Spook Country (30 page)

O shosi, scout and hunter, had entered Tito in mid-backtuck. He heard the gray car strike the lamppost as his black Adidas found the sidewalk, confusing cause and effect. The orisha propelled him immediately forward, then, like a child walking a doll, making a puppet of its limbs. Oshosi was huge in his head, an expanding bubble forcing him against the gray interior of his skull. He wanted to scream, but Oshosi clamped fingers of cold damp wood around his throat. “Buddy,” he heard someone say. “Hey, buddy, you okay?” Oshosi walked him past the voice, his heart hammering within his rope-wrapped rib cage like a mad bird.

A bearlike, bearded man, in heavy dark clothing, having seen the crash, was climbing into the cab of an enormous pickup. Tito struck the flat black fiberglass cover of the pickup’s bed with the palm of his hand. It boomed hollowly.

“What the fuck you doing?” the man shouted back at him, craning angrily back out of the open door.

“You’re here for me,” said Oshosi, and Tito saw the man’s eyes widen above his black beard. “Open this.”

The man ran back, his face strangely white, tearing at the fastening of the cover. It popped up, and Tito hauled himself in, dropping the hard hat as he collapsed on a large sheet of spotless brown cardboard. He heard a siren.

Something struck his hand. Yellow plastic, with a yellow cord attached. An identification badge. The fiberglass cover came booming down, and Oshosi was gone. Tito groaned, fighting the urge to vomit.

He heard the truck’s door slam, its engine roar, and then they were accelerating.

The man who had followed him, in Union Square. One of the two behind him, there. That man was here, and had just tried to kill him.

His ribs ached, within the cruelly wound rope. He worked the phone from his jeans pocket and opened it, glad of the screen’s light. He speed-dialed the first of the two numbers.

“Yes?” The old man.

“One of the men who were behind me, in Union Square.”

“Here?”

“He tried to hit me, with his car, in front of the hotel. He struck a pole. Police are coming.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you?”

“In your friend’s truck.”

“Are you injured?”

“I don’t think so.”

The signal fizzed, faded. Was gone.

Tito used the glow of the phone to look around the truck’s bed, which proved empty, aside from the hard hat and the yellow-framed identification tag. Ramone Alcin. The photograph looked like anyone. He slipped the cord over his head, closed the phone, and rolled onto his back.

He lay there, slowing his breathing, then checked his body, methodically stretching, for sprains or other damage. How could the man from Union Square have followed him here? Terrible eyes, through the windshield of the gray car. He had seen his death coming, in another’s eyes, for the first time. His father’s death, at the hands of a madman, the old man had said.

The truck stopped, waiting at a light, then turned left.

Tito set the phone to vibrate. Put it back in the side pocket of his jeans.

The truck slowed, pulled over. He heard voices.

Then they drove on, over rattling metal grates.

H aving dropped Tito and driven on, not far at all along this strip of low-lying auto-body repairs and marine supplies, Garreth turned right, into the parking lot of what seemed to be a much taller building, one built on an entirely different scale. Behind it, they pulled in beside a pair of shiny new dumpsters and a row of content-specific recycling bins. The dumpsters, she saw, were covered in runny silk-screened multiples of photographic images. She smelled commercial art.

“We’re location scouts,” he said, taking an orange cardboard PRODUCTION placard from between the seats and putting it on the dash.

“What picture?”

“Untitled,” he said, “but it actually doesn’t have that shabby a budget. Not even by Hollywood standards.” He got out, so she did the same.

And was stunned to discover the brilliantly floodlit vastness of the port, right there, past twelve feet of chain-link and some railroad tracks. The lights were like the lights on a playing field, but taller. A grimly artificial daylight. Towering rows of concrete cylinders, smoothly conjoined, like abstract sculptures. Grain storage, she guessed. Some other, much more high-tech sculptor, had employed huge, strangely ephemeral-looking black tanks, one of which was steaming, cauldron-like, in the cool air. Beyond these, and far taller, were the titanic Constructivist cranes she’d glimpsed on her drive over. Between the tracks and these large-scale sculptures were windowless geometrics in corrugated metal, and a great many shipping containers, stacked like the blocks of some unusually orderly child. She imagined Bobby’s wireframe container suspended above it all, invisible, like Alberto’s fallen River on the sidewalk below the Viper Room.

It generated white noise, this place, she guessed, on some confusingly vast scale. Iron ambients, perceived in the bone. A day here and you’d stop noticing it.

She turned, looking up at the building he’d parked behind, and was again startled by scale. Eight tall stories, its footprint broad and deep enough to allow its mass to be read as a cube. The scale of an older Chicago industrial building, alien here.

“Live-work space,” he said, opening the van’s rear doors. “Studio rental.” He took out the bungee-wrapped dolly, unhooking them, unfolding and extending it. Then the long gray case, which he lay carefully on the pavement beside the dolly. He wasn’t moving too quickly, she thought, but he was moving just as quickly as he could without actually moving too quickly. “Would you mind carrying this tripod, and the bag?” He got a solid grip on the black case, grunting softly as he turned with it and lowered it onto the dolly. He put the gray case on top of it, angled against the extended handle, and began snapping it all together with bungees.

