When he reached Broadway he bought a paper cup of coffee, black, and sipped from it as he walked, letting the rhythm of his stride find his systema. He let himself be focused by his progress, his road. There could be nothing but the road until he had completed his task, even if he were to turn back for some reason, or stand still.
The uncles who taught him systema had themselves been taught by a Vietnamese, a former soldier, one who had come from Paris to end his days in the village of Las Tunas. Tito as a child had sometimes seen this man at rural family functions, but never in Havana, and had never spoken with him. The Vietnamese had always worn a loose black cotton shirt with no collar, untucked at the waist, and brown plastic shower sandals scuffed the color of dust in a village street. Tito had seen him, as the older men had sat drinking beer and smoking cigars, ascend a two-story wall of whitewashed concrete blocks, no more purchase afforded than the very shallow grooves of mortar between the courses. It was a strange memory, since even as a child Tito had taken what he saw there to be impossible, in the ordinary sense of the world. No applause from the watching uncles, no sound at all, the blue smoke rising as they puffed their cigars. And the Vietnamese rising like that smoke in the twilight, and as quickly, his limbs not so much moving as insinuating themselves into different and constantly changing relationships with the wall.
Tito himself, later, when it had come his time to learn from the uncles, had learned quickly, and well. When it was time for his family to leave Cuba, his systema had already been strong, and the uncles who taught him had been pleased.
And while he had learned the uncles’ ways, Juana had taught him the ways of the Guerreros: Eleggua, Ogún, Oshosi, and Osun. As Eleggua opens every road, so Ogún clears each road with his machete. God of iron and wars, of labor; owner of every technology. The number seven, colors green and black, and Tito held these inwardly now, as he walked toward Prince Street, the Bulgarian’s technology tucked within its handkerchief into the inside pocket of his black nylon jacket, from APC. At the very edge of perception rode Oshosi, the orishas’ hunter and scout. These three, along with Osun, were received by an initiate of the Guerreros. Juana had taught him these things, she had said at first, as a means of more deeply embracing the systema of the Vietnamese from Paris, and he had seen in the eyes of his uncles the proof of this, but he had never told them. Juana had taught him that as well, how the holding of knowledge in dignified privacy helps ensure desired results.
He saw Vianca pass him on a small motorcycle, headed downtown, the brightly painted, mirrored helmet turning his way, glinting in the sunlight. Already Oshosi was allowing him a less specific way of seeing. The life of the street, its pedestrians and traffic, was becoming one animal, an organic whole. With half of his coffee gone, he removed the plastic lid, slid his phone in, and recapped the paper cup, depositing it in the first trash receptacle he passed.
By the time he reached the southwest corner of Prince and Broadway he was flowing with the Guerreros, an alert and interested marcher within some invisible procession. Oshosi showed him the black, black-clad store detective with the bead in his ear, as Eleggua hid him from this man’s attention. Passing the thick frosted cylinder of the store’s glass elevator, he descended the stairway built into the rolling slope of the floor. He had often come here to enjoy the strangeness of it, as of some carnival ride halted in mid-swing. The clothes had never appealed to him, though he liked the look of them displayed here. They spoke too much of money, to the street; they were clothes that Canal copied; anonymous in their way, but too easily described.
He saw another store detective, white, in a beige coat and black shirt and tie. They must be provided with allowances for clothing, he thought, as he rounded a white modular wall of cosmetics and arrived at the men’s shoes.
The Guerreros recognized the stranger standing there, a three-eyelet black alligator oxford in his hand. The strength of their recognition startled.
Blunt and broad shouldered, dark hair cut very short, the other, perhaps thirty, turned. Replaced the shoe on its shelf. “Sixteen hundred,” he said, his English warmly accented in some unfamiliar way. “Not today.” He smiled, teeth white but crowded. “Know Union Square?”
“Yes.”
“At the north end of the park, Seventeenth Street, the Greenmarket. One sharp, don’t show before then. If you did, he wouldn’t be there. If you get within ten paces, and nothing’s happened, break and run. They’ll think you’ve seen them. Some of them will try to take him. Others will try to take you. Get away, but lose this in the process.” He dropped the white rectangle of the iPod, in its Ziploc bag, into Tito’s jacket’s side pocket. “Run for the W, the hotel on the corner of Park and Seventeenth. Know it?”
Tito nodded, remembering having wondered about the name as he’d passed the place.
“Main entrance on Park, up from the corner. Not the revolving door nearest the corner; that’s the hotel’s restaurant. But that’s where you’re actually headed, the restaurant. In past the doorman, but then right. Not up the steps to the lobby. Not into the lobby, understand?”
