Not just hot, but correctly, expertly seasoned. Hot like when they brought you a plate of lemon slices, to suck on as needed, to partially neutralize the burn. It had been a long time since Milgrim had had food like that. It had been a long time since he’d eaten a meal that had provided any memorable pleasure at all. The Chinese he was most familiar with these days was along the lines of the stepped-on Cantonese they brought him at the laundry on Lafayette, but just now he was recalling that sensation, strangely delightful, of drinking cold water on top of serious pepper-burn—how the water filled your mouth entirely, but somehow without touching it, like a molecule-thick silver membrane of Chinese antimatter, like a spell, some kind of magic insulation.
The Rize was like that, the cold water being the business of being Milgrim, or rather those aspects of being Milgrim, or simply of being, that he found most problematic. Where some less subtle formulation would seek to make the cold water go away, the Rize encouraged him to take it up, into his mouth, in order to savor that silver membrane.
Though his eyes were closed, he knew that Brown had just now come to the connecting door, which stood open.
“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun’s inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn’t fired the gun since they’d been together.
“What did you say?”
“Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable.
“The fuck—”
“If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.”
Brown opened his mouth. Closed it.
“It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”
There was a look on Brown’s face that Milgrim hadn’t seen there before. Now Brown tossed a fresh bubble-pack down on the bedspread.
“Good night,” Milgrim heard himself say, still insulated by the silver membrane.
Brown turned, walking silently back into his own room in his stocking feet, the partial pistol in his hand.
Milgrim raised his right arm toward the ceiling, straight up, index finger extended and thumb cocked. He brought the thumb down, firing an imaginary shot, then lowered his arm, having no idea at all what to make of whatever it was that had just happened.
30. FOOTPRINT
She drove to Malibu with the Blue Ant helmet in its carton beside her. It was sunny through Beverly Hills, but by the time she reached the sea something monochrome and saline had insinuated itself.
She went to Gladstone’s, took the carton in with her, and stood it on the massive timber bench opposite her own, while she topped up her hyper-healthy hotel breakfast with a small chowder and a large Coke. The light on the beach was like a sinus headache.
Things were different today, she assured herself. She was working forNode , and her expenses would be covered. She had decided to look at it that way, and not think of herself as Bigend’s employee, or Blue Ant’s. There had, after all, been no real change in her formal situation; she was a freelancer, on assignment toNode to write seven thousand words on locative computing and the arts. That was the situation today and she could deal with it. The Bigend version, she was less certain of. Pirates, their boats, CIA maritime units, tramp freighters, the traffic in and hunt for weapons of mass destruction, a shipping container that spoke to Bobby Chombo—she wasn’t certain of any of that.
As she was paying, she remembered Jimmy’s money, back at the Mondrian, locked in the little keypad safe in her room, coded to open on “CARLYLE.” She didn’t know what else to do with it. Inchmale said he could tell her whether any of it was counterfeit. She’d take him up on that, she thought, then go on from there.
The thought of seeing him again woke an old ambivalence. While it had never been true, as the magazines had often had it, that she and Inchmale had been a couple, in any carnal or otherwise ordinary sense, they had nonetheless been married in some profound if sexless way; co-creatives, the live wires of the Curfew, held down and variously together by Jimmy and Heidi. She was grateful, ordinarily, to whatever fates might be, for Inchmale having found the excellent Angelina and Argentina, thereby to be translated, for the most part, out of her world. It was better that way for everyone, though she’d have had a hard time explaining that to anyone other than Inchmale. And Inchmale, never blind to the background radiation of his own singularity, would have been all too ready to agree.
When she got back to the car, she put the carton on the unopened trunk and got the helmet out, fumbling with the unfamiliar controls. She put the thing on, curious as to whether anyone had been locatively creative in the immediate vicinity.
A cartoonishly smooth Statue of Liberty hand, holding a torch a good three stories high, loomed above her, blotting out the hurtful glow of the salt-metal sky. Its wrist, emerging from the Malibu sand, would’ve had roughly the footprint of a basketball court. It was far bigger than the real thing, it was blatant copying to have it emerging from the beach this way, and still it managed to be more melancholy than ridiculous. Would it all be like this, in Alberto’s new world of the locative? Would it mean that the untagged, unscripted world would gradually fill with virtual things, as beautiful or ugly or banal as anything one encountered on the web already? Was there any reason to expect it to be any better than that, any worse? The Liberty hand and its torch looked as though they had been cast from the stuff they made beige Tupperware out of. She remembered how Alberto had described his labors in the creation of skins, textures. She remembered the microskirted Aztec princesses on his Volkswagen. She wondered where the wifi for this piece was coming from.
She took the helmet off and put it back in its carton.
Driving back, as the sun gradually found its way out again, she decided to try to find Bobby’s factory, if only to put him on her map in a different way. It shouldn’t be hard. Her body, she was finding, remembered Los Angeles much more thoroughly than her head did.
