‘Of – ?’
‘Of a state in which "mass" media existed, if you will, within the world.’
‘As opposed to?’
‘Comprising it.’
The light in the room changed, as he said this. She raised her eyes to the screen, where a metallic blue ant-glyph had taken over the screen.
‘What’s in Chombo’s container?’ she asked.
‘It’s not Chombo’s container.’
‘Your container.’
‘It’s not our container.’
‘ “Our” being you and who?’
‘You.’
‘It’s not my container.’
‘Just as I said,’ said Bigend. And smiled.
‘Whose is it, then?’
‘I don’t know. But I believe you might be able to find out.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘We don’t know that either.’
‘What does Chombo have to do with it?’
‘Chombo, evidently, has found a way to know where it is, at least periodically.’
‘Why don’t you just ask him?’
‘Because it’s a secret. He’s being paid handsomely to keep it a secret, and his personality is such, as you’ve noted, that he likes having a secret.’
‘Who’s paying him, then?’
‘That seems to be even more of a secret.’
‘Do you think it might be the container’s owner?’
‘Or its ultimate addressee, should it ever acquire one? I don’t know. But you, Hollis, are the person I’ve found whom Bobby is most likely to talk to.’
‘You weren’t there. He wasn’t that glad to have Alberto bring me around. There were no suggestions of further invitations.’
‘That’s where I’m convinced you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘When he’s gotten used to the idea that you’re available for more face time, you may well hear from him.’
‘What have iPods got to do with it?’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘Rausch told me to look for iPods being used for data storage. Do people still do that?’
‘Chombo periodically loads an iPod with data and sends it out of the United States.’
‘What kind of data?’
‘Music, ostensibly. We’ve had no way of finding out.’
‘Do you know where he sends them?’
‘San José, Costa Rica, so far. We have no idea where else it might go, from there.’
‘Who receives it?’
‘Someone whose job is to run an expensive post office box, essentially. There’s a lot of that, evidently, in San José. We’re working on it. Have you been there?’
‘No.’
‘There’s quite a community of retired CIA people there. DEA as well. We have someone there now, trying to have a quiet look into things, though so far it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.’
‘Why are you so interested in the contents of Chombo’s container?’
Bigend removed a pale-blue microfiber dust cloth from his jacket pocket, pulled a chair out on its casters, and gave it a good dusting. ‘Seat?’ He offered her the chair.
‘No thanks. Go ahead.’
He seated himself. He looked up at her. ‘I’ve learned to value anomalous phenomena. Very peculiar things that people do, often secretly, have come to interest me in a certain way. I spend a lot of money, often, trying to understand those things. From them, sometimes, emerge Blue Ant’s most successful efforts. Trope Slope, for instance, our viral pitchman platform, was based on pieces of anonymous footage being posted on the Net.’
‘You did that? Put that thing in the background of all those old movies? That’s fucking horrible. Pardon my French.’
‘It sells shoes.’ He smiled.
‘So what do you expect to get out of this, if you can find out what’s in Chombo’s container?’
‘No idea. None whatever. That’s exactly what makes it so interesting.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.’
‘Which means?’
‘Secrets,’ said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, ‘are cool.’ On the screen appeared their images, standing beside the table, Bigend not yet seated, captured by a camera somewhere above. The Bigend on the screen took a pale blue cloth from his pocket, pulled out a chair, and began to dust its arms and back and seat. ‘Secrets,’ said the Bigend beside her, ‘are the very root of cool.’
21 Salt of Sofia
Tito crossed Amsterdam, passing the gray, snow-dusted stalks of a makeshift public garden, then walked quickly along 111th, toward Broadway.
The snow had stopped falling.
He recognized his cousin Vianca in the distance, by the Banco Popular, dressed like a teenager. Who else would be out, he wondered, for his ride back to Chinatown?
By the time he’d reached the Broadway median, Vianca was no longer visible. Attaining the western sidewalk, he turned south, heading for the 110th Street stop, hands in his pockets. Passing a framing shop, he picked her up in the depths of a mirror, crossing diagonally, a few yards behind his left shoulder.
Descending into the tiled trench of the subway, thinly roofed with iron and asphalt, he saw his breath rising.
