He thought of the peculiar, phoenix-like creature on the front door, downstairs.
But then he remembered eating pizza that Brown had ordered, in the kitchen, downstairs. Pepperoni and three cheeses. And the fridge, which had contained a six-pack of very cold Pepsi and nothing else. He remembered feeling the smooth white circles of the heating elements on the range, something he’d not seen before. Brown had taken his pizza into a sort of study, along with a glass and a bottle of whiskey. Milgrim had never seen Brown drink before. Then he’d heard Brown on the phone, through the closed door, but hadn’t been able to make anything of it. And then, he guessed, he’d treated himself to another Rize.
Sometimes, he observed now, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, a little too much had a way of clearing the air, the morning after. He looked up and encountered the eagle’s gun-muzzle eye. Looking quickly away, he rose, surveyed the room, and began to search it, quietly and with an efficiency born of practice.
It had obviously been decorated to be a boy’s room, and in the style of the rest of the house, though perhaps with a bit less effort. Less Ralph Lauren than some diffusion line. He hadn’t yet seen a single actual antique, aside from the Ur-eagle outside, which might even be original to the house. The furnishings were faux-old, and that rather halfhearted, more likely made in India or China than North Carolina. For that matter, he thought, noting the room’s empty inbuilt bookcase, he hadn’t seen a single book.
He carefully, quietly opened each drawer in the small bureau. All empty, aside from the bottom one, which contained a wire coat hanger clad in tissue, printed with the name and address of a dry cleaner in Bethesda, and two pins. He knelt on the carpet and peered under the bureau. Nothing.
The small, vaguely Colonial desk, finished, like the bureau, in rather robotically distressed blue paint, offered nothing more, other than a dead fly and a black ballpoint pen marked PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT in white. Milgrim tucked the pen into the elastic waistband of his underwear, having at that point no pockets, and carefully opened what he took, correctly, to be a closet door. The hinges squeaked with disuse. Empty coat hangers rattled on a hook. The closet proved to contain nothing but more coat hangers, on one of which hung a small navy blazer with an elaborately gold-embroidered crest. Milgrim went through its pockets, finding a wadded Kleenex and a stub of chalk.
The boy’s jacket and the piece of chalk saddened him. He didn’t like thinking of this as a child’s room. Perhaps there had been other things here once, books and toys, but somehow it didn’t seem like it. The room suggested a difficult childhood, perhaps not too different from the one Milgrim himself had had. He left the closet, closing the door, and went to the blue ladder-backed chair on which his clothes had been draped. Forgetting the U.S. Government pen, he jabbed himself with it as he was putting on his pants.
Dressed, he approached the drawn striped drapes of the room’s single window. Positioning himself so that he could move the outer edge of one drape as minimally as possible, he discovered what he took to be N Street, on what appeared to be an overcast day. But his angle down also revealed the right front fender of a parked car, black and highly polished. A large car, to judge by what he could see of its fender.
He put on the Paul Stuart coat, discovering his book in its pocket, clipped the government pen into the inside pocket, and tried the room’s door, finding it unlocked.
A paneled, carpeted hallway, illuminated now by a skylight. He looked over a banister and down, two flights, to the softly gleaming gray marble of the hallway they’d entered yesterday evening. One of those central but minimal stairwell-shafts encountered in houses of this age, very long and narrow, running back to front. Beside his ear, a spoon rattled against china. He spun, starting violently. ‘I appreciate that,’ an invisible Brown said, with an uncharacteristic note of gratitude.
The hallway was empty.
‘I understand what you have to work with,’ said a voice Milgrim had never heard before, the speaker equally close, equally invisible. ‘You’re using the best men available to you, and finding them lacking. We see that all too often. I’m disappointed, of course, that you weren’t able to apprehend him. In the light of your previous lack of success, I think it would have been wise to arrange to try to photograph him. Don’t you? To be prepared to photograph him in any case, in the event he escaped again.’ The man had a lawyer’s cadence, Milgrim thought. He spoke slowly and clearly, and as though he took it for granted that he’d be paid attention to.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Brown.
‘Then we might at least have a chance to learn who he is.’
‘Yes.’
Eyes wide, gripping the banister rail as though it were the railing of a ship in a storm, Milgrim stared down at the distant, narrow slice of marble floor, tasting his own blood. He’d bitten the inside of his cheek, when that spoon had rattled against that coffee cup. Brown’s breakfast conversation was being reflected off that marble floor, he guessed, or being sucked up this slit of Federal stairwell, or both. Had children stood here a hundred years ago, he wondered, suppressing giggles at some other conversation?
