Spook Country (16 page)

B y the time Milgrim had finished shaving and gotten dressed, Brown was holding a meeting in the adjoining room. Milgrim had never known Brown to have a visitor before, and now he was having three, three males. They had arrived within minutes of Brown having made his call, and Milgrim had gotten brief glimpses of them as they’d filed into Brown’s room. From what little he’d managed to see, he knew that they were white and conventionally dressed, and that was it. He wondered if they too had been staying here, particularly as two of them were in shirtsleeves and carried no coats or jackets.

He could hear them talking now, conversing quickly, but couldn’t make anything out. Brown was making various decisive sounds, yeas or nays, and periodically interrupting to reel off what Milgrim took to be revised strategic requirements.

Milgrim decided to treat this as opportunity to pack, and having considered the circumstances, to re-Rize. Packing consisted of putting his book in the pocket of his overcoat, and seeing to toiletries. He rinsed and dried the blades of his blue plastic razor. He used a piece of toilet paper to tidy up the threads and cap of his small tube of Crest toothpaste; replacing the cap, he carefully furled the tube to its shortest possible length, watching it plump out satisfyingly as he did so. He washed and rinsed his white toothbrush, dried its bristles with one piece of toilet paper, and then wrapped them loosely in another. He considered taking the small bar of New Yorker soap, which lathered up nicely, but then he wondered why it was that he assumed they wouldn’t be coming back.

Something was up. Afoot. He remembered reading Sherlock Holmes, centuries before. Leaving the bar of wet soap on the edge of the soap-and-whisker-speckled sink, he tucked the rest of his possessions away in the various pockets of the overcoat. He assumed that Brown would still have the wallet and identification he’d confiscated on first picking Milgrim up (he’d pretended to be a cop, and Milgrim wouldn’t have doubted it, not on that first meeting), but otherwise these grooming aids, and his book, plus the clothes he was wearing and the overcoat, comprised the whole of Milgrim’s worldly possessions. Plus two 5 mg tablets of Rize. He thumbed the pack’s penultimate dose into his palm and considered it. Was this a worldly possession, he wondered. Unworldly, he decided, swallowing it.

Hearing Brown’s meeting conclude with what sounded like a determined slapping of palms, he walked to the window. No need to see them, really, or they him. If indeed they weren’t already quite familiar with him. But still.

“Move it,” said Brown, from the door.

“I’m all packed.”

“You’re what?”

“‘Game is afoot.’”

“You want a broken rib?”

But Brown’s heart wasn’t in it, Milgrim saw. He was distracted, focused utterly on his impending operation, on whatever needed to be done now with regard to IF and Subject. He had his cased laptop in his hand, and his other black nylon bag slung across his shoulder. Milgrim watched him pat himself down with his free hand, locating pistol, handcuffs, flashlight, knife, whatever other empowerments he didn’t leave home without. Spectacles, Milgrim recited to himself, testicles, wallet, watch. “Ready when you are,” he said, and walked past Brown into the hallway.

As his benzo-boost kicked in, in the elevator, Milgrim became aware of a not unpleasurable excitement. Something really was afoot, and as long as it didn’t mean another four hours in the laundry on Lafayette, it promised to be interesting.

Brown marched them across the lobby, to the main entrance, and out into surprisingly bright sunlight. A bellman was holding open the driver’s door of a recently washed silver Corolla and proffering the key, which Brown took, handing the man two dollars. Milgrim rounded the back of the Corolla and got in. Brown was placing his laptop and other bag on the floor behind the passenger seat. When they rode together in a car like this, Milgrim knew, he rode shotgun, probably because that made him easier to shoot. Was that why they called it that? He heard Brown power-lock the doors.

Brown headed east on Thirty-fourth. The weather was fine, bespeaking some genuine onset of spring, and Milgrim imagined himself a pedestrian, strolling pleasantly. No, he thought, a pedestrian strolling with a mere 5 mg of Rize on hand. He reframed the image, hanging Brown’s black bag over his shoulder. Wherein, he assumed, was kept the brown paper bag with the Rize supply.

