Children of the Underground (22 page)

I walked in a circle around the mark, keeping the tip of my knife pointed toward his face. His eyes didn't show fear. Instead they showed cunning. He was trying to plan his next move. He didn't want to hurt me, but he would if he had to. I took one small step after another toward the purse on the ground. His eyes flashed toward the purse for a split second, deciphering my plan in an instant. He moved quickly, lunging forward. I took a stab at him again, plunging the knife about a quarter inch into his chest and pulling it out again. I fell back for a second and I reached down and grabbed the purse. The mark looked down at the wound in his chest. Then he looked up at me again. I could see that all the hesitation that he'd had about hurting me was gone. I was his enemy now. I'd read about what he did to his enemies.

Michael had to be right outside the door by now. I ran for it, knowing that I didn't have time to reach into the purse and pull out the gun. The mark was right behind me. He took two steps after me and then stopped. When I reached the door, it was already open. Michael had opened it. He was standing there, his knife drawn.

“What the fuck is this?” the mark said out loud to me, as if I'd betrayed some sort of trust. Then to Michael: “You can't use her to trap me. You can't use an innocent as bait. That's against the rules.”

Michael looked at the mark. The mark was already bleeding in two places. He looked down at me standing almost next to him. Michael's eyes moved to the cheek where the mark had struck me. Michael must have seen something there, a bruise or a reddened handprint. “I'm not a big fan of the rules,” Michael said. His voice was quiet but loud enough for the mark to hear him. Michael wasn't being witty. He was stating a fact. The rules had killed his best friend. The rules had kept him from living a new life. Michael wasn't a fan of the rules.

“You can leave, Maria,” Michael said as he stared at the mark. “Get the door on your way out.”

I stepped outside the door and closed it behind me. I leaned my back against it and rifled through the purse for the key. My hands were shaking. I heard some commotion coming from inside the room, desks screeching along the floor. I heard a loud banging sound. I turned for a second and looked through the small rectangular window in the door. I saw the mark. He was coming toward me. Michael was behind him, but the mark was faster. I didn't have time to keep looking for the key. Instead, I turned. I leaned my back against the door with all my strength and will. I reached down and grabbed the doorknob with both hands, trying to keep it from turning. A split second later, I felt the doorknob begin to twist beneath my grip. I felt every muscle in my body, all those muscles that I'd been training over the past months, tighten as I tried to keep the doorknob from turning. It turned anyway. All I could do was slow it down as it slipped beneath my fingers. Then I felt a push against the door. I braced my feet on the ground and pushed into the door with everything I had. The mark was less than two inches behind me, separated from me by two inches of cheap wood. I pushed against the door with all of the strength I had, with more strength than I had ever had before.

The mark was trying to escape certain death, and I was using my new muscles to stop him. I didn't want to think about what would happen if he got out. I didn't hear Michael stab him. I remembered the sound from that night in St. Martin, how I heard the stabbing sound from much farther away, but this time I didn't hear it. I was too tired. The door was too thick. All I heard was the mark's grunt as the blade entered his body. The pressure on the door weakened. The mark was still pushing but not as hard anymore. Finally, I heard a higher-pitched, whimpering sound, like the sound of a dog who'd been disciplined by its master. Then the pressure on the door let up completely. The muscles in my legs gave way and I crumpled to the ground.

Michael was able to push the door open enough to slip through it. When he opened the door, a trickle of blood seeped out into the hallway. “I thought you said you had the key,” Michael said, as I sat there on the ground, spent.

“I couldn't get to it in time,” I answered. He looked down at me and almost laughed.

“No matter,” he said. “The job's done. We need to get out of here.” I couldn't stand up. My strength was gone. Michael leaned down and grabbed me under one of my armpits. He lifted me to my feet, ignoring the pain in his leg. “You did good,” he said as he slung one of my arms over his shoulders to help me walk.

