Spook Country (7 page)

H e remembered her apartment in San Isidro, near the big train station. Exposed wires crossed the high walls like vines, bare bulbs suspended, pots and pans on sturdy hooks. Her altar there was a maze of objects, charged with meaning. Vials of foul water, the half-assembled plastic kit of a Soviet bomber, a soldier’s felt shoulder patch in purple and yellow, old bottles with bubbles trapped within their glass, air from days gone a hundred years or more. These things comprised a mesh, Juana said, about which the deities were more easily manifest. Our Lady of Guadalupe had looked down upon it all, from her painting on the wall.

That altar, like the one here in her Spanish Harlem apartment, had been dedicated primarily to He Who Opens The Way, and to Ochun, their paired energies never quite in balance, never entirely resting.

The slaves had been forbidden the worship of their home gods, so they had joined the Catholic Church and celebrated them as saints. Each deity had a second, a Catholic face, like the god Babalaye, who was Lazarus, raised by Christ from the dead. Babalaye’s dance was the Dance of the Walking Dead. In San Isidro, deep in the long evenings, he had seen Juana smoke cigars, and dance, possessed.

Now he was here with her, these years later, early in the morning, seated before her New York altar, as tidily dusted as the rest of her apartment. Those who didn’t know would only think it a shelf, but Tito saw that her oldest bottles were there, the ones with ancient weather trapped in their cores.

He had just finished describing the old man.

Juana no longer smoked cigars. Nor danced, he supposed, though he wouldn’t bet on it. She reached forward and from a small plate on her altar took four pieces of coconut meat. She passed the fingers of her other hand across the floor, before kissing the fingertips and their wholly symbolic dust. She closed her eyes, praying briefly in the language that Tito could not understand. She asked a question in that language, her tone firm, shook the coconut pieces in her cupped hands, and tossed them down. She sat, elbows on her knees, considering them.

“All have fallen meat to heaven. It speaks of justice.” She collected them and threw them again. Two up, two down. She nodded. “Confirmation.”

“Of what?”

“I asked what comes with this man who troubles you. He troubles me as well.” She tossed the four shards of coconut into a tin Dodgers wastebasket. “The orishas may sometimes serve us as oracles,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean they’ll tell us much, or even that they’ll know what will happen.”

He moved to assist her, when she rose, but she brushed his hands away. She wore a dull-gray dress with a zippered front, like a uniform, and a matching kerchief, or babushka, beneath which she was largely bald. Her eyes were dark amber, their whites yellowed like ivory. “I will make your breakfast now.”

“Thank you.” It would have been useless to decline, though he had no desire to do that. She shuffled slowly toward her kitchen in gray slippers that seemed to match her institutional dress.

“Do you remember your father’s place at Alamar?” Over her shoulder from the kitchen.

“The buildings looked like plastic bricks.”

“Yes,” she said, “they wanted it as much like Smolensk as possible. I thought it perverse of your father, to live there. He had his choice, after all, and so few did.”

He stood, the better to watch her old hands patiently slice and butter the bread for the toaster oven, fill the tiny stovetop aluminum espresso maker with water and coffee, put milk in a steel jug.

“He had choices, your father. More perhaps than had your grandfather.” She looked back, meeting his eyes.

“Why was that?”

“Your grandfather was very powerful, in Cuba, though secretly, while the Russians stood to remain. Your father was a powerful man’s first son, his favorite. But your grandfather had known, of course, that the Russians would be going, that things would change. When they left, in 1991, he anticipated the ‘special period,’ the shortages and deprivation, anticipated Castro reaching for the very symbol of his archenemies, the American’s dollar, and of course he anticipated his own subsequent loss of power. I will tell you a secret, though, about your grandfather.”

“Yes?”

“He was a Communist.” She laughed, a startlingly girlish sound in the tiny kitchen, as though someone else might be there. “More a Communist than a santero. He believed. All the ways things failed, and in the ways we knew, that the ordinary people could not know, and still, in his way, he believed. He, like myself, had been to Russia. He, like myself, had had eyes to see. Still, he believed.” She shrugged, smiling. “I think that it allowed him some extra degree of leverage, some special grasp, on those to whom we, through him, had become fastened. They had always sensed that about him, that he might believe. Not in the tragic, clownish fashion of the East Germans, but with something like innocence.” The smell of toasting bread filled the kitchen. She used a small bamboo whisk to froth the milk, as it neared boiling. “Of course, they had no way to prove it. And everyone purported to believe, at least publicly.”