Eventually she found herself back on Romaine, looking for the turn Alberto had taken. For those white-painted walls. She found it, turned, and saw something big and bright and whiter still, just pulling away. She slowed, pulled over. Watched the long white truck turn, swinging right, out of sight at the far corner. She didn’t know trucks, but she guessed this one was as long as they got without having the back end become a separate trailer. But big enough to move the contents of a two-bedroom house. Unmarked, shiny, white. And gone.
“Shit,” she said, pulling up where Alberto had pulled up. She could see the green-painted metal door they’d entered through. She didn’t like the diagonal of shadow across it now. The sun was high, and that diagonal meant the door was open, three inches or more. For the first time she saw the long, white-painted, horizontally corrugated doors of a loading bay. Back a truck up to that and take out anything you wanted.
She popped the trunk, getting out with her PowerBook over her shoulder and the carton in her arms. She put these in the trunk and closed it, retrieved her purse, clicked the transponder to lock the car, then squared her shoulders and walked over to the green door. As she’d assumed, it was standing open a few i
nches. On darkness, she decided, tipping her head to squint inside, over her sunglasses.
She dug through the smaller objects at the bottom of her purse, coming up with a flat little LED-light on a key ring whose only keys were for a commercial mailbox she no longer rented, and for a Club to secure a car she no longer owned. She squeezed the light between thumb and forefinger, expecting its battery to be dead, but no, it was working. Feeling stupid, she gave the green door a rap, hurting her knuckles. It was heavy, and didn’t move when knocked on. “Bobby? Hello? It’s Hollis Henry, Bobby…” She put her left hand flat on the door and pushed. It swung smoothly, but very slowly. With the LED in her right hand, she pulled off her sunglasses with the other and stepped into darkness.
The LED did little in terms of increased visibility. She turned it off and stood, waiting for her eyes to accommodate. She began to make out points and small, faint beams in the distance. Flaws in the painting of blacked-out windows, she guessed. “Bobby? It’s Hollis. Where are you?”
She tried the LED again, this time pointing it at the floor. Surprisingly bright, it illuminated a length of one of Bobby’s powdered white gridlines. Broken, she saw, with the partial print of one of his winkle-picker Keds clones. “Whoa,” she said, “Nancy Drew. Bobby? Where are you?”
She brought the LED around in a slow arc, level with her waist, faintly making out a panel of switches. She crossed to them and tried one. Behind her, overhead, several of the big halogens came on.
She turned and saw, not unexpectedly now, the fieldlike floor, empty save for Bobby’s GPS grid drawn in flour, churned and partially erased like chalk on a blackboard, where the table, chairs, and computers had been removed. She moved forward, stepping carefully, trying to avoid the white powder. There seemed to be a variety of prints, and quite a few of Bobby’s—or someone else’s, wearing those same ridiculous shoes, which seemed unlikely. There were beige filter tips, too, smoked down short and mashed flat against the concrete. Without picking one up, she knew that they’d be Marlboro.
She looked up at the lights, then back down at the prints and butts. “Bobby did a runner,” she said, recalling an expression of Inchmale’s.
Someone had removed the Safety Orange outline of Archie the squid.
She went out, avoiding touching the partially open green door. She got her computer out of its case in the trunk, woke it up, and while it booted, removed the Blue Ant helmet from its carton. With her right arm through the skeletal helmet and the PowerBook under her left, she closed the trunk and reentered the building. She opened the PowerBook and checked to see if that wireless network 72fofH00av, the one she’d accessed here before, had gone with Bobby. It had, but she’d expected that. She closed the laptop, tucking it under one arm as she fumbled to power up the helmet and put it on.
Archie was gone.
But the shipping container was still there, something glowing at its center, through wireframe.
She took a step forward and it vanished.
She heard a soft voice behind her, syllables not in English. She started to turn, then remembered to remove the helmet first.
A couple stood in the doorway, backlit by the sun. They were small people. The male held a broad-headed push broom. “Hola,” he said.
“Hello?” Walking toward them. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m just leaving. You can see they’ve left a mess.” Gesturing behind her with the arm she’d again thrust through the helmet.
The man said something in Spanish, gently but questioning, as she stepped past them. “Goodbye,” she said, not looking back.
A careworn silver-gray Econoline was parked beside the rented Passat. She used the transponder as she walked up to the car, quickly opening the door, getting in, helmet on the passenger seat, PowerBook on the floor, key in the ignition, pulling away, the dented rear doors of the Econoline in the mirror now, and then she was accelerating along Romaine.
31. PURO
Brotherman took the black packages down and loaded them into his truck, then the chair and ironing board, to be delivered to Vianca. She returned with Korean beefbowl. The three of them ate, silently for the most part, sitting in a row on Tito’s black-wrapped mattress, and then Brotherman and Vianca left.
