“We just crossed the Arizona-Utah border,” he says to Ellison and nods at his window. “Look down there, kiddo, and you’ll see the patch of buttes and dust and rattlesnakes that John Ford made famous. If the Duke has a ghost, I’d wager green folding money that’s where you’d find it.” And then he winks at her and lights a cigarette, which saves Ellison the trouble of having to ask if she can smoke on the flight.
“I thought you fucking hated planes,” she says, then clears her throat again. “I thought with you it was railways and highways or no ways at all. I thought you’d rather eat the peanuts out of a pile of pig shit than get on an airplane.”
The Signalman watches her and rubs his salt-and-pepper stubbled chin. It doesn’t look as if he’s shaved since the day before. Or maybe the day before that.
“And I thought I’d find you healthy and clean, living it up on the banks of the Vltava,” he replies. “You wanna tell me again why it is I didn’t?” And then to Mackenzie Regan, he says, “That’s in Prague, the River Vltava,” and she sighs and tells him she knew that already.
Ellison frowns and lets the matter drop. She finds a shiny new Zippo and a half-empty pack of Chesterfields in the breast pocket of the blazer. She lights one and stares at the sky for almost a whole minute before asking, “How long was I out?”
“Not too long,” the Signalman replies. “Since just before takeoff. An hour and a half, more or less. I warned you that was some potent shit, not like that nickel-and-dime skag you’ve been shooting.”
“Yeah,” she mutters around the filter of her cigarette. “You warned me.”
Kitty Wells is replaced by Connie Francis, “Who’s Sorry Now.” The plane might belong to Albany, but it’s sure as shit the Signalman’s mixtape.
Ellison finishes the beer and sets the empty bottle back into the cup holder. She wants to ask if she can get another and is debating whether or not that’s a bad idea, trying to guess just how deep the Signalman’s indulgence runs, when he holds up a manila folder so she can see, then taps it with an index finger. There’s an identical folder lying on the otherwise empty seat next to her, and she nods at him, picks up the folder, and opens it. Inside, there’s a thin sheaf of typed pages held together with a red plastic paper clip. Typed, she notes (and on onionskin), not a computer printout, because Albany has never trusted computers for these sorts of things and likely never will. The cover sheet is stamped with green ink, COSMIC TOP SECRET and EYES ONLY and so on and so forth. Ellison takes a drag on her Chesterfield, then turns to the second page. And here, assembled in a terse, itemized list, are all the many reasons that the agency has sent the Signalman to yank her back into the fold, all the horrors and unlikelihoods that add up to this moment, to her sitting in this seat on this plane, racing through the sky above a cowboy-movie landscape of towering sandstone buttes and cowboy-movie phantoms.
“I’m going to need another beer for this,” Ellison says, because, really, the worst he can do is say no. She shuts her eyes, trying to scrape together a few stingy shreds of courage and summon some measure of backbone from the heroin’s deceitful, warm embrace. When she opens her eyes again, the empty bottle’s gone and there’s a fresh Natty Boh in the cup holder. Its already been opened for her. The Signalman is standing now, stooped slightly so he can gaze out one of the circular windows.
“You don’t have to read it all at once,” he says. “You’ve got some time. But I do need you to read all of it, kiddo. And then we’ll talk.”
Ellison takes a swallow of the cold malt liquor, wipes her mouth, then looks back down at the folder in her lap, the bloody-red paper clip, the crisp typed pages, the bizarre catalog of atrocities lined up all neat and tidy for her careful consideration. The life and times and not quite unspeakable sins of a Welsh woman named Jehosheba Talog, the only assignment Ellison Nicodemo never finished, the only one who ever got away.
“To tell you the truth,” says the Signalman, “after what happened in Atlanta, I thought maybe she’d crawled off somewhere to lick her wounds and . . . whatever. Swum away home like a good pollywog to King Neptune’s stately pleasure palace or just fucking died. What the fuck ever it is people like her do when they’ve finally done the world all the mischief they can manage. I honestly thought we’d heard the last of her.”
After what happened in Atlanta . . .
Ellison glances down at the scars on her hands, then shuts her eyes again.
“No, you didn’t,” she says, so softly that the words are almost lost in the low, rumbling purr of the King Air’s twin turbine engines. “You didn’t think that for a minute. So why bother lying to me about it?”
When he doesn’t answer the question, Ellison opens her eyes and goes back to staring at (but not reading) the contents of the manila folder. It’s not like she really expects an answer.
“Anyway,” the Signalman says finally, “read it. Maybe you’ll see some kinda pattern there we’re missing. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you. We’re refueling at Offutt, then flying on to Quonset Point.”
“And there’s nothing the least bit portentous about making a pit stop at the birthplace of the Enola Gay.”
“I stopped thinking like that a long, long time ago,” says the Signalman. “You have to, or you wind up seeing the face of Jesus in every bowl of