I didn't look back at the door, at the blood or at the body. “What took you so long to get here?” I asked Michael.

He didn't answer me and we limped away together.

Thirty-three

That night, Michael wanted to go out to celebrate. I didn't believe that we had anything to celebrate. “You have to celebrate,” Michael said to me, without much joy in his voice. It made me remember the Michael that your father had described in his journal. If felt like Michael was trying to remember that Michael too.

“This is ridiculous,” I said to Michael as we walked to South Street. “We should be hiding.”

“You sound like Joe,” Michael said.

I refused to be insulted. “Joe was smart.”

Michael stopped walking. He turned to me so that we were facing each other on the sidewalk. “He was,” Michael agreed. “Joe was always more disciplined than me, and look where that got him.” He paused long enough for the silence to confirm that I had no response. “Just a few drinks,” Michael promised. “It's important.” I didn't understand how it could be important, but if it was important to Michael, it was important to me too.

Michael picked the darkest, dingiest bar we could find. He let me pick our seats, so we went to the table farthest from the door in the back. The jukebox was blaring loud enough that neither of us could hear anyone in the bar but each other. Michael went to the bar and ordered our first two drinks. He returned with four glasses in his hands: two pint glasses half-full of Guinness and two shot glasses with a mix of Baileys and Irish whiskey. He put the glasses down on the table, a pint glass and a shot glass in front of me and a set in front of him. He sat down on the graffiti-riddled bench and picked up his pint glass. He lifted the pint glass and held it halfway across the table. “To a job well done,” he said with all the enthusiasm of a man delivering a eulogy. I lifted my pint glass and clinked it against his. I made the only toast that I could think of.

“To not drinking alone,” I said. Michael smiled. He put the pint glass back on the table, picked up the shot glass, dropped it in the pint glass, and chugged. “I still can't believe I'm doing this,” I said before following suit. The taste of the drink hit me right away. The effects of the alcohol didn't take much longer. Michael got up and got us more drinks.

“How does it feel?” he asked me.

“How does what feel?” I asked, assuming he must mean more than the effects of the alcohol.

“Your first job,” he said.

I looked down at the drink in my hand. I swirled the thick liquid around the glass. “It wasn't my job,” I said to Michael without looking up at him. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” I finished, knowing that I was trying to convince myself as much as Michael.

“Whatever gets you through the day.” Michael laughed.

“How do you do it?” I asked Michael, throwing it back at him.

“How do I get through the day?” Michael laughed again, more genuinely this time.

The bar was filling up. The music was still loud enough to cover our voices. Even so, I lowered my voice into a new whisper. “How do you kill people and then move on like nothing ever happened?”

Michael took a sip of his scotch and shrugged. “I'm a child of paranoia,” he said. “It's what we do.”

I shook my head. It wasn't true. “Joe struggled with it,” I said. “Even before he met me, Joe struggled with it.”

“Does that make it better?”

“Yes. It does.”

Michael finished the drink in his hand. “You're right, Maria. Joe struggled with it. Even in the beginning, when revenge is enough for most people, it wasn't enough for Joe. So he bought all that good-and-evil crap they feed us. He had to, or he would have snapped. He had to believe that everything he did was righteous.” My mind flashed back to the kid that your father killed in the field in Ohio. It was the last thing that boy ever said:
I'm not like you. I'm righteous
. Then your father shot him in the head. “But if that's how you get by, you're going to struggle with doubt.” Michael's voice got weak for a moment. “I loved Joe for that. I loved Joe because he wanted to be good.”

“What about the people who don't buy into the good-and-evil stuff?”

“Some people get off on the power. They like to play the game, whether they believe it or not.”

“Jared?” I guessed. Michael didn't respond.

“But what about you? How do you get by?”

Michael shrugged. “I never thought I had a choice. This is the life I was born into. This is what I have to do.”

“That's it?”

