Spook Country (15 page)

It seemed so simple.

He supposed it was, really, but Brown had been waiting for this, for the IF to receive one of these messages in his room, on one of the IF’s steadily replaced cell phones, where the fancy little bug under the coatrack could also pick it up. Brown had been waiting for it since he’d acquired Milgrim. Previous messages were assumed to have been received elsewhere, when the IF was out and about, drifting as he seemed to through lower Manhattan. Milgrim had no idea how Brown knew about those previous deliveries, but he did, and it had become evident to Milgrim that what Brown wanted most of all wasn’t the IF, or whatever it might be that he was delivering, but this “usual client,” a second “he” in Brown’s phone conversations, sometimes also referred to as “subject.” Brown ate and slept Subject, Milgrim knew, and the IF was merely some facilitator. Once Brown had raced to Washington Square, his people converging invisibly with him, only to find Subject gone, and the IF strolling back down Broadway like a small black crow, narrow black legs moving over a broken cover of sooty snow. Milgrim had seen this from the window of a gray Ford Taurus that stank of cigars, over Brown’s tactical nylon shoulder.

Milgrim stood, massaging stiffness from his thighs, discovered his fly unzipped, zipped it, rubbed his eyes, and dry-swallowed the morning’s Rize. It delighted him, knowing Brown wouldn’t interrupt him now. He looked down at Brown’s BlackBerry on the bedside table, beside the translated Volapuk.

The dream came back. Those gallows things. They were in Bosch, weren’t they? Torture devices, props for vast disembodied organs?

He picked up the BlackBerry and the sheet of stationery, and went to the connecting door, which as usual stood open. “Union Square,” he said.

“When?”

Milgrim smiled. “One. Today.”

Brown was in front of him, taking the BlackBerry and the paper. “This is it? This is all it says?”

“Yes,” said Milgrim. “Will I be going back to the laundry?”

Brown looked at him, sharply. Milgrim didn’t ask these questions. He’d learned not to. “You’re coming with me,” said Brown. “You might get to do some live translation.”

“You think they speak Volapuk?”

“They speak Russian,” Brown said. “Cuban-Chinese. The old man speaks it too.” He turned away. Milgrim went into his bathroom and ran the cold. The Rize hadn’t gone down smoothly. He looked at himself in the mirror and noted that he could use a haircut.

As he drank the glass of water he wondered when he’d quit looking at his own face in mirrors, other than for the most basic functions of grooming. He never saw himself there. At some point he’d decided not to.

He could hear Brown on the phone, energized and giving orders. He held his wrists under the cold stream from the tap, until it almost hurt. Then he turned it off and dried his hands on a towel. He pressed his face against the towel, imagining other people, strangers, whose faces had also touched it.

“I don’t want more,” he heard Brown say, “I want fewer and I want better. Get it through your head these aren’t your sand monkeys. You’re not over there now. These are operators, bred from the ground up. You lost him going into fucking Canal Street Station. You lose him in Union Square, you don’t want to know. You hear me? You don’t want to know.”

Milgrim supposed he didn’t want to know either, not in that sense, but this was all interesting. Cuban-Chinese, illegal facilitators who spoke Russian and messaged in Volapuk? Who lived in windowless mini-lofts on the fringes of Chinatown, wore APC and played keyboards? Who weren’t sand monkeys, because this wasn’t over there?

When in doubt, and when not compelled to simply enjoy his medication, Milgrim was in the habit of shaving, provided the necessities were at hand, as they were now. He began to run the hot.

Operators. Bred from the ground up.

Old man. That would be Subject.

He put the towel around his neck and tossed a washcloth into the hot water beginning to fill the sink.

E zeiza,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The airport. International Terminal B.”

She’d gotten him on his cell in Buenos Aires, after getting hers activated for international calling. No idea what it was costing.

“And you’re getting here day after tomorrow?”

“Day after that. It’s a long flight up to New York but it’s basically just flying north; odd to go that far without any time zones. I’m having lunch with a friend, dinner there with someone from the Bollards’ label. Then I’m out to your end next morning.”

“I think I’ve gotten myself into something, Reg, with this Node assignment.”

“What did we tell you? The lady wife has your boy’s number. Been getting steadily harsher about him since you brought his name up. This morning she’d gotten it up to ‘unclean.’ Or is that down?”

