I held my eyes to that door for a second, squinting hopefully, as if to open it by force of will and get the salvation I was seeking.
“All right, well.” Ruben raised his leaf blower. “I better get back to it.”
“Hold up a sec,” I said, in a burst of inspiration. “Y’all hiring?”
His brows arched with fresh skepticism. “I dunno. You gotta ask Rick about that.”
“Rick?”
“Yeah. Rick or I guess-Rick or Tiny.”
“Tiny?”
“That’s right.”
“You got a number?”
“It’s on the truck, man.”
Ruben was done with me. He turned away and fired up his leaf blower and called “Good luck” over its roar as I tippled over to that truck, a Pakistani pickup on high wheels towing an enclosed flatbed trailer cluttered with mowers and rakes and shit. Both the truck and the trailer had CIRCLE CITY LAWNSCAPING painted on the side, and under the name was the number.
The whole community center was about as big as a Monopoly house, and it looked older than sin, older than Adam and Eve the sinners.
Except for the lock on the door. That lock was brass, and it looked shiny and new.
I smiled to myself as I got the number off the side of the truck, feeling pretty pleased at having noticed that detail. Happy about having gotten-guided by the ATM receipt-to the bank, to the Catholic community center, to Ruben, to the door. Happy with all I’d done even before Bridge and his people managed to get me the full file. I was feeling the pleasure of discovery, the pleasure of the job.
That’s the problem with doing the devil’s work. It can be pretty satisfying now and again. Pretty goddamn satisfying.
I had with me in Indianapolis all my usual equipment. Some of it was in my room at the Capital City Crossroads, some of it was stashed in the trunk of the car. A variety of costume pieces-some wigs, some fake jewelry, and various basic elements of facial camouflage: a tube of spirit gum, a few shades of foundation, an eyebrow pencil. I had six different pairs of clear-glass spectacles and six different sets of colored contact lenses. Other tools, too: a set of picks and rakes for cracking locks, plus a backup set. Lanyards with name tags, fake badges in fake badge holders. Clothes and shoes. My phone and its charger and its various accessories; the computer. Paperwork for Jim Dirkson, and three more complete sets on three other names, all of it comprehensively backstopped, every phone number connected to a real phone, a real person who knew what to say if somebody called. Cash, too, of course-rolls of bills in rubber bands, available for my use for incidental expenses, all of which were to be reported at the completion of each assignment.
I had a gun, but it stayed in the hotel. Almost all the time, that’s where I kept it. I am an undercover operative in a dangerous line of work, but understand that I am also an African American male living in the United States of America. There are going to be checkpoints. I am going to get stopped. Every once in a while I’m going to have to dump out my bag under the watchful eye of some kind of lawman. Sheriff’s deputy, patrol officer, state trooper, what have you. Might just be some shopping-center wage-slave shithead rolling up on his Segway, flashing his costume-shop tin, wanting to prove his cock size to the girl at the sunglasses kiosk.
When that sort of BS happened I had no choice but to submit. I had no badge, no ID. I was true undercover, right down the line. If you saw the way I traveled, if you went through my suitcase or the trunk of my car, you’d think I was a thief, some kind of con man.
Which I was, of course. Really, that’s exactly what I was. I was a thief. I was some kind of con man.
When I got back outside, I found a police car parked right alongside my Altima, just outside the cemetery gate. I stopped and I stared at it for a second: an IMPD black-and-white, with the stenciled letters on the side and the sirens on the roof and the long radio antenna sticking up stiff and proud from the rear. I glanced up and down the street to see if the owner was around, but it was just as quiet as it had been before. Even the sky, still gray and cool, the clouds right where I had left them. Everything same as it was, except for the marked car.
I bounced on my heels a couple times, as if my body were getting ready to take off running. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, looking at the rear bumper of that police vehicle, looking at the gravestones, at the houses down the street, an uneasy feeling gathering and drifting in me like mist.
I was thinking that there had been two cops in the Fountain Diner last night, a black one and a white one, a couple tables over from the priest and me, looking at something on one of their phones, laughing and carrying on. Slowly I approached the parked police vehicle, listening to the distant, indistinct sounds of the city. Someone honking somewhere. A doorway gate rattling up, maybe Steak & Lemonade or The Big & The Tall opening for the day.
I committed the number to memory. Car number 101097. Big city, I was thinking. Big city, full of cops. That’s all.
7.
“What is this? What is this, now?”
I was standing on the hotel room’s rickety wooden chair so the top of my head grazed the ceiling. I had a halfway decent printer, government-issue and portable, but it worked just fine, and when a file came in it was my practice to print it and lay the sheets out on the hotel bedspread in a grid and study them from above, as though I were doing helicopter surveillance on a city block.
The full file was a goddamn mess, and I was not pleased. I hate mess. I hate unevenness and uncertainty, and that’s what the full file was-it was uneven and uncertain.
It was midafternoon already. The file had appeared on the second server by noon, as promised, and I’d been staring at its ugly sheets since then, scowling at them, drinking water from the cheap hotel-room tumbler, puzzling over the nine pages of closely typed text and illustrations, and thinking the same thing: What a goddamn mess.
The first three pages of the file concerned Father Barton and his cell of the Underground Airlines, and this section was short on details and long on conjecture, pure search-engine bullshit. Some intern in Bridge’s office had strung it together from old arrest warrants and radical abolition chat rooms: Barton’s birth date, town of origin, known and suspected associates. His close ties to the International Canaan Organization (ICO) and Les Bénévoles Blackburn, his loose ties to the Black Panthers and two other “domestic terror organizations.” His name in connection with a nasty incident twenty-two months ago: a body found in a crate in a Cincinnati FedEx routing center, never delivered, substantially decayed. This corpse was eventually ID’d with a PIN and a service name-a runner from Boone County, Carolina, who’d gotten himself crated and sent to “Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, Indiana.” The FedEx employee who’d facilitated this Hail Mary maneuver, an abbo sympathizer working freelance, was in federal prison but could not be persuaded to admit he’d been acting on Barton’s behest-at least, that is, not according to this useless, messy, bullshit file.
All these first few pages did was tell me what I already knew-that despite his claims of innocence, the parish priest was a prolific smuggler of runaways, directly or indirectly responsible for dozens of illegal manumissions over the last several years. Bridge or Bridge’s intern had “a high degree of certainty” (whatever the fuck that meant) that it was Barton and his group who’d pulled Jackdaw off the plantation and/or gotten him across the Fence. They were equally certain it was Barton’s people shielding the boy till he could be moved across the 49th parallel to permanent freedom.