Chapter20

 

Sara pulled the car into a narrow ally in the Iron Bound section of Newark, a part of town that looked a lot like portions of south Brooklyn, populated with Portuguese and Italians, who clung to their old neighborhood through the best and worst of time, until finally, their world became a Mecca for the urban revival of young professionals and students from the university who suddenly discovered it as a viable place to live.

Yet in daylight – despite the attempt to gentrify it into a playground for the want-to-be-rich – the neighborhood still clung to its working class roots, men and women struggling to make their living, these blocks still living with the fresh fish and fruit stands, markets for clothing or shoes, offices offering legal help or travel arrangements to places no young professional would want to go, and among these, a host of small upscale taverns and eateries.

“We leave the car and don’t come back to it,” Ponci told Sara, glancing around as if he expected a sudden onslaught and was surprised when it did not come.

“We always over estimate our enemies,” he thought, wondering if the drones had run into a traffic jam in the sky or cloud cover had kept the satellites from keeping track of the car’s movements through the streets.

He had directed Sara to turn down every street possible, creating a maze-weave through the north part of the city in order to steer southeast again. He would have abandoned the vehicle sooner, but didn’t trust finding another before they – whoever it is – found them. It was better to keep moving in a vehicle that they knew about then to abandon it too soon and be caught in a part of the city he and she could not escape easily.

Sara led him through several streets until they came upon Ferry Street, the heart of both old and new, lined with shops of numerous sorts, though only those serving the older population seemed open at that hour. Ponci hobbled behind Sara as she headed to one of the small, older style restaurants that had signs in Portuguese, Spanish and English advertising breakfast specials. The Fed Ex box seemed heavier than it had been at first, and he struggled to keep a grip on it.

He felt weak, and warm with the return of a fever. But the scent or cooking that flowed out from some of the eateries also stirred up another need. He could not remember the last time he had eaten – maybe at Sara’ place on the south side, maybe not even then. But was famished now, and focused his attention on getting there and fed so he might be able to think clearly again.

Everything seemed a haze, even in daylight.

The place Sara picked had large arched stained glass doors, each glistening with the sunlight, each depicting some scene of the sea, and what appeared to be Portuguese sailors atop great galleys on turbulent seas.

The interior was dim, illuminated by a series of flickering electric candle lamps posted at intervals along the walls. The brightest space was behind the long stainless steel bar at which several very tough looking men sat sipping eye-openers before their trip to their jobs at the waterfront a mile or so south of Newark. Two equally tough men served drinks and food. Metal buckets stood on the bar near them filled with freshly cooked mussels, and near these were plates filled with empty shells.

Neither of the bartenders took notice of Ponci or Sara as they made their way to the far wall and the even dimmer lighted booths along it, even though the center of the room had a number of vacant round tables.

Ponci stumbled into one side of the booth, huffing hard, and letting out a pained single breath when he finally managed to sit. The pain was increasing, and so was the haze.

Sara slid in the booth across from him. She looked scared, and kept glancing nervously towards the door and at the bar.

Ponci looked nowhere or at best down at the box that he had placed on the table in front of them. He could barely keep his eye open, but was determined to see what was in the box, what he had killed and had nearly been killed to get, and what would keep them both alive in future if he could trade it.

But he could not get the tape off that sealed the box closed.

“Let me,” Sara said.

She picked up a butter knife from the table and sawed through the plastic tape with its serrated edge. Finally, she slid out the computer and the small envelop containing the handful of flash drives.

Both sat on the table like icons to some strange faith. Neither Ponci nor Sara touched them at first.

Then Ponci finally reached out and opened the laptop.

“My brother said not to turn it on,” Sara said. “He said they can track it if we do.”

“They’ll track us anyway eventually,” Ponci said. “But we’ll eat first, then look, then get the hell out of here.”

“Why do you need to look?”

“I have to have some idea of what we’re trading to save our lives,” Ponci said. “It must be damned important for everybody to be doing what they’re doing to get it.”

“Important enough to get my brother killed,” Sara said, sourly.

Ponci closed the lap top and then set it on the seat beside him. The waiter came. Ponci ordered soup and some fried fish. Sara ordered coffee and a roll. When the waiter left, Ponci took one of the napkins and pressed it against his side. Splotches of red showed on it.

“You’re bleeding again,” Sara said with a gasp.