“Why do you say that he had fewer choices?”

“The head of a large family has duties. And we had already become a different sort of family, a firma, as we are today. He put his family before his desire for a more perfect state. If it had been him, alone, I believe he would have stayed. Perhaps he would be alive today. Your father’s death, of course, strongly affected his decision to bring us here. Sit.” She brought a yellow tray to the small table, with the tostada on a white saucer, and a large white cup of café con leche.

“This man, he enabled Grandfather to bring us here?”

“In a sense.”

“What does that mean?”

“Too many questions.”

He smiled up at her. “Is he CIA?”

She glowered at him from beneath the gray kerchief. The pale tip of her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth, then vanished. “Was your grandfather DGI?”

Tito dunked and chewed a piece of his tostada, considering. “Yes.”

“There you are,” said Juana. “Of course he was.” She brushed her wrinkled hands together, as if wishing to be free of the traces of something. “But who did he work for? Think of our saints, Tito. Two faces. Always, two.”

I nchmale had always been balding and intense, and Inchmale had always been middle-aged—even when she first met him, when they were both nineteen. People who really liked the Curfew tended to like Inchmale or to like her, but seldom both. Bobby Chombo, she thought, as Alberto drove her back to the Mondrian, was one of the former. But that had been a good thing, really, because it had meant that she’d been able to lay out her best public pieces of Inchmale without revealing herself, then shuffle them, palm them, rearrange them, withdraw them, to help keep him talking. She’d never asked Inchmale, but she took it for granted he did the same with her.

And it hadn’t hurt that Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn’t war. Inchmale understood it, though, and indeed had championed it, as soon as it was digitally possible pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous.

She’d also assumed that she had Bobby’s Marlboro binge on her side, though she’d noticed that she was starting to count his smokes, and to worry, as he neared the bottom of his pack, about having one herself. She’d tried distracting herself with sips of room-temperature Red Bull from a previously unopened can she’d excavated from the table clutter, but it had only made her bug-eyed with caffeine, or perhaps with taurine, the drink’s other famous ingredient, extracted supposedly from the testicles of bulls. Bulls generally looked more placid than she now felt, or perhaps those were cows. She didn’t know cattle.

Bobby Chombo’s sampling talk had helped her make a kind of sense of him, of his annoying shoes and his tight white pants. He was, basically, a DJ. Or DJ-like, in any case, which was what counted. His day job, troubleshooting navigational systems or whatever it was, made a sort of sense too. It was, often as not, the wonk side of being DJ-like, and often as not the side that paid the rent. Either it was his wonk-hipster thing that had so strongly evoked Inchmale for her, or that he was the sort of jerk that Inchmale had always been able to handle so efficiently. Because, she supposed, Inchmale had been more or less that sort of jerk himself.

“It went better than I expected it to,” said Alberto, interrupting her thoughts. “He’s a difficult person to get to know.”

“I went to a gig in Silverlake, a couple of years ago, what they call reggaeton. Sort of reggae-salsa fusion.”

“Yeah?”

“Chombo. The DJ was a big deal in that scene: El Chombo.”

“That’s not Bobby.”

“I’ll say. But why’s our Bobby white-guy a Chombo too?”

Alberto grinned. “He likes people to wonder about that. But his Chombo’s a kind of software.”

“Software?”

“Yes.”

She decided there wasn’t much to be thought about that, at this point. “He sleeps there?”

“He doesn’t go out, unless he has to.”

“You said he won’t sleep twice in the same square of that grid.”

“Never mention that to him, no matter what, okay?”

“And he does gigs? DJs?”

“He podcasts,” Alberto said.

Her cell rang.

“Hello?”

“Reg.”

“I was just thinking about you.”

“Why was that?”

“Another time.”

“Get my e-mail?”

“I did.”

