Spook Country (2 page)

T he old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

If Tito were to see one of those announcing the very latest, the most recent and terrible news, yet could know that it had always been there, fading, through every kind of weather, unnoticed until today, that might feel something like meeting the old man in Washington Square, beside the concrete chess tables, and carefully passing him an iPod, beneath a folded newspaper.

Each time the old man, expressionless and looking elsewhere, pocketed another iPod, Tito noticed the dull gold of his wristwatch, its dial and hands almost lost behind the worn plastic crystal. A dead man’s watch, like the ones jumbled in battered cigar boxes at the flea market.

His clothes were like a dead man’s as well, cut from fabrics Tito imagined exuding their own chill, a cold distinct from the end of this uneven New York winter. The cold of unclaimed luggage, of institutional corridors, of steel lockers scoured to bare metal.

But surely this was costume, the protocol of appearance. The old man could not be genuinely poor and do business with Tito’s uncles. Sensing an immense patience, and power, Tito imagined that this old man, for reasons of his own, disguised himself as a revenant from lower Manhattan’s past.

Each time the old man received another iPod, accepting it the way an ancient and sagacious ape might accept a piece of some not particularly interesting fruit, Tito half-expected him to crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then to draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity.

And now, across a steaming tureen of duck soup, in this second-floor restaurant overlooking Canal Street, Tito found himself unable to explain this to Alejandro, his cousin. In his room, earlier, he had been layering sounds, attempting to express in music these feelings the old man woke in him. He doubted he would ever play that file for Alejandro.

Alejandro, who had never been interested in Tito’s music, looked at him now, his brow smooth between shoulder-length, center-parted hair, said nothing, and carefully ladled soup, first into Tito’s bowl, then into his own. The world outside the restaurant’s windows, beyond words in a red plastic Cantonese neither of them could read, was the color of a silver coin, misplaced for decades in a drawer.

Alejandro was a literalist, highly talented but supremely practical. This was why he had been chosen to apprentice under gray Juana, their aunt, the family’s master forger. Tito had lugged ancient mechanical typewriters through the downtown streets for Alejandro, impossibly heavy machines purchased in dusty warehouses beyond the river. He had run errands for their inked-cloth ribbons and the turpentine Alejandro used to wash out most of their ink. Their native Cuba, Juana taught, had been a kingdom of paper, a bureaucratic maze of forms, of carbon copies in triplicate—a realm the initiate might navigate with confidence and precision. Always precision, in the case of Juana, who had herself been trained in the white-painted subbasements of a building whose upper stories afforded narrow views of the Kremlin.

“He frightens you, this old man,” Alejandro said.

Alejandro had learned Juana’s thousand tricks with papers and adhesives, watermarks and stamps, her magic in improvised darkrooms, and darker mysteries involving the names of children who had died in infancy. Tito had sometimes carried, for months on end, decaying wallets bulging with fragments of the identities Alejandro’s apprenticeship had generated, prolonged proximity to his body removing every trace of the new. He had never touched the cards and folded papers the heat and movement of his body sueded so convincingly. Alejandro, removing them from their stained envelopes of dead man’s leather, had worn surgical gloves.

“No,” Tito said, “he doesn’t frighten me.” Though really he wasn’t sure; fear was a part of it, but he didn’t seem to fear the old man himself.

“Perhaps he should, cousin.”

The strength of Juana’s magic had faded, Tito knew, amid new technologies and an increasing governmental stress on “security,” by which was meant control. The family relied less now on Juana’s skills, obtaining most of their documents (Tito guessed) from others, ones more attuned to present needs. Alejandro, Tito knew, was not sorry about this. At thirty, eight years older than Tito, he had come to regard life in the family as at best a mixed blessing. The drawings Tito had seen, taped to fade in sunlight against the windows of Alejandro’s apartment, were a part of this. Alejandro drew beautifully, seemingly in any style, and there was an understanding between them, unspoken, that Alejandro had begun to carry the subtleties of Juana’s magic uptown, into a world of galleries and collectors.

