J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

I don’t try it out, not wanting to mark my shirt, but I can imagine a man leaning forward against this shaft, his arms stretched just as I saw Brandon Ford’s arms back at the barn in Matamoros, wrists secured at the end of the metal arms. Remembering Jeff’s makeshift dissection, I feel light-headed. Queasy.

Removing my flashlight, I peer along the grimy floor for any signs of blood, but if they’re here, they are hidden from the naked eye. A forensics team could find them, I’m certain of that, and they’d match the telltale grease stain on the back of the corpse’s leg to some piece of railing in the pit. He would have been filthy from dying down there. Jeff would have had to drag him up, then over to the bathroom for a wash. I look for an axe, just in case, but there’s no sign of one.

Climbing up to the floor, I retrace his probable steps, ending in the small, dank restroom. The sink is gray from oil. The trash basket beside the basin bursts with fetid gray rags.

The night he rescued me from Ford’s men, it wasn’t home base Jeff brought me to, not his refuge. He brought me to his killing ground, his carefully appointed torture chamber, then spun a story so he could gauge my reaction and determine how much I knew. I’d felt so grateful to him for the unexpected deliverance that I wasn’t really on my guard. Not psychologically, and certainly not physically. If he’d wanted to, if he’d decided I could be of more value to him down in the pit than up here on the surface, I have no doubt Jeff would have killed me. After seeing him standing over Ford with the glistening knife, I have no doubt at all.

I spin and stumble, reaching for something to steady myself on. My hand rests on the edge of the table where Jeff stacked his many books. His books. I’d imagined him reclining on the army cot, reading his paranoid literature until the wee hours of the morning, unable to sleep. Now I can picture him coming up out of the hole for a break, a little rest and relaxation, leaving his victim down below to linger in agony. I see him reading while a moan ascends from the abyss, a private smile on his lips.

I don’t rip the books apart or even lash out at them. All I do is push them one by one, with the slightest pressure of my fingers, over the edge and onto the floor. Each one drops with a satisfying impact that sends a thud reverberating through the garage. I move the books over the edge like so many beads across the wire of an abacus, counting an arithmetic of hidden shame. The whole place should burn. It should be razed to the ground. But it’s not up to me to see this done. None of it is up to me anymore. I was not born to set this right. Not this.

The last book left is a thick old paperback with a creased black spine. The pages curl upward from repeated reading, their edges brown with age. On the cover is a detail from a medieval painting, a horned demon with serpents projecting from his head, the bare legs of a half-consumed man dangling from his mouth. All around him, naked bodies writhe in bubbling oil vats. They are stoked by pitchforks, their bone-white faces twisted in pain. This is a thousand-year-old vision of the depths of hell, affixed to the front of Dante’s Inferno , a place Jeff didn’t believe in but brought to life.

I snatch the book up, the same copy Magnum was reading the morning I jogged past him at the picnic table. Can you keep a secret? And to my surprise, in blue ballpoint just inside the cover is written the name ANDREW NESBITT.

That confident trickster and talent spotter, grooming future dictators for the good of democracy, a would-be puppet master whose own paranoia became his undoing, who never settled the debts he owed to justice and didn’t live to see the red harvest his deeds put in motion. Like a jeweler gazing through his loupe, he had seen something in me all those years ago, some flaw of character that led him to believe I would go along with concealing a woman’s murder. And then he’d seen something else and, after a lifetime, sent me a message by way of his torturer, hoping to put that second flaw to use, my willingness to travel on the other side of the line that keeps good men on the path and bad ones in check, to balance his sheet while avenging the death of a nameless woman in 1986, and every woman who came after her, and all the rest. I look in vain for a place to set the book down. Finding none, I take it with me. Full circle and a fitting end to a story I never intended to be a part of, let alone to tell.