“Okay,” he answered.
“Any other conditions?” I asked.
“Yeah, you have to remember that I’m not Joe. I’m never going to be Joe.” I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to remind me that he wasn’t your father. I kept my mouth shut. He isn’t your father, but I do see something in him that I saw in your father. Michael pretends to be a machine, but I can tell that he’s decent.
“Is that all?” I asked.
“For now,” he answered.
He picked up the phone sitting on the desk between us and dialed. As he went through the code to be patched through, I could hear the fear in his voice. In everything we’d already been through together, I had never heard that before. I knew he wasn’t afraid of killing or dying. He was simply afraid that they’d forgotten him or that they were going to tell him that they didn’t need him anymore. When Michael finished going through the code, three seemingly random names, the line went quiet for a long time. I imagined people scrambling on the other end of the line, trying to find anyone who could take this call, anyone who remembered Michael. It took ten minutes before someone picked up. I watched Michael as he waited. He was taking deep breaths, trying to control his anxiety. Then I heard a man’s voice come through the receiver. “Hello, Michael. We’ve been waiting for you.” Michael nodded and his breathing relaxed.
We were on a train to New York only hours later. They wanted him to come in. They have offices in New York. Michael is supposed to go to the office tomorrow. They’d never asked Michael to come in before. Michael had never heard of them asking anyone to come in before. For almost seven years, Michael did everything they asked. He killed over and over again in their name, and they just kept sending him out on jobs. Then he became a deserter, and now they want him to come in. I asked him if he was sure it was safe.
“When are you going to stop asking me questions that I don’t have the answers to?” Michael answered, but the fear in his voice was gone. They’d remembered him.
* * *
At eleven o’clock in the building above Grand Central Station. Michael wanted me to stay at the hotel we’d rented, but I refused. I felt a need to be closer to him than that, like if I were closer to him, I could somehow protect him. There were benches littered throughout Grand Central Station. With everyone around me either coming or going, I figured I could simply sit on one and wait without having anyone notice me. I picked a bench near a coffee shop. I have no idea how long he’ll be inside. Michael still wasn’t nervous this morning. I was. Michael dressed for the meeting, wearing a crisp, pressed shirt with black pants and black shoes.
“I feel like I’m going on a job interview,” Michael joked as he stared at himself in the mirror and straightened the cuffs of his shirt.
“Have you ever gone on a job interview?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “Have you?” I shook my head. We were quite a pair.
“Remember everything,” I told him. “Remember everything they say. Remember how everything looks, how everyone acts. We don’t know what’s going to be useful for us. I want you to tell me everything when you get back.” Somewhere inside that building might be information that leads us to you. Michael nodded.
We went out drinking together last night. Michael made me. How could I refuse him after everything he’s risking for me, everything he’s risking for you? We went to a bar in the East Village where Michael knew I wouldn’t get carded. He drinks like a frat boy. He was downing something he called an Irish Car Bomb—a shot of Irish whiskey mixed with Baileys, dripped into a half a pint of Guinness—all night. He made me drink two with him. It tastes kind of like a milk shake. When I asked him if he thought he was too old for a drink like that, he told me that, “You’re only as old as you feel.” When I told him that I must be a hundred years old then, he simply said, “We have time to make you young again.” He should know that you are the only thing that will do that, though. I have to hope that’s what he meant.
This morning, we took the subway together to Grand Central Station. When we got here, we went our separate ways. We didn’t talk. We didn’t even look at each other after we got off the subway, in case someone was watching us. I came here. Michael headed for the elevators. I felt a twinge in my stomach when I could no longer see him. I hope this isn’t one giant mistake. I hope Michael knows what he’s doing. I hope I didn’t just watch our last hope walk into a nightmare he can’t escape from.
Fifteen
I waited there, across from the coffee shop, for six hours. I was okay for the first three. For the first two hours, I kept myself busy updating this journal. I killed another hour rereading select parts of your father’s journal. There wasn’t much left in it for me. I’d practically memorized it already. After three hours, I started to get nervous. I never thought whatever it was that Michael was doing or whatever they were doing to Michael would take that long. I didn’t know what to do. I knew what floor Michael had gone to. I imagined myself going up and bursting through the doors, demanding to know what they’d done with Michael, but I was either too scared or too smart to do that. So I waited, burning through coffee after coffee. I looked at the face of every person who walked past me, wondering who were the ones going up to those floors where they planned the War and who were the innocent ones with normal jobs and normal families. Sitting there, sipping my coffee and counting down the minutes, I had no way of telling the difference. I was dying for a cigarette. I hadn’t had one since Michael demanded that I quit.
Then at ten after five, I saw Michael walking away from the elevators. I had an urge to jump up and run to him. I controlled it. I watched Michael as he walked toward the subway. He had a thick manila envelope in his hand. He looked exhausted. His gait was slow and unsteady. What had they done to him? I wanted to know everything, but I knew I had to wait. I’d already been waiting ten months for information. I could handle another hour.
