J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“We’re going to stay here and wait for her to come back,” she explains. “And we need you to keep this entirely confidential. It’s a matter of homeland security. Thanks for your cooperation.”

The woman teeters on the threshold, looking simultaneously dazed and excited. Then she springs forward and presents Bea with the key.

“If you need anything -” she begins.

“We’ll let you know.”

When she’s gone, we close the door. Bea goes straight for the luggage, looking for anything packed away underneath the clothes. She finds nothing in the first case. From the second, she produces a zip-around pouch full of passports, currency, credit cards, and driving licenses, all bearing Hilda Ford’s face but with different names including Hillary Mendez. She puts everything back in place, then shakes the bag over her head in triumph. I motion for her to keep looking. In one of the internal pockets, wrapped in a silk slip, she finds a stack of file folders identical to the dossiers on Brandon Ford and myself.

“Look at this.”

We spread them out on the bed, open to the photos. There are five in total, all of them men in their mid-twenties to late-thirties. I pat my jacket pocket, removing the now-familiar photo. Brandon Ford flanked by two buddies, with Hilda in the background. I lay it on the bed among the folders.

“This one here,” I say, tapping the man on Brandon’s right. “That’s him.” I show her the folder with his photograph. “And the one on his left, that’s him over there.” I slide another folder alongside.

“They’re all using false identities.”

I lift one of the folders, holding the image close up for inspection.

“You recognize that one, too?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I hand her the folder. “That’s the one I killed.”

A brooding silence descends as we wait. I sit at the window, listening to the rumble of traffic on the street below, the sun warm on my hands, my face, my closed eyelids. I can hear Bea perched on the edge of the bed, quietly browsing through the dossiers, trying to make sense of what this means. I haven’t told her about my run-in with Ford on Allen Parkway, about the voices of the men who came after me, no doubt the same ones whose files she holds on her lap. If they were Englewood’s team, as I assumed, why does Hilda have their dossiers? Obviously she created their new identities, just as she created Jeff’s. That’s her specialty, he said.

“I should have known about this,” Bea says. “I should have dug deeper to begin with. I just accepted everything they told me. I made it easy for them.”

“It won’t be easy for them anymore.”

“No,” she says. “Not if I can help it.”

I open my eyes. She’s holding all the files in a thick stack, her knuckles white. From across the room, her sinewy, boyish muscularity and the random twists of hair spouting around her temples make me think of a kid in school, stumped by the test.

Sometimes my thwarted fatherly instinct comes out. I’ll find myself connecting, albeit awkwardly, to substitute children like Carter Robb, maybe even Cavallo. Not that I’m old enough to have fathered either of them, but I can imagine Carter as the grown-up son I never had, imagine Cavallo as the daughter who was taken from me. It’s stupid, I know, but maybe it explains some things.

Looking at Bea, I feel none of that. Her broad, unlined face is just a cipher. She could just as easily be carved from stone. And the funny thing is, I bet if I asked about her job, how she gets along with her colleagues, what they think of her, I’d hear a story not unlike my own. We’re a lot alike, I suspect, and that’s why we can sit in a room together and both feel alone.

“You know something-”

She silences me with a finger, then tilts her head toward the door.

I rise quickly, moving across the room, positioning myself inside the bathroom while Bea sets aside the stack of files and slips into the corner to the right of the door. We make eye contact. Bea holds a collapsible ASP baton in her hand, a wicked smile on her lips.

Here we go.

The door swings open. A short, plump woman laden with plastic shopping bags walks through, heading straight to the kitchenette. She hoists the bags onto the counter, peels off her sunglasses, and pauses. Her head turns toward the bed, toward the stack of files.

“Hello, Hilda,” Bea says, pushing the door shut.

In the photo I’ve been carrying, Hilda Ford is a hard-looking, ashen-faced woman with demon eyes. In real life, she has a dimple on one cheek and a crooked smile. She gives off a comfortably aged, grandmotherly vibe, and if she’s shocked to find two unexpected visitors in her safe house, she doesn’t let on.

“Hello yourself,” she says, dragging the words out like she’s trying to recall a forgotten appointment. “Bea. And you-” she turns my way-“I recognize you. You’re Roland March.”

“That’s right. You made a file on me.”

“And I see you’ve been sneaking through my files.”

“You got careless, Hilda,” Bea says, moving forward, slapping the baton against the palm of her hand. “You thought I wouldn’t find you.”

The older woman shrinks back at Bea’s approach, and I have a terrible premonition of sudden violence, Bea’s arm lifting and the baton crashing down. I edge myself between them to head off the possibility. Seeing this, Bea smirks.

“Why don’t you have a seat, Hilda?” I ask. “We need to have a little talk.”

“You set me up,” Bea says. “You lied to me.”

“That’s not true-”

“ You told me Brandon was dead .”

Hilda smiles sweetly, her palms turned up. “I thought he was. I only told you what I believed myself. I was trying to help.”

“Then why did you disappear?”

“Not because of you, dear,” Hilda says.

She trails past the bed, glancing around as if the room is unfamiliar, finally settling herself on the chair I recently vacated by the window. She wears a flowery capped-sleeve top, stretched tight across her thick arms, and boot-cut jeans with little sparkles down the side. There’s nothing threatening about Hilda, nothing to even suggest the sort of work she’s done or the secrets she must have been privy to over the years.

Bea puts the tip of her baton on the arm of the little sofa and makes a show of collapsing it back to its original size. Then she slumps onto the cushion, leaving the last chair for me. I scoot it over, positioning myself between Hilda and the door. It’s force of habit. I don’t anticipate her making a run for the exit.

“I knew Andrew Nesbitt,” I tell her. “Were you aware of that?”

“Yes, I was. But I’m surprised you are. He went looking for you a couple of years after your first meeting, to see if you had ripened up. And lo and behold, you were out of the military and working as a Houston cop. He didn’t have any use at that time for a Houston cop, but he kept you in mind. He told me he figured he could make something out of you.”

“I’ll bet. Do you know what it was he wanted to give me?”

She strokes thoughtfully at the fold of skin beneath her chin. “I have an idea what it might have been, but no more than that.”

“Can we back up a minute?” Bea says. “Who are you talking about?”

“I’ll let Hilda explain.”

“Andrew Nesbitt was my boss,” she tells Bea, “before you were my boss.” She’s using the slow, clear enunciation of a first grade teacher. “It was Andy who brought our little family together, and Andy who gave us work to do.”

“He worked for the CIA,” I say.

Hilda tilts her head, acknowledging this might be so.

“And so did you?” I ask.

She smiles. “I’ve done some things here and there. I give people new lives. I’ve been doing it a long time. It’s gotten harder in some ways and a whole lot easier in others. Documents are a snap. It’s all the computers that pose the challenge now. That’s why I called to warn you, Bea, because I knew that my work for Brandon was only going to hold up for so long. If the police dug past the middle of 2002, things would look a little fishy. And if they ran his DNA, well, like all my boys, Brandon was ex-military. They were sure to find out who he was.”