“Yes, but not as bad as before.”

“We have to take care of it.”

“Later, after the meeting,” Ponci said. “By then, we’ll know whether or not it’s worth the effort.”

“You mean the man might kill us?”

“That is a possibility,” Ponci said. “or the others might.”

“Who are they?”

“There’s more than one, I think,” Ponci said. “But the ones at the liquor store were government.”

“Our government?”

“Yeah, trying to get this stuff back,” Ponci said. “They went for the package right away.”

“But if they were our government, why not bring in the police?”

“Because police would mean public records, reports, and questions. Whatever is in this computer and on these thumb drives, the government doesn’t want exposed – even to the police.”

“But why would the government want to kill my brother?”

“To stop him,” Ponci said, “although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the government that hired me, but some third party with their own interest in this, perhaps someone who originally arranged for your brother to collect it, and then he changed is mind.”

“But my brother was a patriot,” Sara said. “He would never betray the government unless he found something terrible.”

“You suggested as much earlier,” Ponci said. “I suspect this stuff is a record of a lot of terrible things the government doesn’t want, but other people want for their own purposes. I think your brother might have discovered himself working for people who wanted to use the information for bad purposes and decided not to give it to them either.”

“But what did he intend to do with it?” Sara asked. “He wouldn’t bring it back to where he got it.”

“Too dangerous if he tried,” Ponci said. “But I suspect he may have wanted to get it to the press.”

“Then that’s what we should do with it.”

“If we do, we’ll be as dead as your brother,” Ponci said. “We have to trade it for our lives if we can.”

“But if my brother didn’t want them to have it…”

“Your brother is dead. Let’s deal with reality,” Ponci said.

The waiter returned, bearing food and a drink Ponci had requested, something with which he could numb the pain, and quiet the voices in his head. The drink did just that. The food felt good in his stomach, and when he sat back, a little of the haze had lifted.

“I changed my mind about one thing,” he said.

“What’s that?” Sara asked.

“We’re not going to open the computer here. It doesn’t matter what is on it, only that they want it. We probably wouldn’t understand any of it any.”

“If we could copy it, my friends might be able to figure it out,” Sara said.

“W don’t have time, and as you said, turning the thing on will likely bring down the wrath of God on us. As it is, we’re going to have to run like hell the minute we dump this into that guy’s lap.”

“Why? Wouldn’t it be over by then? Wouldn’t the others go after him?”

“Sure, they’ll go after him. But if you thought about making copies, don’t you think the government might suspect you have as well?”

“Then they’ll keep hunting us?”

Ponci sighed. He’d never felt so weary or so old.

“Nothing’s a sure thing,” he said finally. “It’s a gamble at best that our guy will let us live after he gets what he wants. I wouldn’t. As for the government people, they want to stop a leak, and so they will kill us if they can find us. But I’m gambling that they might get distracted and give us time to run. We might just end up dead anyway.”

Sara stared down at the table.

“And if we do get away with it?” she finally asked. “What then?”

“We go our separate ways.”

Sara looked up, her eyes filled with rage again.

“You kill my brother and I’m supposed to let it go?”

“It’s business,” Ponci said. “Nothing personal.”

“It’s personal to me.”

“Then you’re going to have to get over it. Just like I will.”

“What’s for you to get over? You kill people all the time.”

“The killing is not the problem – except for the voices. You are.”

“Me?”

“The minute I first laid eyes on you, I got all rubbery inside, and for a man in my profession, rubbery is not a good way to feel.”

“Rubbery?”

“Guilty, all right. I look at you and I feel guilty about killing your brother.”

“And you’ve never felt guilty about killing anybody before?”

“Of course not. I couldn’t have kept it all up if I did. Well, that’s not true. There was one other.”

“Who was that?”

“It’s not important.”

“I want to know.”

Ponci started to speak, then stopped. Inside his head, he heard the echo of a distant voice, one so familiar to him it sounded almost like his own thoughts, or like his best friend, when it was neither. It was not an old or young voice, but one he knew so well, he could have imitated it at any time, and imitated what it would say before it said it, a voice stirring to life again as if called to the front of the line to speak after having me shoved back with the multitude of victims that came after him.

“Well?” Sara asked. “What is this other person you felt guilty about killing?”

“It was a cop, a long time ago,” Ponci said.

