounced on the balls of his feet. The dog poked its nose around. I was scared of that dog. “Who is it that gives us these clothes?”

“GGSI.”

“Who puts food in our bellies?”

“GGSI.”

“That’s right. Sing it, brothers. Sing it with me now.”

And we were back into it, hands and backs and spirit, too, everybody singing with noticeably more verve now, in the presence of the law. While we sang the two overseers worked their way down the line, one on either side, checking everybody’s papers. This was not perfunctory, either-they were holding pens, checking carefully, while the singing went on around them.

“You good.” Looking each man in the eye, then looking at the paperwork, nodding. “You good. You good.”

My pass was incomplete. As the trusty on my side drew closer, he and his dog, I managed a good, clear look at the Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate of the man beside me, and I could see how Newell had fucked me. At the bottom, not in any box, just jammed in where there was space for it next to the signature, this man’s pass bore an inky thumbprint. By accident or by design, Newell had left mine off.

I kept singing. I considered my options. My hands were shackled. The snare was sprung, the lock in place. I had no options. I continued to sing.

I watched the overseer moving down the line, watched my madman’s game sailing toward its end. I should have felt scared, I knew. I should have felt the horror of the man trapped in his fate.

Instead I was just thinking I failed you, a quick burst of felt thought, like a prayer-but I wasn’t sure who I was praying to. Whom had I failed?

The overseer was in front of me now, running his eyes over my face. He took the piece of paper from between my fingers and looked at it closely. His expression did not harden; his round cheeks did not change. “As Thou hast done in times gone by,” I sang. “Oh, Lord, protect GGSI.” The man turned very slightly back toward the other overseer, to check where he was, then he took my pass, and when he placed it back in my hand it had a thumbprint on the bottom.

“You good,” he said and kept moving.

When the men were done the shackles loosened, just enough for us to withdraw our hands, but they stayed dangling, jostling and swinging in front of our eyes as the train lurched back into motion.

The next stop was Free White Housing, and I got off.

That is one of the moments I still think about. Lord, I do.

I’ve tried to enact it. The small, quick, dangerous motions: to pop his thumb quickly in and out of his mouth, drag it through Newell’s signature, jam the smeary thumb pad into the corner of my paper. Furtive movements. One, two, three.

I think about that moment all the time, how nice it would have been to say thank you. To say something. This man a stranger to me. My hero. I would have kissed him. I return in my mind to Bell’s, to Chicago, to the thousand small kindnesses with which we armored ourselves against the world.

Free White Housing area 9 was visible from where the train doors opened, an ugly apartment block surrounded by a high chain-link fence. I booked it over there, hustling quick, eyes front, knees up. I ran past a high guard tower, ran with my back erect and my paper held out in front of me, thinking, One way or another, this is almost over.

The fence was unlocked. As I was going in, a pair of whites was coming out, rumpled blue work clothes marked GGSI, and I stepped aside, angled my eyes down. They took no notice. The buildings of Free White Housing were pale sandstone apartment houses, the kind of undistinguished clustered residences you see on the outskirts of poor towns-every apartment with a tiny balcony facing squarely forward, overlooking a concrete courtyard below. Four balconies per floor, six floors up. Apartments like cages, like drawers in a rolltop desk, identical and interchangeable, like pigeonholes in a wall.

I found building B and pressed the button for apartment 8. I had to stand calmly; I had to force my body to be still. Pressed the button again and waited.

They found him out, I was thinking. William Smith. He made a run for it. He’s dead.

But then when I pressed the button again there were footsteps, thumping a thousand miles an hour, coming down the steps inside.

“Stop buzzing,” said a voice, muffled, through the door. “Stop buzzing!”

The door of the lobby jerked open. A rag doll of a man, with a thin neck and long greasy heavy-metal hair, jutted his head outside into the courtyard, looked around quickly.

“Get in, man. Get in. For fuck’s sake get in.”

8.

Billy Smith was in a bad, bad way.

“Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man,” he kept saying, a steady mumble, all the time shaking his head, gritting his teeth, running one hand through his greasy heavy-metal hair. “Oh, man, oh, man.”

“Why don’t we have a seat, Mr. Smith?” I said-I kept saying-but he couldn’t do it or wouldn’t. He told me to call him Billy, everybody fucking called him Billy, but that was all the sense I got out of him, at least at first. I sat watching him from one of his two folding chairs while he smoked and paced the tiny apartment in caged-tiger loops, trailing ash, stepping over and around Styrofoam food cartons and empty beer bottles. Billy didn’t look like any truck driver I had ever seen: lean and lank, with nervous, edgy eyes that flickered constantly into all corners of the room.