‘You say the information intended for him indicates that he still has no tracking ability, hence no knowledge of whereabouts or ability to predict destination.’
‘Whoever he has working on it,’ Brown said, ‘doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.’
‘And our friends,’ the other said, ‘are they able to determine, when they go over this material, what it is, exactly, that’s being so unsuccessfully searched for?’
‘The assessment’s handled by someone who has no knowledge of any of this. It’s just information, to him, and he analyzes classified data constantly.’
‘Government?’
‘Telco,’ Brown said. ‘You know who handles the decryption. They never look at the product. And our analyst has every reason to pay as little attention as possible to what this might actually be about. I’ve made sure of that.’
‘Good. That was my understanding.’
Cutlery rattled loudly on a plate, so seemingly close that Milgrim winced. ‘So,’ the other man said, ‘are we in a position to bring things home?’
‘I believe we are.’
‘So the shipment finally comes to port. After all this time.’
‘But not in conus,’ Brown said.
Conus? Milgrim blinked, terrified for an instant that this entire conversation might all be some unprecedented aural hallucination.
‘No,’ agreed the other, ‘not yet on American soil.’
CONUS, thought Milgrim, in Fourth of July capitals. Continental United States.
‘And what are the current odds of it being opened for inspection?’ the man asked.
‘Extremely unlikely,’ Brown said. ‘Slightly more likely to have a gamma scan, but the contents and packing look fine, that way. We actually had it gamma’d ourselves, in a previous port of call, to see how it reads.’
‘Yes,’ said the other, ‘I saw those.’
‘You agree, then?’ asked Brown.
‘I do,’ said the other. ‘What steps are being taken in your absence, in New York?’
Brown took a moment to answer. ‘I sent a team to the IF’s room, for fingerprints and to recover the surveillance device. They found the door open and everything under a coat of fresh latex paint. Even the lightbulb. No fingerprints. And there were none on the iPod, of course. The unit was where I left it, under a coatrack, but they’d dumped that outside.’
‘They didn’t find it?’
‘If they did find it, they might avoid doing anything to indicate that.’
‘Are you any closer to understanding who they are?’
‘They’re one of the smallest organized crime families operating in the United States. Maybe literally a family. Illegal facilitators, mainly smuggling. But a kind of boutique operation, very pricey. Mara Salvatrucha looks like UPS in comparison. They’re Cuban-Chinese and they’re probably all illegals.’
‘Can’t you get ICE to roll them up for you?’
‘You have to find them first. We found the kid and followed him home, in the course of trying to find the subject. We found him, to the extent that we ever did, from what you told us about the subject. The rest of them are like ghosts.’ Milgrim found that he knew Brown well enough, now, to hear the edge of a certain craziness in his voice. He wondered if the other man did.
‘Ghosts?’ The other man’s tone was absolutely neutral.
‘The problem,’ Brown said, ‘is that they’ve been trained. Really trained. Some kind of intelligence background, in Cuba. I’d need that professional a team, and it hasn’t happened, has it?’
‘No,’ said the other, ‘but as you yourself once said, they aren’t really our problem. He is our problem. But if he knows what we’re doing, we now know that he doesn’t know when, or where. Perhaps, later, we can steer adequate professionalism in the direction of your facilitators. When it has nothing to do with us, of course. And we’ll certainly have to find out who our man is, and do something about him.’
China rattled on a table, as someone stood. Milgrim released the banister and made it back into his room in two long, agonized, exaggeratedly careful steps. He closed the door with utmost care, took off his coat, draped it over the chair, removed his shoes, and got under the angling-themed sheet, pulling it up beneath his chin. He closed his eyes and lay perfectly still. He heard the front door close. A moment later he heard an engine start, and a car pull away.
After an indeterminate period of time, he heard Brown open his door. ‘Wake up,’ Brown said. Milgrim opened his eyes. Brown stepped to the bed and tore the sheet away. ‘How the fuck can you sleep in your clothes that way?’
‘I fell asleep,’ Milgrim said.
‘Bathroom’s down the hall. There’s a robe there, and a garbage bag. Put everything you’re wearing in the garbage bag. Shower, shave, put on the robe, and come down to the kitchen for a haircut.’
‘You give haircuts?’ Milgrim asked, amazed.
‘The housekeeper’s here. He’ll give you a haircut and measure you for some clothes. And if I catch you sleeping in them, you’ll regret it.’ Brown turned on his heel and left the room.
Milgrim lay there, looking at the ceiling. Then he got up, got his toiletries out of his coat, and went to take his shower.
51 Cessna
Tito discovered that he could sleep on an airplane.