“Red Team One,” Brown said, firmly, as they took a right on Broadway, “south on Broadway, for Seventeenth.” He listened to some distant voice.

Milgrim looked over and saw the gray plug in Brown’s ear, the gray wire vanishing into the collar of his jacket.

“I’m going to leave you in the car,” Brown said, touching something at his collar, a mute control. “I’ve got Transit Authority tags that’ll keep the traffic cops off it, but I’m thinking I’ll cuff you.”

Milgrim knew better than to offer an opinion on this.

“But this is New York,” Brown said.

“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, tentatively.

“You look like a junkie. Cop thinks you’re doing a Transit Authority car, then sees you’re cuffed to it, alone, not good.”

“No,” said Milgrim.

“So no cuffs.”

Milgrim said nothing.

“I’m going to need these cuffs today,” said Brown, and smiled. Milgrim couldn’t remember having seen Brown smile. “You, on the other hand, are going to need the dope in this bag, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, having already come to the same conclusion, a few minutes before.

“I get back to this car and your ass isn’t in it, you’re finished.”

Milgrim wondered what Brown thought constituted deeper shit, for Milgrim, in his current situation, although having benzo-seizures while homeless and penniless on the streets of Manhattan actually did fully qualify, by Milgrim’s own standards, and maybe Brown knew it. “I hear you,” Milgrim said, trying for a tone that would match Brown’s, but not antagonize him. He had a feeling, though, that Brown’s “finished” meant dead, and that was a more peculiar feeling than he would have expected.

“Copy,” Brown said, to the voices in his ear. “Copy.”

T he Guerreros took him up Broadway, through the sunlight. He hadn’t expected this, assuming he’d reach Union Square by subway, then round and circle until the time of his meeting. But no, and so he walked with them, just as they led him. And soon he was simply a man walking, the orishas spread through a seemingly ordinary awareness, invisible as drops of ink in a volume of water, his pulse steady, enjoying the look of the sun on the floral ironwork that supported many of these old buildings. This was, he knew, though he avoided directly considering it, a still higher state of readiness.

A part of him felt dismay at the thought that he very probably would leave this city soon, perhaps before sunset. It seemed impossible, somehow, but once it must have seemed impossible that he would leave Havana. He couldn’t remember if it had, though he’d left Cuba on equally short notice, taking nothing but the clothes he’d been wearing when his mother had fetched him from a restaurant. He’d been eating a ham sandwich. He could still remember the taste of the bread, a type of square bun that had been a feature of his childhood. Where would he be, tomorrow?

He crossed Houston. Pigeons flew up from the crosswalk.

The summer before, he’d met two NYU students in Washington Square. They were freerunners, devotees of something loosely akin to systema, and also practitioners of what they called tricking. They were black, and had assumed him to be Dominican, though they’d called him “China.” He wondered, now, continuing north, whether this sun would bring them to Washington Square today. He’d enjoyed their company, the demonstrations and exchanges of lesser techniques. He learned the backtucks and other tricks they practiced, incorporating them into his systema, but declined to join them in freerunning, for which they had already been charged with minor infractions of trespass or public safety. He had been looking forward to seeing them again.

He passed Bleecker, then Great Jones Street, the namesake of the latter always imagined as some giant, a creature from the age of iron-framed buildings, bowler-hatted, shoulders level with second-story windows. A figment of Alejandro’s, from the days of his apprenticeship to Juana. He remembered Alejandro sending him into Strand Books, which he soon would be passing, for titles printed in particular years, in particular countries, on various specific types of stock. To be purchased for no content other than the blank endpapers, pages Tito had thought of as stories left unwritten, to be filled in by Alejandro with intricately constructed identities.

