Cook yawned. The nurses came out of the Starbucks, chatting happily, steam rising from their cup lids. I craned my neck and stared up at him, at Old Abe, Honest Abe, Abraham the Martyr. Big hands palms up, long fingers outstretched, his homely features solemn and beatified, looking south down Meridian Street.
“You see how they posed him, looking down the street? That’s where the hotel was.” Willie Cook pointed south on Meridian Street, then jerked his handsome face up at Old Abe. “Poor guy’s gonna stand there forever with birds shitting on his head, looking at where he got killed.”
I mustered a hollow laugh, but Officer Cook wasn’t paying attention: he was watching the man who was coming now, a powerfully built black man crossing Market Street with his hands jammed in the pockets of gray slacks.
“All right,” murmured Officer Cook. “Here we go now.”
He stood up straight as the man came up the steps toward us. He was very tall and very dark-skinned-midnight, I calculated automatically, offhandedly: midnight, purple tone, a number 121 or 122. His eyes were bright and yellow, hidden deep in his head, shifting questioningly back and forth from Cook to me, me to Cook, taking us in. I read the man as muscle, a body man; what was called, in Airlines slang, a baggage handler. I looked down Market to see what kind of car he’d come out of, but wherever he had parked was out of view.
Cook raised his hand cheerfully, but the newcomer spoke first.
“Who is this?”
“This here’s Jim. Jim’s new business. Jim, meet Mr. Maris.”
Maris nodded at me once, not impolitely, then turned back to Cook, repeating the words new business in mildly accented English. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or uncertain of the expression or what. My mind chewed on the accent. African. West African? He wore a cheap blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he had the thick forearms of a prizefighter. I’ve known tall men before, but there was something about this Maris’s tallness that made you want to turn around and run.
“You must spread your legs and raise your arms, Jim.”
Cook looked with amusement at me, soft-bellied Jim Dirkson, then back at Maris. “Does he look like he’s carrying a gun to you?”
Maris stepped forward into the shadow of the statue and efficiently ran his big hands over my body. “I am sorry,” he said. “It is necessary.” I shrugged. “Oh. It’s okay. I understand.”
Right as I said it, though, he came out of my back pocket with my butterfly knife, which at the last minute before leaving the hotel I had taken out of my toiletries bag and jammed into my back pocket. Maris held it up to me with a grave expression, then showed it to Cook, who looked at me with eyebrows raised. I blushed, looked down.
“I’ve uh-I’m sorry. I’ve been advised to be careful.”
Cook looked steadily at me for a second, but then he laughed. Maris did not laugh. Wordlessly he slipped the knife inside his breast pocket, then cocked his head, considering me.
“And what of Jim, if anything, is known by our favorite?”
Maris delivered this inquiry to Officer Cook with a solemn expression, pronouncing the word favorite with three syllables: fave-o-writ. The slight lilt in Maris’s voice contrasted pleasantly with the formality of his speaking style, like violet flowers in rich, dark soil. Definitely West African. I wondered if his prints were on file somewhere, if his name or alias was on a watch list. In Bridge’s building in Gaithersburg or in Washington, at Counterterrorism. A Liberian; a friend to the cause.
“Oh, he knows, he knows,” said Cook. He smiled at Maris, who did not smile back. “Father Sunshine’s just being a little particular. You know how he gets.”
Maris’s eyes narrowed, and his nostrils flared. His dislike for Officer Cook rose off of him like steam. “He does not like to take on new projects until old projects have been completed.”
“Right,” said Cook. “He don’t like to, but he will. He’s done it before.”
“I don’t like to, either.”
“No disrespect, brother, but I could give a shit what you like.”
Maris glowered. I bore silent witness, thinking, There is no army of abolition. This is what the world has for heroes. Ordinary men, squabbling and prideful. Hassling each other, doing their best, busting the world free. And men like me, behind fake papers and clear-glass spectacles, keeping it chained.
“This man’s got a woman he loves and nowhere else to turn,” said Cook. “And the other thing is just about put to bed, right?”
“No, it is not yet…” A minor hesitation as Maris furrowed his brow, decoding the idiom. “It is not put to bed.”
“How’s he holding up, by the way?” said Cook. “Our boy? What’s the word from Dr. V?”
I kept my eyes blank while I listened to their conversation with radiological intensity. I noticed “How’s he holding up?” I noticed “Dr. V.” I stood silently just behind Officer Cook, noticing things.
They were done talking before long, and the three of us stood and waited. Cook leaned on Lincoln’s pillar, but Maris crossed his arms and stood erect, his big forearms bulging. He darted out his tongue and licked his lips, and the tip of his tongue was bright pink, like a bit of fruit. And then at last came Father Barton in civilian drag, no collar, just a black overcoat and blue jeans, slightly hunched forward, floating like a shadow up the white steps.
Maris descended one step, raised his hand to the priest.
Barton saw Maris, then he saw Cook.
Then Barton saw me, stopped walking, and turned and went back down the steps.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Officer Cook.
Maris hustled down the steps after Father Barton, raising one arm, literally giving Cook and me the back of his hand.
“Fuck’s sake!” Cook called again, and chased after them both. “Hey-hey, come on. Hey-”
I was left at the top step, alone with ugly Abraham Lincoln, with his grim hawk nose and gloomy face, forever president-elect, looking out over his world.
12.
Back in the hotel room, I’d found a long, spidery crack in the corner behind the rickety desk they give you for writing on, and I sat and stared at that crack for a while, clutching my chest at heart level, holding myself still. I had all these leads, the case was wide open, I had Cook and Maris and their conversation leaky as an old boat, I had Whole Wide World to get to, but here all the old stuff was rising up in me like swamp water, the Old Man and the Franklins and Castle and Mr. Reedy and a swamp full of black red blood, all of it coming up until the mud filled the back of my throat, until I was choking-when I had work to do. Castle, Castle’s big eyes in the darkness-so much fucking work to do.
With a slow, careful motion I opened the laptop and turned it on. While it was starting up I set up my cassette player and put on a mix tape I had. It wasn’t all MJ on that one, but quite a lot of it was, and the first song was “Ben,” nice and easy, gentle and tender. I let that song work its magic a second, let it cool me out, then I opened my laptop to look for Dr. V.
There was no shortage of doctors in Indianapolis, it looked like. It looked, actually, like medicine was one of a handful of bright spots in a dark economic landscape. Like a lot of big midwestern cities, this one had spent the second half of the twentieth century stumbling in and out of recessions, trying to make the best of America’s fucked-up, piecemeal economy: all that proud but self-defeating unwillingness to do business with the Hard Four; all the blood and treasure wasted in the Texas War; all the industries, from cars to coal to computers, that had bloomed and then wilted in the face of international boycotts and sanctions (while, funnily enough, the slave states prospered, protected by the economic insulation of permanently deflated labor costs).