Spook Country

  “Would these contractors attempt to take the iPod?”

  “They will not try to apprehend you, on your way to the delivery. Above all, they want the old man. But they also want the iPod, and they will do whatever possible to capture you, once they have the old man in sight.”

  “But you know what I’ve been instructed to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you explain why I’m to do it?”

  “It looks to me,” Alejandro said, raising one sock-hand as if to peer into its nonexistent eyes, “as if the old man, or those who send him the iPods, wish to feed someone some puro.”

  Tito nodded. Puro, in his family, meant the most perfectly groundless of lies.

  32. MR. SIPPEE

  She ate a dollar-fifty-nine barbecue beef rib with broasted potatoes off a paper plate on the trunk of the Passat, waiting for Alberto to turn up at Mr. Sippee, a blessed oasis of peace and mutual respect situated in a twenty-four-hour convenience store at the Arco gas station at Blaine and Eleventh.

  Nobody messed with you in Mr. Sippee. She knew that from her previous stay in Los Angeles, and that was what brought her here now. Close to the tents under the freeway, Mr. Sippee catered to an eclectic clientele of the more functionally homeless, sex workers of varied gender and presentation, pimps, police officers, drug dealers, office workers, artists, musicians, the map-lost as well as the life-lost, and anyone in serious search of the perfect broasted potatoes. You ate standing up, if you had a car to put your food on. If you didn’t, you sat on the curb out front. She had often thought, while eating there, that the United Nations could do worse than investigate the pacific powers of broasted potatoes.

  She felt safe here. Even if she’d been followed from Bobby Chombo’s recently vacated space in the factory on Romaine. Which she didn’t think she had, really, but it had definitely felt like she should have been. The feeling had made a knot between her shoulder blades, but now Mr. Sippee was taking that away.

  The car nearest hers was an ivory-hued vehicle that aspired to mildly Maybachian proportions. The two young men who belonged to it, in capacious hoodies and elaborate sunglasses, weren’t eating. Instead, they were soberly fiddling with their digital hubcaps. One sat behind the wheel, tapping patiently on a laptop, while the other stood staring at the left front hubcap, bisected by a sullenly pulsing line of colored LEDs. Were they, she wondered, the car’s owners, or someone’s technical support staff? Meals at Mr. Sippee could involve these questions of unfamiliar roles, of foreign economies of scale. Particularly when dining here in the small hours, as the Curfew had often done after an evening in the studio. Inchmale loved the place.

  Now a classic Volks bug, frosted with doe-eyed Aztec princesses and quasi-phallic volcanoes, drew in past the magic hubcaps, Alberto at the wheel. He parked a few vehicles down and approached as she finished the last bite of her potatoes.

  “He’s gone,” said Alberto, plaintively. “Is my car safe?” Looking around at their fellow diners.

  “I know he’s gone,” she said. “I told you. And nobody messes with your car at Mr. Sippee.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Your car’s safe. Where’s Bobby?”

  “Gone.”

  “Did you go there?”

  “Not after what you said. But his e-mail addresses are all bouncing. And his work’s gone. Not on the servers he uses.”

  “The squid?”

  “Everything. Two pieces of mine, in progress. Sharon Tate—”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  He frowned at her.

  “Sorry, Alberto. I’m on edge myself. It was creepy, turning up like that and finding the place cleaned out. Speaking of which, did Bobby have cleaners?”

  “Cleaners?”

  “A couple? Hispanic, oriental? Middle-aged, small?”

  “By Bobby’s standards, the place was clean when I took you there. He just let it pile up. He’d never trust anyone in to clean. The last place he had, he moved out because they kept asking him if he had a meth lab. He’s that private, hardly ever goes out—”

  “Where’d he sleep?”

  “He slept there.”

  “Where?”

  “On a pad, in a bag, in a fresh square of grid. Every night.”

  “Did he have a big white truck?”

  “I’ve never even seen him drive.”

  “Did he always work alone?”

  “No. He’d bring kids in, if he was in crunch mode.”