He walked on, never looking back, confident that he wasn’t being followed by anyone who wasn’t a relative; had it been otherwise, he would have been alerted by one or another family member from the team he knew was keeping pace with him, scattered along a constantly moving two-block stretch of either sidewalk, continually trading off positions according to a KGB protocol older than Juana.

Now he saw his cousin Marcos stepping off the curb, half a block ahead. Marcos the conjuror, the pickpocket, with his dark curls.

He walked on.

HAVING DISCARDED his phone, he began to check the time on clocks, through the windows of banks and dry cleaners, as he neared the southern end of Union Square. Clock time was not for the orishas. It would be up to him to coordinate his arrival.

Fifteen to one. On East Fourteenth, beneath the weird art numbers frantically telling a time nobody could read, he looked with Oshosi toward the distant canvas stalls of the market.

And then they passed him, laughing, his two freerunners from the summer and Washington Square. They hadn’t seen him. He remembered, now, that they lived in NYU dorms, here in Union Square. He watched them go, wishing he could go with them, while around him the orishas briefly and very faintly rippled the air, like heat rising above August pavement.

S he lay very still, on her back, the sheet forming a cool dark tunnel, and gave her body explicit permission to relax. This made her remember doing the same thing in an overhead berth on a tour bus, but with a sleeping bag instead of sheets, and foam earplugs instead of asking the desk to hold her calls, and setting the ring on her cell to silent.

Inchmale had called it womb-return, but she knew it was the opposite, really; not so much the calm of not yet having been born, but the stillness of already having died. She didn’t want to feel like a fetus, but like the recumbent figure carved atop a sarcophagus, cool stone. When she’d explained that to Jimmy Carlyle, once, he’d cheerfully told her that was pretty much exactly what he was after with heroin. Something about that exchange had left her very glad she’d never been much attracted to drugs, other than garden-variety cigarettes.

But anything that shook her sufficiently, really hard, could get her into tube mode, preferably in a darkened room. The departures of serious boyfriends had done it, as had the end of the Curfew, her initial major losses when the dot-com bubble had popped (the fact of those holdings having been residue of a serious boyfriend, if you wanted to look at it that way) had done it, and her subsequent (and she supposed possibly final, the way things were headed) major financial loss had done it as well, when her friend Jardine’s ambitious shot at an indie music emporium in Brooklyn had not so unexpectedly failed. Investment in that had initially seemed like a sort of hobby move, something fun and open-ended and potentially even profitable, that she could afford to take a chance on, given the dot-coms had briefly made her worth some single-digit number of millions, at least on paper. Inchmale, of course, had lobbied for her to dump the start-up stocks at what she now knew had been their white-hot and utterly evanescent peak. Inchmale, being Inchmale, had by then already dumped his own, which had driven acquaintances crazy, as they’d all believed he was throwing away the future. Inchmale had told them that some futures needed throwing away, badly. And Inchmale, of course, had never sunk a quarter of his net worth into founding a large, aggressively indie, bricks-and-mortar retail establishment. Selling music on the full variety of what were, after all, Inchmale had insisted, dead platforms.

Now, she knew, she’d been returned to the tunnel by that sudden stab of weird fear, in Starbucks; fear that Bigend had gotten her into something that might be at once hugely and esoterically dangerous. Or, she thought, if you looked at it as process, by the cumulative strangeness of what she’d encountered since she’d accepted the assignment from Node. If indeed Node existed. Bigend seemed to be saying that Node only existed to whatever extent he might ultimately need it to.

What she needed, she knew, however belatedly, was a second career. Helping Hubertus Bigend exercise his curiosity wasn’t going to be it, and neither, she knew absolutely, was anything else Blue Ant might offer her. She had always, she’d reluctantly come to know, wanted to write. During the Curfew’s heyday, she’d frequently suspected that she was one of very few singers who spent a certain part of every interview wishing she were on the other side of the microphone. Not that she wanted to be interviewing musicians. She was fascinated by how things worked in the world, and why people did them. When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself. If she could do that and pay the grocery bills, the ASCAP check could pay the rent, and she’d see where that could go.

