Underground Airlines (26 page)

“All right,” I said. “So what am I looking for?”

“It’s a package. Small. An envelope, padded and sealed. Kevin’s instructions when he had it were to mark it on the back with his initials, so we would know it for sure. We do not know if he did that or not. But on the front it will bear the insignia of Garments of the Greater South. Do you know that insignia?”

I nodded. I knew it. I knew it from where it had been emblazoned on the collarbone of Jackdaw the slave, Kevin the sophomore. I knew it from the full file.

“So it’s a sealed envelope from GGSI. Thick envelope. Marked on the back.” Barton nodded. “But what’s inside?”

“Evidence. Powerful evidence that will bring down the very foundations of slavery.”

I almost laughed: the willful obscurantism, the curtain of mystery. “So I go down into the Four, I chase down this thing, I don’t even know what it is?”

“You will do,” said Maris from his new remove on the far side of the room, “as we have told you to do.” And for once, he and Cook were in agreement.

“Or,” said the cop, “we’ll kill ya.”

But Barton looked at me thoughtfully as he rose. “No, we’ll tell him. We will tell you. Mr. Maris and Mr. Cook, you will tell our friend how to make contact with the lawyer. And you will explain to him what it is he is recovering.” He laid his hand on my head and let it rest there a moment. “Let him understand why it matters so much that he succeed. Not just for his life but for the lives of us all.”

Barton bowed his blond head toward me. “This is a hard situation we are putting you in. But you
must
see it”—he emphasized the same word he had used with Kevin, that soft and powerful word,
must,
soft and hard at once, like a hammer wrapped in velvet—“you
must
see this as your opportunity to undo the evils that you have done. To put a mark in the other column. Here you can be a soldier—you can be good, my son. You can do good.”

24.

It was
another hour that I sat there with the Underground Airlines, in the cold company of Mr. Maris and Willie Cook.

I was told everything I would need to know. Told me about the lawyer, where and how to find him, everything I needed to get started chasing down what Kevin had left behind.

They told me all about it, too, the shocking evidence, what was going to shake the very foundations. And I had to work hard, pretending to be impressed with it all. With the enormity of the crime, with the scandal that was to be exposed.

It was Cook who broke it down; Maris was still angry, seething at me from the back corner of the room like lurking death. Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, was in violation—long-term, systematic violation—of the Clean Hands laws.

Beginning as early as 1994, GGSI had set up a cluster of shell companies in Kuala Lumpur through which they were annually channeling millions of dollars’ worth of cotton goods. Their Alabama plantation exported finished textiles to the Malaysian companies; the companies changed the labels and resold them to a stateside retailer. Even after the shells took their cut, even after the costs of shipping, even after the costs of bribery and permit forging and logistical workarounds, this operation was massively profitable for both sides.

But the kicker—the part that required me to be most impressed—was the identity of the criminal partner on the American side. This ain’t no small potatoes we’re talking about, was how Cook put it. No mom-and-pop operation. GGSI’s partner was none other than Townes Stores, the single largest retailer in the United States: shops in thirty-six states, selling everything from refrigerators to perfume, from small electronics to coloring books. And clothes, of course—aisles and aisles of cheap cotton clothes.

“You believe that, man?” said Cook, but of course I could. He was a city policeman who was secretly moonlighting for the Airlines; I was a retail site analyst and secretly an enforcer of the FPA. I believe anything. Everything happens.

It was Massachusetts that passed the first Clean Hands law, back in the day. Good old radical Mass., where crazy John Brown had passed the hat for his crusades, where Nell and Morris’s League of Freedom was born in the 1850s and reborn in the 1910s. The hunting ground of the Boston Vigilance Committee, hunting for slave catchers till the slave catchers left town.

In 1927 the commonwealth’s legislature declared that the possession, sale, or consumption of slave-made goods within its borders would thenceforth be a criminal act.

Southern interests—in their genteel and eloquent southern manner—said no fucking way. Why, this was an illegal regulation of trade! Why, this was protectionism! American citizens were being robbed of their God-given and constitutionally protected right to spend their money however they liked! This clash of virtues landed in the Supreme Court in the form of
Amalgamated Products v. Hendricks
. The attorney general of Massachusetts argued that it was within the police powers of the individual states to safeguard the moral fitness of their respective citizens. Wearing clothing that had been plantation-picked and plantation-sewn did grave harm to the people of the commonwealth. And the Supreme Court, surprise surprise, endorsed this point of view.

Other northern states hurried to pass Clean Hands laws of their own, and Roosevelt’s Democratic majority sealed the deal with the federal version in 1934. If your company wanted to do business in
any
Clean Hands state, you were required to follow those rules everywhere you operated. Since then, Clean Hands has been an article of faith. All right, says the Righteous North: so we must live with the grievous reality of slavery, we must live with official state racism within our borders. So we are bound up economically and politically with the evil behind the Fence, tied to it and even enriched by it: southern tax dollars go to the national treasury, and southern profits go to Wall Street. And of course Clean Hands only goes one way—there are no laws preventing
southern
consumers from enjoying the fruits of
northern
manufacturing.

But at least there is this great conscience-soothing balm: when you go to the store in Milwaukee or Peoria, you are not coming home with blood on your hands.

It was exactly that consolation, that comfort, that Father Barton was intending to tear away.

