‘And that might be?’
She thought of the wireframed cargo container, how Chombo had so abruptly tried to yank the helmet off her head, almost pulling her over. She hesitated.
‘Pirates,’ he said.
‘Pirates?’
‘The Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea. Small, fast boats, preying on cargo vessels. They operate from lagoons, coves, islets. The Malay Peninsula. Java, Borneo, Sumatra…’
She looked from Bigend to the crowd around them, feeling like she’d fallen into someone else’s pitch meeting. A ghostly studio log line, left to hover near the bar’s massively timbered, corrugated ceiling, had fallen on her, the first likely victim to sit at this table. A pirate movie. ‘Arrrr,’ she said, meeting his gaze again and downing the last of her gin-tonic, ‘matey.’
‘Real pirates,’ Hubertus Bigend said, unsmiling. ‘Most of them, anyway.’
‘Most?’
‘Some of them were part of a covert CIA maritime program.’ He put his empty plastic glass down as though it were something he was considering bidding on at Sotheby’s. He framed it with his fingers, a director considering a shot. ‘Stopping suspect cargo vessels to search for weapons of mass destruction.’ He looked up at her, unsmiling.
‘Irony-free?’
He nodded, a tiny movement, very precise.
Thus perhaps did diamond factors nod in Antwerp, she thought. ‘This isn’t bullshit, Mr. Bigend?’
‘It’s as expensively quasi-factual as I can afford it to be. Material like this tends to squirm a bit, as you can well imagine. One rather deep irony, I suppose, is that this program, which had apparently been fairly effective, fell victim to blowback from your domestic political struggles here. Prior to certain revelations, though, and to the name of a cover company being made public, CIA teams, disguised as pirates, accompanied real pirates boarding merchant vessels suspected of smuggling weapons of mass destruction. Using radiation detectors, and other things, they inspected cargo holds and containers, while the real pirates took whatever more mundane cargo they chose to acquire. That was the payoff for the pirates, that they could have their pick of cargo, provided the teams were given a first look at all of the holds and containers.’
‘Containers.’
‘Yes. Pirates and teams provided one another with mutual backup. The teams would have amply bribed any local authorities, and of course the U.S. Navy would stay well away when one of these operations was under way. The ships’ crews were never the wiser, whether contraband was discovered or not. If something were found, the interdiction came later, nothing to do with our pirates.’ He gestured to a waiter for another piso. ‘Another drink?’
‘Mineral water,’ she said. ‘Joseph Conrad. Kipling. Or a movie.’
‘The pirates who proved best at this were out of Aceh, in northern Sumatra. Prime Conrad territory, I believe.’
‘Were they finding much, the faux pirates?’
The diamond factor’s nod again.
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘In August 2003, one of these joint CIA-pirate operations boarded a freighter with Panamanian registry, bound from Iran to Macau. The team’s interest centered on one particular container. They’d broken its seals, opened it, when orders came by radio to leave it.’
‘Leave it?’
‘Leave the container. Leave the vessel. Those orders were followed, of course.’
‘Who told you that story?’
‘Someone who claims to have been a member of the boarding team.’
‘And you think that Chombo, somehow, has something to do with that?’
‘I suspect,’ Bigend said, leaning closer and lowering his voice, ‘that Bobby periodically knows where that container is.’
‘Periodically?’
‘Apparently it’s still out there, somewhere,’ Bigend said. ‘Like the Flying Dutchman.’ His second piso arrived, along with her water. ‘To your next story,’ he toasted, touching the rims of their fresh plastic glasses.
‘The pirates.’
‘Yes?’
‘Did they see what was in it?’
‘No.’
‘Most people don’t self-drive these,’ Bigend said, pulling out onto Sunset, headed east.
‘Most people don’t drive them at all,’ Hollis corrected, from the passenger seat beside him. She craned her neck for a glimpse back into what she supposed could be called the passenger cabin. There seemed to be a sort of frosted skylight, as opposed to any mere moonroof. And a lot of very glossy wood, the rest in carbon-colored lambskin.
‘A Brabus Maybach,’ he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. ‘The firm of Brabus extensively tweaks the product of Maybach, to produce one of these.’
‘"Darth my ride"?’
‘If you were riding in back, you could watch for locative art on the monitors in each front seatback. There’s MWAN and a fourplex GPRS router.’