“What’s in it?” she asked, meaning the canvas bag, as she pulled the folded tripod out and put it under her arm.

“A spotting scope. And an apron.”

She picked it up by its canvas handles. “Heavy apron.”

He closed and locked the van’s rear doors, bent to grasp the dolly’s handle.

She looked back at the container stacks, thinking of Bigend’s pirate story. Some of them were close enough to read the names of companies. YANG MING.

CONTSHIP.

He hauled the loaded dolly up an incline, to a double door that reminded her of Bobby’s factory. She followed him, the heavy canvas bag bumping against her knee, as he used one of a ring of several keys to open one of the doors.

It swung shut behind her, locking, as she entered. Brown ceramic tile floor, crisp white walls, good light fixtures. He was turning another key, this one in a steel elevator panel. He pushed a button, which lit. Wide enameled doors jolted open, revealing a room-sized elevator walled with splintery, unpainted plywood. “Serious freight,” he said, approvingly, wheeling the dolly in, the gray and the black cases bound with black bungees. She put the canvas bag down on the paint-spotted floor of the elevator, beside it. He pushed a button. The doors closed and they began to rise.

“I loved the Curfew, when I was in college,” he said. “Still do, I mean, but you know what I mean.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“Why did you break up?”

“Bands are like marriages. Or maybe only good ones are. Who knows why a good one works, let alone why it stops working.”

The elevator stopped, its doors opening to reveal more of the brown tile. She followed him along a white corridor.

“Have you been here before?” she asked.

“No.” He parked the dolly beside a door and got out his keys. “I sent a friend to negotiate an evening’s rental. She’s in film production here, knows what to say. They think we’re scouting it for a night shoot, checking angles.” He turned the key. “But we really are checking angles, so keep your fingers crossed.” He opened the door and pulled the dolly inside. She followed. He found a light switch.

A tall, partially lofted white space, lit by halogen fixtures strung like stainless-steel clothespins along taut high cables. Someone worked here in glass, she saw. Massive fist-thick slabs of green-edged glass, some of them the size of doors, were racked like CDs in raggedly padded constructions of dull galvanized pipe. There were corrugated foil ducts, HEPA filters, exhaust fans. Live-work didn’t strike her as so attractive, if the work involved ground glass. She put the heavy bag down on a workbench, propped the tripod beside it, and scratched her ribs, under her jacket, thinking of ground glass.

“Excuse me,” he said, picking up the tripod, “while I play director of photography.” He crossed to a wide, steel-mullioned window and quickly set up the tripod. “Could you open the bag, please, and bring the scope?” She did, finding a sort of thickly truncated gray telescope atop smooth thick folds of pale blue plastic. She brought it to him, watched as he mounted it on the tripod, removed the black lens caps, and peered through it, making adjustments. He whistled. “Oh. Dear. Fuck.” He whistled. “Pardon me.”

“What?”

“Very nearly buggered. By that roof peak there. Look.”

She squinted through the scope.

The turquoise container seemed to float, just above the slanted metal roof of a windowless building. She assumed it must be stacked atop others, the way they did that.

“Shit out of luck, if that roof were a foot taller,” he said. “We’d no idea.” He was bending over the dolly, unhooking the bungees now. He carried the long case to the workbench and carefully put it down, beside the canvas bag. He returned to the dolly, which lay on the floor now, the black case on top of it. He knelt and took something iPod-sized and yellow from his jacket pocket. He held it near the case, pressed something, then brought it closer, reading a screen.

“What’s that?”

“Dosimeter. Russian. Surplus. Excellent value.”

“What did you just do?”

“Radiation count. All good.” He smiled at her, from where he knelt on the floor.

She was suddenly self-conscious, watching him. She glanced around, noting a zippered white tarp taped so that it sealed off the section under the loft. Pretending interest in this, she walked over and partially undid the white nylon zipper, a six-foot fly that curved to one side, near the bottom. She stuck her head through.

Into someone’s life. A woman’s. The contents of a small apartment had been shoehorned into this space. Bed, dresser, suitcases, bookcases, clothes sagging on a spring-loaded rod. Someone’s childhood staring out from a shelf, in stuffed acrylic fur. A lidded paper Starbucks cup forgotten on the corner of the Ikea dresser. The light, through the white tarp, was diffuse and milky. She felt suddenly guilty. Withdrew her head, zipped up.

He’d opened the long gray case.

It contained a rifle. Or some Surrealist’s take on one. Its wooden stock, in deliriously grained tropical hardwood, was biomorphic, counterintuitive somehow, like something from a Max Ernst landscape. The barrel, which she assumed must be blue steel, like the other metal parts, was encased in a long tube of lustrous gray alloy that reminded her of expensive European kitchenware. Like a rolling pin by Cuisinart. But still, somehow, quite undeniably a rifle, one with a scope, and something else slung beneath its Cuisinart muzzle.

