Spook Country (5 page)

T he message tone woke him. He reached for his phone in the dark, watched Volapuk scroll briefly past. Alejandro was outside, wanting in. It was ten after two in the morning. He sat up, pulled on his jeans, socks, sweater. Then his boots, whose laces he tied carefully: this was protocol.

It was cold in the hallway, as he locked his door behind him, less cold in the elevator. In the narrow, fluorescent-lit foyer below, he rapped once on the street door, heard his cousin’s three raps in reply, then one. When he opened the door, Alejandro stepped in, surrounded by a nimbus of colder air and the smell of whiskey. Tito closed and locked the door behind him.

“You were sleeping?”

“Yes,” Tito said, starting for the elevator.

“I went to Carlito,” Alejandro said, following Tito into the elevator. Tito pushed the button; the door closed. “Carlito and I have our own business.” Meaning separate from family business. “I asked him about your old man.” The door opened.

“Why did you do that?” Tito unlocked his door.

“Because I didn’t think you had taken me seriously.”

They entered the darkness of Tito’s room. He turned on the small shaded lamp attached to his MIDI keyboard. “Shall I make coffee? Tea?”

“Zavarka?”

“Bags.” Tito no longer made tea in the Russian way, though he did steep his tea bags in a cheap Chinese tchainik.

Alejandro seated himself on the foot of Tito’s mattress, knees drawn up before his face. “Carlito brews the zavarka. He takes it with a spoon of jam.” His teeth shone in the light from the MIDI lamp.

“What did he tell you?”

“Our grandfather was the understudy of Semenov,” Alejandro said. Tito turned on his hotplate and filled the kettle.

“Who was that?”

“Semenov was Castro’s first KGB advisor.”

Tito looked back at his cousin. This was something like hearing a fairy tale, though not an entirely unfamiliar one. And then the children met a flying horse, his mother would tell him. And then grandfather met Castro’s KGB advisor. He turned back to the hotplate.

“Grandfather was one of the less obvious participants in the formation of the Dirección General de Inteligencia.”

“Carlito told you that?”

“I knew it already. From Juana.”

Tito thought about this as he put the kettle to boil on the element. Their grandfather’s secrets could not have gone with him entirely. Legends grew like vines, through a family like theirs, and the midden of their shared history, however deep, was narrow, constrained by the need for secrecy. Juana, so long in charge of the production of required documents, would have enjoyed a certain overview. And Juana, Tito knew, was the deepest of them all, the calmest, most patient. He often visited her, here. She took him to El Siglo XX Supermarket to buy malanga and boniato. The sauces she prepared for these were of a potency he already found alien, but her empanadas made him feel as if he were blessed. She had never told him about this Semenov, but she had taught him other things. He glanced toward the vessel holding Ochun. “What did Carlito say, about the old man?”

Alejandro looked over his knees. “Carlito said there is a war in America.”

“A war?”

“A civil war.”

“There is no war in America.”

“When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?”

“That was the ‘cold war.’”

Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. “A cold civil war.”

Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun’s vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.

“You don’t follow politics, Tito.”

Tito thought of the voices on the Russian Network of America, drowning somehow, taking his Russian with them. “A little,” he said.

The kettle began to whistle. Tito took it off the element and dashed some boiling water into the tchainik. Then he added the two tea bags and poured the water with a habitual fast flourish. He put the lid on.

The way that Alejandro sat on his bed reminded Tito of crouching with his schoolmates, at dawn, to whip a wooden top from one cobble to the next, the day’s heat gathering in the street around them. They had worn pressed white shorts and red scarves. Did anyone spin tops, in America?

Leaving the tchainik to steep, he sat beside Alejandro on the mattress.

“Do you understand how our family came to be what it is, Tito?”

“It began with Grandfather, and the DGI.”

“He wasn’t there long. The KGB needed its own network in Havana.”

Tito nodded. “On Grandmother’s side, we had always been in Barrio de Colón. Juana says before Batista.”

“Carlito says that people in the government are looking for your old man.”

“What people?”

“Carlito says that it reminds him of Havana here now, of the years before the Russians left. Nothing now is business as usual. He tells me that this old man was instrumental in bringing us here. That was a big magic, cousin. Bigger than our grandfather could have worked alone.”

Tito suddenly remembered the smell of the English-language papers, in their mildewed case. “You told Carlito you thought it was dangerous?”

“Yes.”

Tito got up to pour two glasses of tea from the tchainik. “And he told you that our family is under an obligation?” He was guessing. He looked back at Alejandro.

“And that you were specifically requested.”

“Why?”

“You remind him of your grandfather. And of your father, who was working for this same old man when he died.”

Tito passed Alejandro a glass of tea.

“Gracias,” said Alejandro.

“De nada,” said Tito.