‘No thanks.’ The seats back there, upholstered in that gunmetal lamb, obviously reclined, becoming beds, or possibly chairs for high-end elective surgery. Through the smoked glass at her side, she saw pedestrians at the intersection, staring at the Maybach. The light changed and Bigend pulled away. The vehicle’s interior was still as a museum at midnight. ‘Do you always drive this?’ she asked.
‘The agency has Phaetons,’ he said. ‘Good stealth cars. Mistake them for Jettas, at a distance.’
‘I’m not a car person.’ She ran her thumb along a lambskin seat seam. Like touching the butt of a supermodel, probably.
‘Why have you decided to interest yourself in journalism, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Looking for a way to make a living. Curfew royalties don’t amount to much. I haven’t been that talented an investor.’
‘Few people are,’ he said. ‘If they’re successful at it, of course, then they imagine they are. Talented. But they’re all doing the same things, really.’
‘I wish someone had told me what they’re doing, in that case.’
‘If you need to earn money, there are more lucrative fields than journalism.’
‘Are you discouraging me?’
‘Not at all. I’m simply encouraging you in a broader way. I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.’
‘Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.’
‘Were they an inspiration?’
She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. ‘Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,’ she corrected herself.
He nodded.
She glanced back down at the dash display and found the street map gone, replaced by wireframe diagrams of a helicopter, its bulbous profile unfamiliar. Now it appeared above the wireframe profile of a ship. Either a small ship or quite a large helicopter. Cut to video of the actual aircraft in flight. ‘What’s this?’
‘The Hook, so-called. It’s an older, Soviet-made helicopter, one with tremendous lifting capacity. Syria owns at least one of them.’
The Hook, or another just like it, was lifting a Soviet tank now, as if in demonstration. ‘Drive,’ she ordered. ‘Don’t be watching your own PowerPoint.’
Cut to a colorful, simplified animation, illustrating how a helicopter (not looking very Hook-like) could shuffle cargo containers on the deck and in the holds of a freighter. ‘The container in your story,’ she began.
‘Yes?’
‘Did they say whether it was very heavy?’
‘It’s not, that we know of,’ said Bigend, ‘but it’s sometimes at the center of a stack of much heavier containers. That’s a very secure position, as there’s ordinarily no way at all, at sea, to access a container in that position. The Hook, though, would allow you to do that. Plus you could have arrived from somewhere else, another ship say, with your container Hooked. Decent cruising range, reasonably fast.’
He got on the 101 Freeway, southbound. The Maybach’s suspension turned the pockmarked pavement into something silken, smooth as warm fudge. She could sense the car’s power now, held effortlessly in check. On the dash display, lines symbolizing signals were being emitted by a shipping container. They rose at a sharp angle, to be intercepted by a satellite, which bounced them back down, past the curve of the earth. ‘Where are we going, Mr. Bigend?’
‘Hubertus. To the agency. It’s a better place to discuss things.’
‘Agency?’
‘Blue Ant.’
And here on the display, now, unmoving and crisply hieroglyphic, was that insect itself. Blue. She looked back up at him.
His profile vaguely reminded her of someone.
18 Elleggua’s window
Tia Juana sent him walking, crosstown along 110th, to Amsterdam and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the better to consult Elleggua. The owner, she said, of the roads and doors in this world. Lord of the crossroads, intersection of the human and the divine. For this reason, Juana maintained, there had secretly been raised a window to him and a place of devotion, in this great church in Morningside Heights.
‘Nothing can be done in either world,’ she said, ‘without his permission.’
It had begun to snow, as he walked uphill, past chicken wire and poster-crusted plywood, where the retaining wall of the cathedral’s grounds had been brought down, long ago, by rain. He turned up his collar, settled his hat, and walked on, no stranger now to snow. Though he was grateful, finally, to reach Amsterdam. He saw the unlit neon of V&T Pizza, like something pointing to the avenue’s ordinary human past, and then he was passing the priest’s house, and the garden that surrounded the perpetually dry fountain, with its delirious sculpture, where the decapitated head of Satan dangled from the great bronze claw of the Holy Crab of God. It was this sculpture that had most interested him, when Juana first brought him here, that and the cathedral’s four peacocks, one of them albino and, Juana said, sacred to Orunmila.
There were no guards at the cathedral’s doors, but he found them within, waiting, with their suggestion of five dollars’ donation. Juana had shown him how to remove his hat, and cross himself, and, ignoring them, pretending he spoke no English, to light a candle and pretend to pray.
