Spook Country

“I know Silverlake.”

“The artist Beth Barker is here, her apartment. You will come, you will experience the apartment, this environment. This is an a

“A

“Each object is hyperspatially tagged with Beth Barker’s description, with Beth Barker’s narrative of this object. One simple water glass has twenty tags.”

She looked at the white orchid blooming on the taller coffee table, imagined it layered with virtual file cards. “It sounds fascinating, Odile, but it will have to be another day. I need to make some notes. Absorb what I’ve seen so far.”

“She will be desolate, Beth Barker.”

“Tell her chin up.”

“Chin—?”

“I’ll see it another day. Really. And the poppies are wonderful. We must talk about them.”

“Ah. Very well.” Cheered. “I will tell Beth Barker. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye. And Odile?”

“Yes?”

“Your message. You said you wanted to talk about Bobby Chombo.”

“I do, yes.”

“We will, then. Bye.”

She stood up quickly, as if doing so would keep the phone, which she thrust into one of the robe’s pockets, from ringing again.

“HOLLIS HENRY.” The boy at the no-name rental lot a short walk down Sunset looked up from her license. “Have I seen you on TV?”

“No.”

“Do you want full collision?”

“Yes.”

He X’d the contract three times. “Signature, initials twice. Movies?”

“No.”

“Singer. In that band. Bald guy with the big nose, guitar, English.”

“No.”

“Don’t forget to fill it up before you bring it back,” he said, staring up at her now with mild if unabashed interest. “That was you.”

“No,” she said, picking up the keys, “it wasn’t.” She went out to her rented black Passat, the carton from Blue Ant under her arm, and got in, putting it in the passenger seat beside her.

28. BROTHERMAN

T ito and Vianca packaged the contents of his room as ten parcels of varying sizes, each one double-wrapped in contractor-grade black trash bags and sealed with heavy black tape. This left Tito’s mattress, the ironing board, the long-legged chair from Canal Street, and the old iron clothing rack. Vianca, it had been agreed, was taking the ironing board and the chair. The mattress, assumed to contain enough skin flakes and hair for a DNA match, would be on its way to landfill as soon as Tito left the building. Vianca had sealed it in two of the black plastic bags before she’d vacuumed the room. The black bags made a slithering sound, now, when you sat on the mattress, and Tito would have to sleep on it.

Tito touched the Nano again, on its cord around his neck, grateful to have his music.

“We’ve packed the tchainik,” he said, “and the kettle. We can’t make tea.”

“I don’t want to wipe them again.”

“Carlito called Alejandro and I tchainiks,” Tito told her. “It meant we were ignorant but willing to learn. Do you know that way of using ‘tchainik’?”

“No,” Vianca said, looking like a very pretty, very dangerous child, under her white paper hairnet. “I only know it to mean teapot.”

“A hacker’s word, in Russian.”

“Do you ever think that you are forgetting Russian, Tito?” she asked in English.

Before he could answer, someone rapped lightly at the door, in protocol. Vianca came out of her crouch on the mattress with a peculiar grace, at once tight and serpentine, to rap a reply. “Brotherman,” she said, and unlocked the door.

“Hola, viejo,” said Brotherman, nodding to Tito and pulling off a black knit headband that served him as earmuffs. He wore his hair in a vertical mass, touched a peculiar dark orange with peroxide. In Brotherman, Juana said, some African had surfaced in the Cuban, before mingling with the Chinese. Brotherman exaggerated this now, to his own advantage and that of the family. He was completely ambivalent, racially. A chameleon, his Spanish slid deftly between Cuban, Salvadoran, and Chilango, while his black American was often incomprehensible to Tito. He was taller than Tito, and thin, long-faced, the whites of his eyes shot with red. “Llapepi,” he greeted Vianca with a nod, backslanging papilla: teenager.

“Hola, Brotherman. Qué se cuenta?”

“Same old,” said Brotherman, bending to catch and squeeze Tito’s hand. “Man of the hour.”

“I don’t like waiting,” Tito said, and stood, to shake unease from his back and arms. The bare bulb overhead seemed brighter than ever before; Vianca had wiped it clean.

“But I have seen your systema, cousin.” Brotherman raised a white plastic shopping bag. “Carlito sends you shoes.” He passed Tito the bag. The high-topped black shoes still had their white-and-blue Adidas logo tags. Tito sat on the edge of the bagged mattress and removed his boots. He laced the Adidas shoes and pulled them on over medium-weight cotton socks, removed the tags, and carefully tightened the laces before tying them. He stood up, shifting his weight, taking the measure of these new shoes. “GSG9 model,” Brotherman said. “Special police in Germany.”

Tito positioned his feet shoulder-width apart, dropped his Nano inside the neck of his T-shirt, took a breath, and backtucked, the new shoes missing the bare bulb in the ceiling fixture by less than a foot. He landed three feet behind his starting position.

He gri

“Anything,” said Tito.

“I’ll start loading this,” said Brotherman, toeing the pile of black packages. Vianca passed him a fresh pair of gloves from her jacket pocket.

“I’ll help,” said Tito.

“No,” said Brotherman, pulling on the gloves and wiggling white fingers at Tito. “You twist your ankle, sprain anything, Carlito have our asses.”

“He’s right,” said Vianca, firmly, removing her paper hairnet and replacing it with her baseball cap. “No more tricking. Give me your wallet.”

Tito passed her his wallet.

She removed the two pieces of identification most recently provided by the family. Surname Herrera. Adiós. She left him his money and MetroCard.

He looked from one cousin to the other, then sat back down on the mattress.

29. INSULATION

T here was something about Rize, Milgrim decided, reclining fully dressed across his New Yorker bedspread, that reminded him of one of the more esoteric effects of eating exceptionally hot Szechuan.

Not just hot, but correctly, expertly seasoned. Hot like when they brought you a plate of lemon slices, to suck on as needed, to partially neutralize the burn. It had been a long time since Milgrim had had food like that. It had been a long time since he’d eaten a meal that had provided any memorable pleasure at all. The Chinese he was most familiar with these days was along the lines of the stepped-on Cantonese they brought him at the laundry on Lafayette, but just now he was recalling that sensation, strangely delightful, of drinking cold water on top of serious pepper-burn—how the water filled your mouth entirely, but somehow without touching it, like a molecule-thick silver membrane of Chinese antimatter, like a spell, some kind of magic insulation.

The Rize was like that, the cold water being the business of being Milgrim, or rather those aspects of being Milgrim, or simply of being, that he found most problematic. Where some less subtle formulation would seek to make the cold water go away, the Rize encouraged him to take it up, into his mouth, in order to savor that silver membrane.

Though his eyes were closed, he knew that Brown had just now come to the co

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun’s i