Tito was alone with the mattress, the Bulgarian’s gun tucked beneath it, his toothbrush and toothpaste, the clothing he’d wear when he went to meet the old man, the old iron rack the clothing hung on, two wire hangers, his wallet, his telephone, the white cotton gloves he still wore, and three spare pairs of black socks he planned to tuck into the waistband of his loose black jeans.
His room had become larger, unfamiliar. The fossil imprints of plywood on the high ceiling were comfortingly unchanged. He brushed his teeth at the sink, decided to sleep in his jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. When he turned off the light, the darkness was absolute and of no particular size. He got up and switched the light back on. He lay back down on the black-wrapped mattress, the plastic crinkling noisily, and placed one of the pairs of new black socks across his eyes. They smelled of fresh wool.
Then Alejandro rapped on his door in protocol, the rhythm utterly familiar. Removing the socks, Tito rolled off the mattress and rapped the response, waited for the answer, then opened the door. His cousin stood in the hallway, a set of keys in his hand, smelling faintly of alcohol, looking past Tito to the empty room. “It looks like a cell,” Alejandro said.
“You always said it did.”
“An empty one,” Alejandro said, stepping in and closing the door behind him. “I’ve been to see the uncles. I’m to brief you on tomorrow, but I’m here to tell you more than I’m supposed to.” He grinned, and Tito wondered how drunk he might be. “This way, you have no choice but to hear me.”
“I always listen.”
“Hearing is something else. Give me those socks.” Tito passed him the pair of unworn socks and he separated them, pulling one over either hand. “I’ll show you something.” He grasped the bar of the rack with his sock-covered hands. Alejandro pulled the rack partially over, bracing the wheeled base with his shoe to prevent it rolling. “Look underneath.”
Tito bent and peered under the ornately molded iron base. Something black, held there with tape. “What is it?”
“Mind your toes,” Alejandro warned, as he raised the bar, lowering the base to the floor again.
“What is it?”
“It picks up incoming and outgoing cellular traffic. Messaging. The Volapuk. When you receive the message to deliver the iPod to your old man, regardless of your number, they’ll have it.” Alejandro smirked, an expression from their boyhood.
“Who? Who are they?”
“The old man’s enemies.”
Tito thought of their previous conversations. “He is from the government? The CIA?”
“He was a counterintelligence officer, once. Now he is a renegade, a rogue player, Carlito says. Mad.”
“Mad?”
“It’s beside the point. Carlito and the others have committed the family to his operation. Have committed you. But you know that. You didn’t know about this bug,” indicating the rack, “but the uncles did. Family were watching when it was placed here, and more recently when the battery was replaced.”
“But do you know who put it here?”
“That’s complicated.” Alejandro crossed to the sink and propped himself against it. “Sometimes the closer to a truth one gets, the more complicated things become. The men in bars, who explain every dark secret of this world, Tito, have you noticed, no secret requires more than three drinks to explain. Who killed the Kennedys? Three drinks. America’s real motive in Iraq? Three drinks. The three-drink answers can never contain the truth. The truth is deep, cousin, and shifts, and runs away into the cracks, like the little balls of mercury we played with as children.”
“Tell me.”
Alejandro raised his hands, making puppets of the black socks. “‘I am an old man who once kept secrets for the government here,’” he said for the sock on the le
ft, “‘but I detest certain policies, certain figures in the government whom I believe guilty of crimes. I am mad perhaps, obsessed, but clever. I have friends of a similar tendency, less mad perhaps and with more to lose. I find out secrets with their help, and plot to—’”
“Can it hear us?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Carlito had a friend look at it. No mere wire. Something only the government has, illegal to possess.”
“Are they the government?”
“‘Contractors,’” he said for the sock on the right, “‘we are contractors. That is how things are done here now. We contractors, we work for the government, yes. Except,’” and the sock turned toward Tito and crumpled its mouth for emphasis, “‘when we don’t.’” Alejandro made the socks bow to one another, lowered them. “They are working for someone in the government, perhaps, but not on government business. But they don’t necessarily know that. They wouldn’t want to know that, would they? Sometimes these contractors find it most convenient to know nothing at all. Do you see?”
“No,” Tito said.
“If I were more specific, I’d be inventing a story. Most of this, I infer from things Carlito and others have said. Here are some things that are definite, though. Tomorrow, you will meet a man in the basement of Prada, the men’s shoe section. He will give you an iPod and certain instructions. You will already have received a message, here, in Volapuk, instructing you to deliver the iPod to the old man, at the farmers’ market in Union Square, at one o’clock in the afternoon. You will leave here as soon as you receive the message. Once you have the iPod, you will be nowhere in particular, moving, until one. The family, of course, will be with you.”
“The others had been left in drop boxes,” Tito said.
“But not this time. You must be able to recognize this man later. You must do as he tells you. Exactly as he tells you. He is with the old man.”