I followed Michael, staying close enough not to lose him but far enough to avoid arousing suspicion. I watched him as he got on the subway. Michael stood on the subway, hanging on to a pole and riding most of the way with his eyes closed. They had him for six hours. They must have done something to him. He looked like a shadow of the man who had walked into the building.
Even when we got back to the hotel, I still waited, letting Michael go up to the room first. I tried to give him time to compose himself. Then I walked up, unlocked the door with my key, and stepped inside.
Michael was sitting on one of the beds. The room was in complete disarray. The drawers had been pulled out of each of the cabinets. Our clothes and the rest of the contents of our bags were strewn across the floor. Michael lifted his head and looked at me when I walked through the door. “They were here,” he said as I looked around the room. For a second, I felt like I was going to throw up.
“I can see that.” I bent down and started picking up my clothes and throwing them back in my bag. “So what are we going to do?” I asked, wondering why Michael’s voice had no sense of urgency.
“What do you mean?” he asked, looking up from the bed.
“They know about me!” I shouted. “They were in our room. They know I was here. We’ve got to leave.” I picked up Michael’s duffel bag and threw it toward him.
“They don’t know that it’s you,” Michael said, tossing his duffel bag back onto the floor. “I told them that I met a girl in St. Martin, some gold digger that I was trying impress with an expensive hotel room.”
“And they believed you?”
“Yeah. It’s not really out of character for me.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because they had me locked in an interrogation room while they searched the place. When they came back, they said that everything I’d told them checked out.” We’d gotten lucky. I had the journals and the postcards from Underground with me. If I’d left them in the room, Michael would probably be dead alr
eady.
“What happened?” All I wanted to know was if he learned anything useful, but I didn’t want to be so crass as to come out and ask. Not yet. He looked too weak.
“As soon as I went inside, I was escorted to a large room. I barely saw anything. It was like going into any other office building. There was a reception desk with two receptionists. There were offices and secretaries. They have at least three whole floors of the building, probably more. The room they took me to was like a conference room with a long wooden table, but the chair at the head of the table was welded to the floor and had leather straps on its arms. I spent hours in that room, strapped into that chair.”
“What did they ask you?”
“They asked why I ran away. They asked about my loyalties. They asked if I was still willing to fight. They asked what I thought about Joe’s betrayal.” Michael looked at me when he said those words. I didn’t flinch. I was learning to control my reactions. “They asked me why I came back.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them what they wanted to hear,” Michael said.
“Did you convince them?”
“For now,” Michael said, his eyes too weak to be as certain as I wanted them to be. “I need to rest, Maria. I’m going to get into a bath. We can talk more when I’m done.”
“Okay,” I answered.
Michael began unbuttoning his shirt. He was moving slowly, like his whole body was sore. When his shirt was unbuttoned, he bent one shoulder back and slowly lifted the shirt from it. That’s when I saw the discolored bandages on his back. I couldn’t tell if the discoloration was blood or something else. Michael dropped his other shoulder and pulled his shirt down off his back. The bandages with their dark stains ran across the entire upper part of this back.
“What did they do to you?”
“Take a look for yourself,” he said, turning his back to me.
I walked over to him. I ran my hand over the sinews on his shoulders. Then I grabbed some of the tape holding the bandages on and I pulled it back. His skin was raised from one shoulder blade to the other, and scabs were already beginning to form. It looked like they had tortured him. “What is this?” I asked.
“Branding,” he answered. I pulled away and looked. From a few feet away I could see that the blisters on his back were in the shapes of letters. They had written a message in his skin.
“You mean they burned you?”
“Yeah.” It looked painful.
I blew on the blisters, hoping to cool them down. I could hear Michael sigh as he felt my breath hit the bare skin on his back. Then I leaned back again and read the words that they had burnt into his skin. “Eu Loito Porque Eu Me Lembro,” I read out loud. The words were broken down into three lines. Eu Loito was on the top, Porque in the middle, and Eu Me Lembro on the bottom.
“I fight because I remember,” Michael translated for me.
“What language is that?” I asked.
“Galician,” he answered. “But don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.”
“So, this was your punishment.”
“It wasn’t a punishment,” Michael said. He stood up and walked over to the bathroom. “It was a test.”
“What were they testing?” I asked, struggling to believe that someone could come up with a test so cruel.
“My loyalty,” Michael answered.
“Did you pass?” I asked
“I didn’t flinch when I smelled my skin burning or when I heard it sizzle beneath the hot metal.” Michael pointed to the manila envelope I had seen him carrying earlier. It was sitting on top of the dresser. “My first new job is in that packet. I don’t think they would have given me that if I failed.” I looked at the envelope. Michael was going to kill whoever’s name was in that envelope. “It’s going to take a few jobs before they really trust me again.” Michael looked at me as he spoke, making sure that I knew that this was only the beginning of the plan. We still had a long way to go.
