Spook Country (17 page)

M ilgrim remembered Union Square from twenty years before, when it had been a place of broken benches and litter, where a corpse might go unremarked amid the huddled and unmoving bodies of the homeless. It had been a flagrant drug bazaar, in those days, when Milgrim himself had had no need of such a place. But now it was Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, Whole Foods, Virgin, and he, Milgrim, had gone equally far, it sometimes seemed, in the opposite direction. Addicted, not to put too fine a point on it, to substances countering a tension at the core of his being; something wound too tightly, perpetually threatening to collapse his person; imploding, as though a Buckminster Fuller tensegrity structure contained one element that perpetually tightened itself counter to the balance of forces required to sustain it.

That was the experiential nature of the thing, though he was still capable, in the abstract, of considering the possibility that the core anxiety as he knew it today was in part an artifact of the substance.

Be that as it may, he decided, as Brown parked the silver Corolla on the south side of East Seventeenth, just short of Union Square West, the extra dose of Japanese pharmaceutical he’d treated himself to had certainly brightened things up, not to mention the unexpectedly fine weather.

Could Brown park here, Milgrim wondered. It didn’t look like it, but after announcing to his throat-mike (or his inner demons perhaps) that “Red Team One” was on the scene, Brown hauled up his black bag from the floor behind Milgrim’s seat, and drew out a pair of licenses, drably official-looking and encapsulated in long rectangular suction-mount envelopes of some transparent but slightly yellowed plastic. Transit Authority, in black sanserif caps. Milgrim watched as Brown licked a thumb, spreading spit on the concave faces of the two suction cups on one of these, and pressed it against the inside of the top of the windshield, directly above the steering wheel. He lowered the bag back down behind Milgrim’s seat, on top of his laptop. He turned to Milgrim, producing his handcuffs, the two bracelets displayed in his palm as though he were about to suggest that Milgrim purchase them. They were as professionally lusterless as his other favorite things. Did they make handcuffs out of titanium, Milgrim wondered. If not, these had a sort of faux-titanium finish, like the faux Oakley sunglasses they sold on Canal Street. “I said I wasn’t going to cuff you into the car,” Brown said.

“No,” Milgrim agreed, carefully neutral, “you said you were going to need them.”

“You don’t know what to say if a cop or a traffic warden shows up and asks what you’re doing here.” Brown snapped the cuffs back into their little formfitting plastic holster on his belt.

Help me, I’ve been kidnapped, Milgrim thought. Or, better: The trunk of this car is full of plastic explosives.

“You’re going to sit on a bench, enjoy the sun,” Brown said.

“Right,” said Milgrim.

Brown unlocked the doors and they both got out. “Keep your hands on the roof of the car,” Brown said. Milgrim did, while Brown opened the rear door on his side and bent in, to secure the second Transit Authority tag on the inside of the rear window. Milgrim stood with his palms flat on the clean, warm roof of the Corolla. Brown straightened up, closing the door. He clicked his key, locking the car. “This way,” Brown said, then something else, something Milgrim didn’t catch, probably in his role as Red Team One.

Brown’s laptop, Milgrim thought. The bag.

Rounding the corner and finding the park spread before them, Milgrim squinted, unready for space, light, trees on the verge of leafage, the cheery canvas huddle of the Greenmarket.

Sticking close, he followed Brown across Union Square West and into the Greenmarket, passing young mothers with ATV-wheeled strollers and plastic bags of organic goodies. Then down past that WPA-era building he remembered, now apparently a restaurant, but closed. They came to the path that crossed the park at Sixteenth, with Lincoln atop his plinth at its center. Milgrim remembered trying to figure out what it was that Lincoln held at his side, in his left hand. A folded newspaper?

“Right here,” said Brown, indicating the bench nearest Union Square West, on the south side of the path. “Not in the center. Here.” He pointed to a spot directly beside the circular armrest, designed to be deliberately inhospitable to the back of any weary head. Milgrim sat, gripping the armrest to do so, as Brown pulled a skinny strip of shiny black plastic out of the waistband of his trousers, whipped it adroitly around the armrest and Milgrim’s wrist, and fastened it, tightening it with a sharp, zipping sound. This left about a foot of excess plastic protruding from the cuff Brown had formed. He twisted this out of the way, making it less evident, and straightened up. “We’ll collect you later. Keep your mouth shut.”