“I haven’t actually found him that personally repulsive, aside from his taste in cars, but I don’t like the sense of enormous amounts of money at the service of, of, well, I don’t know. He’s like a monstrously intelligent giant baby. Or something.”

“Angelina says he’s utterly amoral in the service of his own curiosity.”

“That probably covers it. But I don’t like the sort of thing he’s currently curious about, and I don’t like the way it feels to me that things are starting to happen, around that.”

“Sort of thing. Feels to you. You’re being uncharacteristically oblique.”

“I know,” she said, and paused, lowering her phone in abrupt recognition of what was bothering her. She put it back to her ear. “But we’re on the phone, aren’t we?”

There was a silence, on his end. A true, absolute, and digital silence, devoid of that random background sizzle that she’d once taken as much for granted during an international call as she took the sky overhead when she was outside. “Ah,” he said. “Well. There is always that. Increasingly more so, one imagines.”

“Imagines more rapidly, around him.”

“Ahem. I look forward to hearing more about this in person, then. But if my Spanish is at least semifunctional today, my flight’s just being called.”

“Good one, Reg.”

“Call you from New York.”

“Damn,” she said, closing her phone. She’d wanted, needed, to tell him about Bigend’s pirate story, about meeting Bobby, about seeing the white truck driving away and how that made her feel. He’d sort it out, she knew. Not make it make any more sense, necessarily, but just that his categories were so unlike hers. Unlike anyone’s, maybe. But something else had happened; some recognition of a line crossed, some ambiguous territory entered.

Bigend and his James Bond villain’s car, his half-built headquarters to match, his too much money, his big sharp curiosity and his bland willingness to go poking it wherever he wanted. That was potentially dangerous. Had to be. In some way she’d never really imagined before. If he wasn’t lying, he’d been paying people to tell him about secret government programs. The war on terror. Were they still calling it that? She’d caught some, she decided: terror. Right here in her hand, in Starbucks, afraid to trust her own phone and the net stretching out from it, strung through those creepy fake trees you saw from highways here, the cellular towers disguised with grotesque faux foliage, Cubist fronds, Art Deco conifers, a thin forest supporting an invisible grid, not unlike the one spread on Bobby’s factory floor in flour, chalk, anthrax, baby laxative, whatever it was. The trees Bobby triangulated on. The net of telephony, all digitized, and all, she had to suppose, listened to. By whoever, whatever, made the sort of things Bigend was poking at its business. Somewhere, she had to believe, such things were all too real.

Maybe now, they already were. Listening to her.

She looked up and saw the other customers. Relatively minor functionaries in film, television, music, games. None of them, in that moment, looking particularly happy. But none of them, probably, touched in quite the same way by this new bad thing, this shadow, fallen across her.

H e left the black-wrapped mattress on the floor, with his keys at its exact center, the toothbrush and toothpaste on the edge of the sink, the wire hangers on the old rack that concealed the bug Alejandro had shown him. He closed the door behind him for the last time and left the building, stepping out into a startlingly fresh bright day, a new sun starting to warm the winter’s residue of dog turds.

When he reached Broadway he bought a paper cup of coffee, black, and sipped from it as he walked, letting the rhythm of his stride find his systema. He let himself be focused by his progress, his road. There could be nothing but the road until he had completed his task, even if he were to turn back for some reason, or stand still.

The uncles who taught him systema had themselves been taught by a Vietnamese, a former soldier, one who had come from Paris to end his days in the village of Las Tunas. Tito as a child had sometimes seen this man at rural family functions, but never in Havana, and had never spoken with him. The Vietnamese had always worn a loose black cotton shirt with no collar, untucked at the waist, and brown plastic shower sandals scuffed the color of dust in a village street. Tito had seen him, as the older men had sat drinking beer and smoking cigars, ascend a two-story wall of whitewashed concrete blocks, no more purchase afforded than the very shallow grooves of mortar between the courses. It was a strange memory, since even as a child Tito had taken what he saw there to be impossible, in the ordinary sense of the world. No applause from the watching uncles, no sound at all, the blue smoke rising as they puffed their cigars. And the Vietnamese rising like that smoke in the twilight, and as quickly, his limbs not so much moving as insinuating themselves into different and constantly changing relationships with the wall.

Tito himself, later, when it had come his time to learn from the uncles, had learned quickly, and well. When it was time for his family to leave Cuba, his systema had already been strong, and the uncles who taught him had been pleased.