He had sent in Kevin, and Kevin had come out with evidence of the collusion between GGSI and Townes Stores: a hard drive bristling with incriminating information, six months’ worth of internal data—shipment tracking records, transaction records, the numbers of bank accounts in four different countries. All documenting a commercial connection between a massive retailer and a slave-state factory that would (Barton thought…Barton hoped…Barton dreamed…and Barton had persuaded Kevin to dream, too) scandalize northern sensibilities. It would demonstrate the fecklessness of the federal regulatory scheme. It would prove the whole edifice of compromise to be rotten to its very foundation. It would show northerners who liked to believe, who
needed
to believe, that they were not personally touched by the cruel hand of slavery that they were in fact touched by it every day. Were wearing it on their feet, were lining up for it the day after Thanksgiving.

He would splash his evidence on the front page of every northern newspaper, deliver it himself to prosecutors in the Southern District of Illinois, which had jurisdiction over Townes’s headquarters, and the world would change.

This was the idea that had so gripped Kevin when first he heard it, the plan he had agreed to with a rapidity that was like a fever. It was this possibility that had persuaded him to take the hideous risk, allow himself to be costumed and tattooed and sold.

Barton thought the world would change, and his lieutenants thought so, and Kevin had thought so, too.

I didn’t believe it for a second. I could see the future. I knew what would happen, and what would happen was nothing.

They’d been talking about freedom in Old Abe’s time, but then they shot Old Abe, and what changed? Nothing changed.

A hundred years later Dr. King was dreaming his dream, telling America it was time to finish its unfinished business. Northerners, black and white, went south for Freedom Summer, crisscrossing the remaining slave states, bearing witness. A huge crowd of abolitionists gathered in newly free Georgia and marched all the way to Selma, Alabama. A brave slave woman in Montgomery refused to eat until conditions were improved, sparking hunger strikes all over the South. The president got on board: the Voting Rights Act, the New Agenda, “abolition in our time.”

And then what? Then the BLP officially condoned the force-feeding of Persons Bound to Labor. Then LBJ got distracted from the New Agenda, drawn deeper and deeper into the swamp of the Texas War. The movement cut itself up, violence versus nonviolence, “rights for us” versus “freedom for them.” The Panthers were declared a terrorist organization. Dr. King, celebrating his great victory—legislated abolition in Tennessee—was shot outside his hotel room.

Nothing changed, not really. The Eighteenth Amendment remained the Eighteenth Amendment. America stayed America.

So what was he thinking now, this zealous priest, this radical child, wild with self-delusion? All of them, Maris glowering and righteous, Cook talking about the new era that they were about to bust loose. I knew better. I knew what would happen. Of course it would be shocking if all those Iowans and Idahoans found out that the cheap T-shirts they’ve been buying have blood on them. It would grab some headlines. The chairman of Townes would give a press conference, shake his head and purse his lips and say, “I accept full responsibility.” GGSI would be shuttered—maybe, maybe not, or maybe just temporarily—while an inspection could be undertaken. Townes Stores would pay a big fine, and they’d have a bad quarter.

In time, people would go back to Townes, because their shit is pretty cheap, wherever it’s coming from. It’s pretty cheap, and it’s pretty good. Nothing would change. People shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders, slaves suffering somewhere far away, the earth turning around the sun.

And that, honey, is how I justified what I did next. That’s how I thought it through to myself as I drove back to the Capital City Crossroads, even then, even with Kevin’s broken, bleeding body lying fresh in my memory like a chastisement.

I believed—I truly believed; I allowed myself to believe—that if I found that envelope filled with stolen data and turned it over to Father Barton, that not a goddamn thing would change. The three million would not be set free.

But there was a way that envelope could get
one
person free, and that one person was me.

I went out onto my hotel-room balcony and lit a cigarette. And then I called Mr. Bridge.

25.

“I don’t
know what you thought you were doing, son. I don’t know what you thought you were up to.”

Mr. Bridge spoke slowly but firmly, projecting control. I listened to him, standing out on my balcony, smoking my cigarette, waiting for him to get it out of his system. I thought about other things. I saw the streetlamps blink on. I gazed at the faded twilight ghost of the sun.

“By placing that call to my office, and by playing false with a federal law enforcement official, you have committed a serious violation of the law. Not to mention a serious violation of our agreement.”

Mr. Bridge, scolding a wayward child. Mr. Bridge, enumerating my sins.
Federal law enforcement official
took me a second. Janice—he meant Janice.

“Impersonation of an agent. Illegal possession of classified information.”

This bill of indictment I didn’t even bother to answer. I didn’t even take the time to say, “Fuck you.” Sunday sunset had brought something like a peaceful calm to the gray city, a wan beauty. I was exhausted. The pain in my shoulder was a buried throb. I still had dirt on my boots, on the palms of my hands, on my knees—the mud stains of the underground.

Poor Bridge was assuming that I was a couple of steps behind him, trying to keep up. But I was way out ahead. I was so far out ahead that he could barely see me.

“Quiet, man,” I said finally. “Hush up a minute.”

“What?”

“I said hush. Listen. Okay? Because you’re a dead man.”

“Are you—” A silence I hadn’t heard before: genuine shock. “Was that a threat?”

“Nope. It was a statement of fact. True fact. I’m not telling you nothing you don’t already know. You’re fucked, but I’m gonna help you. We’re gonna help each other out. Okay?”

“I…”

Mr. Bridge let the word dissolve into silence. A silence that was easy to read. Slow and thick, gummy with fear.

“Here’s what’s next,” I told him, and he didn’t even bother with another stammering interruption: he just listened. I told him to hang up, leave his office, and call me back from the pay phone just inside the baggage claim area, door 7, at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The pay phones, I told him, were across from the bank of courtesy phones that got you a rental car or a motel room.

“Write this down,” I told him, and I gave him the number of a new phone, a disposable phone I had purchased for this purpose, at a place on 38th Street, on my way from Saint Anselm’s. “Forty-five minutes.”