She dug through the smaller objects at the bottom of her purse, coming up with a flat little LED-light on a key ring whose only keys were for a commercial mailbox she no longer rented, and for a Club to secure a car she no longer owned. She squeezed the light between thumb and forefinger, expecting its battery to be dead, but no, it was working. Feeling stupid, she gave the green door a rap, hurting her knuckles. It was heavy, and didn’t move when knocked on. ‘Bobby? Hello? It’s Hollis Henry, Bobby…’ She put her left hand flat on the door and pushed. It swung smoothly, but very slowly. With the LED in her right hand, she pulled off her sunglasses with the other and stepped into darkness.
The LED did little in terms of increased visibility. She turned it off and stood, waiting for her eyes to accommodate. She began to make out points and small, faint beams in the distance. Flaws in the painting of blacked-out windows, she guessed. ‘Bobby? It’s Hollis. Where are you?’
She tried the LED again, this time pointing it at the floor. Surprisingly bright, it illuminated a length of one of Bobby’s powdered white gridlines. Broken, she saw, with the partial print of one of his winkle-picker Keds clones. ‘Whoa,’ she said, ‘Nancy Drew. Bobby? Where are you?’
She brought the LED around in a slow arc, level with her waist, faintly making out a panel of switches. She crossed to them and tried one. Behind her, overhead, several of the big halogens came on.
She turned and saw, not unexpectedly now, the fieldlike floor, empty save for Bobby’s GPS grid drawn in flour, churned and partially erased like chalk on a blackboard, where the table, chairs, and computers had been removed. She moved forward, stepping carefully, trying to avoid the white powder. There seemed to be a variety of prints, and quite a few of Bobby’s – or someone else’s, wearing those same ridiculous shoes, which seemed unlikely. There were beige filter tips, too, smoked down short and mashed flat against the concrete. Without picking one up, she knew that they’d be Marlboro.
She looked up at the lights, then back down at the prints and butts. ‘Bobby did a runner,’ she said, recalling an expression of Inchmale’s.
Someone had removed the Safety Orange outline of Archie the squid.
She went out, avoiding touching the partially open green door. She got her computer out of its case in the trunk, woke it up, and while it booted, removed the Blue Ant helmet from its carton. With her right arm through the skeletal helmet and the PowerBook under her left, she closed the trunk and reentered the building. She opened the PowerBook and checked to see if that wireless network 72fofHooav, the one she’d accessed here before, had gone with Bobby. It had, but she’d expected that. She closed the laptop, tucking it under one arm as she fumbled to power up the helmet and put it on.
Archie was gone.
But the shipping container was still there, something glowing at its center, through wireframe.
She took a step forward and it vanished.
She heard a soft voice behind her, syllables not in English. She started to turn, then remembered to remove the helmet first.
A couple stood in the doorway, backlit by the sun. They were small people. The male held a broad-headed push broom. ‘Hola,’ he said.
‘Hello?’ Walking toward them. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I’m just leaving. You can see they’ve left a mess.’ Gesturing behind her with the arm she’d again thrust through the helmet.
The man said something in Spanish, gently but questioning, as she stepped past them. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, not looking back.
A careworn silver-gray Econoline was parked beside the rented Passat. She used the transponder as she walked up to the car, quickly opening the door, getting in, helmet on the passenger seat, PowerBook on the floor, key in the ignition, pulling away, the dented rear doors of the Econoline in the mirror now, and then she was accelerating along Romaine.
31 Puro
Brotherman 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.
32 Mr. Sippee
She 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.’
