Spook Country

74. AS DIRECTED

M ilgrim had been thinking about offering Brown a Rize, when he spotted the IF walking along the sidewalk. They were headed east on the street where the Princeton Hotel was, coming up on it again, but bound, Milgrim guessed, for another wifi session, courtesy of CyndiNet.

They backed directly on the tracks, these places. Milgrim supposed you could see the floodlit stacks of boxes, from their rear windows. From some of them, even, the one particular turquoise box that had Brown so visibly stressed.

He knew that he wasn’t really going to suggest that Brown try a Rize, but he did believe that, just now, it would probably be a good thing. Brown had been muttering, periodically, and when he wasn’t doing that, Milgrim could see the muscle in his jaw working. Milgrim had sometimes, though rarely, given tranquilizers to civilians, people who weren’t habituated. Though only if they seemed to him to be in serious need, and if he himself was sufficiently well supplied. He always explained that he had a prescription (he often had several) and that these drugs were perfectly safe, if used as directed. He just didn’t get into the matter of who or what might be doing the directing.

He had never seen Brown this tense, before.

Brown had come into his life a week before Christmas, on Madison, a solid figure zipped into the same black jacket he wore tonight. A hand around Milgrim’s upper arm. Flashing something in a black badge case. “You’re coming with me.” And that had been it. Into a car that might as well have been this one, driven by an unsmiling younger man wearing a tie decorated with Goofy in a Santa Claus outfit.

Two weeks later, he’d been sitting with Brown at a table near the window of that magazine place on Broadway, eating sandwiches, when the IF had walked past in a black leather porkpie.

Now here he came again, the IF, but in a short, bright green jacket, with a construction worker’s yellow helmet tucked under his arm. Sort of like a younger Joh

“What? Where?”

“There. Green jacket. That’s him, right?”

Brown braked, peering, spun the wheel, and gu

Milgrim had time to see that the furiously screaming girl in the passenger seat of the car braking violently in front of them was actually giving them the finger.

He had time to see the IF’s face register the Taurus, the boy’s eyes widening in amazement.

He had time to note the dullness of the beige brick of the Princeton Hotel.

He had time to see the IF do something patently impossible: shoot straight into the air, knees tucked, flipping over, the Taurus and Milgrim passing directly through the space he’d occupied an instant before. Then the Taurus clipped something that wasn’t the IF, and a pale hard thing like a very large nursery toy, full of concrete, manifested from nowhere at all, somehow, between Milgrim and the dashboard.

The Taurus’s alarm was sounding.

They weren’t moving.

He looked down and saw something on his lap.

He picked it up. A rearview mirror.

The horrible, hard, pale thing that had hurt his face was deflating. He prodded it with the mirror. “Airbag,” he said.

He looked to the left as he heard Brown’s door open. Brown’s airbag, undeflated, crowned the steering column like some nameless, ominous device in the window of an orthopedic supply house. Brown swatted it out of his way, feebly but viciously. Stood swaying, supporting himself on the open door.

Milgrim heard a siren.

He looked down at Brown’s laptop, in its black nylon bag between the seats. He watched his hand unzip the side pocket, enter, and emerge with a number of bubble-packs. He looked out, over his detumescent airbag, and watched Brown, who seemed to have hurt his leg, hop awkwardly to a hooded trash receptacle, slip Skink’s Glock from his jacket, and slide it quickly under the spring-loaded black flap. He hopped back to the car, more slowly now and taking greater care, and leaned against the mysteriously wrinkled hood. His eyes met Milgrim’s. He gestured, urgently. Out.

Milgrim reminded his hand, bold but absentminded, to pocket the bubble-packs.

The door was stuck, but then it popped open, almost spilling him on the sidewalk. A crowd had emerged from the Princeton. Baseball caps and waterproof outerwear. Hair like a Dead concert.

“Get over here,” Brown ordered, palms flat on the hood, trying to keep his weight off his injured leg.

Milgrim saw flashing lights approaching, homing fast, downhill, from the east. “No,” he said, “sorry,” and turned, walking west as quickly as he could. Expecting the hand, any hand, on his shoulder or upper arm.

He heard the siren shut off in mid-yelp. Saw the whirl of red lights from behind him, thrown across sidewalk, animating his shadow.

His hand, in the pocket of the Jos. A. Banks jacket, decided to pop a Rize out of its bubble. He didn’t entirely approve, but then had to dry-swallow it, as he didn’t like loose tablets. He saw the painted lines of a pedestrian crossing, just as the light changed, and crossed with his gaze fixed on the jaunty little illuminated pictoglyph on the far side.

He walked uphill, then, into relative darkness, the hooting of the wounded Taurus fading behind him.

“Sorry,” he said, walking, to tall dark houses looming amid low forties commercial, while his busy, clever hand patted down his own pockets as if he were some ambulatory drunk it had just encountered. Taking stock. The Rize. New wallet, empty. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Plastic razor in a fold of toilet paper. He stopped, turned, looking back down the incline to the street where Brown had tried to kill the IF. He wished he were back in the Best Western, looking at the textured ceiling. Some old movie on the television, sound down low, just that little bit of movement out of the corner of your eye. Sort of like having a pet.

He walked on, feeling the dead fisheyes of the old houses. Oppressed by this darkness, silence, the specter of some long-vanished domesticity.

But then the upper stories of another street appeared, as if from nowhere, another, better world, with all the lurid gravity of major hallucination. As if glowing from within, the ornate gold-leaf sign of a tobacconist; beside it, a general store; more. The neighborhood of grim dark houses reconstituting itself in its i

Then he saw a camera dip and smoothly turn, at the end of a craning metal arm, scooping up the bright vision, and knew that this was a set, constructed, he now understood, within the black and invisible ruin of some gutted foundry. “Sorry,” he said, and walked on, past caterers’ trucks and walkie-talkied girls, his ankle starting to itch.

He bent to scratch it, finding a hundred and fifty Canadian dollars tucked into the top of his sock, left over from the Glocking expedition.

But better still, in his other, his nonclever hand, he discovered his book.

Straightening, he pressed it against his cheek, swept with gratitude for still having it. Within it, beyond the worn paper cover, lived landscapes, figures. Bearded heresiarchs in brilliantly jeweled gowns, sewn from peasant rags. Trees like giant dead twigs.

He turned, and looked back at the precise, unearthly glow of the film set.

Brown, he was certain, would be gone now, explaining himself to the police. The Princeton Hotel would have a sandwich and a Coke, which would yield whatever change one needed for a bus, or even a cab. And then he would find his way west, to this city’s downtown core, and shelter, and perhaps a plan.

“Quintin,” he said, starting back down the hill, toward the Princeton. Quintin had been a tailor. God incarnate of the Spiritual Libertines. Burned for seducing respected ladies of Tournai, in 1547.