J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

There are so many, some without names, and behind them all, haunting my sleep, the little girl I could never save, my own daughter, Jess, taken by chance while I was miles and miles away. Hunched beside that grave in Leesville like Atlas taking on the first of his weight, I had no idea what was in store for me or I would have run.

Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have. This is the way I was made. I came from the factory with a sense that time was out of joint and had no Shakespearean qualms about being the one to set it right. Righteous indignation ran in my veins long before I had any reason to feel it. All that’s happened since has only confirmed what I knew from the cradle. The world had long since fallen into the ditch, but that didn’t mean we belonged there, caked in mud.

As I walked back to the car, I found Magnum leaning on the bumper.

He had his arms folded, the right hand tucked under his suit jacket casually. Probably gripping the butt of a pistol.

I stopped.

“I could kill you from here, if that’s what I wanted,” he said, flashing his grin.

“All right, then.” I closed the distance between us, pausing a few yards off. “You’ve got a gun under that coat, and this here’s a cemetery, but I’m not to read anything into that?”

“Read whatever you want into it.”

“You’re just here to say your goodbyes.”

“Is this goodbye? What makes you think that?”

“For one thing, I’m leaving. For another, I’m gonna be a cop. Since you’re an accomplice to murder and probably a murderer in your own right-”

“Hold on, there, partner. There’s no need to get worked up. You’ve got the wrong idea about me entirely. I’m on the side of the angels. The world’s just not as black and white as you seem to think.”

“That girl out there,” I said. “Maybe you ought to pay your respects while you’re out here. Didn’t see you at the funeral.”

“The thing is, March, I was telling myself there was still hope for you. The way you handled yourself that night. . I was impressed. I know a lot of guys with resumés that would put yours to shame who couldn’t pull off what you did. What I’m saying is, I think we ought to have a talk.”

“I think we already did.”

“Don’t blow this off. That would be a mistake. There are opportunities that come only once in a lifetime. I’m talking about the major leagues here. The big show. There’s no glory in it, no recognition to speak of, but that kind of thing doesn’t matter once you’ve looked behind the curtain.”

“I already got a peek back there. Didn’t like what I saw.”

“Come on, now. I’m not going to throw myself at you-”

“Is that what all this is about? You’re trying to recruit me? This is how it works?”

He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked at me with a strange fierceness. “This is my core,” he said. “This is my inner sanctum I’m opening up to you. You have no idea what I’ve seen. No idea what’s happening all around you every day. Men like you sleep at night because men like me don’t. All I’m saying is, you made a bad move back there, but it revealed something about you I hadn’t seen before. Now I know.”

“Now you know what?”

“I know I can make something of you, March.”

“No thanks.”

The suddenness of my answer surprised him. It surprised me, too. There was a time not long before that I would have jumped at the offer. To hear a man like him saying these things about me would have galvanized me. Now it meant nothing. I’d seen his world for what it was, and I couldn’t unsee it.

“I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you’ve seen. I don’t care what’s behind your curtain. If we cross paths again, I’ll put you in cuffs as an accessory to murder.”

“That’s not even an option,” he said. “Those rules don’t apply.”

“We’ll see,” I told him.

I opened the driver’s door and got inside. He motioned for me to roll down the passenger window, then leaned in for a final word. His hand wasn’t under the jacket anymore. And he was smiling like his usual self.

“I’m gonna keep an eye on you,” he said. “Maybe I’ll drop in and see how you’re doing from time to time. This isn’t goodbye. I’m taking the long view when it comes to you.”

I waited for him to pull back so I could roll up the window.

“You ever read Conrad, March? Joseph Conrad. You should. I told you I was more of a literature man. There’s a book of his-it’s great. It starts with a guy blowing up some Russian aristocrat’s carriage; then he hides out with this second man, more of a law-and-order type like yourself. And he can sense the judgment coming from your guy, just like I can sense it from you. So I’m gonna tell you what he tells the guy in the book.”

“Fine, go ahead.”

“Here’s what he says: ‘Men like me are necessary to make room for self-contained, thinking men like you.’ You understand? Say what you want-and believe me, I’ve heard it all before-but men like me are necessary. But maybe men like you are necessary, too. I’m keeping an open mind about you, March. One of these days, maybe I’ll find a use for you after all.”

And then he was gone.

In the end it is politics, not virtue, that saves me. Even as the surgeons perform their ethered miracle inside my chest cavity, a narrative begins to take shape. Bea Kuykendahl tells the story in the presence of Federal agents as they number the bullet wounds in Brandon Ford’s recovered corpse. According to this account, Ford died in the line of duty, and so did I nearly. Though I don’t remember it this way, I am later told that when the Federales burst into the apartment, they found me bleeding out with a pistol in one hand and the scruff of drug lord César Soto-Andrade in the other.

I am a hero.

Not only that, but at the time I was apparently operating with the blessings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in full knowledge of the Mexican authorities, who not only sanctioned the operation but played a significant role in its accomplishment. The first photo of me to hit the wire is snapped at my bedside with my torso swathed in bandages and my chin covered in stubble. I’m shaking hands with a uniformed Mexican military official while members of Bea’s team, including the old-timer who’d warned me off, look on in stony silence.

There would be many more photos, many hospital-room interviews, many tight-lipped congratulations from law enforcement officials who had a good idea what had really gone down. But politics is politics, and none of them could deny the bounty: a high-profile cartel boss, a thwarted arms shipment, and a dead FBI rogue contractor in need of posthumous apotheosis. Is there any other kind? All the bent and broken rules, all the red tape, all the fodder for an international incident-with the wave of the political wand, it all just vanishes.

All that’s required of me is to keep my mouth shut. For once, I do. Whether Bea is a snake or not, I can’t tell, but if so, she’s the snake that saved me.

The real story goes something like this. When they found me, I was short of breath and coughing up a fine mist of blood. The bullet had entered my chest and collapsed a lung, which made my blood pressure drop rapidly. Keller put pressure on the wound to try and stop the flow of blood, but by the time the paramedics reached me, I had slipped into shock.

Bea says I was rambling incoherently, that I mistook her for a boy at one point, and for my deceased daughter at another. It pains me to hear this.

After they stabilized me, I was rushed into surgery, spent the night on a ventilator, and woke up with a blank space where my memory of the night before should have been. I was flown back to Houston and discharged after a week free of complications. The doctor who signed off on my papers told me I was lucky.