  “You get to know any?”

  “No.”

  She studied the pattern of potato grease on her empty paper plate. If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word. She looked over at the LED-wheeled ivory car. “Is their display broken?”

  “You can’t see an image unless the wheels are turning. The system senses the wheel’s position and fires the LEDs it needs, to invoke an image in persistence of vision.”

  “I wonder if they make them for a Maybach?”

  “What’s a Maybach.”

  “A car. Did Bobby ever talk about shipping containers?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Somebody’s piece, maybe?”

  “He didn’t talk about other artists’ work. The commercial stuff, like that squid for Japan, sure.”

  “Do you know any reason he’d just blow, this way?”

  Alberto looked at her. “Not unless something about you frightened him.”

  “Am I that scary?”

  “Not to me. But Bobby’s Bobby. What worries me about this, though, aside from losing my work, which is killing me, is that I can’t imagine him getting it together to move out. Not that efficiently. The last time, getting out of the place where they thought he had a meth lab, and into the space on Romaine, took him three days. He hired some tweaker with a mail van. I finally had to come in to help him, to organize it.”

  “I don’t know what it is that bothers me about it,” she said, “but something sure does.” The hoodie boys were still into their hubcaps, serious as NASA technicians, prelaunch. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  He looked at the Arco station and the convenience store. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Then you’re missing some jammin’ potatoes.”

  33. COUNTERPANE

  Brown, in a cloak and tight-fitting cowl fashioned from one of the New Yorker’s foam-core blankets, gestured across the rolling beige plain with a sturdy wood-look staff, its length decorated in a traditional pattern of cigarette burns. “There,” he said.

  Milgrim squinted in the direction indicated, the direction in which they seemed to have been traveling for some time, but saw only the gibbet-like timber constructions interrupting the otherwise featureless expanse. “I can’t see anything,” Milgrim said, preparing to be struck for disagreement, but Brown only turned, still pointing forward with his staff, and put his other hand on Milgrim’s shoulder. “That’s because it’s below the horizon,” said Brown, reassuringly.

  “What is?” asked Milgrim. The sky had a Turner-on-crack intensity, something volcanic aglow behind clouds that looked set to birth tornadoes. “The keep of great Baldwin,” Brown declared, leaning closer to Milgrim’s eyes, “count of Flanders, emperor of Constantinople, suzerain of every Crusader princeling in the Eastern Empire.”

  “Baldwin is dead,” Milgrim protested, startling himself.

  “Untrue,” said Brown, but still gently, and still gesturing with the staff. “Yonder rises his keep. Can you not see?”

  “Baldwin is dead,” Milgrim protested, “but among the poor this myth of the Sleeping Emperor goes all about, and a pseudo-Baldwin, one so claiming, supposedly walks among them now.”

  “Here,” said Brown, lowering his staff and gripping Milgrim’s shoulder more firmly, “he is here, the one and true.”

  Milgrim saw that not only were Brown’s hood and cloak made from the beige foam-core ma
terial, but so was the plain. Or rather covered with it, as it felt beneath his bare soles like a thin carpet spread over a dune.

  “Here,” Brown was saying, shaking him awake, “here it is.” The BlackBerry thrust into his face.

  “Pencil,” Milgrim heard himself say, rolling upright on the edge of the bed. Cracks of daylight at the border of New Yorker drapes. “Paper. What time is it?”

  “Ten-fifteen.”

  Milgrim had the BlackBerry now, squinting at its screen, scrolling unnecessarily. Whatever it was, it was brief. “Pencil. Paper.”

  Brown handed him a sheet of New Yorker stationery and a tooth-marked four-inch stub of yellow pencil, kept ready because Milgrim had insisted that he needed to be able to erase. “Leave me alone while I do this.”

  Brown made a strange little strangled sound, some deep combination of anxiety and frustration.

  “I can do a better job if you go into your own room,” Milgrim said, looking up at Brown. “I have to concentrate. This isn’t like translating high school French. This is the very definition of idiomatic.” He saw that Brown didn’t know what that meant, and noticed his own satisfaction at the fact.

