Spook Country (9 page)

He nodded.

She glanced back down at the dash display and found the street map gone, replaced by wireframe diagrams of a helicopter, its bulbous profile unfamiliar. Now it appeared above the wireframe profile of a ship. Either a small ship or quite a large helicopter. Cut to video of the actual aircraft in flight. “What’s this?”

“The Hook, so-called. It’s an older, Soviet-made helicopter, one with tremendous lifting capacity. Syria owns at least one of them.”

The Hook, or another just like it, was lifting a Soviet tank now, as if in demonstration. “Drive,” she ordered. “Don’t be watching your own Power-Point.”

Cut to a colorful, simplified animation, illustrating how a helicopter (not looking very Hook-like) could shuffle cargo containers on the deck and in the holds of a freighter. “The container in your story,” she began.

“Yes?”

“Did they say whether it was very heavy?”

“It’s not, that we know of,” said Bigend, “but it’s sometimes at the center of a stack of much heavier containers. That’s a very secure position, as there’s ordinarily no way at all, at sea, to access a container in that position. The Hook, though, would allow you to do that. Plus you could have arrived from somewhere else, another ship say, with your container Hooked. Decent cruising range, reasonably fast.”

He got on the 101 Freeway, southbound. The Maybach’s suspension turned the pockmarked pavement into something silken, smooth as warm fudge. She could sense the car’s power now, held effortlessly in check. On the dash display, lines symbolizing signals were being emitted by a shipping container. They rose at a sharp angle, to be intercepted by a satellite, which bounced them back down, past the curve of the earth. “Where are we going, Mr. Bigend?”

“Hubertus. To the agency. It’s a better place to discuss things.”

“Agency?”

“Blue Ant.”

And here on the display, now, unmoving and crisply hieroglyphic, was that insect itself. Blue. She looked back up at him.

His profile vaguely reminded her of someone.

T ia Juana sent him walking, crosstown along 110th, to Amsterdam and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the better to consult Eleggua. The owner, she said, of the roads and doors in this world. Lord of the crossroads, intersection of the human and the divine. For this reason, Juana maintained, there had secretly been raised a window to him and a place of devotion, in this great church in Morningside Heights.

“Nothing can be done in either world,” she said, “without his permission.”

It had begun to snow, as he walked uphill, past chicken wire and poster-crusted plywood, where the retaining wall of the cathedral’s grounds had been brought down, long ago, by rain. He turned up his collar, settled his hat, and walked on, no stranger now to snow. Though he was grateful, finally, to reach Amsterdam. He saw the unlit neon of V&T Pizza, like something pointing to the avenue’s ordinary human past, and then he was passing the priest’s house, and the garden that surrounded the perpetually dry fountain, with its delirious sculpture, where the decapitated head of Satan dangled from the great bronze claw of the Holy Crab of God. It was this sculpture that had most interested him, when Juana first brought him here, that and the cathedral’s four peacocks, one of them albino and, Juana said, sacred to Orunmila.

There were no guards at the cathedral’s doors, but he found them within, waiting, with their suggestion of five dollars’ donation. Juana had shown him how to remove his hat, and cross himself, and, ignoring them, pretending he spoke no English, to light a candle and pretend to pray.

So large a space, within this church; Juana said the largest cathedral in the world. And this morning of snow he found it deserted, or seemingly so, and somehow colder than the street. There was a fog here, a cloud, of sound; the tiniest echoes, set moving by any movement, seemed to stir ceaselessly among the columns and across the stone floor.

Leaving his candle burning beside four others, he went in the direction of the main altar, watching his own breath, and pausing once to look back at the dim glow of the giant rose window, above the doors through which he’d come.

One of the bays of stone that lined the sides of this tremendous space was Eleggua’s, and this made clear by images in colored glass. A santero consulting a sheet of signs, among which would be found the numbers three and twenty-one, whereby the orisha recognizes himself and is recognized; a man climbing a pole to install a wiretap; another man studying the monitor of a computer. All images of ways in which the world and worlds are linked, and all these ways under the orisha.

Silently, within himself, as Juana had taught him, Tito made respectful greeting.

There was a disturbance in the fog of sound, then, louder than the rest, its source lost immediately in the turning and stirring of echo. Tito glanced back, down the length of the nave, and saw a single figure, approaching.

He looked up, to Ellegua’s window, where one man used something like a mouse, another a keyboard, though the shapes of these familiar things were archaic, unfamiliar. He asked to be protected.

The old man, when Tito looked back, was like some illustration of perspective and the inevitability of the given moment’s arrival. Snow dusted the shoulders of the man’s tweed coat, and the brim of a dark hat held against his chest. His head seemed bowed, slightly, as he walked. His gray hair shone like steel, against the dull putty tones of the cathedral’s stone.