“Okay,” said Milgrim, craning his neck to watch Brown walk quickly south, his back to the Greenmarket. Milgrim blinked, processing, seeing the Corolla’s curbside rear window shatter. That delicious instant, just before it fell into countless fragments. If you were careful, the alarm might not even sound. You could lean in, over the ragged edge of glass, and snag the strap on Brown’s bag, wherein, Milgrim was certain, would be found the brown paper bag of Rize. And walk away.

Milgrim looked down at the narrow black band of unbreakable plastic around his wrist. He adjusted the cuff of the Paul Stuart coat, to make his situation less obvious to passersby. If Brown were using ordinary hardware-department cable-ties, which this looked to be, Milgrim knew how to release it. The milky, translucent flexicuffs the NYPD used, he knew from experience, were not as easily unfastened. Had Brown not wanted to carry anything that wasn’t black or titanium, he wondered.

Milgrim had briefly shared an apartment in the East Village with a woman who’d kept an emergency supply of Valium in an aluminum fishing-tackle box. The box’s latch had a hole through which a small padlock could have been inserted, but she’d preferred to seal it with a plastic cable-tie, a slightly smaller version of the tie that now tethered Milgrim to this bench. When it was necessary to access the supply, Milgrim had determined, she’d snip the tie with pliers or nail-clippers, replacing it with a fresh one when she needed to reseal the box. This procedure made little sense, Milgrim had observed, but people did tend to be eccentric about their drugs. He’d supposed that the ties, like an embossed wax seal on a letter, provided proof that she was the last to have opened the box. Milgrim had looked for her supply of ties, the simplest way to bypass this, but hadn’t been able to find it.

He had, however, determined that cable-ties are actually closed with a tiny molded internal ratchet. Once he’d learned to insert the flat tip of a jeweler’s screwdriver, he’d been able to open and close her ties at will, even if she’d snipped them off short, as she tended to do.

The fact of his pilfering had quickly put that particular relationship behind him, but now he leaned forward, over his knees, to peer down at the unswept pavement between his feet. He’d already conducted a mental inventory of his pockets, and knew that he had nothing at all like a jeweler’s screwdriver.

Uncomfortably aware that he could be taken for a tweaker looking for hallucinatory fragments of crack, he conducted a focused survey of the ground. He noticed, and as quickly rejected, an inch-long shard of brown bottle glass. Sawing through the tie was at least a theoretical possibility, but he had no idea how long it might take, or really if it would work at all, and he was also afraid of cutting himself. A paper clip, after what Brown might have called field-expedient modification, might do, but in his experience you didn’t find paper clips or wire coat hangers when you needed them. But here, a few feet beyond the tip of his left shoe, was something slender, rectangular, apparently metallic. Glinting faintly. Getting a grip on the armrest with his captive hand, he swiveled awkwardly off the bench, extending his left leg as far as possible and scraping repeatedly over the object with his left heel as he attempted to bring it closer. The fifth or sixth scrape did it, and he was able to snatch up his gratifying rigid and narrow prize with his free hand, returning quickly to the bench and a more orthodox posture.

He held it between thumb and forefinger, like a seamstress her needle, and studied it carefully. It was the broken clip from a pen or pencil, stamped tin or brass, and rust flecked its cheap plated finish.

Very nearly perfect. He checked its tip against the small opening through which he intended to dislodge the invisible ratchet. Too wide, but not by much. He found a particularly rough section of cast iron on the side of the armrest and went to work.

It felt good to have something to do with his hands, or, anyway, hand, on a summer day. “Man the toolmaker,” said Milgrim, filing away at his fairy Houdini shiv.

T ito knelt and tightened the laces of his Adidas GSG9s, respectfully reminding the Guerreros that it was time. He stood, flexed his toes, crossed Fourteenth Street, and started up through the park, his hand on the iPod in its plastic bag in his jacket pocket.

Juana, once, in Havana, had taken him to a building of great and utterly decayed grandeur, though in those days he had had no idea that a structure of such age and intricacy might be found in any other condition. In the foyer, continents and oceans of distempered plaster were mapped on walls and ceiling. The elevator had shaken and screeched, carrying them to the top floor, and as Juana had heaved the cagelike metal door open, Tito had abruptly become aware of the drums he must have been hearing for some time, perhaps since they had first entered this street in Dragones. As they waited at the tall doors of the floor’s single apartment, Tito had read and reread the handwritten message in Spanish on a grease-flecked slip of brown paper, fastened to the door with four thickly rusted carpet tacks: “Enter in the spirit of God and Jesus Christ, or do not enter.” Tito had looked up at Juana, raising his eyebrows in some question he wasn’t quite able to form. “It might as well say Marx and Lenin,” Juana had told him. The door had been opened by a tall woman in a scarlet headscarf, a lit cigar in her hand, who smiled broadly to see them, and reached out to touch Tito’s head.

