I traced the row from left to right; I moved my finger slowly across it, like a man reading a Bible verse, memorized the numbers and the facts the numbers represented, and then I dragged my finger back over and did it again. The shipment bore internal identifier number 49-09-5442. The hauling vehicle was a forty-five-foot semitrailer pulled by a midroof tractor unit, VIN number 6ZRFL1622CJ287765. Behind the wheel was driver number HR59.
The truck was bound for Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport laden with “4,200 raw bolts for export” along with “six tons misc. supply/waste” and twenty-six pallets of cotton T-shirts: forty boxes to the pallet, seventy-five shirts to a box.
That made 78,000 T-shirts, plus—I was now sure, I was pretty goddamn sure—one brave, scared, sick, and desperate man. One human being tacked in there, among all the numbers. La liberté est une question de logistique.
I looked at the sidewalk again, the old man shifting around, people walking past, in and out of the parking lot. Wherever I looked in this city, all I saw was parking lots. That’s what it felt like, anyway. Bleached sidewalks and a grim, sunless horizon. Something about this job was washing out the world. Taking the weather out of the sky.
Jackdaw left GGSI at 8:49 on a tractor-trailer bound for Hartsfield airport. Pine Woods to Hartsfield. South to south.
Georgia abolished slavery by statute in the year 1944, same as Kentucky. It was President Truman’s great victory, achieved by dangling the prize of wartime contracts, a huge economic incentive for states to go free. But the Georgia legislature, in its wisdom, and under pressure from Alabama and the newly united state of Carolina, had kept its airport quasi-southern—half slave and half free. The same with the Red Highway—US Highway 20—like an open wound, east to west across the state, keeping its neighbors connected to its airport and to the international market for cotton and cattle and corn.
According to the very last column on the chart, all those cotton T-shirts were bound, ultimately, for Shanghai Pudong International Airport.
But Jackdaw hadn’t been flown to China, had he? He was here. He was known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis. Right?
When the girl brought my hamburger, I murmured “Thank you” and ate it slowly, purposefully, enjoying each bite as I had trained myself to enjoy such things. I chewed and swallowed and cleaned my chin with my napkin, not thinking about the smells and sights of my childhood, imagining Jackdaw as a blue dot moving east and not as a man, folded up inside a forty-five-foot trailer, dying from having to piss, his delicate face wilting and sweat-soaked, his eyes big in the darkness of whatever box or pallet he was crated up in. What was he thinking about? Did he know how he was going to get from there to here? Had Barton’s proxies briefed him on the plan, or had he simply cast his lot with strangers? Was he just waiting to find out what would happen to him, as I was waiting to find out now?
When I was done with the burger I pushed away my plate. I kept on staring at the printout from Whole Wide World, but all that was left to be discovered was on the back, where Angie had drawn a smiley face and her phone number in pink highlighter.
In the car I turned on my laptop and saw right away that Mr. Maris was no longer driving around. The dot, which had been making Pac-Man patterns around the map of the city, had now settled on 30th Street, a mile and a half past Keystone. Maybe Maris had realized he was still carrying around old Jim’s butterfly knife and tossed the thing out the window—or maybe he was there now with Jackdaw the slave, and all my searching and cross-checking were moot, and all I had to do was go and scoop him up.
15.
When I got there, though, there was no sign of Mr. Maris.
I got out of the Altima at the address the map had given me, in yet another gray parking lot on East 30th Street. This lot was little more than a widening of the road shoulder—an oval of rough gravel with parking spaces haphazardly painted on.
The businesses arranged around the lot, all apparently part of the same fiefdom, were of a ramshackle, third-world quality. There was Slim’s Market, an unpainted small building, wide and low as a log cabin, the front door propped open with a phone book, a few rows of fruit and vegetable bins haphazardly arrayed outside on staggered wooden platforms. Opposite the market was Slim’s Garage, an auto-body shop with its doorway nearly obscured by a half dozen teetering columns of tires. And then there was a rickety unsanded picnic table, and behind the picnic table a flimsy copper archway, hammered into the dirt like a croquet wicket at the head of a rough path winding down into the woods. Following this path, said the sign, would take you to Slim’s Trailer Court.
No Maris, no sign of Maris. No sign of anyone. Mine was the only car in the lot. I opened the shotgun door and checked my laptop again. Lo and behold, the dot had disappeared, and no new location was being shown. Mr. Maris had dropped clean off the map.
“Goddamn it,” I said out loud. I looked around. “Fuck.”