She had, during the Curfew days, written a few pieces for Rolling Stone, a few more for Spin. With Inchmale, she’d written the first in-depth history of the Mopars, their mutual favorite sixties garage band, though they hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to pay them to publish it. In the end, though, it had run in Jardine’s record store’s in-house magazine, its publication one of the few things she’d gotten out of that particular investment.

Inchmale, she guessed, was sitting up in business class, headed for New York, reading the Economist, a magazine he read exclusively on airplanes, swearing that on arrival he promptly and invariably forgot every word.

She sighed. Let go, she told herself, though she had no idea of what.

Alberto’s virtual monument to Helmut Newton appeared, in her mind’s eye. Silver-nitrate girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.

“Let go,” she said, aloud, and fell asleep.

NO BORDERS of glare edged the multiple layers of drapes, when she woke. Already evening. She lay there in her sheet-tube, no longer needing it in the same way. The edge of her anxiety had receded, not quite past the horizon but sufficient to have restored her curiosity.

Where was Bobby Chombo, now? Had he been hauled off, along with his equipment, by the Department of (as Inchmale called it) Homemade Security? Charged (or not) with dicking around with some scheme to smuggle weapons of mass destruction? Something about the quietly deep peculiarity of those two cleaners led her to think not. Rather, she thought, he’d done a runner, but with considerable help. Some crew had come in, loaded his gear into that white truck, and hauled him off, elsewhere. He might be no more than a few blocks from the first place, for all she knew. But if he’d cut himself off from Alberto, and the rest of that art scene, what were her chances of finding him again?

Somewhere, she thought, looking up at the almost invisible whiteness of the darkened room’s ceiling, there was, supposedly, the container. A long, rectangular box of…were they made of steel? Yes, she decided, steel. She had had carnal knowledge of an Irish architect in one, on his rural property in Derry. He’d converted it into a studio. Oversized portholes cut with a torch, glass framed in with plywood. Definitely steel. His had been insulated originally for refrigeration, she remembered him telling her; the simpler ones too chilly, prone to condensation of human breath.

She’d never really thought about them, before. You glimpsed them from freeways, sometimes, stacked tightly as Odile’s robotic Lego. An aspect of contemporary reality so common as to remain unconsidered, unquestioned. Almost everything, she supposed, traveled in them now. Not raw materials, like coal or grain, but manufactured things. She remembered news items about them being lost at sea, in storms. Breaking open. Thousands of Chinese rubber duckies bobbing gaily along the great currents. Or sneakers. Something about hundreds of left sneakers washing up on the beach, the rights having been shipped separately to prevent pilferage. And someone else, on a yacht in the harbor at Cannes, telling scary transatlantic sailing stories; how they don’t sink immediately, containers gone over the side, and the silent, invisible threat they then pose to sailors.

She seemed to have cycled through most of the fear she’d felt, before. Curiosity hadn’t replaced it entirely, but she had to admit she was curious. One of the scary things about Bigend, she supposed, was that with him you stood an actual chance of finding some things out. And then where would you be? Were there things that were, in themselves, deeply problematic to learn? Definitely, though it would depend on who knew you knew them, she decided.

But then the small dry sound of an envelope being slid under the door, familiar from her life on tour, suddenly triggered, as it always had, the atavistic mammalian fear of nest invasion.

She turned on a light.

The envelope, when she retrieved it from the carpet, contained a color printout, on unexceptional paper, of a photograph of the white truck, parked beside the loading bay of Bobby Chombo’s rented factory.

She turned it over, finding, inscribed in Bigend’s vaguely cuneiform hand: “I’m in the lobby. Let’s talk. H.”

Curiosity. Time she satisfied some. And time, she knew, to decide whether or not she was willing to go on with this.

She went into the bathroom, to ready herself to meet Bigend again.