“The words on your back,” I asked. “What are you supposed to be remembering?” I thought maybe they finally told him the reasons for the War.
“Whatever it was that made me want to fight in the first place,” Michael answered. Then he walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. I looked at the envelope lying on the top of the dresser. Michael must have known that I was going to look inside it. Why else would he have mentioned it and left it there? I heard the water running in the bathroom as Michael filled up the bathtub. As the water ran, I picked up the envelope and tore it open. I poured the contents of the envelope out onto my bed.
Eu loito porque eu me lembro. I don’t need scars on my back to remind me why I’m fighting.
Sixteen
Michael’s first target was a fat man. It was strange looking at the details of a life, laid out so meticulously, knowing that it was these details that would ensure that the life would soon be over. I thought of something my father used to tell me: the devil is in the details. If he only knew. It felt like we were being shown everything about this man’s life so that we’d know exactly what we were taking away. The envelope contained dozens of pictures taken from different angles, showing the fat man doing various things. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how they’d gotten some of the photos. They seemed so close, almost intimate. I found photos of his house somewhere in the country. One of the last pictures showed the fat man’s three Doberman pinschers.
The fat man was five feet, eleven inches tall and weighed a touch over four hundred pounds. He was forty-seven years old. He was single. He lived alone, not counting his dogs. On the physical condition line, he was listed simply as unfit. In the section where the target’s skills are noted, it said Intelligence/strategy management. I scanned down the page to the subsection titled Combat Skills. I looked across the page at the words None known. Then I flipped to the next page.
The reports contained page after page of the target’s professional and personal history. I skimmed them, knowing that Michael would be out of his bath soon. The target was the younger of two sons. His father had been the head of intelligence for the Eastern seaboard for more than twenty years. He was killed in a raid when a boat that he was on blew up, killing him and three of his enemies. The story in the press was that the boat blew up due to a gas leak and some faulty wiring. According to the report given to Michael, the fat man’s father sacrificed his own life to save critical intelligence for his side. Their father a hero, his sons quickly moved up the ranks in the War. His older son became a soldier and was killed in action at the age of twenty-nine. He had more than twenty confirmed kills when he died. His younger son, Michael’s target, went into intelligence. He had no combat experience. He’d never fought a single fight in his life. Instead he rose through the ranks based on his father’s and his brother’s reputations. Despite having no fighting experience of his own, it was the fat man’s job to identify individuals or families for “customized, small-scale extermination.” He was one of the ones who picked their targets—he drafted the list of the dead.
I heard Michael unplug the bath and heard the water swirling down the drain. I had gotten through most of the contents of the envelope. I glanced at the remaining pages, trying to absorb what information I could. The fat man was a bit of a recluse. He saw other people only for work. His identity had been discovered just a few months ago. It had been a tip. He’d been betrayed by someone on his own side, someone with a grudge. They had gathered all this information in a few months. I flipped to the last page of the envelope. It was titled Personal Connection. Only one entry was on the page, about halfway to the bottom. A year was listed. It was nineteen years ago. I read the sentence opposite the year and felt my heart stop for a moment. The bathroom door opened. I flinched when it did, looking up at Michael. He stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “I feel better,” he said, looking at the contents of th
e envelope in front of me. Then he walked over to his duffel bag and took out a hairbrush and some deodorant. When he did, I got a clear view of his back. He had kept the bandages off, airing out the blisters and scabs. “So what did you learn?” He rubbed deodorant under his arms and walked back to the bathroom with his hairbrush. He left the bathroom door open. “Who do they want me to kill?” he asked.
I started to say the fat man’s name, but Michael cut me off before I could even finish the first syllable. “No,” he said. The word was sharp and cutting. I looked at Michael reflection in the mirror. He was shaking his head. “We never use their names. The targets don’t get names.”
I hesitated, thinking about asking him why, but I knew. It wasn’t because the targets didn’t deserve names; it was because naming them might make it harder. “Then what should I call him?”
“Pick a defining characteristic.”
I could see Michael’s reflection in the bathroom mirror as he brushed his hair. “He’s fat,” I said. I could hear the nervousness in my own voice.
Michael laughed. “Then we’ll call him the fat man. Tell me more.”
“He lives in some town north of here called New Paltz.”
“I know the town. I used to hike there,” Michael said. He finished combing his hair and took out a razor and some shaving cream. “Keep going.”
“He lives alone,” I said, “but he’s got guard dogs.” My voice trailed off, not knowing what else to say. Michael was shaving in long slow strokes from the bottom of his neck up. He looked at my reflection in the mirror, waiting for me to continue. “He’s never fought. He works in intelligence.”
“What does he do?” Michael asked. His voice was calm. Half his face was now cleanly shaven.
“He decides who they’re going to kill. He analyzes their intelligence and picks the people they should target.” I could see Michael nodding to himself in the mirror, either because he now understood why they wanted this man dead or because he now knew that he wouldn’t have any qualms killing him. Maybe it was both.