“You gotta just tell them I’m fucking sorry, man,” he said over and over in our first few minutes together, no matter what I asked, no matter where I tried to start. “You gotta just tell them I’m fucking sorry. Okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “You bet. But listen. Billy.”

“You’ll tell them? Please?”

I couldn’t make him slow down. I couldn’t make him hear me. Billy was operating on some level beyond my reach. The air in the apartment was a low, thick funk, the smell of a scared little man, an addict who had run out of whatever it was that kept him bumping along life’s bottoms.

“I did what I could, okay? I’m sorry; things don’t always-I did my best, okay?”

He lit a new cigarette with the end of the one he was smoking and shook his head bitterly. “I don’t know why I ever got involved with all this mess. I really, surely do not.” Inhaling, twitching, pulsing. “It all just depends who’s on the gate, you know, and it was supposed to be Murph, but it wasn’t Murph, and there’s nothing I could do, so I’m sorry. Will you tell them? Will you?”

“Mr. Smith?” I said, real loud, then I slapped my hand down hard on the table and for whatever reason that caught him. He stopped moving. Rubbed his forefingers into his eyes, shook his head, then took a good look at me at last: no shirt, black pants, green wristband.

“What center you sneak out of?”

“I’m not part of the population here, Billy. I’m from the outside.”

“No shit?” His eyes went wide. “How’d you get in?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.” He rushed over to the window, slowly lifted one slat of the blinds, and peeked outside, clutching his chest. “Jesus.”

And he was off, a new tense orbit around the apartment. This man had all sorts of cosmic things going on in his mind, some stew of fear and regret and, unless I missed my guess, early-stage narcotics withdrawal.

“They’re coming,” he said now. “They’re fucking coming.”

“Who, Billy?”

“Bosses, man.” He gaped at me. “Bosses always coming, man. It’s not my house, you know what I’m saying? They can come in any time they want to. They got that right, okay? It’s my house, you know, but they own it. Rent comes right outta my check. Everything. Food. Water. Stove gas. Everything.” He had ramped up, he was talking fast, a million nervous miles an hour. “They can come in whenever. My man Jackie Boy in building C, he got jacked for porn. Black-girl porn, too, which they fucking hate. Tossed him right the fuck out. I knew a guy-Bolo, Bowler, Bowser, something-in FW 6, he had a bunch of coke in a Baggie in the toilet tank, you know? They canned his ass in a hurry. They woulda sold him offshore if he had a drop of nigger in him, shit you not.” Billy had made his way back to the window, and he risked another glance outside. “No, man, no: they can come in any time they want to. That’s why I’ve been so freaked out, you know?” He crossed the room in two long paces, sat down across from me, sudden and hard. “So let’s go, okay? What do you want to know?” Banged his fist on the table. “What do you want to fucking know?”

“You said something about Murph. Who’s Murph?”

“Fucking no one, man. Murph wasn’t there. He wasn’t fucking there.”

Murph was one of the gate men, but Murph used to be a driver, just like Billy. Murph owed Billy all kinds of favors. Billy had gotten Murph high more times than he could count-“and laid, too, man-laid and fucked up a hundred times.” And it was Murph, last Sunday night, who was scheduled to be at the large-vehicle exit point doing driver clearance. The trucks and the truckers are checkpointed separately, Billy told me in his special Billy style. Trucks get searched while the cargo goes in, then they get searched again by a whole separate team before they’re sealed. The loaded trailers are towed to one of the seven LVEPs, where they are connected to a tractor. That’s where the truckers show up, at the LVEP; that’s where they get their driver clearance before climbing in the rig.

“I’m serious,” Billy said bitterly, hissing out a long contrail of smoke. “I do not know how I got into this fucking mess.”

Maybe Billy didn’t know, but I had my suspicions. Ada guessed it was sex that had roped the man in, a pair of nubile abolitionist nurses, but looking at Billy, inhaling, twitching, pulsing, I figured it had to be drugs.

“It all depends on who’s doing that hand search, you know, and it was supposed to be Murph. I had the fucking envelope, though. I was holding it.”

Billy had been directed to leave his jacket slung over his balcony-unit 8, three stories up-and then when he went to put it on that Sunday night, lo and behold, a padded envelope was in the pocket. You would never approach the LVEP with anything remotely resembling contraband, except that on this night it was supposed to be Murph-the whole plan hinged on Murph’s weak vigilance. Then Murph got the flu.

“You believe that?” Old cigarette out, new one lit. “The fucking flu.”