And while he had learned the uncles’ ways, Juana had taught him the ways of the Guerreros: Eleggua, Ogún, Oshosi, and Osun. As Eleggua opens every road, so Ogún clears each road with his machete. God of iron and wars, of labor; owner of every technology. The number seven, colors green and black, and Tito held these inwardly now, as he walked toward Prince Street, the Bulgarian’s technology tucked within its handkerchief into the inside pocket of his black nylon jacket, from APC. At the very edge of perception rode Oshosi, the orishas’ hunter and scout. These three, along with Osun, were received by an initiate of the Guerreros. Juana had taught him these things, she had said at first, as a means of more deeply embracing the systema of the Vietnamese from Paris, and he had seen in the eyes of his uncles the proof of this, but he had never told them. Juana had taught him that as well, how the holding of knowledge in dignified privacy helps ensure desired results.

He saw Vianca pass him on a small motorcycle, headed downtown, the brightly painted, mirrored helmet turning his way, glinting in the sunlight. Already Oshosi was allowing him a less specific way of seeing. The life of the street, its pedestrians and traffic, was becoming one animal, an organic whole. With half of his coffee gone, he removed the plastic lid, slid his phone in, and recapped the paper cup, depositing it in the first trash receptacle he passed.

By the time he reached the southwest corner of Prince and Broadway he was flowing with the Guerreros, an alert and interested marcher within some invisible procession. Oshosi showed him the black, black-clad store detective with the bead in his ear, as Eleggua hid him from this man’s attention. Passing the thick frosted cylinder of the store’s glass elevator, he descended the stairway built into the rolling slope of the floor. He had often come here to enjoy the strangeness of it, as of some carnival ride halted in mid-swing. The clothes had never appealed to him, though he liked the look of them displayed here. They spoke too much of money, to the street; they were clothes that Canal copied; anonymous in their way, but too easily described.

He saw another store detective, white, in a beige coat and black shirt and tie. They must be provided with allowances for clothing, he thought, as he rounded a white modular wall of cosmetics and arrived at the men’s shoes.

The Guerreros recognized the stranger standing there, a three-eyelet black alligator oxford in his hand. The strength of their recognition startled.

Blunt and broad shouldered, dark hair cut very short, the other, perhaps thirty, turned. Replaced the shoe on its shelf. “Sixteen hundred,” he said, his English warmly accented in some unfamiliar way. “Not today.” He smiled, teeth white but crowded. “Know Union Square?”

“Yes.”

“At the north end of the park, Seventeenth Street, the Greenmarket. One sharp, don’t show before then. If you did, he wouldn’t be there. If you get within ten paces, and nothing’s happened, break and run. They’ll think you’ve seen them. Some of them will try to take him. Others will try to take you. Get away, but lose this in the process.” He dropped the white rectangle of the iPod, in its Ziploc bag, into Tito’s jacket’s side pocket. “Run for the W, the hotel on the corner of Park and Seventeenth. Know it?”

Tito nodded, remembering having wondered about the name as he’d passed the place.

“Main entrance on Park, up from the corner. Not the revolving door nearest the corner; that’s the hotel’s restaurant. But that’s where you’re actually headed, the restaurant. In past the doorman, but then right. Not up the steps to the lobby. Not into the lobby, understand?”

“Yes.”

“Through the door, right, you’ve made a U-turn. You’re headed south. When you get to the revolving door, at the corner of the building, left. Into the restaurant, straight through it, into the kitchen, exit onto Eighteenth. Green step-van with silver lettering, south side of Eighteenth. I’ll be there.” He turned his head, as if scanning the display of shoes, most of which, today, Tito found very ugly. “They have radios, the men who’ll try to take you, and phones, but all of that will be jammed, as soon as you move.”

Tito, pretending to look at a zip-sided black calf boot, touched its toe with his finger, nodding noncommittally, turning to go.

Oshosi knew that the white detective in the beige jacket had been watching them.

The door of the frosted-glass elevator slid aside. Brotherman emerged, tall hair streaked with copper, eyes glazed, gait unsteady. The white detective instantly forgot Tito, who crossed to the elevator, entered, and pushed the button for the twenty-foot ride to the ground floor. As the door closed, Tito saw the one the Guerreros had recognized, grinning at the detective’s approach to Brotherman, who was about to become abruptly sober, dignified, and firmly but courteously disinclined to be interfered with by a store detective.