“Yes.”
“Through the door, right, you’ve made a U-turn. You’re headed south. When you get to the revolving door, at the corner of the building, left. Into the restaurant, straight through it, into the kitchen, exit onto Eighteenth. Green step-van with silver lettering, south side of Eighteenth. I’ll be there.” He turned his head, as if scanning the display of shoes, most of which, today, Tito found very ugly. “They have radios, the men who’ll try to take you, and phones, but all of that will be jammed, as soon as you move.”
Tito, pretending to look at a zip-sided black calf boot, touched its toe with his finger, nodding noncommittally, turning to go.
Oshosi knew that the white detective in the beige jacket had been watching them.
The door of the frosted-glass elevator slid aside. Brotherman emerged, tall hair streaked with copper, eyes glazed, gait unsteady. The white detective instantly forgot Tito, who crossed to the elevator, entered, and pushed the button for the twenty-foot ride to the ground floor. As the door closed, Tito saw the one the Guerreros had recognized, grinning at the detective’s approach to Brotherman, who was about to become abruptly sober, dignified, and firmly but courteously disinclined to be interfered with by a store detective.
36. SPECTACLES, TESTICLES, WALLET, AND WATCH
By the time Milgrim had finished shaving and gotten dressed, Brown was holding a meeting in the adjoining room. Milgrim had never known Brown to have a visitor before, and now he was having three, three males. They had arrived within minutes of Brown having made his call, and Milgrim had gotten brief glimpses of them as they’d filed into Brown’s room. From what little he’d managed to see, he knew that they were white and conventionally dressed, and that was it. He wondered if they too had been staying here, particularly as two of them were in shirtsleeves and carried no coats or jackets.
He could hear them talking now, conversing quickly, but couldn’t make anything out. Brown was making various decisive sounds, yeas or nays, and periodically interrupting to reel off what Milgrim took to be revised strategic requirements.
Milgrim decided to treat this as opportunity to pack, and having considered the circumstances, to re-Rize. Packing consisted of putting his book in the pocket of his overcoat, and seeing to toiletries. He rinsed and dried the blades of his blue plastic razor. He used a piece of toilet paper to tidy up the threads and cap of his small tube of Crest toothpaste; replacing the cap, he carefully furled the tube to its shortest possible length, watching it plump out satisfyingly as he did so. He washed and rinsed his white toothbrush, dried its bristles with one piece of toilet paper, and then wrapped them loosely in another. He considered taking the small bar of New Yorker soap, which lathered up nicely, but then he wondered why it was that he assumed they wouldn’t be coming back.
Something was up. Afoot. He remembered reading Sherlock Holmes, centuries before. Leaving the bar of wet soap on the
edge of the soap-and-whisker-speckled sink, he tucked the rest of his possessions away in the various pockets of the overcoat. He assumed that Brown would still have the wallet and identification he’d confiscated on first picking Milgrim up (he’d pretended to be a cop, and Milgrim wouldn’t have doubted it, not on that first meeting), but otherwise these grooming aids, and his book, plus the clothes he was wearing and the overcoat, comprised the whole of Milgrim’s worldly possessions. Plus two 5 mg tablets of Rize. He thumbed the pack’s penultimate dose into his palm and considered it. Was this a worldly possession, he wondered. Unworldly, he decided, swallowing it.
Hearing Brown’s meeting conclude with what sounded like a determined slapping of palms, he walked to the window. No need to see them, really, or they him. If indeed they weren’t already quite familiar with him. But still.
“Move it,” said Brown, from the door.
“I’m all packed.”
“You’re what?”
“‘Game is afoot.’”
“You want a broken rib?”
But Brown’s heart wasn’t in it, Milgrim saw. He was distracted, focused utterly on his impending operation, on whatever needed to be done now with regard to IF and Subject. He had his cased laptop in his hand, and his other black nylon bag slung across his shoulder. Milgrim watched him pat himself down with his free hand, locating pistol, handcuffs, flashlight, knife, whatever other empowerments he didn’t leave home without. Spectacles, Milgrim recited to himself, testicles, wallet, watch. “Ready when you are,” he said, and walked past Brown into the hallway.
As his benzo-boost kicked in, in the elevator, Milgrim became aware of a not unpleasurable excitement. Something really was afoot, and as long as it didn’t mean another four hours in the laundry on Lafayette, it promised to be interesting.