The number 1 local arrived, like a sign, just as he reached the platform. He would return slowly, on the 1 to Canal, then walk east. He boarded the train, certain that Vianca and at least two others were doing the same. Protocol, for the detection and identification of followers, required a minimum of three.
As they left Sixty-sixth Street, Carlito entered from the car behind. Tito’s car was almost empty. Vianca sat near the front end, apparently engrossed in a small video game.
Carlito wore a dark-gray topcoat, a scarf a shade lighter, black leather gloves that made it look to Tito as though his hands might be carved from wood, and black rubbers over the polished calf-skin of his Italian shoes. He looked conservative, foreign, un-asimilated, and somehow religious.
He seated himself to Tito’s left. ‘Juana,’ he asked in Spanish, ‘she is well?’
‘Yes,’ Tito said, ‘she seems well.’
‘You have met him.’ It was not a question.
‘Yes,’ Tito said.
‘You have your instructions.’
‘Yes.’
Tito felt Carlito slip something into his pocket.
‘Búlgaro,’ Carlito said, identifying the object for him.
‘Charged?’
‘Yes. A new valve.’
The Bulgarian’s guns were close to half a century old now, but still functioned with great efficiency. It was sometimes necessary to replace the Schrader valve set into the flat steel reservoir that also served as a grip, but there were remarkably few moving parts. ‘Loaded?’
‘Salt,’ Carlito said.
Tito remembered the salt cartridges, with their yellowed glassine membranes sealing either end of an inch-long, strangely scented cardboard tube.
‘You must prepare now, to go away.’
‘For how long?’ Tito knew that this was not an entirely acceptable question to ask, but it was the sort of question that Alejandro had taught him to at least consider asking.
Carlito didn’t answer.
Tito was on the verge of asking what his father had been doing for the old man when he had died.
‘He must not be captured.’ Carlito touched the knot in his scarf with his stiff, gloved hands. ‘You must not be captured. Only the item you are delivering must be captured, and they must not suspect you of having given it to them.’
‘What do we owe him, Uncle?’
‘He saw our way here. He honored his word.’
Carlito rose as the train pulled into Fifty-ninth Street. One gloved hand rested for an instant on Tito’s shoulder. ‘Do well, nephew.’ He turned and was gone.
Tito glanced past boarding passengers, hoping to see Vianca still there, but she too was gone.
He reached into his jacket’s side pocket, finding the Bulgarian’s singular, meticulously made weapon. It was folded loosely, within a fresh white cotton handkerchief from China, still stiff with sizing.
On drawing it from your pocket, those around you might think you were about to blow your nose. Without looking, Tito knew that the cardboard cylinder of carefully milled salt filled the entirety of the very short barrel. He left it where it was. Now that the Bulgarian’s rubber gaskets had been replaced with silicone, an effective charge could be maintained for up to forty-eight hours.
The salt, he wondered, was it Bulgarian? Where had those cartridges been made? In Sofia? In Moscow, perhaps? In London, where the Bulgarian was said to have worked before Tito’s grandfather had brought him to Cuba? Or in Havana, where he’d lived out his days?
The train pulled away from Columbus Circle.
23 Two Moors
Brown left Milgrim in the Korean’s laundry for a very long time. Eventually a younger Korean, perhaps the proprietor’s son, arrived with a brown-bagged Chinese meal, which he presented to Milgrim with no comment. Milgrim cleared a space among the magazines on the plywood coffee table and unpacked his lunch. Plain rice, boneless chicken nuggets in red dye no. 3, fluorescent-green vegetable segments, finely sliced brown mystery meat. Milgrim preferred the plastic fork to the chopsticks. If you were in prison, he encouraged himself, you’d find this food a treat. Unless you were in a Chinese prison, some less-cooperative part of himself suggested, but he worked his way through it all, methodically. With Brown, it was best to eat what you could when the opportunity presented itself.
As he ate, he thought about the twelfth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. Either God was everything, believed the brethren of the Free Spirit, or God was nothing. And God, to them, was very definitely everything. There was nothing that wasn’t God, and indeed how could there be? Milgrim had never been one for metaphysics, but now the combination of his captivity, medication on demand, and this text was starting to reveal the pleasure to be had from metaphysical contemplation. Particularly if you were contemplating these Free Spirit guys, who seemed to have been a combination of Charlie Manson and Hannibal Lecter.
