B rotherman 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 left, “‘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.”
“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.
S he 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.”
B rown, 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 material, 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