Spook Country

31. PURO

B rotherman took the black packages down and loaded them into his truck, then the chair and ironing board, to be delivered to Vianca. She returned with Korean beefbowl. The three of them ate, silently for the most part, sitting in a row on Tito’s black-wrapped mattress, and then Brotherman and Vianca left.

Tito was alone with the mattress, the Bulgarian’s gun tucked beneath it, his toothbrush and toothpaste, the clothing he’d wear when he went to meet the old man, the old iron rack the clothing hung on, two wire hangers, his wallet, his telephone, the white cotton gloves he still wore, and three spare pairs of black socks he planned to tuck into the waistband of his loose black jeans.

His room had become larger, unfamiliar. The fossil imprints of plywood on the high ceiling were comfortingly unchanged. He brushed his teeth at the sink, decided to sleep in his jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. When he turned off the light, the darkness was absolute and of no particular size. He got up and switched the light back on. He lay back down on the black-wrapped mattress, the plastic crinkling noisily, and placed one of the pairs of new black socks across his eyes. They smelled of fresh wool.

Then Alejandro rapped on his door in protocol, the rhythm utterly familiar. Removing the socks, Tito rolled off the mattress and rapped the response, waited for the answer, then opened the door. His cousin stood in the hallway, a set of keys in his hand, smelling faintly of alcohol, looking past Tito to the empty room. “It looks like a cell,” Alejandro said.

“You always said it did.”

“An empty one,” Alejandro said, stepping in and closing the door behind him. “I’ve been to see the uncles. I’m to brief you on tomorrow, but I’m here to tell you more than I’m supposed to.” He grinned, and Tito wondered how drunk he might be. “This way, you have no choice but to hear me.”

“I always listen.”

“Hearing is something else. Give me those socks.” Tito passed him the pair of unworn socks and he separated them, pulling one over either hand. “I’ll show you something.” He grasped the bar of the rack with his sock-covered hands. Alejandro pulled the rack partially over, bracing the wheeled base with his shoe to prevent it rolling. “Look underneath.”

Tito bent and peered under the ornately molded iron base. Something black, held there with tape. “What is it?”

“Mind your toes,” Alejandro warned, as he raised the bar, lowering the base to the floor again.

“What is it?”

“It picks up incoming and outgoing cellular traffic. Messaging. The Volapuk. When you receive the message to deliver the iPod to your old man, regardless of your number, they’ll have it.” Alejandro smirked, an expression from their boyhood.

“Who? Who are they?”

“The old man’s enemies.”

Tito thought of their previous conversations. “He is from the government? The CIA?”

“He was a counterintelligence officer, once. Now he is a renegade, a rogue player, Carlito says. Mad.”

“Mad?”

“It’s beside the point. Carlito and the others have committed the family to his operation. Have committed you. But you know that. You didn’t know about this bug,” indicating the rack, “but the uncles did. Family were watching when it was placed here, and more recently when the battery was replaced.”

“But do you know who put it here?”

“That’s complicated.” Alejandro crossed to the sink and propped himself against it. “Sometimes the closer to a truth one gets, the more complicated things become. The men in bars, who explain every dark secret of this world, Tito, have you noticed, no secret requires more than three drinks to explain. Who killed the Kennedys? Three drinks. America’s real motive in Iraq? Three drinks. The three-drink answers can never contain the truth. The truth is deep, cousin, and shifts, and runs away into the cracks, like the little balls of mercury we played with as children.”

“Tell me.”

Alejandro raised his hands, making puppets of the black socks. “‘I am an old man who once kept secrets for the government here,’” he said for the sock on the left, “‘but I detest certain policies, certain figures in the government whom I believe guilty of crimes. I am mad perhaps, obsessed, but clever. I have friends of a similar tendency, less mad perhaps and with more to lose. I find out secrets with their help, and plot to—’”

“Can it hear us?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Carlito had a friend look at it. No mere wire. Something only the government has, illegal to possess.”

“Are they the government?”

“‘Contractors,’” he said for the sock on the right, “‘we are contractors. That is how things are done here now. We contractors, we work for the government, yes. Except,’” and the sock turned toward Tito and crumpled its mouth for emphasis, “‘when we don’t.’” Alejandro made the socks bow to one another, lowered them. “They are working for someone in the government, perhaps, but not on government business. But they don’t necessarily know that. They wouldn’t want to know that, would they? Sometimes these contractors find it most convenient to know nothing at all. Do you see?”

“No,” Tito said.

“If I were more specific, I’d be inventing a story. Most of this, I infer from things Carlito and others have said. Here are some things that are definite, though. Tomorrow, you will meet a man in the basement of Prada, the men’s shoe section. He will give you an iPod and certain instructions. You will already have received a message, here, in Volapuk, instructing you to deliver the iPod to the old man, at the farmers’ market in Union Square, at one o’clock in the afternoon. You will leave here as soon as you receive the message. Once you have the iPod, you will be nowhere in particular, moving, until one. The family, of course, will be with you.”

“The others had been left in drop boxes,” Tito said.

“But not this time. You must be able to recognize this man later. You must do as he tells you. Exactly as he tells you. He is with the old man.”

“Would these contractors attempt to take the iPod?”

“They will not try to apprehend you, on your way to the delivery. Above all, they want the old man. But they also want the iPod, and they will do whatever possible to capture you, once they have the old man in sight.”

“But you know what I’ve been instructed to do?”

“Yes.”

“Can you explain why I’m to do it?”

“It looks to me,” Alejandro said, raising one sock-hand as if to peer into its nonexistent eyes, “as if the old man, or those who send him the iPods, wish to feed someone some puro.”

Tito nodded. Puro, in his family, meant the most perfectly groundless of lies.