  Brown turned and walked out of the room.

  Milgrim scrolled the message again and started translating, printing in block capitals on the New Yorker stationery.

  ONE TODAY IN

  He stopped and considered.

  UNION SQUARE AGRICULTURE

  He used the eraser, which was nearly gone, the metal ferrule scratching the paper.

  UNION SQUARE FARMERS MARKET

  17TH STREET DELIVERY TO USUAL CLIENT

  It seemed so simple.

  He supposed it was, really, but Brown had been waiting for this, for the IF to receive one of these messages in his room, on one of the IF’s steadily replaced cell phones, where the fancy little bug under the coatrack could also pick it up. Brown had been waiting for it since he’d acquired Milgrim. Previous messages were assumed to have been received elsewhere, when the IF was out and about, drifting as he seemed to through lower Manhattan. Milgrim had no idea how Brown knew about those previous deliveries, but he did, and it had become evident to Milgrim that what Brown wanted most of all wasn’t the IF, or whatever it might be that he was delivering, but this “usual client,” a second “he” in Brown’s phone conversations, sometimes also referred to as “subject.” Brown ate and slept Subject, Milgrim knew, and the IF was merely some facilitator. Once Brown had raced to Washington Square, his people converging invisibly with him, only to find Subject gone, and the IF strolling back down Broadway like a small black crow, narrow black legs moving over a broken cover of sooty snow. Milgrim had seen this from the window of a gray Ford Taurus that stank of cigars, over Brown’s tactical nylon shoulder.

  Milgrim stood, massaging stiffness from his thighs, discovered his fly unzipped, zipped it, rubbed his eyes, and dry-swallowed the morning’s Rize. It delighted him, knowing Brown wouldn’t interrupt him now. He looked down at Brown’s BlackBerry on the bedside table, beside the translated Volapuk.

  The dream came back. Those gallows things. They were in Bosch, weren’t they? Torture devices, props for vast disembodied organs?

  He picked up the BlackBerry and the sheet of stationery, and went to the connecting door, which as usual stood open. “Union Square,” he said.

  “When?”

  Milgrim smiled. “One. Today.”

  Brown was in front of him, taking the BlackBerry and the paper. “This is it? This is all it says?”

  “Yes,” said Milgrim. “Will I be going back to the laundry?”

  Brown looked at him, sharply. Milgrim didn’t ask these questions. He’d learned not to. “You’re coming with me,” said Brown. “You might get to do some live translation.”

  “You think they speak Volapuk?”

  “They speak Russian,” Brown said. “Cuban-Chinese. The old man speaks it too.” He turned away. Milgrim went into his bathroom and ran the cold. The Rize hadn’t gone down smoothly. He looked at himself in the mirror and noted that he could use a haircut.

  As he drank the glass of water he wondered when he’d quit looking at his own face in mirrors, other than for the most basic functions of grooming. He never saw himself there. At some point he’d decided not to.

  He could hear Brown on the phone, energized and giving orders. He held his wrists under the cold stream from the tap, until it almost hurt. Then he turned it off and dried his hands on a towel. He pressed his face against the towel, imagining other people, strangers, whose faces had also touched it.

  “I don’t want more,” he heard Brown say, “I want fewer and I want better. Get it through your head these aren’t your sand monkeys. You’re not over there now. These are operators, bred from the ground up. You lost him going into fucking Canal Street Station. You lose him in Union Square, you don’t want to know. You hear me? You don’t want to know.”

  Milgrim supposed he didn’t want to know either, not in that sense, but this was all interesting. Cuban-Chinese, illegal facilitators who spoke Russian and messaged in Volapuk? Who lived in windowless mini-lofts on the fringes of Chinatown, wore APC and played keyboards? Who weren’t sand monkeys, because this wasn’t over there?

  When in doubt, and when not compelled to simply enjoy his medication, Milgrim was in the habit of shaving, provided the necessities were at hand, as they were now. He began to run the hot.

