Silence.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
I had to hold the phone away from me. I bared my teeth. I tilted my head back. Tortured, then, before she was killed. Of course. I knew there was something behind it all along, and what’s always behind everything? When you scrape away the sticky cobweb of euphemisms like known to have intended to remove himself, you always find something hiding underneath it, and it is always violence. It’s always some kind of violence.
I said the girl’s name to myself, the name Kevin had called out to the sky. Luna. The sun was all the way gone now. The sky was dark, and the moon had crept up, shrouded in clouds.
“The one thing…” Bridge started, then stopped.
“What?”
“I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“Anything. When I delivered that file to you, I thought it was real. I promise you that, Victor.”
Jesus Christ. He wanted me to care. He wanted me to know that he cared, for God’s sake.
“I agreed with you from the beginning about the quality of the file. I also felt there was something off there. I told you to do your job because that’s my job. But you had-numerous concerns, and you were vocal about them. You were persistent about those.”
“I told you to look into it.”
“And I looked into it.” He cleared his throat. “Correct.”
A sensation welled up in me, of tenderness. Empathy. This feeling I strangled. I tightened my grip on the phone. I focused on sorting out the timeline.
“So you called your boss and asked him about the file.”
“Her.”
“Fine. Her. And she called you back when? Friday morning?”
“Yes. And she told me there was nothing to be concerned about. But that-I was not satisfied with that. I pushed her. She hung up. She called me back Friday night.”
“Seven thirty.”
“Yes. Right. She told me…” A fumbling half-second silence, a search for language. “She gave me the backstory on this.”
“She told you that members of your agency have been participating in a massive fraud on the American people.” I was in a mood now to have my suspicions explicitly confirmed. “Bridge?”
“Yes.”
“And she told you the real job here was to find this kid so he could be killed and this evidence could be collected and destroyed.”
Silence. Total silence. Dead and sad.
“Bridge? She explained to you that the real job here was to find this kid so he could be murdered and his magic envelope tossed on a fire. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“And why didn’t you tell her to go fuck herself?”
“It’s just…that’s not-that wasn’t an option for me.”
Not an option for him. I marveled at the phrase. I wondered in shades of furious red what the shackles were that he imagined himself to be wearing: loyalty? Some tawdry piece of information she was holding, this boss, maybe about some malfeasance of his some years ago? Was it-the word choked in me-love? Were they fucking, Bridge and this mysterious her? I held the phone down to my stomach for a second, twisted the cheap piece of plastic like it was someone’s neck, and then I put it back to my ear.
“-you want, Victor?”
“It’s very simple. That boy is dead.”
“Dead…how-”
“They killed him by accident.”
I didn’t give him time to be happy about it. I ground my teeth. I bore down. “But the package never made it out of the Four. He left it behind. Somewhere.”
“Why?”
“Just listen. He left it behind. He felt betrayed by the Airlines, and he stashed it. It’s still behind the Fence. And no one can get it. And they are sending me there to get it. Do you understand? I have been subverted. I am a double agent now. I work for the enemy.”
At last Bridge did not ask why or say, “What?” At last he simply understood.
“You work for the enemy, except you are telling me that you do.”
“I’ve got layers, Mr. Bridge. I go way down.”
Darkness was rising all around me like black water. Darkness was subsuming me; darkness was me. I focused instead on the distant light, high and far above me, the glittering promise I had glimpsed when Barton set me to my new task.
“I’m going to go get this thing for these people,” I told Bridge. “And then I’m going to bring it to you. And in exchange, you’re going to give me what I want.”
“Which is?”
“Which is freedom. I bring it back, and you pull out my pin. You unclip me, and I go to Canada, and I never hear from you again.”
I caught up to Martha coming out of her room, halfway down the first-floor hallway, a duffel bag strung over her arm. I was holding a bag, too, the thin plastic bag they give you for dirty laundry.
“Martha,” I said, and she turned around, and I didn’t have my glasses on and my clothes were a rumpled mess. There was blood on my sleeve, blood down the length of my arm.
“Jim?” she said, but even as she said it she knew that Jim was gone-I had left Jim behind; he had melted into mud in the bed of the White River.
“My name’s not Jim,” I said. “It’s Victor.”
“What?”
“And it’s not even Victor.”
“What-what’s in the bag?”
We went into her room, where we could be alone. The same as my room, but with two double beds instead of one king. One of the beds, Martha’s bed, was spotless, made, and Lionel’s was a mess of kid stuff-comic books, small garbagey plastic toys, spacemen and soldier-men and superheroes. Lionel was waiting in the lobby, she said, while she packed up the car. Except I told her that she couldn’t go.
“No. What? We’re-I checked out. We’re leaving.”
I took her hands-I squeezed them.
“Listen,” I said, and goddamn it if I wasn’t crying-crying for Kevin, crying for me, for Castle. “I need help,” I said. “I need a lot of help.”
I had never been on the blood sump because the blood sump was not a station. In your first two years inside they moved you every three months, and in two years I had worked the lairage, the chiller, hooves and horns, the downpuller, every stop along the rail. But the blood sump was not a regular station because it did not need to be tended regularly.
It tended to itself. Excess blood from the kill floor guttered through the drain and filled up the sump outside, and two times a year a truck came with a pipe and sucked it out.
But it was raining. The Chinese were on-site, that was the first thing, and the second thing was the rain, and then there was fat Reedy getting sick like he did.
Opportunity came like that: one, two, three. Castle had been telling me it would come, and it came like that, like horseshoes ringing on the pole, one, two, three. Did Castle know that opportunity would come, or did opportunity come because Castle said it? Anyway, it came.
I had heard about the Chinese before but never seen them. On this day in the morning we got woke before even the rooster, and the Old Men had all been woken before that, and they were all clapping and shouting: Tianjin Jiachu! Tianjin Jiachu! That was the name of the company, our biggest customer, but to me then those words were just like magic words, and all the Old Men and the guards were fussy or furious, barking orders, and all the working whites were walking double-time, talking loud. Get down to work. Eyes on the ball. Do it for each other. For Mr. Bell.
I was cutting out intestines on that day, pulling out the thick ropes of stomach and winding them into careful piles, and I was at it but fifteen minutes when they swept in, a crowd of curious Chinese, appearing on the floor all together and then scattering into every corner: bowing, peering into stations. I kept on working. Everybody did. The men and women from Tianjin Jiachu had knee pads on, and they crawled under the machines and murmured. They had clipboards tucked neatly under their arms. The Franklins made way for them, and so did the working whites.