And then he was there, unmoving, directly in front of Tito. He looked very directly into Tito’s eyes, then up, at the window. “Gutenberg,” he said, raising his hat to indicate the santero. “Samuel Morse sending the first message,” indicating the man using the mouse. “A lineman. A television set.” This last what Tito had taken for a monitor. He lowered the hat. His gaze returned to Tito. “You resemble both your father and grandfather, strongly,” he said in Russian.

“Did she tell you I would be here?” Tito asked, in Spanish.

“No,” the old man replied, his accent that of an older Cuba, “it was not to be my pleasure. A formidable woman, your aunt. I had you followed here.” He switched to English: “It has been some time, since you and I have seen one another.”

“Verdad.”

“But we will be seeing one another again, and soon,” the old man said. “You will be given another, identical item. You will bring it to me, as before. As before, you will be observed, followed.”

“Alejandro was correct, then?”

“No fault of yours. Your protocol is highly correct, your systema adroit,” injecting the Russian term into his English sentence. “It was made quite certain that you would be followed. We require it.”

Tito waited.

“They will attempt to seize us,” the man said, “as you make the delivery. They will fail, but you will have lost the item to them. That is essential, as essential as your escape, and my own. And you have a systema for exactly that, do you not?”

Tito nodded, moving his head only slightly.

“But then,” said the old man, “you will be going away, as you’ve been prepared for. The city will no longer be safe for you. Do you understand?”

Tito thought of his windowless room. His computer. His keyboard. The vase for Ochun. He remembered the protocol established for his departure, carefully maintained. He had absolutely no idea what place would have been chosen for him, beyond that protocol. He only knew that it would not be New York. “I understand,” he said, in Russian.

“There is an arch, here,” the old man said, in English, “called the Pearl Harbor Arch.” He looked up, and back along the nave. “It was pointed out to me, once, but I can no longer recall where it is. The masons laid down their tools, the day of the attack. The construction of the cathedral lapsed for decades.”

Tito turned and looked up, uncertain as to what he was supposed to be looking for. The arches were so high overhead. He and Alejandro had once played with a helium-filled Mylar blimp, in Battery Park. A small radio-controlled airship. With such a thing, here, one could explore the nave’s forest of arches, the shadows of its inverted deep-sea canyon. He wanted to ask this man about his father, ask him how and why his father had died.

When he turned back, the man was gone.

B rown took Milgrim back to the Korean-owned laundry on Lafayette Street, for parking. From what Milgrim had heard of Brown’s end of the morning’s cellular traffic, Brown felt that his team needed more talking to about having lost the IF.

This time, Brown didn’t bother to remind Milgrim that there were watchers outside, or that attempting to escape would be both futile and painful. Brown was starting to assume, Milgrim decided, that he, Milgrim, had internalized the watchers (whether they existed or not, and Milgrim now doubted they ever had). This was interesting, Milgrim thought.

Brown didn’t say goodbye. Just turned and headed down the west side of Lafayette.

Milgrim and the Korean owner, a man in his seventies, with an ageless and curiously nonreflective simulacrum of Kim Jong Il’s jet-black haircut, eyed each other neutrally. Milgrim supposed Brown had some arrangement here, as the Korean never asked where Milgrim’s laundry was, or why it was, otherwise, that Milgrim would sit for hours at the westernmost end of a red vinyl settee, either reading his medieval messianism book, thumbing through the Korean’s dead gossip magazines, or just staring into space.

Milgrim unbuttoned the Paul Stuart, but seated himself without removing it. He looked at the thick compost of celebrity features on the coffee table in front of him (did navels count as features?) and noted the issue of Time with the president dressed up like a pilot, on the flight deck of that aircraft carrier. That issue was nearly three years old now, he decided, after some calculation, older than the majority of these gossip mags—which Milgrim did sometimes resort to, if twelfth-century messianism proved inconveniently soporific, as it certainly could. If he nodded out here, he’d learned, the Korean would come over and prod him in the ribs with a rolled-up Us.

At the moment, however, he was ready for William the Goldsmith and the Amaurian “Spirituals,” who were the run-up, so to speak, to his favorite, the heresy of the Free Spirit. He was sliding his hand into his pocket, to retrieve the comfortingly worn volume, when a dark-haired girl in high brown boots and a short white jacket entered. He watched a transaction take place, the Korean giving her a receipt in exchange for two pairs of dark pants. Then, rather than leaving, she took out a phone, started carrying on a conversation in animated Spanish, crossed to the settee, and sat while talking, raking periodically and without much interest through the gossip magazines on the Korean’s plywood coffee table. President Bush in his flight suit went under almost immediately, but she didn’t manage to turn up anything Milgrim hadn’t seen before. Still, it was pleasant to share this vinyl bench with her, and to enjoy the sound of a language he didn’t understand. His seemingly innate fluency in Russian, he’d always assumed, had somehow been paid for with the loss of any ability in the Romance languages.

The girl dropped her phone back into her large purse, stood, smiled absently in his general direction, and walked out.

He was pulling his book from his pocket when he saw her phone lying there on the red vinyl.