“Carlito,” Alejandro named an uncle now, carefully, passing Tito a small white china bowl of greasy, scented warmth. “What has Carlito told you about him?”

“That he speaks Russian.” They were speaking Spanish. “That if he addresses me in Russian, I may reply in Russian.”

Alejandro raised an eyebrow.

“And that he knew our grandfather, in Havana.”

Alejandro frowned, his white china spoon poised above his soup. “An American?”

Tito nodded.

“The only Americans our grandfather knew in Havana were CIA,” Alejandro said, more softly now, though there was no one else in the restaurant other than the waiter, who was reading a Chinese weekly on his stool behind the till.

Tito remembered going with his mother to the Chinese cemetery behind Calle 23, shortly before he had come to New York. Something had been retrieved from an ossuary there, one of the small houses of bones, and Tito had delivered this elsewhere, proud of his tradecraft. And in the reeking toilet behind a Malecon restaurant he had flicked through the papers, in their mildewed envelope of rubberized fabric. He had no idea what they might have been, now, but he knew they had been typed in an English he’d scarcely known how to read.

He had never told this to anyone, and now did not tell Alejandro.

His feet, in black Red Wing boots, were very cold. He imagined himself slipping luxuriously into a deep Japanese bath of this same duck soup. “He looks like the men who used to stand in the hardware stores along this street,” he said to Alejandro. “Old men in old coats, with nothing else to do.” The hardware stores of Canal were gone now, replaced by cellular shops and counterfeit Prada.

“If you were to tell Carlito that you had seen the same van twice, or even the same woman,” Alejandro told the steaming surface of his soup, “he would send someone else. The protocol demands it.”

Their grandfather too was gone, the author of that protocol, like those old men along Canal Street. His complexly illegal ashes had been flung, one chilly April morning, from a Staten Island Ferry, the uncles shielding ritual cigars against the wind, while the vessel’s resident pickpockets hung well back, away from what they rightly perceived to be a most private activity.

“There has been nothing,” Tito said. “Nothing to indicate any interest.”

“If someone pays us to pass this man contraband—and by the nature of our business we pass nothing else—then someone else is surely interested.”

Tito tested the joints of his cousin’s logic, finding them sound. He nodded.

“You know the expression ‘get a life,’ cousin?” Alejandro had switched to English. “We all need lives, Tito, eventually, if we’re to stay here.”

Tito said nothing.

“How many deliveries, so far?”

“Four.”

“Too many.”

They ate their soup in silence then, hearing trucks rumble over metal, along Canal.

LATER TITO STOOD before the deep sink in his single tall room in Chinatown, washing winter socks with Woolite. Socks were no longer quite so foreign in themselves, but the weight of these, wet, still amazed him. And still his feet were sometimes cold, in spite of a variety of insulated insoles from the surplus store on Broadway.

He remembered the sink in his mother’s apartment in Havana. The plastic bottle filled with the henequen sap she used as a detergent, the pad of coarse fibers from the interior of the same plant, and a small can of charcoal. He remembered the tiny ants, speeding along the edge of his mother’s sink. In New York, Alejandro had once pointed out, ants moved much more slowly.

Another cousin, relocated from New Orleans in the wake of the flood, had spoken of seeing a swarming, glittering ball of red ants in the water. This was how ants avoided drowning, it seemed, and Tito, hearing the story, had thought that his family was like that as well, afloat in America, less numerous but supported by one another on their invisible raft of tradecraft, the protocol.

Sometimes he watched the news in Russian, on the Russian Network of America, on his Sony plasma screen. The voices of the presenters had begun to acquire a dreamlike, submarine quality. He wondered if this was what it felt like, to begin to lose a language.

He rolled his socks, squeezed water and suds from them, emptied and refilled the sink, put them back in to rinse, and dried his hands on an old T-shirt he used as a towel.