Later, beneath a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and another of Che Guevara, the tall woman had begun the Dance of the Walking Dead, and Tito, pressed close to Juana, squinting through fumes of cigars and sweet aftershave, had watched as bare feet softly slapped the ruined parquet.

The Guerreros were around him now, talking among themselves in a language like weather, like high fast clouds. He shivered within his jacket, and walked on through the sunlight, toward the bare trees with their green buds. Oshosi showing him dead spots in the square’s human matrix, figures that were no part of the unconscious dance formed here by this clearing amid the long city’s buildings. He didn’t look directly at these pretenders, watchers. He adjusted his path, avoiding them.

When he was closer to the canvas stalls of the market, he saw the old man, moving slowly along between displays of vegetables, his long tweed coat open to the warmth of the day. He walked now with a bright metal cane, and seemed to have some difficulty with his leg.

Oshosi rounded suddenly, sliding into Tito like a wind, dry and unexpectedly warm, showing him the convergence of the watchers. The nearest was a tall, broad-shouldered man with sunglasses and a blue baseball cap, doing a poor job of pretending to stroll casually in the direction of the old man, an S of tension marking his brow between the glasses and the cap. Tito felt the two behind him as if Oshosi were pushing thumbs into his back. He adjusted his course, making it plain that he was headed for the old man. He slowed, and made a show of squaring his shoulders, hoping the men behind him would read and respond to this lie of the body. He saw the lips of the man with the sunglasses move, and remembered what the one in Prada had said about their radios.

Systema was in each fall of his black Adidas. Pulling the iPod from his pocket, held in the open plastic bag, not touching it with his fingers.

He was almost there, the Prada man’s ten paces, but black glasses was a mere three from the old man when the old man pivoted, gracefully whipping the cane up and sideways, at arm’s length, into the side of black glasses’ neck. Tito saw the S of tension erased from the man’s brow as the cane struck, and for what seemed far too long there was a face that consisted only of three holes, beneath the visor of the blue baseball cap, the twin voids of the sunglasses and the equally round and seemingly toothless black hole of a mouth. Then the man struck the sidewalk like something deboned, the loaded cane clattering heavily beside him, and Tito felt their hands on his shoulders, and stopped moving forward.

“Thief!” cried the old man, with great force, his voice ringing out. “Thieves!”

Tito backtucked, as the followers’ momentum carried them past him. As he came down, Oshosi showed him his elegant cousin Marcos, smiling urbanely between two handsome displays of produce, and straightening from having recovered something from between the wooden sawhorses of a farmer’s stand. A length of wood, Marcos gripping it firmly at either end with gloved hands, his feet braced, as a trio of men running in the direction of the old man seemed to strike an invisible wall, and then to fly through it, becoming airborne. One landed on a farmer’s display and women began to scream.

Marcos tossed the wooden handle of the tripwire down, as if discovering it fouled with filth, and strolled away.

The two men who had been following Tito, realizing he was behind them now, spun in unison, their shoulders colliding. The heavier of the two was slapping at something on his neck. Tito saw the wires of a radio. “Red team won,” the man declared, furiously, with a savage and inexplicable emphasis on whatever victory that might be, then lunged for Tito, shoving his companion out of his way to do so.

Tito was having to feint, as if panicking, in various directions, in order to provide these two with the illusion of almost capturing him. Seeing the clumsiness of the one reaching for him, he decided that any more elaborate miming of fumbling and losing the iPod would be wasted. He dropped it, directly in the man’s path, a square of white plastic separating as it struck the pavement. He pretended to lunge for it, in order to underline the fact that it was there. His would-be captor, seeing it, reflexively batted him aside. Rolling with the blow, Tito came up running, as the heavy man dove for the iPod. His companion tried to block Tito with a move he might have remembered from American football. Tito somersaulted between his legs and kicked off—on what must have been one of the man’s Achilles tendons, to judge by his sharp yelp of pain.

Tito ran south, away from the intersection of Seventeenth and Park, his destination. Past the one from the Prada shoe department, in a tradesman’s paint-splashed overalls, in one hand a yellow box with three short black antennas.

Around Tito ran the orishas, panting like vast dogs; scout and opener, opener and clearer. And Osun, whose role was mystery.