So large a space, within this church; Juana said the largest cathedral in the world. And this morning of snow he found it deserted, or seemingly so, and somehow colder than the street. There was a fog here, a cloud, of sound; the tiniest echoes, set moving by any movement, seemed to stir ceaselessly among the columns and across the stone floor.
Leaving his candle burning beside four others, he went in the direction of the main altar, watching his own breath, and pausing once to look back at the dim glow of the giant rose window, above the doors through which he’d come.
One of the bays of stone that lined the sides of this tremendous space was Elleggua’s, and this was made clear by images in colored glass. A santero consulting a sheet of signs, among which would be found the numbers three and twenty-one, whereby the orisha recognizes himself and is recognized; a man climbing a pole to install a wiretap; another man studying the monitor of a computer. All images of ways in which the world and worlds are linked, and all these ways under the orisha.
Silently, within himself, as Juana had taught him, Tito made respectful greeting.
There was a disturbance in the fog of sound, then, louder than the rest, its source lost immediately in the turning and stirring of echo. Tito glanced back, down the length of the nave, and saw a single figure, approaching.
He looked up, to Elleggua’s window, where one man used something like a mouse, another a keyboard, though the shapes of these familiar things were archaic, unfamiliar. He asked to be protected.
The old man, when Tito looked back, was like some illustration of perspective and the inevitability of the given moment’s arrival. Snow dusted the shoulders of the man’s tweed coat, and the brim of a dark hat held against his chest. His head seemed bowed, slightly, as he walked. His gray hair shone like steel, against the dull putty tones of the cathedral’s stone.
And then he was there, unmoving, directly in front of Tito. He looked very directly into Tito’s eyes, then up, at the window. ‘Gutenberg,’ he said, raising his hat to indicate the santero. ‘Samuel Morse sending the first message,’ indicating the man using the mouse. ‘A lineman. A television set.’ This last was what Tito had taken for a monitor. He lowered the hat. His gaze returned to Tito. ‘You resemble both your father and grandfather, strongly,’ he said in Russian.
‘Did she tell you I would be here?’ Tito asked, in Spanish.
‘No,’ the old man replied, his accent that of an older Cuba, ‘it was not to be my pleasure. A formidable woman, your aunt. I had you followed here.’ He switched to English: ‘It has been some time, since you and I have seen one another.’
‘Verdad.’
‘But we will be seeing one another again, and soon,’ the old man said. ‘You will be given another, identical item. You will bring it to me, as before. As before, you will be observed, followed.’
‘Alejandro was correct, then?’
‘No fault of yours. Your protocol is highly correct, your systema adroit,’ injecting the Russian term into his English sentence. ‘It was made quite certain that you would be followed. We require it.’
Tito waited.
‘They will attempt to seize us,’ the man said, ‘as you make the delivery. They will fail, but you will have lost the item to them. That is essential, as essential as your escape, and my own. And you have a systema for exactly that, do you not?’
Tito nodded, moving his head only slightly.
‘But then,’ said the old man, ‘you will be going away, as you’ve been prepared for. The city will no longer be safe for you. Do you understand?’
Tito thought of his windowless room. His computer. His keyboard. The vase for Ochun. He remembered the protocol established for his departure, carefully maintained. He had absolutely no idea what place would have been chosen for him, beyond that protocol. He only knew that it would not be New York. ‘I understand,’ he said, in Russian.
‘There is an arch, here,’ the old man said, in English, ‘called the Pearl Harbor Arch.’ He looked up, and back along the nave. ‘It was pointed out to me, once, but I can no longer recall where it is. The masons laid down their tools, the day of the attack. The construction of the cathedral lapsed for decades.’
Tito turned and looked up, uncertain as to what he was supposed to be looking for. The arches were so high overhead. He and Alejandro had once played with a helium-filled Mylar blimp, in Battery Park. A small radio-controlled airship. With such a thing, here, one could explore the nave’s forest of arches, the shadows of its inverted deep-sea canyon. He wanted to ask this man about his father, ask him how and why his father had died.
When he turned back, the man was gone.
19 Fish
Brown took Milgrim back to the Korean-owned laundry on Lafayette Street, for parking. From what Milgrim had heard of Brown’s end of the morning’s cellular traffic, Brown felt that his team needed more talking to about having lost the IF.
