“You there?”
“It says what it says. It says he’s in Indianapolis.”
I read the sentence to him again, struck-as I had been the first time I read it and each time since-by its obscurity, the ugliness of the construction. Even for government grammar, it was a nasty and clotted run of words. The subject is known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis, Indiana. And then, at the end, there was a strange little mark. A dagger.
“You see that it’s footnoted?” I asked Bridge. “Is it footnoted on yours?”
“It is.”
“So?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at that sentence. At the footnote marker. There wasn’t any footnote at the bottom of the page to go with it. No amendments or addenda at the end, either, no page of notes the dagger was telling the reader to go and look at. I heard Bridge’s fingers clicking away, so I knew he was looking, so I asked him, and he said yes, it was the same in his copy: a reference with no referent, a dagger pointing to nothing.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”
“All right. Good.”
“Victor. How is your progress?”
That was it: question time was over. I lit a new cigarette with the end of the old one, and I gave Mr. Bridge what he was waiting for.
“I followed Barton’s bread crumbs to a church facility in a colored neighborhood on the west side of the city,” I said. “Place is all closed up, but the good father is coming and going, probably other folks, too. Someone at the diocese level had it shuttered a few months ago, but there’s a new lock on the place. My money says this is the new temporary HQ for an ongoing operation. Permanent floating craps game.”
“Okay. And?”
I sighed. Mr. Bridge did not give pats on the back. No chucks on the chin.
“Victor?”
“I cracked the lock in about a minute.”
“And?”
“I had a look around.”
“Did you find the runner?”
“Yeah, Bridge. I got him. He’s here. We got fried chicken and watermelon from room service.”
But you couldn’t get a rise out of Mr. Bridge. You couldn’t make him jump. So I just went on, staring down at the cars in the lamplit parking lot. I pried away for Mr. Bridge the plywood panel over the hidden doorway at Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise; I led him into Father Barton’s crawl space, and showed off for him a variety of distinctly nonclerical objects I had discovered therein. Six guns of a variety of manufacture and caliber, none with serial numbers; three bulletproof vests; a shoe box full of driver’s licenses, displaying a wide array of black and white faces, issued by the states of Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. A locked chest that had yielded to the attention of my picks and rakes and turned out to be full of money-small and large bills, rolled up in tight circles, the better to be passed into waiting hands.
What was most interesting, though, was a single photograph, which I had found taped to the underside of a small wooden schoolboy desk, pushed up against the wall in one corner of the crawl space. The photograph was of excellent quality, seemingly the result of high-quality macro-lens photography. The faces of the two causasian gentlemen in the photograph were crystal clear, and there could be no doubt as to the activity in which they were vigorously engaged.
“Fucking?” said Bridge.
“Yes, sir. Fucking.”
Discomfort. Embarrassment. A rare species of silence, to be prized. I smiled.
“Are you suggesting,” said Barton at last, “that Father Barton is a pornographer?”
“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. No worldly sense on Bridge at all; a desk man, right down to the floor. “Not a pornographer. A blackmailer.”
I spelled it out for poor, dense Bridge. Of the two gentlemen captured in the photograph, one was in his socks, but the other had had the poor judgment to remain in his green work shirt, the corporate logo of which was displayed to the lens: a purple-and-green globe emblazoned with speed lines. Visible behind the happy couple, painted on a gray tiled wall below a row of clocks, was the same logo. Before Bridge’s call I had figured out where they were: Whole Wide World Logistics, a third-party transport company, short haul and long haul, mostly small freight, with a regional headquarters and “client relationship center” in Indianapolis.
“So maybe lover boy is married,” I told Bridge. “Maybe he doesn’t want his boss knowing what’s going on in the office after hours. Either way, they’re leaning on this mope to arrange special deliveries.”
“Do you have a name?” Bridge’s voice had recovered its customary composure.
“Winston Bibb. He’s the assistant regional manager.”
“And have you paid him a visit yet?”
I said no, and Bridge said why not, and I drew in a lungful of poison and said because I was done with this approximation of a human existence, with bending not only my abilities but my real human soul to the sinister will of an authoritarian state, and that one day I would transform my flesh to metal and become a sword aimed at his heart.
Bridge didn’t laugh. He waited in silence until, in the same even tone, I said no, I hadn’t gone to Whole Wide World yet, because it was nighttime and they weren’t open, and I doubted I would gain much ground by B and E. In daylight I would go over there and find out what special shipment poor Winston was forced to arrange so Jackdaw could be put on it. From there I could find out who took delivery, find out where-find out and find out until I found out the man himself, found him out and called him in, and then Bridge’s white vans would roll up in their rough government splendor and bear him away.
As I gave my report and we laid our plans I could hear Bridge’s fingers rattling on his keyboard, and I could feel his happiness buzzing and popping, crackling along the cables and down the invisible waves between us. His pink bureaucratic heart was alive with pleasure. Another file, almost ready to be closed.
“Okay,” he said, “very good,” getting ready to be done, and I said, “I got one more question about the file.”
“Do you?”
“Where’d he come from?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nothing here on the record of acquisition. It says he’s been in service for nineteen and a half months. So what about before that? He’s twenty-three years old. His patrimonial and matrimonial lines are question marks. All his stamps before the current one are blacked out.”
Bridge didn’t answer right away. Somewhere in the darkness below me, a car stuttered and started. I tried to guess what kind of car it was based on the tenor of the engine noise and the shape of the lights: the high whine of the engine said it was something cheap, subcontinental. Bridge, in his office, was frowning at his screen, scrolling through his own copy, seeking out the relevant portion of the record.
“Perhaps he was inherited,” he said finally. “Maybe he was a gift. Maybe he was won in a card game.”
I finished my Baba and flicked it out into the lot. “Does that still happen?”
“Everything happens.”
I scowled. A dark feeling was fighting up in me like a living thing, clawing up from my stomach, pushing its way from the inside out. “Well, can we find out?”
“I will look into it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I will look into it.”
And there it was: for the first time in the years I had known him-except of course I had never known him at all-Mr. Bridge had raised his voice. A change in tone, almost but not quite below the level of notice. He had…insisted. He had emphasized.
Castle’s eyes would get so wide in the dark.
Castle’s bright and beautiful white eyes, like twin planets. His eyes were all I could see when it was just Castle and me under our shared blanket, on our shared cot, in our cabin, which was the one closest to the northernmost chain fence. There was no light in the cabin except the moonlight coming from one high window, but even under the blanket I could always see Castle’s eyes. He was my brother. He’d wake me up when the other ones were all sleeping. The Old Man and the others of us as well. In the middle of the night, almost every night, he would shake my shoulder till I woke. This is starting when I was…God, I don’t know-six years old? Seven? It feels like I was so little, except I was on the pile already when he started it, which means I was done with the school, so I had to be eight or more, and Castle was off the pile-he was indoors, on the kill floor. One step up from where I was. Same thing had happened when we were babies: when I was done with the breed lot and into the school, he was already done with school and on the pile.