“Angelina asked me to call, re-reiterate. Ree-ree.”

“I get the message, thanks. I don’t think there’s much I can do about it, though, except do what I’m doing and see what happens.”

“Are you taking some sort of seminar?” he asked.

“Why?”

“You sounded uncharacteristically philosophical, just then.”

“I saw Heidi, earlier.”

“Christ,” said Inchmale. “Was she walking on her hind legs?”

“She drove past me in a very nice-looking car. Headed in the direction of Beverly Hills.”

“She’s been headed in that direction since the birth canal.”

“I’m with someone, Reg. Have to go.”

“Toodles.” He was gone.

“Was that Reg Inchmale?” Alberto asked.

“Yes, it was.”

“You saw Heidi Hyde tonight?”

“Yes, while you were getting rousted in Virgin. She drove past on Sunset.”

“Wow,” said Alberto. “How likely is that?”

“Statistically, who knows? Subjectively, feels to me, not so weird. She lives in Beverly Hills, works in Century City.”

“Doing what?”

“Something in her husband’s company. He’s a tax lawyer. With his own production company.”

“Eek,” said Alberto, after a pause, “there really is a life after rock.”

“You’d better believe it,” she assured him.

ODILE’S ROBOT appeared to have died, or to be hibernating. It sat there by the drapes, inert and unfinished-looking. Hollis nudged it with the toe of her Adidas.

There were no messages on the hotel voice mail.

She got her PowerBook out of the bag, woke it, and tried holding the back of the open screen against the window. Did she want to rejoin trusted wireless network SpaDeLites47? Yes, please. SpaDeLites47 had treated her right, before. She assumed SpaDeLites47 was in the period apartment building across the street.

No mail. One-handed, supporting the laptop with her other, she Googled “bigend.”

First up was a Japanese site for “BIGEND,” but this seemed to be a brand of performance motor oil for dragsters.

She tried the link for his Wikipedia entry.

Hubertus Hendrik Bigend, born June 7, 1967, in Antwerp, is the founder of the innovative global advertising agency Blue Ant. He is the only child of Belgian industrialist Benoît Bigend and Belgian sculptor Phaedra Seynhaev. Much has been made, by Bigend’s admirers and detractors alike, of his mother’s early links with the Situationist International (Charles Saatchi was famously but falsely reported to have described him as “a jumped-up Situationist spiv”) but Bigend himself has declared that the success of Blue Ant has entirely to do with his own gifts, one of which, he claims, is the ability to find precisely the right person for a given project. He is very much a hands-on micromanager, in spite of the firm’s remarkable growth in the past five years.

Her cell began to ring, in her bag, back on the table. If she moved the PowerBook, she’d lose the wifi from across the street, though this page would still be cached. She crossed to the table, put the laptop down on it, and dug her phone out of her bag. “Hello?”

“Hubertus Bigend, for Hollis Henry.”

It sounded as though her phone had received some sort of corporate upgrade. She froze, out of primeval fear that he’d caught her Googling him, peering into his Wiki.

“Mr. Bigend,” she said, giving up on the idea of any attempt at the Franco-Belgian pronunciation.

“Miss Henry. Consider us introduced, shall we? You may have no idea why I’m calling. The Node start-up, you see, is a project of mine.”

“I’ve only just Googled you.” She opened her mouth wide, wider, in the silent scream that Inchmale had taught her reduces tension.

“Ahead of the game, then. What we want in a journalist. I’ve just spoken myself with Rausch, in London.”

If Rausch is in London, she wondered, then where are you? “Where are you?”

“I’m in the lobby of your hotel. I was wondering if you might like a drink.”

Milgrim was reading the New York Times, finishing his breakfast coffee in a bakery on Bleecker, while Brown conducted a series of quiet, tense, and extremely pissed-off conversations with whoever was supposed to be in charge of watching the IF’s known exits, when the IF was home sleeping—or whatever the IF did, when he was home. “Known exits” seemed to Milgrim to imply that the IF’s neighborhood might be riddled with gaslit opium tunnels and the odd subterranean divan, a possibility Milgrim found appealing, however unlikely.

