Spook Country

33. COUNTERPANE

B rown, in a cloak and tight-fitting cowl fashioned from one of the New Yorker’s foam-core blankets, gestured across the rolling beige plain with a sturdy wood-look staff, its length decorated in a traditional pattern of cigarette burns. “There,” he said.

Milgrim squinted in the direction indicated, the direction in which they seemed to have been traveling for some time, but saw only the gibbet-like timber constructions interrupting the otherwise featureless expanse. “I can’t see anything,” Milgrim said, preparing to be struck for disagreement, but Brown only turned, still pointing forward with his staff, and put his other hand on Milgrim’s shoulder. “That’s because it’s below the horizon,” said Brown, reassuringly.

“What is?” asked Milgrim. The sky had a Turner-on-crack intensity, something volcanic aglow behind clouds that looked set to birth tornadoes. “The keep of great Baldwin,” Brown declared, leaning closer to Milgrim’s eyes, “count of Flanders, emperor of Constantinople, suzerain of every Crusader princeling in the Eastern Empire.”

“Baldwin is dead,” Milgrim protested, startling himself.

“Untrue,” said Brown, but still gently, and still gesturing with the staff. “Yonder rises his keep. Can you not see?”

“Baldwin is dead,” Milgrim protested, “but among the poor this myth of the Sleeping Emperor goes all about, and a pseudo-Baldwin, one so claiming, supposedly walks among them now.”

“Here,” said Brown, lowering his staff and gripping Milgrim’s shoulder more firmly, “he is here, the one and true.”

Milgrim saw that not only were Brown’s hood and cloak made from the beige foam-core material, but so was the plain. Or rather covered with it, as it felt beneath his bare soles like a thin carpet spread over a dune.

“Here,” Brown was saying, shaking him awake, “here it is.” The BlackBerry thrust into his face.

“Pencil,” Milgrim heard himself say, rolling upright on the edge of the bed. Cracks of daylight at the border of New Yorker drapes. “Paper. What time is it?”

“Ten-fifteen.”

Milgrim had the BlackBerry now, squinting at its screen, scrolling u

Brown handed him a sheet of New Yorker stationery and a tooth-marked four-inch stub of yellow pencil, kept ready because Milgrim had insisted that he needed to be able to erase. “Leave me alone while I do this.”

Brown made a strange little strangled sound, some deep combination of anxiety and frustration.

“I can do a better job if you go into your own room,” Milgrim said, looking up at Brown. “I have to concentrate. This isn’t like translating high school French. This is the very definition of idiomatic.” He saw that Brown didn’t know what that meant, and noticed his own satisfaction at the fact.

Brown turned and walked out of the room.

Milgrim scrolled the message again and started translating, printing in block capitals on the New Yorker stationery.

ONE TODAY IN

He stopped and considered.

UNION SQUARE AGRICULTURE

He used the eraser, which was nearly gone, the metal ferrule scratching the paper.

UNION SQUARE FARMERS MARKET

17. TH STREET DELIVERY TO USUAL CLIENT

It seemed so simple.

He supposed it was, really, but Brown had been waiting for this, for the IF to receive one of these messages in his room, on one of the IF’s steadily replaced cell phones, where the fancy little bug under the coatrack could also pick it up. Brown had been waiting for it since he’d acquired Milgrim. Previous messages were assumed to have been received elsewhere, when the IF was out and about, drifting as he seemed to through lower Manhattan. Milgrim had no idea how Brown knew about those previous deliveries, but he did, and it had become evident to Milgrim that what Brown wanted most of all wasn’t the IF, or whatever it might be that he was delivering, but this “usual client,” a second “he” in Brown’s phone conversations, sometimes also referred to as “subject.” Brown ate and slept Subject, Milgrim knew, and the IF was merely some facilitator. Once Brown had raced to Washington Square, his people converging invisibly with him, only to find Subject gone, and the IF strolling back down Broadway like a small black crow, narrow black legs moving over a broken cover of sooty snow. Milgrim had seen this from the window of a gray Ford Taurus that stank of cigars, over Brown’s tactical nylon shoulder.

Milgrim stood, massaging stiffness from his thighs, discovered his fly unzipped, zipped it, rubbed his eyes, and dry-swallowed the morning’s Rize. It delighted him, knowing Brown wouldn’t interrupt him now. He looked down at Brown’s BlackBerry on the bedside table, beside the translated Volapuk.

The dream came back. Those gallows things. They were in Bosch, weren’t they? Torture devices, props for vast disembodied organs?

He picked up the BlackBerry and the sheet of stationery, and went to the co

“When?”

Milgrim smiled. “One. Today.”

Brown was in front of him, taking the BlackBerry and the paper. “This is it? This is all it says?”

“Yes,” said Milgrim. “Will I be going back to the laundry?”

Brown looked at him, sharply. Milgrim didn’t ask these questions. He’d learned not to. “You’re coming with me,” said Brown. “You might get to do some live translation.”

“You think they speak Volapuk?”

“They speak Russian,” Brown said. “Cuban-Chinese. The old man speaks it too.” He turned away. Milgrim went into his bathroom and ran the cold. The Rize hadn’t gone down smoothly. He looked at himself in the mirror and noted that he could use a haircut.

As he drank the glass of water he wondered when he’d quit looking at his own face in mirrors, other than for the most basic functions of grooming. He never saw himself there. At some point he’d decided not to.

He could hear Brown on the phone, energized and giving orders. He held his wrists under the cold stream from the tap, until it almost hurt. Then he turned it off and dried his hands on a towel. He pressed his face against the towel, imagining other people, strangers, whose faces had also touched it.

“I don’t want more,” he heard Brown say, “I want fewer and I want better. Get it through your head these aren’t your sand monkeys. You’re not over there now. These are operators, bred from the ground up. You lost him going into fucking Canal Street Station. You lose him in Union Square, you don’t want to know. You hear me? You don’t want to know.”

Milgrim supposed he didn’t want to know either, not in that sense, but this was all interesting. Cuban-Chinese, illegal facilitators who spoke Russian and messaged in Volapuk? Who lived in windowless mini-lofts on the fringes of Chinatown, wore APC and played keyboards? Who weren’t sand monkeys, because this wasn’t over there?

When in doubt, and when not compelled to simply enjoy his medication, Milgrim was in the habit of shaving, provided the necessities were at hand, as they were now. He began to run the hot.

Operators. Bred from the ground up.

Old man. That would be Subject.

He put the towel around his neck and tossed a washcloth into the hot water begi