At the tail end of our dinner together, while we were tussling over the bill, I lifted Father Barton’s wallet. This small and seamless maneuver caused me no difficulty or concern: I had performed the same quick action dozens of times in the past. There he was, poor man, embarrassed by my grief, flustered by my adamance, anxious to escape an emotionally charged moment. It would be a lot to ask, in such complicated circumstances, to keep track of something so prosaic, so secular, as a wallet. In the bathroom I photographed its contents, utilizing a tiny device that attaches to my cell phone, then I slipped the wallet back into his pocket when I embraced him good-bye.
And now, back in the Capital City Crossroads Hotel on 86th Street, with the door locked, with the shades pulled, I opened my laptop and began entering data into the remarkable mapping program I had on there. I entered the home address from Father Barton’s driver’s license. I entered the addresses of three restaurants and five gas stations he had recently patronized and from which he had helpfully held on to the credit-card receipts. I entered the address of his gym, his local branch library, and the Sport Clips where he got his hair cut. I entered, too, the Meridian Street address of the restaurant where we had just eaten at his suggestion and that of the parish church of Saint Catherine’s, where I had accosted poor old LuEllen a few hours earlier.
I had never been to Indianapolis before, but I had been to lots of other cities, and every city is the same. Neighborhoods and waterways, big roads and side roads. A circle of downtown in the middle, a circle of highway around the perimeter, like a dog fence. Rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. Black areas, white areas, mixed. CVS and Starbucks, Walmart and Townes Stores. The world is the same everywhere you go.
In the North, I should say. The world is about the same in every northern city. I’m a lot less familiar with the South these days.
What the mapping software did was turn each of the addresses into a blinking red dot. When I was done with the data entry and could take a look at the map, one of the dots sang out to me right away. It called my name. Most of the other dots were clustered together, centered around the priest’s church up there on Meridian and just north of it, along the crowded shopping corridor of 86th Street, a mile or two west of where I was sitting. But this one dot was way, way down, in a different part of town. It sat at the intersection of 38th and Graceland, in a neighborhood the map called Mapleton–Fall Creek.
“All right,” I said out loud. “Well, all right.” I laid a fingertip on that dot, as if to feel it, to measure its strength.
My name is not Jim Dirkson.
Neither is my name Dudley Vincent, the identity under which I’d been staying at the Hilton Garden Inn near the Cleveland, Ohio, airport until last night, when Mr. Bridge called me and woke me and told me to start packing. Mr. Vincent’s driver’s license and American Express card had since been cut to pieces, and those pieces were now buried in a construction-site Dumpster behind a Cleveland shopping mall.
I had a lot of names. Or, more precisely, it was my practice at the beginning of a new job to think of myself as having no name at all. As being not really a person at all. A man was missing, that’s all—missing and hiding, and I was not a person but a manifestation of will. I was a mechanism—a device. That’s all I was.
I looked at the dot on 38th Street. The dot blinked, and I blinked back at the dot. That address had come from a cash machine receipt dated three days ago—Sunday, at 4:32 p.m. Two hundred dollars from a Regions bank ATM. I tapped a few more keys, and the laptop whirred to life, accenting my map with the requested demographic information, shading every square block of the city according to its African American population.
When this was done I sat back and laid my hands flat on the desk, on either side of the computer keyboard. The main cluster of dots, representing Father Barton’s usual stomping ground—those dots were in pale areas: blocks with an African American population of 10 percent or less, 5 percent or less. That one dot, though, the one blinking lonesome dot down in Mapleton–Fall Creek: that one was singing a different song. It wasn’t in the darkest part of the map—that was a six-square-block area just northwest of downtown. That would be Freedman Town, I figured. But the area where Father Barton had taken out two hundred bucks on Sunday afternoon—there was some pigmentation down there, no question about it.
I whistled very softly, still sitting motionless, hands still flat on the table.
“All right,” I whispered. “All right, all right, all right.”
4.