Michael's eyes glanced across the faces of the people in the bar. I tensed up, ready to react if he saw something. His eyes landed back on me. “I tell myself that everyone that I kill is playing the same game as me.” Then he added, as if it was an afterthought, “And I hope that there's a good reason for all of it. I hope that I'm the good guy.” I couldn't help but think that he was more like your father than he let on.

“You could have run like Reggie did.”

Michael shook his head. “You know that's not my style.”

“You seemed pretty confident that there were good reasons for the War when we spoke to Clara.”

“No. I never said there was a good reason. Just a reason.”

“What if you find out the reason and it turns out you're the bad guy?”

Michael shrugged again. “Then I was born to be a bad guy.” After a pause, he said, “Tell me something about yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me something that I don't know about what your life was like before this.”

I honestly considered it for about a second. Then I shook my head. “No.”

“I just want a better feel for who you really are.”

All I could think of was that I'd helped kill a man today. “Who I am now and who I was then have nothing to do with each other. If I was going to tell you stories about what I was like when I was a little girl, I might as well tell you stories that I read in a book.” Michael looked at me and waited. I had nothing more to say. Maybe a time will come when I can tell you stories, but I need to get some of the girl I used to be back first.

Michael was right about the drinking. Already the memories of that afternoon were beginning to fade in my head. Soon the only memories that were left were those of the mark's blood trickling through the crack in the door as Michael slipped out, and the relief I felt when the pressure on that door from the mark's pushing subsided. Those memories weren't going to go away, no matter how much I drank.

“And you?” Michael asked after we were silent for some time. I didn't know what he meant. He saw my confusion and clarified. “How do you plan on getting by?”

I wasn't ready for the question. It struck me like a bat to the head. My eyes welled up with tears. I blame some of it on the alcohol. “I do it all for Christopher.” I clenched my jaw, trying to stop the emotion. “I don't care if that makes me the bad guy either.” I picked a napkin up off the table and wiped the tears away from my eyes.

“You were good today,” Michael said, trying to cheer me up.

“I felt weak,” I told him.

“You messed his face up pretty good before I got there. That didn't look weak to me.” Michael leaned in closer to me, putting his elbows on the table. “Listen, there's always going to be someone stronger than you. That's true if you're five-feet-nothing like you or if you're Jared. In your case, you're always going to be physically weaker than most men. Your job isn't to become stronger than them, because you can't. Your job is to become as strong as you can. It's to become stronger tomorrow than you were yesterday. It's to remember that everything you do is practice for the next thing you do. That's it. He hit you hard in the face. I saw the mark. But you got back up. Two months ago, you never would have gotten up off the floor. And you held the door closed when the mark was pushing on it.”

“Barely,” I said, but the pep talk was working. I was feeling stronger.

“Doors are either opened or they're closed, Maria.”

A slow song came on the jukebox. Michael's eyes scanned the bar again. My body didn't tense up this time. I was too tired. “Do you want to dance?” he asked, staring at the empty space in the middle of the bar.

“Here?” I asked. “People will see us.”

Michael shrugged. He didn't care. I imagined what it would be like. Michael would stand up, pulling my hand, pulling me up off the bench and leading me to the empty space in front of the jukebox. He'd put his arms around my waist, and I would reach up around his neck and place my hands on his shoulders. I'd run my hands over the raised skin on his back where the letters had been burned forever. I'd rest my head on his chest and we would simply sway there, our feet hardly moving. Then I would close my eyes and imagine that I was dancing with your father. I wondered who Michael would imagine he was dancing with. It didn't matter. The only people we had to dance with was each other.

The song ended before I could respond. I looked up at Michael and told him that I thought we should go. He agreed. When we got back to the hotel room, Michael climbed into his bed and I climbed into mine. We both slept. If it weren't for the alcohol, I'm not sure if I ever would have gotten to sleep that night. Before we went to sleep, Michael told me that he was going to call in tomorrow to find out what his next job was. He asked if I wanted to listen. I said yes.