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 square’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.
Systema was in each fall of his black Adidas. Pulling the iPod from his pocket, held in the open plastic bag, not touching it with his fingers.
He was almost there, the Prada man’s ten paces, but black glasses was a mere three from the old man when the old man pivoted, gracefully whipping the cane up and sideways, at arm’s length, into the side of black glasses’ neck. Tito saw the S of tension erased from the man’s brow as the cane struck, and for what seemed far too long there was a face that consisted only of three holes, beneath the visor of the blue baseball cap, the twin voids of the sunglasses and the equally round and seemingly toothless black hole of a mouth. Then the man struck the sidewalk like something deboned, the loaded cane clattering heavily beside him, and Tito felt their hands on his shoulders, and stopped moving forward.
‘Thief!’ cried the old man, with great force, his voice ringing out. ‘Thieves!’
Tito backtucked, as the followers’ momentum carried them past him. As he came down, Oshosi showed him his elegant cousin Marcos, smiling urbanely between two handsome displays of produce, and straightening from having recovered something from between the wooden sawhorses of a farmer’s stand. A length of wood, Marcos gripping it firmly at either end with gloved hands, his feet braced, as a trio of men running in the direction of the old man seemed to strike an invisible wall, and then to fly through it, becoming airborne. One landed on a farmer’s display and women began to scream.
Marcos tossed the wooden handle of the tripwire down, as if discovering it fouled with filth, and strolled away.
The two men who had been following Tito, realizing he was behind them now, spun in unison, their shoulders colliding. The heavier of the two was slapping at something on his neck. Tito saw the wires of a radio. ‘Red team won,’ the man declared, furiously, with a savage and inexplicable emphasis on whatever victory that might be, then lunged for Tito, shoving his companion out of his way to do so.
Tito was having to feint, as if panicking, in various directions, in order to provide these two with the illusion of almost capturing him. Seeing the clumsiness of the one reaching for him, he decided that any more elaborate miming of fumbling and losing the iPod would be wasted. He dropped it, directly in the man’s path, a square of white plastic separating as it struck the pavement. He pretended to lunge for it, in order to underline the fact that it was there. His would-be captor, seeing it, reflexively batted him aside. Rolling with the blow, Tito came up running, as the heavy man dove for the iPod. His companion tried to block Tito with a move he might have remembered from American football. Tito somersaulted between his legs and kicked off – on what must have been one of the man’s Achilles tendons, to judge by his sharp yelp of pain.
Tito ran south, away from the intersection of Seventeenth and Park, his destination. Past the one from the Prada shoe department, in a tradesman’s paint-splashed overalls, in one hand a yellow box with three short black antennas.
Around Tito ran the orishas, panting like vast dogs; scout and opener, opener and clearer. And Osun, whose role was mystery.
41 Houdini
With a click that he felt, rather than heard, the tiny ratchet at the heart of the cable-tie moved aside for Milgrim’s modified ballpoint clip. He sighed, enjoying a moment of unaccustomed triumph. Then he loosened the tie, without removing it from the bench’s armrest, and slid his wrist free. Keeping his wrist on the rest, he looked around the park as casually as possible. Brown was nowhere to be seen, but there was the matter of the other three he’d glimpsed in Brown’s room at the New Yorker, plus whoever else comprised Brown’s Red Team.
Why, he wondered, were such teams always red? Of tooth and claw, the teams of men like Brown. Seldom even blue. Never green, never black.
Past him moved a sunny afternoon’s pedestrian traffic, across the width of the park. There were people here, he knew, who were playing at being here. Playing games. Brown’s game, the game of the IF and those who worked with him. There were no police in evidence, he noted, and that struck him as odd, though in truth he hadn’t passed this way for so long that he had no idea what sort of presence they currently chose to maintain.
‘It must have been defective,’ he said aloud, of the cable-tie, rehearsing a line in the event of Brown’s return before he could compose himself sufficiently to move away from this bench. ‘So I waited for you.’
Very large hands found Milgrim’s shoulders, pressed down. ‘Thank you for waiting,’ said a deep, measured voice, ‘but we aren’t detectives.’ Milgrim looked over at the hand on his left shoulder. It was enormous, a black man’s hand, with pink, glossily polished nails. Milgrim rolled his eyes, craning his neck gingerly, and saw, atop a vast bluff of button-studded black horsehide, a mighty black chin, perfectly shaven.
‘We aren’t detectives, Mr. Milgrim.’ The second black man, rounding the far end of the bench, had unbuttoned his heavy, cuirass-like coat, exposing a double-breasted black-on-black brocade vest and an elaborately collared satin shirt the color of arterial blood. ‘We aren’t police at all.’
Milgrim craned around a little further, to better see the one whose hands rested on his shoulders like two-pound bags of flour. They were both wearing the tight woolen skullcaps he remembered now from the laundry on Lafayette. ‘That’s good,’ he said, wanting to say something, anything.
Horsehide creaked as the second man settled himself on the bench, his enormous leather-clad shoulder touching Milgrim’s. ‘In your case, Mr. Milgrim, I wouldn’t be so sure of that.’