“You feel guilty about killing a police officer? After all you’ve done?”

“I know it seems strange – even to me. But I do, and it’s not because he was a cop. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it was the circumstances.”

“What do you mean?”

“I shot him in the back of the head at the top of the World Trade Center just before the first plane hit.”

“Huh?”

“I know he would have probably died anyway. He was above the fire line with no way out.”

“Why there?”

“He was a witness in a federal corruption case. The feds were looking into a particular U.S. senator. They kept a lot of records there and they often interviewed witnesses downstairs in the same building. I got told he was going to the restaurant at the top for breakfast. So I got there first, shot him where he sat and left. Security cameras probably caught the whole. It was sloppy. But I didn’t have time to find the security office and wipe the tapes. It cringed about it the whole time I went down to the street. By the time I got to the bottom in the flood of frightened workers, none of that mattered. Not with all the smoke coming out from the top.”

“Did you know what had happened?”

“No, not then. I’d heard something hit and felt the building shake while I was still inside. But I didn’t think much about it. I remember hearing people screaming, but I just kept moving. It was all routine. You stick to routines and you don’t get hurt.”

“You mean like you got hurt when my brother shot you.”

“That was a fluke. Who knew he had a gun?”

“Did you get hurt at the World Trade Center?”

“Not in the same way. It messed with my head. I stopped in the street like everybody else did. I started up at the smoke, shocked like others were, and even cried out when the other plane struck the other tower, when the flames came out the side.”

“You mean you stayed there?”

“I couldn’t help myself. I kept thinking about all those voices and wondered if they would end up inside of me.”

“You blamed yourself for killing them?”

“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“Not as crazy as you would think,” Sara said, staring off into a dark corner of the restaurant, and things that stirred in memory. “You were younger then.”

“Not that young,” Ponci mumbled. “I should have known better.”

“When did you leave the area?”

“When we saw the towers start to fall,” he said. “I ran when everybody else ran. I got covered in dust like other people did. I eventually took the long trek uptown like a regular refugee eventually finding my way back to Jersey via the ferry. After that, I don’t remember much, except that a few days later, I rented a car and fled to Florida, hoping bright sun and warm weather might wash the cold I felt in my bones.”

“But you thought about that police officer after that?”

“All the time. I couldn’t get his death out of my head, or the collapse of the towers. One was always connected with the other. I kept looking for his name on the lists – of victims or even the missing but I never found it. A few weeks later, someone found his body at the edge of the rubble. But because he’d been shot, they didn’t connect it with the attack at all. I guess they just thought the building fell on him after he was dead. His partner became obsessed with finding the man who did it. But he didn’t have much to go on. He came up with some blurry surveillance image of me from some remote camera. But he couldn’t connect the pieces. I heard he fell apart after a while.”

“You say you hear the voices in your head of all the people you’ve killed?”

“Sometimes more than that,” Ponci said. “Sometimes I can see their faces, and feel what they feel. They make my life hell, making me relive their last moments. Eventually, they get quiet, but they never go away.”

“And you said you hear my brother?”

“Yes.”

“You said he talks to you.”

“Not exactly and not all the time,” Ponci said, taking a sip of the whiskey, but this time to ease a different kind of pain. “They all talk a lot after I first kill them, then they sort of go to sleep, waking up when I do or see something connected to them.”

“And my brother?”

“He’s mostly awake.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re with me.”

“Does he talk?”

“Yes.”

“What is he saying?”

“He’s begging me not to kill you, too.”

For a long moment, Sara said nothing.

The sounds of the room washed over the two of them as they ate. Finally, finishing her role, she looked straight at Ponci.

“Do you intend to kill me?”

Ponci stared down at what remained of his food, but he had eaten all he was going to eat and merely moved some of the pieces of meat around on the plate with his fork.

“If I intended to kill you, you’d already be dead,” he said in a very low voice.

“What do you intend to do with me?”

“Finish this thing,” he said, “and then do what I said, we go our separate ways.”

Again, Sara stayed silent for a time.

“I want justice,” she said. “But I don’t want to see any more people die because of it.”

“This thing isn’t over yet,” Ponci said. “We might have to fight for our lives if they decide getting this stuff isn’t enough. It’s what I would do if I was them.”

Ponci glanced over at the bar clock.

“It’s time to go,” he said.