This one had a couch and two chairs, behind the smaller, instrument-filled room where the fat, gray-haired pilot sat. Garreth and the old man sat in the two reclining swivel chairs. Tito lay on the couch, looking up at the curved ceiling, which was upholstered, like the couch, in gray leather. This was an American airplane, the old man had told Tito. It had been one of the last of its kind, made in 1985, he had said, as they’d climbed the little stairway on wheels on the runway at East Hampton Airport.
Tito had no idea why the old man would want such an old airplane. Perhaps it had been his, Tito thought, and he’d simply kept it. If it was that old, though, it was like the American cars in Havana, which were also very old, and shaped like whales made of pale ice cream, frosted greens and pinks, dressed with huge chrome teeth and fins, every inch rubbed to a perfect gloss. As they’d walked to it, from the Lincoln, Garreth and the old man each carrying luggage they’d taken from the trunk, Tito, for all his fear, had been taken with its lines, how it gleamed. It had a very long, very sharp nose, propellers built into its wings on either side, and a row of round windows.
The pilot, fat and smiling, had seemed very glad to see the old man, and had said that it had been a long time. The old man had said that it had indeed, and that he owed the pilot one. He didn’t, the pilot had said, not by half, and had taken the two suitcases, and Tito’s bag, and put them into a space built into the wing, behind one of the engines, hidden when he shut it.
Tito had closed his eyes, going up the stairway, and had kept them closed while Garreth had gone to park the car. ‘Cutting it close,’ the pilot had said, from the front of the plane, while Tito sat with his eyes closed on the couch. ‘Dawn-to-dusk operation, here.’ The old man had said nothing.
Taking off had been very nearly as bad for him as the helicopter, but he’d had his Nano ready, and had his eyes closed.
Eventually, he tried opening them. Sunset was filling the windows, dazzling him. The movement of the plane was smooth, and unlike the helicopter, it felt as though it was actually flying, not being carried along, suspended from something else. It was quieter than the helicopter, and the couch was comfortable.
Garreth and the old man turned on small lights, and put on headsets with microphones, and talked to each other. Tito listened to his music. Eventually the two men unfolded small desks. The old man opened a laptop and Garreth unfolded plans of some kind, studying them, marking them with a mechanical pencil.
It grew warm in the cabin, but not uncomfortable. Tito had taken off his jacket, folded it to use as a pillow, and fallen asleep on the gray couch.
When he woke, it was night, and the lights were off. Through the entrance to the room where the pilot sat, he could see many different lights, small screens with lines and symbols.
Were they leaving the United States? How far could an airplane like this fly? Could it fly to Cuba? To Mexico? He didn’t think it likely they were flying to Cuba, but Vianca having said she thought that Eusebio was in Mexico City, in a neighborhood called Doctores, came back to him.
He looked at the old man, whose profile he could just make out against the glow of the instruments’ lights, sleeping, chin down. Tito tried to imagine him with their grandfather, in Havana, a long time ago, when both the revolution and the whalelike cars had been new, but no images came.
He closed his own eyes, and flew through the night, somewhere above the country he hoped was still America.
52 School clothes
Milgrim found the housekeeper in the kitchen, where Brown had said he would be, rinsing breakfast dishes before putting them in the washer. He was a small man, in dark trousers and a crisp white jacket. Milgrim walked into the kitchen barefooted, wrapped in an oversized robe of thick burgundy terry cloth. The man looked at his feet.
‘He said you’d give me a haircut,’ Milgrim said.
‘Sit,’ the housekeeper said. Milgrim sat on a maple chair, by the matching table, and watched as the housekeeper tidied the last of the breakfast things into the washer, closed it, and turned it on.
‘Any chance of some eggs?’ Milgrim asked.
The housekeeper looked at him blankly, then brought out electric clippers, a comb, and a pair of scissors from a black briefcase on the white counter. He covered Milgrim in what Milgrim assumed (jam spots) had been the breakfast tablecloth, ran the comb through Milgrim’s damp hair, then began to cut it, as if he knew what he was doing. When he was done with the scissors, he used the clippers on the back and sides of Milgrim’s neck. He stepped back, considering, then used comb and scissors for a few minor adjustments. He used a napkin to swipe Milgrim’s hair clippings off the tablecloth, onto the floor. Milgrim sat there, waiting to be presented with the mirror. The man brought a broom and long-handled dustpan, and started sweeping up the hair. Milgrim stood up, thinking that there was always something sad about seeing one’s own hair on the floor, removed the tablecloth, shook it out, and put it on the table. He turned to go.