M ilgrim was dreaming of the Flagellant Messiah, of the Pseudo Baldwin and the Master of Hungary, when Brown reached down into the hot shallows of his sleep, dug his thumbs into his shoulders, and shook him, hard.

“What is this?” Brown kept asking, a question Milgrim had taken to be purely existential, until Brown had wedged those same thumbs into the junctures of Milgrim’s jaw and skull, hard, producing a degree of discomfort so severe that Milgrim was initially unable to recognize it as pain. Milgrim seemed to levitate through no will of his own, mouth opening to scream, but Brown, green-gloved as ever for these more intimate moments, clapped a hand over it.

He smelled the fresh latex covering Brown’s index finger.

The other hand presented the screen of a BlackBerry. “What is this?”

A personal digital assistant, Milgrim was on the brink of answering, but then squinted through tears, recognizing, on the BlackBerry’s screen, a very short specimen of the IF’s family Volapuk.

The smell of Brown’s glove retreated as Milgrim’s mouth was uncovered. “‘I’m outside,’” Milgrim promptly translated. “‘Are you there?’ Signed A—L—E. ‘Ale.’”

“That’s all?”

“Nothing. Else. There.” Milgrim’s own fingertips massaged the hinges of his jaw. There were big nodes of nerve there. Paramedics used that on overdose victims. It got your attention.

“Ten after two,” Brown said, looking at the screen of the BlackBerry.

“You know your bug works now,” Milgrim offered. “You changed the batteries; now there’s proof it works.”

Brown straightened and returned to his own room, without bothering to close the door.

You’re welcome, thought Milgrim, as he lay back on the bed, eyes open, perhaps to reimagine the Flagellant Messiah.

The stolen Paul Stuart overcoat had contained, in its slash-flapped side pocket, a chunky 1961 paperback history of revolutionary messianism in medieval Europe. Owing to copious underlining in black fountain pen, this copy had most recently sold for $3.50, perhaps to the man from whom Milgrim had stolen the coat.

The Flagellant Messiah, as Milgrim imagined him, was a sort of brightly colored Hieronymus Bosch action figure molded from some very superior grade of Japanese vinyl. Tightly hooded in yellow, the Flagellant Messiah moved about a dun-colored landscape inhabited by other figures as well, all of them rendered in this same vinyl. Some of them were Bosch-influenced: say, an enormous and ambulatory pair of bare buttocks, from between which protruded the wooden shaft of a large arrow. Others, like the Flagellant Messiah, sprang from the stolen history, which he read every night, but after a rather circular fashion. He had never had any interest in this sort of thing before, that he could recall, but now he found it somehow comforting, to have his dreams colored this way.

He saw the IF, for whatever reason, as a bird-headed Bosch creature, pursued by Brown and Brown’s people, a brown-hooded posse astride heraldic beasts that weren’t quite horses, their swirling banners inscribed with slogans in the IF’s Volapuk. Sometimes they journeyed for days into the stylized groves bordering that landscape, glimpsing strange creatures in wooded shadow. At times Brown and the Flagellant Messiah would merge, so that Milgrim sometimes woke from dreams in which Brown tore his own flesh with whips whose barbs were coated with the same grayish green that covered his pistol, flashlight, and monocular.

But this new Devonian sea, the blood-warm shallows in which these visions swam, belonged not to Ativan but to Rize, a Japanese product for which Milgrim had immediately formed a firm respect. There were possibilities inherent in Rize, he sensed, that might only be revealed with further application. There was a sense of mobility that had been lacking recently—though he wondered if that had anything to do with the fact that he was being held captive.

The advent of Rize, though, made it easier to get his head around that concept, captivity, and he was finding that it rankled. He hadn’t been in a very good state at all, when Brown had turned up, and someone with Ativan and orders had seemed like not such a bad idea. Indeed, Milgrim reminded himself, he might be dead now, were it not for Brown. Such were the possibilities of seizures, he knew, should he be withdrawn too quickly from medication. And sources, when one had no money, were problematic at best.

But still. How long was one expected to live one’s life in the tautly strung fug of Brown’s curdled testosterone? “I could be disappeared,” said a version of Milgrim’s own voice, somewhere within some remaining citadel of self. He might never have used the verb before, in that peculiarly Argentine sense, but now it applied. Or could apply, easily enough. As far as his previous life went, such as it had gotten to be, he’d already been disappeared. Nobody knew where he was, other than his captor. Brown had taken his identification. Milgrim had no cash, no credit card, and he slept in rooms with grayish-green boxes on their doors, to alert Brown should he attempt to leave.

Most crucially, though, there was the matter of medication. Brown provided. Even if Milgrim were to manage to escape, he could only leave with at most a day’s supply of functionality. Brown never provided more than that.

He sighed, settling through the warmly rippling amniotic soup of his state.