Kevin, meanwhile, in his terrible hiding place: barrel of shit, barrel of blood, barrel strapped to the bed of a truck. The truck in lurching motion, the rattle of the wheels, the slosh of the fluid around him, the sick, close, dark air. And then after all those miles, Billy pops him out of the truck at the truck wash. He’s ready for his connecting flight-and where’s Luna? Where’s the package?

“Billy?”

“It was just bad luck.”

“Billy.”

“Bad, bad fucking luck.”

“Billy, where is it?”

He screwed up his eyes and stared at me. “What?”

“The package, Mr. Smith. Are you telling me it never went off this plantation? Are you telling me it’s still here?”

“Yeah, it’s here.” He was close to the point of tears. He gaped at me. He pressed his dirty fingers into his temples. “That’s what I’m telling you; it’s here.” He got up with a jerk, so fast he wobbled and nearly fell down. “It’s in my fucking fridge.”

My ticket to freedom was exactly as it had been described.

A padded envelope, five inches by seven inches. A half an inch thick. On the front, the logo of GGSI, and on the back, Kevin’s initials. I traced his handwriting with the tip of my forefinger.

I felt nothing. I put my palm on it and waited for the rush of feeling I was expecting, the dream of my new life in Little America, maple trees and a frozen lake and the curl of chimney smoke from my small wooden home.

The envelope felt like nothing. If felt like a small package, five by seven, with a slight bulge in the center.

The crazy courage of this kid. Jackdaw, born as Kevin. The balls. Lying to those holy fools the whole fucking time. Go and get that girl and I tell you where I put your fucking envelope. When he never even had it. He never fucking saw it. He had never held it in his hands.

All of it a wild bluff. Tricked Barton, tricked me, tricked everyone, all to get this girl Luna out.

And now she was dead. And now he was dead.

And here I was in the inside of his world, mourning him all over again, this crazy courageous kid: he’s down there dead in the water, and here I am.

Billy Smith was hovering behind me, twitching back and forth on his heels, hands in his hair, breathing heavy.

“Yeah, man, I’m just glad to get rid of that thing. I mean it. That thing’s been giving me bad dreams, man. Real fucking bad dreams.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” His breath was hot and stale. “You know that lady? The lady that got shot? I dreamed that, man. Night before it happened. She was giving her, like, testimony, you know? In my dream. With the long table and the microphones. All those ugly men staring down at her. You know they wear those flag pins on their jackets?”

I stood facing Billy, holding the envelope, feeling its small weight in my palm.

“Everybody was just fucking freaking out, you know, calling her this and that, nigger lover and everything, and then someone just came up behind and”-he made his fingers a gun, grimaced as he fired it-“pow, shot her head off, you know? That was in my dream. I dreamed it, and then the next day it happened on the fucking news!”

I tucked the envelope into my waistband, at the small of my back. Still I was waiting to feel something-the rush of possibility, the thrill of victory-waiting to feel my future coming.

“So all right, so what the fuck, man?” said Billy. “Somebody coming to get you? You got something set up?”

“No.”

“What? What do you-how you gonna get out of here?”

“We’re going to figure it out, Billy,” I said. “We’ll figure out something.”

“We?” he said. His eyes bulged in his narrow face. “Oh, no way, oh, no. No fucking way.”

We were back and forth on it for a while, Billy and me. He was trying to make me understand what I already knew, what I probably knew a lot better than he did: that it was impossible. People have tried all the ways, man, he told me. Packed in crates. Sewn into seat linings. Wrapped up within a palletized load of cargo. Inside the engine block. Clinging to the chassis.

“Jackdaw got out,” I told him. “You got Jackdaw out.”

“Yeah, but that got planned. You hear what I’m saying, man? That got set up for a fucking year. I mean, I was part of it, I don’t even know how long that got planned. And so what do you wanna do? Just, like, what? Fucking ride out shotgun?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

Although that was among the options I was considering. It was on the list that was writing and rewriting itself in my mind, possibilities arranging themselves in order of plausibility. I could hold Billy hostage or appear to hold him hostage: whittle a wooden gun from one of his sofa legs; build a bomb out of refrigerator parts and strap it to his chest and let the gate men know I’d kill him.

There were so many flaws in such a plan, so many questions.

I thought through the map of the place, thought about the buildings that abutted the property’s edge. What about that Institute for Agricultural Innovation? What about the black building behind it? It was marked off somehow; it was distinct. It occurred to me that a building so marked may be operated separately, may have its own separate system of entrances and exits.

Flaws and questions. Questions and flaws.

