“All right. I understand.” The sternness in Dr. V’s eyes softened, and her mouth twisted at the corners. She was keeping her voice firm, but with effort now. Something else was trying to find its way out, pity or empathy or kindness. “And what is it that you want?”
“All I want to do is see him,” I said. “That’s all. Just-before y’all spirit him away. Up north. I just gotta see him one time. I need him to know I never did forget about him.”
And there were tears in my eyes now, of course. Seems like one thing I could always manage was to conjure up some tears into my eyes. I was still nearly naked, just in my underpants, and it only added to the awkward urgency of our exchange, that we bore this relation to each other-doctor and patient, woman and man. “I just want him to know I never let him out of my heart. I never did. I just want to see him and tell him that. That’s all that I want.”
She should have simply said, “I’m sorry.” She should have said there was nothing she could do. I could only imagine the firm instructions she got from Father Barton, the sternness with which his admonitions of silence were delivered. But the ripples were passing over her, the ripples of want. She wanted to help me. She needed to. It was the flip side of the reflexive hatred of Slim and Slim’s fat pal-someone like Dr. V, white and liberal and a child of her era: she wanted and needed for the poor black man in her office, he of humble circumstance and simple hopes, to see that she was not like the sneering bigots and whiphands of the world, that she was a person of conscience. She was different.
Barton would demand that she keep her peace, do as he did in the diner and disclaim all knowledge. But Barton wasn’t there-he was an abstraction, and I was there in her office. Mr. Morton was real, hands knitted together, eyes wide with need.
“The problem is,” she said slowly, “that I don’t actually know his location.”
“Look, I don’t want to hurt him,” I said, “or take him or nothing. I just want to see his face. I want to hold him one more time.”
“You’re not hearing me. I don’t know his location.”
“But-but you went to him. I thought-you didn’t help him?”
She nodded minutely, bird head popping down, then up. “Yes. But I don’t know where.”
Goddamn it. Fucking priest. Shifty, snake-eyed, base-covering little hypocrite.
“What do you mean?”
“Look, okay.” Her hand ran again through her hair. “I never know much with these-these situations. I get a call from someone. I don’t know who it is. It’s a different number every time. Okay? That’s how this goes. I have a phone they give me, and it rings and I answer it and they tell me where to go.”
“Where?”
“Downtown.”
“Where?’
“The mall. Circle Centre Mall.”
I nodded. I knew it. Right downtown. You could see its parking garage from the statue of Abe the Martyr.
“But that’s not where I met him. That’s just where the car picked me up. It was a taxicab, but not-it wasn’t in service. It was just for me.”
Barton at work: cutout operation, prepaid phones, wheels within wheels.
“So where’d the car take you? It take you to him?”
“Yes, but. Blindfolded.”
They packed her into the car, drove her for at least an hour, drove her around and around in circles, north and then south, until she could have no idea where she was, and then they guided her out of the car and down a path. Rough beneath her feet. Slipping some. Still blindfolded. When they took off the mask, it was dark, totally dark, then someone turned on a flashlight, and there he was.
“There he was,” I repeated softly, remembering the delicate, intelligent face I had seen in the photograph. Dr. V was remembering it, too, standing before me quiet and thoughtful, reliving the moment when she saw him. She gathered some strength, stepped forward, and laid her small hands on mine. “You should be happy, Mr. Morton. I have never seen anyone like that young man. Never. And now he’s going to be free. He’s going to be fine.”
No, he’s not, I thought. Because I’m not any damn Mr. Morton, and I’m getting closer. Because I’m a wolf and I’ll find him, today, because Bridge said if you can’t find the man…I offered Dr. Venezia-Karbach a weak, watery smile. “Is he all right, though? What kind of place is this they holding the man?”
“I don’t know, really.” She shook her head softly. “It was a room. I don’t know. There was a generator of some kind, but it kept cutting out, and the lights would flicker on and off.”
“So like a-like some kinda empty building?”
My mind turned. Sprinted out in different directions-warehouse district, abandoned homes, unfinished building projects. “What about all your things?” I gestured around the room-stethoscope, laryngoscope, tongue depressors, gauze. “What about all the doctor things?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “No. My supplies I brought with me. There wasn’t any…no, nothing like that.”
In her mind, she was there. The place. Lair. Hideaway. I could see her seeing it. Smelling it. I leaned in.
“What is it?” I asked. Simple and quiet. “What?”
“There was…” She nodded. Her small bird eyes narrowed, remembering. “Kind of a noise, an odd noise. A whooshing. Like pipes. Like water flowing through pipes.”
“Pipes?” I said. “So…a basement? Some sort of cellar, or-”
“Maybe. It might have been. I don’t know. That’s-I think that’s what I know. Okay? I think that’s all I can tell you.”
The doctor was done. She was casting more and more anxious glances over her shoulder at the door, as if any moment the next patient would come in, or her nurse, or Father Barton himself, glaring with those pale eyes, floating a foot off the floor, leveling a finger at her, denouncing her as a betrayer of the Cause.
“Well, listen,” I said. “I thank you so much. I really do. If I can just see his face…”
She nodded rapidly, said, “Yes, yes,” and something in the rapidness of her nodding and the way she darted her lips in and out made me wonder if it wasn’t just guilt she was feeling but fear. Who is this Barton, anyway? What kind of vengeful Old Testament father are we talking about here? I said thank you about a million times. Humbly I thanked her. Humbly I assured Dr. Venezia-Karbach that her confidence would not be betrayed. She smiled sadly, smoothed her lab coat, and put her face back on.
“Oh, actually, though,” I said, when she was almost out the door, when she had almost escaped me. “I just have one more quick question, if that’s all right.”
“No, Mr. Morton, I’m sorry. I don’t-”
“Please.”
“No more questions.”
“Ma’am? It’s just-why did he need to see a doctor?”
I did test the leash one time. Very early on, I tested it. Years ago. I suppose I had convinced myself, staring at some hotel-room ceiling in an insomniac stupor, as I had lain unsleeping so many of those early nights, almost every night in the first year of it, that the whole thing was a hoax, a con. They had drugged me, put me in a thick opioid haze for two hours, then told me on waking about the tiny computer chip they’d injected in my nervous system, right where the spine touches the brain, that it would be singing out my location from there on out.
Ain’t no way, I told myself. That shit’s impossible, and I’m a fool to believe it. So I refused to believe it.
I remember it was the first time that Bridge put me on to a woman. The service name was Darling. I traced poor Darling to goddamn Idaho City, Idaho, and I was supposed to be staking out the home of a relative, a second cousin, I believe, and instead I shoplifted a change of clothes from a department store and boarded a bus to Oregon, with a vague notion of hitching north to Port Angeles, stowing away on the ferry to Victoria. But when I got off the bus in downtown Portland, what did I see but three men in dark suits drinking coffee. All three stood up at once, and I turned around and got back on the bus and went back to Idaho and finished that job and the one that came after it. Mr. Bridge never mentioned it. Never said, “How was your trip?” That was not his way.