This was good. This was very good. If only he could take it with him.

East on La Brea, Alberto steered the Aztec-lacquered VW, Hollis beside him. “Bobby’s agoraphobic,” he told her, waiting at a light behind a black Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo with heavily tinted glass. “He doesn’t like going out. But he doesn’t like sleeping in the same spot twice, so that’s hard.”

“Was he always like that?” The Cherokee pulled away, ahead, and Alberto followed. She wanted to keep him talking.

“I’ve known him for the past two years, and I couldn’t tell you.”

“Does he have a reputation, in the community, for what he does?” Leaving “community” unlabeled, in hope he’d fill a blank or two for her.

“He’s the best. He was the chief troubleshooter for a company in Oregon that designed professional navigation gear, some military stuff. Says they were very innovative.”

“But he’s down here now helping you put your art together?”

“Enabling. If it weren’t for Bobby, I couldn’t get my stuff up on the grid. Same for the rest of the artists I know here.”

“What about the people who’re doing this in New York, or Tulsa? It’s not just an L.A. thing, is it?”

“Global. It’s global.”

“So who does it for them, what Bobby does?”

“Some of the New York work, Bobby’s involved with that. Linda Morse, she does the bison in Nolita? Bobby. There are people doing it in New York, London, wherever. But Bobby’s ours, here…”

“Is he like…a producer?” Trusting that he’d know she meant music, not film.

He glanced over at her. “Exactly, although I’m not sure I’d want to be quoted.”

“Off the record.”

“He’s like a producer. If someone else were doing what Bobby’s doing for me, my work would be different. Would reach the audience differently.”

“Then would you say that an artist, working in your medium, who had Bobby’s full skill set, would be…”

“A better artist?”

“Yeah.”

“Not necessarily. The analogy with recording music holds true. How much of it is the strength of the material, of the artist, and how much the skill and sensibility of the producer?”

“Tell me about his sensibility.”

“Bobby’s a tech guy, and a kind of mimetic literalist, without knowing it.”

Bobby, she gathered, wasn’t going to be afforded too much aesthetic influence here, however enabling he might be.

“He wants it to look ‘real,’ and he doesn’t have to tie himself in knots over what ‘real’ means. So he gets a kind of punch into the work…”

“Like your River?”

“The main thing is, if I didn’t have Bobby, I couldn’t do any interior pieces. Even some of the exterior installations work better if he triangulates off cell towers. The Fitzgerald piece, he’s actually using Virgin’s RFID system.” He looked worried. “He won’t like it, if I bring you.”

“If you’d asked him, he would’ve said no.”

“That’s right.”

She checked a street sign as they crossed an intersection; they were on Romaine now, in a long stretch of low, nondescript, mostly older-looking industrial buildings. There was very little signage, the rule here seeming to be a tidy anonymity. There would be film vault companies, she guessed, effects houses, even the odd recording studio. The textures were homely, nostalgic: brick, whitewashed concrete blocks, painted-over steel-mullioned windows and skylights, wooden power poles supporting massive arrays of transformers. It looked like the world of American light industry as depicted in a 1950s civics text. Apparently deserted now, though she doubted it would be much busier by day.

Alberto turned off Romaine, pulled over, parked, reached back to get his laptop-and-helmet outfit. “With any luck we’ll be able to view some new work,” he said.

Out of the car, her PowerBook slung over her shoulder in its bag, she followed him toward a featureless, largely windowless structure of white-painted concrete. He stopped beside a green-painted sheet-metal door, handed her the interface device, and pressed a button, set into concrete, that looked like a design-apport from the Standard.

“Look up there,” he said, pointing at nothing in particular, above and to the right of the door. She did, assuming there was a camera, though she couldn’t see it. “Bobby,” he said, “I know you don’t like visitors, let alone uninvited ones, but I think you’ll want to make an exception for Hollis Henry.” He paused, like a showman. “Check it out. It’s her.”

Hollis was about to smile in the direction of the invisible camera, then pretended instead that she was being photographed for a Curfew rerelease. She’d had a trademark semi-frown, in those days. If she invoked the era and sort of relaxed into it, that expression might emerge by default.

“Alberto…Shit…What are you doing?” The voice was tiny, directionless, devoid of gender.

“I’ve got Hollis Henry from the Curfew out here, Bobby.”