The room was square, windowless, with a single steel door and white-painted plasterboard walls. The high ceiling was raw concrete. He sometimes lay on his mattress, staring up, and traced the edges of vanished sheets of plywood there, fossil impressions dating from the pouring of the floor above. There were no other live-in residents. His floor-neighbors were a factory where Korean women sewed children’s clothing, and another, smaller firm, something to do with the Internet. His uncles held the lease here. When they required a place to do certain kinds of business, Tito sometimes slept at Alejandro’s, on his cousin’s Ikea couch.

His own room had a sink and toilet, a hotplate, a mattress, his computer, amp, speakers, keyboards, the Sony television, an iron, an ironing board. His clothing hung on an ancient wheeled iron rack, rescued from the sidewalk on Crosby Street. Beside one of his speakers stood a small blue vase from a Chinese department store on Canal, a fragile thing he had secretly dedicated to the goddess Ochun, she whom Cuban Catholics knew as Our Lady of Charity, at Cobre.

He cabled his Casio keyboard, added warmer water to the rinsing socks, pulled a long-legged folding director’s chair close to the sink, and climbed up into it. Perched in the tall, unsteady chair, from that same Canal Street department store, he settled into the sling of black canvas and lowered his feet into the water. With the Casio across his thighs, he closed his eyes and touched the keys, searching for a tone like tarnished silver.

If he played well, he would fill Ochun’s emptiness.

M ilgrim, wearing the Paul Stuart overcoat he’d stolen the month before from a Fifth Avenue deli, watched Brown unlock the oversized steel-sheathed door with a pair of keys taken from a small transparent Ziploc bag, exactly the sort of bag that Dennis Birdwell, Milgrim’s East Village dealer, used to package crystal.

Brown straightened up, fixing Milgrim with his habitual look of alert contempt. “Open it,” he ordered, shifting slightly on his feet. Milgrim did, keeping a fold of overcoat between his hand and the knob. The door swung open on darkness and the red power indicator of what Milgrim assumed was a computer. He stepped in before Brown had a chance to shove him.

He was concentrating on the tiny tablet of Ativan melting beneath his tongue. It had reached that stage where it was there but not there, merely a focal point of grittiness, reminding him of the microscopic scales on the wings of a butterfly.

“Why do they call it that?” Brown asked, absently, as the uncomfortably bright beam of his flashlight began a methodical interrogation of the room’s contents.

Milgrim heard the door click shut behind them.

It was uncharacteristic of Brown to ask anything absently, and Milgrim took it to indicate tension. “Call it what?” Milgrim resented having to speak. He wanted to concentrate fully on that instant when the sublingual tablet phase-shifted from being to not-being.

The beam came to rest on one of those director’s-chair barstools, standing beside some kind of janitorial sink.

The place smelled of someone living there, but not unpleasantly.

“Why do they call it that?” Brown repeated, with a deliberate and ominous calm. Brown was not the sort of man to willingly voice words or names he found beneath him, either for reasons of their insufficient gravitas or because they were foreign.

“Volapuk,” said Milgrim, feeling the Ativan finally do its not-there trick. “When they text, they’re keying in a visual approximation of Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. They use our alphabet, and some numerals, but only according to the Cyrillic letters they most closely resemble.”

“I asked you why they call it that.”

“Esperanto,” Milgrim said. “That was an artificial language, a scheme for universal communication. Volapuk was another. When the Russians got themselves computers, the keyboards and screen displays were Roman, not Cyrillic. They faked up something that looked like Cyrillic, out of our characters. They called it Volapuk. I guess you could say it was a joke.”

But Brown was not that sort of man. “Fuck that,” he said flatly, his definitive judgment on Volapuk, on Milgrim, on these IFs he was so interested in. IF was Brown-speak, Milgrim had learned, for Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.

“Hold this.” Brown passed Milgrim the flashlight, which was made of knurled metal, professionally nonreflective. The pistol Brown wore beneath his parka, largely made of composite resin, was equally nonreflective. It was like shoes and accessories, Milgrim thought; someone does alligator, the next week they’re all doing it. It was the season of this nonreflective noncolor, in Browntown. But a very long season, Milgrim guessed.

Brown was snapping on a pair of green latex surgical gloves he’d taken from a pocket.

