Now, she knew, she’d been returned to the tunnel by that sudden stab of weird fear, in Starbucks; fear that Bigend had gotten her into something that might be at once hugely and esoterically dangerous. Or, she thought, if you looked at it as process, by the cumulative strangeness of what she’d encountered since she’d accepted the assignment fromNode . If indeedNode existed. Bigend seemed to be saying thatNode only existed to whatever extent he might ultimately need it to.
What she needed, she knew, however belatedly, was a second career. Helping Hubertus Bigend exercise his curiosity wasn’t going to be it, and neither, she knew absolutely, was anything else Blue Ant might offer her. She had always, she’d reluctantly come to know, wanted to write. During the Curfew’s heyday, she’d frequently suspected that she was one of very few singers who spent a certain part of every interview wishing she were on the other side of the microphone. Not that she wanted to be interviewing musicians. She was fascinated by how things worked in the world, and why people did them. When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself. If she could do that and pay the grocery bills, the ASCAP check could pay the rent, and she’d see where that could go.
She had, during the Curfew days, written a few pieces forRolling Stone , a few more forSpin . With Inchmale, she’d written the first in-depth history of the Mopars, their mutual favorite sixties garage band, though they hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to pay them to publish it. In the end, though, it had run in Jardine’s record store’s in-house magazine, its publication one of the few things she’d gotten out of that particular investment.
Inchmale, she guessed, was sitting up in business class, headed for New York, reading theEconomist , a magazine he read exclusively on airplanes, swearing that on arrival he promptly and invariably forgot every word.
She sighed. Let go, she told herself, though she had no idea of what.
Alberto’s virtual monument to Helmut Newton appeared, in her mind’s eye. Silver-nitrate girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.
“Let go,” she said, aloud, and fell asleep.
NO BORDERS of glare edged the multiple layers of drapes, when she woke. Already evening. She lay there in her sheet-tube, no longer needing it in the same way. The edge of her anxiety had receded, not quite past the horizon but sufficient to have restored her curiosity.
Where was Bobby Chombo, now? Had he been hauled off, along with his equipment, by the Department of (as Inchmale called it) Homemade Security? Charged (or not) with dicking around with some scheme to smuggle weapons of mass destruction? Something about the quietly deep peculiarity of those two cleaners led her to think not. Rather, she thought, he’d done a runner, but with considerable help. Some crew had come in, loaded his gear into that white truck, and hauled him off, elsewhere. He might be no more than a few blocks from the first place, for all she knew. But if he’d cut himself off from Alberto, and the rest of that art scene, what were her chances of finding him again?
Somewhere, she thought, looking up at the almost invisible whiteness of the darkened room’s ceiling, there was, supposedly, the container. A long, rectangular box of…were they made of steel? Yes, she decided, steel. She had had carnal knowledge of an Irish architect in one, on his rural property in Derry. He’d converted it into a studio. Oversized portholes cut with a torch, glass framed in with plywood. Definitely steel. His had been insulated originally for refrigeration, she remembered him telling her; the simpler ones too chilly, prone to condensation of human breath.
She’d never really thought about them, before. You glimpsed them from freeways, sometimes, stacked tightly as Odile’s robotic Lego. An aspect of contemporary reality so common as to remain unconsidered, unquestioned. Almost everything, she supposed, traveled in them now. Not raw materials, like coal or grain, but manufactured things. She remembered news items about them being lost at sea, in storms. Breaking open. Thousands of Chinese rubber duckies bobbing gaily along the great currents. Or sneakers. Something about hundreds of left sneakers washing up on the beach, the rights having been shipped separately to prevent pilferage. And someone else, on a yacht in the harbor at Cannes, telling scary transatlantic sailing stories; how they don’t sink immediately, containers gone over the side, and the silent, invisible threat they then pose to sailors.
She seemed to have cycled through most of the fear she’d felt, before. Curiosity hadn’t replaced it entirely, but she had to admit she was curious. One of the scary things about Bigend, she supposed, was that with him you stood an actual chance of finding some things out. And then where would you be? Were there things that were, in themselves, deeply problematic to learn? Definitely, though it would depend on who knew you knew them, she decided.
But then the small dry sound of an envelope being slid under the door, familiar from her life on tour, suddenly triggered, as it always had, the atavistic mammalian fear of nest invasion.
She turned on a light.
The envelope, when she retrieved it from the carpet, contained a color printout, on unexceptional paper, of a photograph of the white truck, parked beside the loading bay of Bobby Chombo’s rented factory.
She turned it over, finding, inscribed in Bigend’s vaguely cuneiform hand: “I’m in the lobby. Let’s talk. H.”
Curiosity. Time she satisfied some. And time, she knew, to decide whether or not she was willing to go on with this.
She went into the bathroom, to ready herself to meet Bigend again.
39. TOOLMAKER
Milgrim 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.
40. DANCING
Tito 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 squar
e’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.