“Alberto…”

The tiny voice seemed at a loss for words. “I’m sorry,” she protested, handing the visor rig back to Alberto. “I don’t want to intrude on you. But Alberto’s been showing me his art, explaining how important you are to what he’s doing, and I—”

The green door rattled, opening inward a few inches. A blond forelock and one blue eye edged past it. This should’ve looked ridiculous, childish, but she found it frightening. “Hollis Henry,” he said, his voice no longer tiny, gender restored. The rest of Bobby’s head appeared. He had, as indeed had Inchmale, the true and archaic rock nose. The full-on Townsend-Moon hooter. She only ever found this problematic in males who hadn’t become pop musicians; it seemed, then, in some weirdly inverted way, affected. It looked, to her, as though they’d grown large noses in order to look like rock musicians. More weirdly, perhaps, they all tended—certified accountants, radiologists, or whatever—to the flopping forelock that had traditionally gone with it, back in Muswell Hill or Denmark Street. This, she’d once reasoned, must be due in one of two ways to hairdressers. Either they saw the rock mega-nose and dressed the hair above it out of a call to historical tradition, or they weighed the issue in some instinctive, deeply hairdresserly way, arriving at that massive slash and heft of eye-obscuring forelock through some simple sense of balance.

Bobby Chombo hadn’t much in the way of a chin, though, so perhaps it all was balance for that.

“Bobby,” she said, thrusting out her hand for his. She shook a cool soft hand that felt as though it wanted, though quietly, to be anywhere else at all.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said, opening the door a few more inches. She stepped around it, around his unease, and past him.

And found herself at the edge of an unexpectedly large space. She thought of Olympic pools and indoor tennis courts. The lighting, at least in one central area, was swimming-pool bright: hemispheres of faceted industrial glass and suspended from girders overhead. The floor was concrete, under a coat of some pleasantly gray paint. It was the sort of space she associated with the building of sets and props, or with second-unit photography.

But what was being built here, while possibly very large, was not available to the naked eye. The gray floor had been marked out in what she guessed were two-meter grid squares, loosely drawn in some white powder delivered by one of those spreaders they use on athletic fields. She could see one of these, in fact, a forest-green uniwheeled hopper, propped against the far wall. This grid didn’t seem to be perfectly aligned with whatever grid system the city and this building were aligned with, and she made a note to ask about that. In the illuminated area stood two twenty-foot folding tables, gray, attended by a scattering of Aeron chairs and by carts loaded with PCs. It looked to her like workspace for two dozen people, though there didn’t seem to be anyone here but this big-nosed Bobby.

She turned back to him. He was wearing an electrically green Lacoste golf shirt, narrow white jeans, and a pair of rubber-soled black canvas sneakers with peculiarly long, sharply pointed toes. He might be thirty, she decided, but not much older. She thought he looked as though his clothes were cleaner than he was; there was still a vertical crease down either side of the front of the knit cotton shirt, the white jeans were spotless, but Bobby himself looked in need of a shower. “Sorry to turn up unannounced,” she said, “but I wanted to meet you.”

“Hollis Henry.” He had his hands in the front pockets of the white jeans. It looked as though it took work, getting hands into those pockets.

“Yes, I am,” she said.

“Why’d you bring her here, Alberto?” Bobby wasn’t happy.

“I knew you’d want to meet her.” Alberto walked over to one of the gray tables and put down his laptop and visor rig.

Beyond the table, something like the shape a child draws to represent a rocket ship had been roughly outlined on the floor in Safety Orange gaffer tape. If she was guessing the size of the grid squares correctly, the pointed shape was a good fifteen meters long. Within it, the white gridlines had been rubbed out.

“Have you got Archie up?” Alberto was looking in the direction of the orange tape outline. “They animate the new skins yet?”

Bobby pulled his hands from the pockets of his jeans and rubbed his face. “I can’t believe you did this. Turned up here with her.”

“It’s Hollis Henry. How cool is that?”

“I’ll leave,” she said.

Bobby lowered his hands, tossed his forelock, and rolled his eyes to heaven. “Archie’s up. Maps are on.”

“Hollis,” said Alberto, “check it.” He was holding what she took to be a VR visor of Bobby’s, one that looked nothing like anything you’d find at a garage sale. “Wireless.” She walked over to him, took it from him, and put it on. “You’re going to love this,” he assured her. “Bobby?”

“On my one. Three…Two…”

“Meet Archie,” said Alberto.

Ten feet above the orange tape outline, the glossy, grayish-white form of a giant squid appeared, about ninety feet in total length, its tentacles undulating gracefully. “Architeuthis,” Bobby said. Its one visible eye was the size of an SUV tire. “Skins,” Bobby said.

The squid’s every surface flooded with light, subcutaneous pixels sliding past in distorted video imagery, stylized kanji, wide eyes of anime characters. It was gorgeous, ridiculous. She laughed, delighted.

“It’s for a Tokyo department store,” Alberto said. “Over a street, in Shinjuku. In the middle of all that neon.”

“They’re already using this, for advertising?” She walked toward Archie, then under him. The wireless visor made a difference in the experience.

“I have a show there, in November,” said Alberto.

Yeah, she thought, looking up at the endless rush of imagery along Archie’s distal surface, River would fly, in Tokyo.