Whoever was on the other end of this particular call was not having a good morning. The IF and another male had left the IF’s building, walked to the Canal Street subway, entered, and vanished. Milgrim knew, from having also overheard Brown’s half of other conversations, that the IF and his family tended to do that, and particularly around subways. Milgrim imagined that the IF and his family had the keys to some special kind of subway-based porosity, a way into the cracks and holes and spaces between things.

Milgrim himself was having a better morning than he recalled having had in some time, and this in spite of Brown’s having shaken him awake to translate Volapuk. Then he’d fallen back into some dream he could no longer remember, not a pleasant one, something about blue light coming from his skin, or beneath it. But all in all very pleasant to be here in the Village this early in the day, having coffee and a pastry and enjoying the Times someone had left.

Brown didn’t like the New York Times. Brown actually didn’t like news media of any kind, Milgrim had come to understand, because the news conveyed did not issue from any reliable, that was to say, governmental, source. Nor could it, really, under present conditions of war, as any genuine news, news of any strategic import whatever, was by definition precious, and not to be wasted on the nation’s mere citizenry.

Milgrim certainly wasn’t going to argue with any of that. If Brown had declared the Queen of England to be a shape-shifting alien reptile, craving the warm flesh of human infants, Milgrim would not have argued.

But midway through a third-page piece on the NSA and data mining, something occurred to Milgrim. “Say,” he said to Brown, who’d just ended a call and was looking at his phone as if he wished he knew a way to torture it, “this NSA data-mining thing…”

It hung there, between them, somewhere above the table. He wasn’t in the habit of initiating conversations with Brown, and for good reason. Brown looked from the phone to Milgrim, his expression unchanged.

“I was thinking,” Milgrim heard himself say, “about your IF. About the Volapuk. If the NSA can do what it says they can, here, then it should be pretty easy to fold a logarithm into the mix that would grab your Volapuk and nothing else. You wouldn’t even need much of a sample of their family dialect. You could just find half a dozen dialectal examples of the form and shoot for a kind of average. Anything that went through the phone system, after that, that had that tag, bingo. You wouldn’t need to be changing any more batteries on the IF’s coatrack.”

Milgrim was genuinely pleased with having thought of this. But Brown, he saw, was not happy with Milgrim for having thought of it. “That’s only good for overseas calls,” Brown said, and seemed to be considering whether or not to hit him.

“Ah,” Milgrim said. He put his head down and pretended to read, until Brown got back on the phone, quietly chewing someone else out for losing the IF and the other male.

Milgrim couldn’t get back into his article, but continued to pretend to read the paper. Something was working its way up, inside him, from some new and peculiarly discomfiting angle. So far he’d taken it for granted that Brown, and by extension his people, were government agents of some kind, presumably federal. And yet, if the NSA had been doing what this Times article said they had been doing, and he, Milgrim, was reading about it, why should he suppose that what Brown had said was true? The reason Americans weren’t freaking out over this NSA thing, Milgrim assumed, was that they’d already been taking it for granted, since at least the 1960s, that the CIA was tapping everybody’s phone. It was the stuff of bad episodic television. It was something little kids knew to be true.

But if there were Volapuk being texted in Manhattan, and the real government really needed it as badly as Brown seemed to need it, wouldn’t they get it? Milgrim folded his paper.

But what if, asked the upwardly burrowing voice, Brown was not really a government agent? There had until now been some part of Milgrim willing to suppose that being held captive by federal agents was in a sense the same as being under their protection. While the majority of him had suspected this was a dubious formulation, it had taken something, perhaps the new calm and perspective afforded by his change of medication, to bring him to this moment of unified awareness: What if Brown was just an asshole with a gun?

It was something to think about, and to his surprise he found that he could. “I need to use the washroom,” he said.

Brown muted his phone. “There’s a back door,” he said, “out the kitchen. Someone’s out there, in case you think you’re leaving. If they thought you might get away, they’d shoot you.”

Milgrim nodded. Got up. He wasn’t going to run, but for the first time, he thought Brown might be bluffing.

In the washroom he ran cool water over his wrists, then looked at his hands. They were still his. He wiggled his fingers. Amazing, really.