And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those who were most in touch with the Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn’t yet gotten the Free Spirit message. To which end they went around having sex with anybody they could get to hold still for it, or not, as the case might be – rape being viewed as particularly righteous, and murder equally so. It was like a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths, and Milgrim thought it was probably the gnarliest single example of human behavior he’d ever heard of. Someone like Manson, for instance, simply wouldn’t have been able to get any traction, had he landed among the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. Probably, Milgrim guessed, Manson would’ve hated it. What good would it be to be Charlie Manson in a whole society of serial killers and rapists, each one convinced that he or she was directly manifesting the Holy Spirit?
But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.
The rattle of the door distracted him from these thoughts. He looked up from the remains of his lunch and witnessed the entrance of an extremely large black man, very tall and very wide, who wore a stout thigh-length black leather coat, double-breasted and belted, and a black wool watch cap, pulled low around his ears. The watch cap put Milgrim in mind of the knitted woolen headgear Crusaders wore beneath their helmets, and that in turn made the leather barnstormer resemble a sort of elongated cuirass. A black knight stepping into the laundry from the early evening cold.
Milgrim wasn’t sure that there had actually been black knights, but couldn’t a Moor have converted, some African giant, and been made a knight in the service of Christ? Compared to that Free Spirit, it seemed the likeliest of scenarios.
Now the black knight had stepped up to the Korean’s counter, and was asking him if he could clean furs. The Korean couldn’t, he said, and the knight nodded, accepting that. The knight looked over and met Milgrim’s gaze. Milgrim nodded too, unsure why.
The knight left. Through the window, Milgrim saw him join a second and remarkably similar black man, in yet another black, double-breasted, belted leather coat. They turned south, down Lafayette, in their matching black wool skullcaps, and instantly were gone.
As Milgrim tidied away his empty foam bowl and his foil dishes, he experienced a nagging sensation of having failed to pay adequate attention to something. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what that might have been.
It had been a very long day.
24 Poppies
Votive candles had been lit in her darkened room. Beside the luminous cottons of the all-white bed, the water pitcher had been filled. She put the carton, dead Jimmy Carlyle’s envelope of hundred-dollar bills, and her makeshift evening purse on the long-legged marble-topped table in the kitchenette.
She used the small unsharpened blade in the handle of the kitchenette’s corkscrew to slit the transparent tape sealing the carton.
There was a note, in an oddly Sumerian-looking script, on a rectangle of plain gray card, resting on a fold of bubble wrap. ‘You need your own. Press On. H.’
She set that aside and lifted the fold of bubble wrap. Something black and matte silver. She drew out what she took to be a more aggressively styled version of the wireless helmet she’d used to view the squid at Bobby Chombo’s. Through the cutaway shell, she saw the same few simple touch pads. She turned the thing over, looking for a manufacturer’s logo, but found none. She did find MADE IN CHINA in minute bas-relief, but then most things were.
She tried it on, intending to do no more than glance at herself in a candlelit mirror, but she must have touched one of the control surfaces. ‘A locative installation, in your room,’ Odile said, sounding as if she were inches from Hollis’s ear. She found herself atop the turned-down bed, clutching Bigend’s headgear, so unexpected had this been. ‘Monet’s poppies. Rotch.’ Rotch? ‘The poppies and whatever background, they are equiluminant.’
And there they were, quivering slightly, reddish orange, arrayed as a field that filled her room, level with the height of the bed.
She moved her head from side to side, scanning the effect. ‘This becomes part of a series. The artist’s Argenteuil series. Rotch.’ There it was again. ‘She fill spaces everywhere with Monet’s poppies. Call me when you have received this. We must talk, also about Chombo.’ She pronounced it ‘Shombo.’
‘Odile?’ But it had been a recording. Still crouching on the bed, she sat down and ran her left hand through the poppies she knew weren’t there. She almost thought she could feel them. She swung her legs over the side and found the floor, poppies around her knees. Wading through them, toward the layered drapes, she felt momentarily as though they floated atop captive, unmoving water. The artist might not have intended that, she thought.