He looked over at the Korean, who was reading the Wall Street Journal. Those weird little stipple portraits, at this distance, reminded Milgrim of fingerprints. He looked back at the phone.

His captivity had changed him. Prior to Brown, he would have pocketed the phone automatically. Now that he lived in the woodwork of Brown’s world of surveillance, seemingly random encounters had become suspect. Had that been a real Spanish-speaking beauty, dropping off her office trousers for cleaning, or was she part of Brown’s team? Was it really an accident, that she’d left her phone?

But what if it wasn’t?

With an eye on the Korean, he palmed the phone. It was still warm, a small but vaguely shocking intimacy.

He stood. “I need to use the bathroom.”

The Korean looked at him, over his Wall Street Journal.

“I need to pee.”

Folding his paper, the Korean stood, held aside a curtain made of flowered fabric, and gestured Milgrim through. Milgrim walked quickly past a clutter of industrial ironing equipment and through a narrow beige-painted door with a silk-screened EMPLOYEES ONLY sign.

The walls of the cubicle, inside, were white-painted plywood, reminding Milgrim of the cabins at a summer camp he’d attended in Wisconsin. It smelled powerfully but not unpleasantly of disinfectant. On general principle, Milgrim secured the door with a fragile-looking piece of gold-tone Taiwanese hardware. He put the lid down on the toilet, seated himself, and had a look at the girl’s phone.

It was a Motorola, with call display and camera. A model from a few years before, though as far as he knew they were still selling them. If he’d stolen it for resale, he would have been disappointed. As it was, it had an almost full battery charge and was roaming.

He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.

Below the calendar, on a four-inch-wide ledge formed by a horizontal in the cubicle’s framing, stood a bare tin can, its sides lightly freckled with rust. Milgrim leaned forward and studied its contents: a thin strata of nuts, bolts, two bottle caps, paper clips and thumbtacks, several unidentifiable metal components, corpses of small insects. Everything there that could oxidize was lightly, evenly rusted.

He settled back against the toilet tank and opened the phone. Hispanic full names in the phone book, interspersed with girls’ names that mostly weren’t.

He entered Fish’s number from memory, closed his eyes, and thumbed send.

Fish, short for Fisher, his surname, answered before a third ring. “Hello?”

“Fish. Hi.”

“Who’s this?”

“Milgrim.”

“Hey.” Fish sounded surprised to hear from him, but then Milgrim supposed he would be.

Fish was a fellow benzo user. Aside from that, what they most had in common was Dennis Birdwell, Milgrim’s dealer. Former dealer, Milgrim corrected himself. Both Milgrim and Fish were long past doctor shopping, and neither was going to get anywhere with New York’s triple-form prescription system. Fish had resources in New Jersey (a writing doctor, Milgrim assumed) but they both depended primarily on Birdwell. Or rather they both had, as Milgrim no longer could. “How are you doing, Milgrim?”

Meaning, Do you have any to spare? “Just getting by,” Milgrim said.

“Oh,” Fish said. He was always short. He did something in computer animation and had a girlfriend and a baby.

“Have you seen Dennis, Fish?”

“Uh, yeah. I have.”

“How is he?”

“Well, ah, he’s angry with you. That was what he said.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said he’d given you money for something, and it didn’t happen.”

Milgrim sighed. “That’s true, but it wasn’t me letting him down. The guy I was going through, you know?”

A baby began to cry, behind Fish’s voice. “Yeah. But, you know, I don’t think you want to mess with Dennis, these days. Not that way.” Fish sounded uncomfortable, and not just because of the crying baby.

“How do you mean?”

“Well,” said Fish, “you know. It’s his other stuff.” Dennis’s other stuff was crystal meth, increasingly his main stock-in-trade, and something neither Milgrim nor Fish had the least use for. It did, however, create in Dennis’s other clients a need for powerfully soothing peripheral substances, hence Dennis’s interest in the benzos they both relied on for peace and clarity. “I think he’s dipping,” Fish said. “You know. More.”

Milgrim raised his eyebrows to the image of the twin towers. “Sorry to hear that.”

“You know how they get.”

“How do you mean?”

“Paranoid,” Fish said. “Violent.”

Dennis had once been a student at NYU. Milgrim could certainly imagine him angry, but imagining him violent was a stretch. “He collects Star Wars memorabilia,” Milgrim said. “He sits there all night, looking for it on eBay.”

There was a pause. Fish’s baby fell silent too, in eerie-seeming synchrony. “He said he’d hire black guys from Brooklyn.” The baby began to scream again, even harder.

“Shit,” said Milgrim, as much to the rusty tin can as to Fish. “Do me a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell him you heard from me.”

“Easy,” said Fish.

“If I get extra,” Milgrim lied, “I’ll call you.” He pressed End.

Back out front, he helped the unhappy Puerto Rican girl move the red settee so she could look under it. While she did that, he slid her phone under a hangnailed copy of In Touch, with Jennifer Aniston on the cover.

He was leaning against a dryer, reading about William the Goldsmith, when she found it.