  Operators. Bred from the ground up.

  Old man. That would be Subject.

  He put the towel around his neck and tossed a washcloth into the hot water beginning to fill the sink.

  34. SPOOK COUNTRY

  Ezeiza,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The airport. International Terminal B.”

  She’d gotten him on his cell in Buenos Aires, after getting hers activated for international calling. No idea what it was costing.

  “And you’re getting here day after tomorrow?”

  “Day after that. It’s a long flight up to New York but it’s basically just flying north; odd to go that far without any time zones. I’m having lunch with a friend, dinner there with someone from the Bollards’ label. Then I’m out to your end next morning.”

  “I think I’ve gotten myself into something, Reg, with thisNode assignment.”

  “What did we tell you? The lady wife has your boy’s number. Been getting steadily harsher about him since you brought his name up. This morning she’d gotten it up to ‘unclean.’ Or is that down?”

  “I haven’t actually found him that personally repulsive, aside from his taste in cars, but I don’t like the sense of enormous amounts of money at the service of, of, well, I don’t know. He’s like a monstrously intelligent giant baby. Or something.”

  “Angelina says he’s utterly amoral in the service of his own curiosity.”

  “That probably covers it. But I don’t like the sort of thing he’s currently curious about, and I don’t like the way it feels to me that things are starting to happen, around that.”

  “Sort of thing. Feels to you. You’re being uncharacteristically oblique.”

  “I know,” she said, and paused, lowering her phone in abrupt recognition of what was bothering her. She put it back to her ear. “But we’re on the phone, aren’t we?”

  There was a silence, on his end. A true, absolute, and digital silence, devoid of that random background sizzle that she’d once taken as much for granted during an international call as she took the sky overhead when she was outside. “Ah,” he said. “Well. There is always that. Increasingly more so, one imagines.”

  “Imagines more rapidly, around him.”

  “Ahem. I look forward to hearing more about this in person, then. But if my Spanish is at least semifunctional today, my flight’s just being called.”

  “Good one, Reg.”

  “Call you from New York.”

  “Damn,” she said, closing her phone. She’d wanted, needed, to tell him about Bigend?
??s pirate story, about meeting Bobby, about seeing the white truck driving away and how that made her feel. He’d sort it out, she knew. Not make it make any more sense, necessarily, but just that his categories were so unlike hers. Unlike anyone’s, maybe. But something else had happened; some recognition of a line crossed, some ambiguous territory entered.

  Bigend and his James Bond villain’s car, his half-built headquarters to match, his too much money, his big sharp curiosity and his bland willingness to go poking it wherever he wanted. That was potentially dangerous. Had to be. In some way she’d never really imagined before. If he wasn’t lying, he’d been paying people to tell him about secret government programs. The war on terror. Were they still calling it that? She’d caught some, she decided: terror. Right here in her hand, in Starbucks, afraid to trust her own phone and the net stretching out from it, strung through those creepy fake trees you saw from highways here, the cellular towers disguised with grotesque faux foliage, Cubist fronds, Art Deco conifers, a thin forest supporting an invisible grid, not unlike the one spread on Bobby’s factory floor in flour, chalk, anthrax, baby laxative, whatever it was. The trees Bobby triangulated on. The net of telephony, all digitized, and all, she had to suppose, listened to. By whoever, whatever, made the sort of things Bigend was poking at its business. Somewhere, she had to believe, such things were all too real.

  Maybe now, they already were. Listening to her.

  She looked up and saw the other customers. Relatively minor functionaries in film, television, music, games. None of them, in that moment, looking particularly happy. But none of them, probably, touched in quite the same way by this new bad thing, this shadow, fallen across her.

  35. GUERREROS

  He left the black-wrapped mattress on the floor, with his keys at its exact center, the toothbrush and toothpaste on the edge of the sink, the wire hangers on the old rack that concealed the bug Alejandro had shown him. He closed the door behind him for the last time and left the building, stepping out into a startlingly fresh bright day, a new sun starting to warm the winter’s residue of dog turds.