‘No,’ said Milgrim.
‘We’ve been looking for you,’ said the one with his hands on Milgrim’s shoulders. ‘Not very actively, we’d be first to admit. But once you’d borrowed that young lady’s telephone to contact your friend Fish, he had that number on call-display. Fish, being a friend of Mr. Birdwell, phoned him immediately. Mr. Birdwell phoned that number. He social engineered the lady, who anyway suspected you of having tried to steal her phone, you understand? Are you following me so far, Mr. Milgrim?’
‘Yes,’ said Milgrim, feeling an irrational but very powerful urge to put the cable-tie back on, as though that would magically reverse the flow of events, taking him back to the uneventful park of a few moments before, seeming now a very paradise of security and light.
‘We happened to be nearby,’ said the one beside him, ‘and drove to Lafayette, where we found you. Since then, as a favor to Mr. Birdwell, we have been observing your movements, Mr. Milgrim, awaiting an opportunity to speak with you in private.’
The hands on his shoulders grew abruptly heavier. ‘Where is that cop-looking motherfucker you always with, Mr. Milgrim? Drove you over here.’
‘He’s not a cop,’ Milgrim said.
‘He didn’t ask you that,’ said the one beside him.
‘Whoa,’ exclaimed the one behind, ‘old white man just deck that boy out the cuts!’
‘Thief!’ shouted a man, from the direction of the Greenmarket. ‘Thieves!’ Milgrim saw movement there.
‘This place supposed to be gentrified,’ said the man beside Milgrim, as if offended by the disturbance. ‘Two million a unit, here.’
‘Shit,’ said the one behind, letting go of Milgrim’s shoulders, ‘it’s a bust.’
‘He’s DEA!’ shrieked Milgrim, lunging forward, his worn leather soles slipping nightmarishly, like feet in some ancient animation, one in which the gate of the projector is jumping. Or a very, very bad dream. And part of that dream, as he ran, was that he was still holding, before him, as if some tiny sword, his painfully honed Houdini key.
42 Going away
Systema avoids pursuit whenever possible, the uncles taught. Systema prefers not to flee; rather, it goes away. The distinction was difficult to express, but easily demonstrated through something as simple as the attempted grappling of wrists across a table. The wrist trained in systema went away.
But Tito, having been directed to a particular place, the mysteriously named W, could no longer fully practice going away, the art of which is dependent on a genuine lack of direction. To be pursued, as Oshosi assured him he now was, was to accept a certain disadvantage. But there was systema for this as well, and he chose to demonstrate it now, taking the back of a bench at speed, dropping, rolling, coming up with his momentum intact but headed in the direction opposite. A simple enough business, spending momentum in the roll, but he heard a child cheer to see it.
The nearest of his three pursuers was just rounding the bench as Tito vaulted back over it, past him, and hit the path, running east now. He looked back. The other two, untrained slaves to their own momentum, were carried past the first and very nearly ran into the bench. These were the ones he’d seen Marcos trip. One of them had a bloodied mouth.
With Oshosi at his shoulder, Tito ran toward Union Square East and Sixteenth Street. The orisha wanted him out of the park and its calculable geometries of pursuit. A cab slid in front of him as he reached the traffic on Union Square East; he went over its hood, meeting the eyes of its driver as he slid past the windshield, friction burning his thigh through his jeans. The driver slammed his horn and held it, and other horns woke reflexively, a sudden uneven blaring that mounted to crescendo as his three pursuers reached the stream of traffic. Tito looked back and saw the one with the bloody mouth maneuvering between crowded bumpers, holding something aloft like a token. A badge, Tito guessed.
Tito ran north, bent low, deliberately slowing, weaving through the crowd, some of whom were pausing to see what the horns were about. Faces peered from the windows of a restaurant. He looked back and saw the bloody-mouthed man spill a woman out of his way as he ran after Tito.
Tito sped up, Oshosi noting that his pursuer was still gaining. He ran across Seventeenth without slowing. Saw the entrance to the restaurant, a revolving door. He ran on, to the hotel’s entrance, an airy lip of glass protruding to shelter it. Under the startled doorman’s black-shirted arm, past a woman just emerging. He saw Brotherman descending two broad marble steps, divided by a central railing. Brotherman wore a Federal Express uniform and cradled a flat red-white-and-blue carton upright in his arms. He’d never seen Brotherman in shorts before. As Tito threw right, his new shoes grabbing the white marble, he heard the bloody-mouthed man slam through the doors behind him.
He glimpsed a sinuous overhang of stairway, deeper in the lobby, and registered the distinctive sound of Brotherman, releasing, on his exit, thirty pounds of twelve-millimeter steel ball bearings, through the trick bottom of his FedEx carton and onto the white marble.
Tito sprinted south, Oshosi indicating that his pursuer, who must have missed the bearings, was only a few steps behind.
Into the restaurant, darting past the row of tables by the south-facing windows; past the unbelieving faces of diners, who an instant before had been lingering over desserts and coffees.