He was unfolding a small black cloth bag that seemed to have its own internal plastic framework.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Catches the shells, as they’re ejected,” he said.

“No,” she said, “that,” indicating the gun.

“Thirty-caliber. Ten-twist, four-groove barrel.”

“He told me you weren’t going to kill anybody.” Behind him, through the window, she saw the glassy black tanks, so weirdly fragile-looking, with their ragged plumes of steam. What would happen if he shot them?

Her cell rang.

Backing away from him, she fumbled in her purse for it, pulling it out with the scrambler dangling from its stub of cable. “Hollis Henry.”

“Ollie’s outside,” said Bigend.

Garreth was staring at her, still holding the black cartridge bag, like some esoteric piece of Victorian mourning equipment.

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“We lost you shortly after you left the car,” Bigend said. “It’s still where you left it. Then you came back on, headed north on Clark. Are you safe?”

Garreth tilted his head, raised his eyebrows.

She looked at the dangling scrambler, realizing that it must have another of Pamela’s GPS units in it. Bastard.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Ollie, though, is definitely not a plus.”

“Shall I send him home?”

“Make sure you do. If you don’t, it’s a deal-breaker.”

“Done,” he said, and was gone.

She closed her phone. “Work,” she said.

“They couldn’t’ve reached you, before,” he said. “I turned on a jammer, when I took you upstairs. You might’ve been wearing a wire. Left it on, until you were aboard. Should’ve told you earlier, but I’ve a one-track mind.” Indicating the rifle, in its bed of gray foam.

“What are you planning on doing with that, Garreth? I think it’s time you told me.”

He picked it up. It seemed to flow around his hands, his thumb actually appearing through one fluidly carved hole. “Nine shots,” he said. “Bolt action. One minute. Evenly spaced along forty feet of Cor-ten steel. A foot above the bottom of the container. That foot clears an interior frame, which we couldn’t penetrate.” He looked at his watch. “But look,” he said, “you can watch me do it. I can’t prepare and explain it to you at the same time, not in any detail. He told you the truth, you know. We aren’t going to injure anyone.” He was attaching the black bag to the rifle. He lay it back on its gray foam. “Time we get you into your apron,” he said, reaching into the canvas bag and bringing out thick folds of pale blue plastic. It slid out to its full length.

“What’s that?”

“Radiologist’s apron,” he said, putting a blue padded loop over her head and coming behind her, where she heard him unfasten, then fasten Velcro. She looked down at the blue and breastless tube her body had become, and understood why the bag had been so heavy.

“Aren’t you going to wear one?”

“I,” he said, taking something much smaller from the bag, “am making do with this butterfly.” He fastened the thing behind his neck, the bulk of it beneath his chin. “Thyroid protection. By the way, would you mind turning the ring off, on your phone?”

She got it out and did so.

He was fitting a foot-long black nylon jacket around the rifle’s fat tube. She looked at it more closely and saw loops of nylon webbing. He looked at his watch. Checked the dosimeter again, this time standing in the middle of the studio space. Went to the iron-framed window. It was divided into five sets of mullions, she saw, but only the ones on either end opened. He opened the one nearest the room’s corner. She felt a cool breeze, laced with something that smelled like electricity. “Three minutes,” he said. “Go.”

He knelt beside the black plastic case and opened it. Removed a three-inch slab of dull gray lead and set this on the floor. There were nine holes drilled in the block of lead that filled the case. A row of five, another of four. Twists of something like Saran Wrap protruded from each hole. One after another, using his left hand, he plucked them out, nine film-wrapped, bottlenecked cartridges, placing each one on the palm of his right hand. He got up, cradling them carefully, and moved quickly to the workbench, where he put them down, with a muffled clink of brass, on the gray foam. He unwrapped them, placing each one in its black nylon loop, the way Mexican bandits wore bullets across their chests in cartoons. He looked at his watch. “Minute. To midnight.” He picked up the rifle and pointed it at the wall. His thumb moved. An intense point of red light appeared on the wall, vanished.

“You’re going to shoot the container.”

An affirmative grunt.

“What’s in it?”

He walked to the window, the rifle cradled at his waist. He looked back at her, the blue thyroid shield like a bad turtleneck. “One hundred million dollars. In a set of fake pallets, along the floor. About fourteen inches deep. Little over a ton of U.S. hundreds.”

“But why,” she said, “why are you shooting it?”

“Remington Silvertips. Hollowed out.” He opened the breech, extracted a cartridge from its nylon loop, and chambered it. “Inside each one, a brachy-therapy capsule. Cancer therapy, localizes the effect on malignant tissue, spares the healthy.” He looked at his watch. “They preplant tubes, insert the capsules. Highly radioactive isotopes.” He raised the rifle to his shoulder, its barrel out the window now, his back to her. “Cesium, in these,” she heard him say.

Then a buzzer or electric bell began to sound, from the port, and he was firing, ejecting, reloading, firing again, with a smooth machine-like rhythm, until the black loops were empty, and the buzzer, as if by some sympathetic magic, had ceased.