I stood. A quarter of an hour passed, then half an hour. I did my own version of Billy’s dance, pacing a circuit around the small space while Billy took his turn sitting, watching me think.

Subway tunnels. Delivery trucks. Employee parking.

I looked out the window. The sun was going down on the plantation, with shadow patterns on the concrete courtyard, with the bright green lawns past the fence turning darker, when the real plan began to form itself in my head-not a good plan, not even close, but perhaps the best of all the bad.

“Billy, are you allowed to go into the town if you feel like it?”

“Course. Sure. Yeah.” He eyed me warily from the table, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “I’m not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I’m going, what time I’ll be back, and then I gotta sign back in.”

“All right.” I nodded. This was something. I sat across from Billy. “You’re gonna go into the town and find a pay phone, and then you’re gonna dial the telephone number I give you. You’re gonna say exactly what I tell you to say, and the man on the other end is going to say okay. Then just stay where you are. Ten minutes later the Turner Alarm will sound.”

“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Listen. You’re going to call that number”-a Maryland number; my man in the system; deus ex machina-“and the Turner Alarm will go off. They’ll go to lockdown here and send out the wagons.”

The alarm was part of the Turner System. It was mutual defense. Every plantation in every county in the Hard Four was required to maintain a reinforced vehicle called a Turner Wagon, with a small armed company of guards, that could be sent out to any other plantation experiencing insurrection: a threat to one being understood as a threat to all. The system is named for Nat Turner, of course, the Virginia slave who with his confederates slaughtered fifty-odd people in 1831, although the system didn’t become common until the so-called Starman Revolt, in Carolina, in 1972.

“So you got it?” I told Billy. “Sirens gonna wail, wagon is gonna roll out.”

“And then what?” said Billy. “Where are you gonna be?”

“I’m going to be on the wagon.”

That plan might have worked, too. There were still some pieces to figure out, obviously-one more ride on that subway, a few more choruses of “These strong hands belong to you.” A couple more tricks to pull, but I was ready to try it, and I think Billy was, too, but then all the sounds started at once.

Chopper blades. A dozen automobile engines, roaring in fast. Car doors slamming, boots on the stairs. Billy’s nightmare made real.

I shouted to him, looking back over my shoulder as I ran for the window, but Billy had fainted-he was flat out. The window was useless. The door was splintering inward. A dozen people were yelling Freeze-yelling Get down; yelling Nigger, get down. A forest of gun muzzles. Me on my knees. Following instructions: hands up, hands laced behind my head, head down…

I had no gun. I had no knife. I only had that envelope, five by seven and padded and marked, and it was torn from me as they dragged me down the stairs.

9.

I knew I was underground, but that was pretty much all I knew.

I had been battered. Dragged out of Free White Housing, kicked with boots and hit with batons, and thrown into an armored car. Pushed through a door and tossed onto an elevator. Same manufacturer, I noted dully, as the one in headquarters. Murdock Elevators of Murdock, Louisiana. Someone shocked me in the midsection with a Taser or stun gun, and I fell down.

Now I was lying on a steel floor. There were tender spots, budding bruises, on my arms and legs. The metal I was on was cold. I was naked. My hands were shackled to each other, my feet were shackled to each other, and a loop of chain was drawn between the two sets of shackles and then through a metal loop bolted to the floor.

I passed in and out of consciousness one or two times.

Who did I think I was? I was just gonna waltz out of there? Ride out shotgun, like the man said?

Who did I think I was?

For a while I kept thinking there was someone else in the room with me. A dark figure, huddled in the corner.

“Is that you?” I even said one time, whispering, reverential, but nobody answered, and when I managed to move my head around, there was no one. I was alone.

When I woke again, though, I could hear someone breathing. Shallow breaths, and a light tapping-tap, tap, tap.

“You up?”

I shifted my weight, and the chains rattled.

The man who spoke, whoever he was, was on the far side of the room. Still making that soft noise, tap, tap, tap.

I turned my head, fought back a rolling spasm of pain, and saw him. He was inside my cage with me, leaning against the thick steel door with his arms crossed, bored. In one hand he held my envelope, Kevin’s envelope, five by seven, with a small bulge in the middle. He was holding it in his right hand and tapping it, tap, tap, tap, against his left bicep.

The man was familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place him. A wide neck, very pale skin. Dull eyes.

“Come on,” he said. “Get up.”

I knew where I’d seen him. The Fountain Diner, my first meal in Indianapolis. Cook’s partner, thick-necked and red-faced. Officer Morris, who wouldn’t know he was on fire unless a pretty girl told him so. I guess someone had told him something.

“Up,” he said again. “Time to go.”