Milgrim held the flashlight where Brown wanted it, savoring the perspective being afforded by the Ativan. He’d once dated a woman who liked to say that the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness. Where was Brown’s powerlessness? Milgrim didn’t know, but now he could admire Brown’s surgically gloved hands, like undersea creatures in some fairyland aquatic theater, trained to mimic the hands of a conjurer.

From a pocket, these had produced a small transparent plastic case, and from this they were cleverly extracting a tiny thing, palest blue and silver, colors that Milgrim thought of somehow as Korean. A battery.

Everything needs batteries, Milgrim thought. Even whatever spooky little unit Brown’s cohort was using to grab the IF’s texting, what little there was of it, both incoming and outgoing, out of the air in this room. Milgrim was curious about that, because as far as he knew it shouldn’t be possible, not without actually having a bug in the IF’s phone. And this IF, Brown had said, seldom used the same phone, or account, twice. He bought them and tossed them on a regular basis—which was no more than Birdwell did, now he thought about it.

Milgrim watched as Brown knelt beside a rack of clothing, feeling with gloved hands beneath the wheeled, cast-iron base at one end. Milgrim wanted to check the labels in the IF’s clothes, some shirts and a black jacket, but he had to keep the light on Brown’s hands. APC, maybe, he judged, squinting. He had seen the IF once, when he and Brown had been sitting in a magazine-and-sandwich place on Broadway. The IF had walked past, beyond the steamed window, and had actually looked in. Brown, taken by surprise, had lost it, hissing codes into his headset, and Milgrim hadn’t understood, at first, that this mild-looking little guy with the black leather porkpie turned up at the front was Brown’s IF. He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it. As far as Milgrim knew, Brown’s people had never intercepted any voice.

These people of Brown’s, they worried Milgrim. Many things worried Milgrim, not the least of them Brown, but he had a special mental folder for Brown’s unseen people. There seemed to be too many of them, for one thing. Was Brown a cop? Were whoever did this text-tapping thing for him cops? Milgrim doubted it. Brown’s people had fed written all over their MO, it seemed to Milgrim, but if that were the case, what did that make Brown?

Brown, as if in answer to this unvoiced query, made a soft, worryingly satisfied grunting sound, from where he knelt on the floor. Milgrim watched the green-gloved hand-creatures reemerge, into their limelight, bearing something matte, black, and partially covered in equally matte and black tape. It had a six-inch rattail of matte black wire, with its own bit of tape, and Milgrim guessed that it might be using this old Garment District rack as additional antenna.

He watched Brown swap in the fresh battery, careful to keep the beam on what Brown was doing, and out of his eyes.

Was Brown a fed of some kind? FBI? DEA? Milgrim had encountered examples of both, enough to know them as very different (and mutually antagonistic) species. He couldn’t imagine Brown as either. These days, though, there must be feds in flavors Milgrim had never even heard of. But something about Brown’s apparent IQ, not terribly high, as Milgrim judged it, and the degree of autonomy he seemed to be manifesting in this operation, whatever it might be, kept niggling at him, right through the hard-bought perspective of the Ativan he needed just to keep standing here without screaming.

He watched Brown replace the bug beneath the rusty base of the old rack, head down, intent on his task.

When Brown stood up, Milgrim saw him knock something dark from the crossbar of the rack. It made no sound when it hit the floor. As Brown took the flashlight and turned, playing it once more over the IF’s belongings, Milgrim reached out and touched a second dark thing that still hung there. Cold wet wool.

Brown’s flashlight’s uncomfortable brilliance found a cheap-looking little vase, made of something nacreous and blue, that stood beside one of the speakers for the IF’s sound system. The amped-up blue-white diode light lent the vessel’s lacquered surface an unreal translucence, as though some process akin to fusion were beginning within it. When the light went out, it was as though Milgrim could still see the vase.

“Out of here,” Brown announced.

On the sidewalk outside, walking briskly toward Lafayette, Milgrim decided that Stockholm syndrome was a myth. Going on a few weeks now, and he still wasn’t empathizing with Brown.

Not even a little bit.