Brown marched them across the lobby, to the main entrance, and out into surprisingly bright sunlight. A bellman was holding open the driver’s door of a recently washed silver Corolla and proffering the key, which Brown took, handing the man two dollars. Milgrim rounded the back of the Corolla and got in. Brown was placing his laptop and other bag on the floor behind the passenger seat. When they rode together in a car like this, Milgrim knew, he rode shotgun, probably because that made him easier to shoot. Was that why they called it that? He heard Brown power-lock the doors.
Brown headed east on Thirty-fourth. The weather was fine, bespeaking some genuine onset of spring, and Milgrim imagined himself a pedestrian, strolling pleasantly. No, he thought, a pedestrian strolling with a mere 5 mg of Rize on hand. He reframed the image, hanging Brown’s black bag over his shoulder. Wherein, he assumed, was kept the brown paper bag with the Rize supply.
“Red Team One,” Brown said, firmly, as they took a right on Broadway, “south on Broadway, for Seventeenth.” He listened to some distant voice.
Milgrim looked over and saw the gray plug in Brown’s ear, the gray wire vanishing into the collar of his jacket.
“I’m going to leave you in the car,” Brown said, touching something at his collar, a mute control. “I’ve got Transit Authority tags that’ll keep the traffic cops off it, but I’m thinking I’ll cuff you.”
Milgrim knew better than to offer an opinion on this.
“But this is New York,” Brown said.
“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, tentatively.
“You look like a junkie. Cop thinks you’re doing a Transit Authority car, then sees you’re cuffed to it, alone, not good.”
“No,” said Milgrim.
“So no cuffs.”
Milgrim said nothing.
“I’m going to need these cuffs today,” said Brown, and smiled. Milgrim couldn’t remember having seen Brown smile. “You, on the other hand, are going to need the dope in this bag, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, having already come to the same conclusion, a few minutes before.
“I get back to this car and your ass isn’t in it, you’re finished.”
Milgrim wondered what Brown thought constituted deeper shit, for Milgrim, in his current situation, although having benzo-seizures while homeless and penniless on the streets of Manhattan actually did fully qualify, by Milgrim’s own standards, and maybe Brown knew it. “I hear you,” Milgrim said, trying for a tone that would match Brown’s, but not antagonize him. He had a feeling, though, that Brown’s “finished” meant dead, and that was a more peculiar feeling than he would have expected.
“Copy,” Brown said, to the voices in his ear. “Copy.”
37. FREERUNNERS
The Guerreros took him up Broadway, through the sunlight. He hadn’t expected this, assuming he’d reach Union Square by subway, then round and circle until the time of his meeting. But no, and so he walked with them, just as they led him. And soon he was simply a man walking, the orishas spread through a seemingly ordinary awareness, invisible as drops of ink in a volume of water, his pulse steady, enjoying the look of the sun on the floral ironwork that supported many of these old buildings. This was, he knew, though he avoided directly considering it, a still higher state of readiness.
A part of him felt dismay at the thought that he very probably would leave this city soon, perhaps before sunset. It seemed impossible, somehow, but once it must have seemed impossible that he would leave Havana. He couldn’t remember if it had, though he’d left Cuba on equally short notice, taking nothing but the clothes he’d been wearing when his mother had fetched him from a restaurant. He’d been eating a ham sandwich. He could still remember the taste of the bread, a type of square bun that had been a feature of his childhood. Where would he be, tomorrow?
He crossed Houston. Pigeons flew up from the crosswalk.
The summer before, he’d met two NYU students in Washington Square. They were freerunners, devotees of something loosely akin to systema, and also practitioners of what they called tricking. They were black, and had assumed him to be Dominican, though they’d called him “China.” He wondered, now, continuing north, whether this sun would bring them to Washington Square today. He’d enjoyed their company, the demonstrations and exchanges of lesser techniques. He learned the backtucks and other tricks they practiced, incorporating them into his systema, but declined to join them in freerunning, for which they had already been charged with minor infractions of trespass or public safety. He had been looking forward to seeing them again.
He passed Bleecker, then Great Jones Street, the namesake of the latter always imagined as some giant, a creature from the age of iron-framed buildings, bowler-hatted, shoulders level with second-story windows. A figment of Alejandro’s, from the days of his apprenticeship to Juana. He remembered Alejandro sending him into Strand Books, which he soon would be passing, for titles printed in particular years, in particular countries, on various specific types of stock. To be purchased for no content other than the blank endpapers, pages Tito had thought of as stories left unwritten, to be filled in by Alejandro with intricately constructed identities.
He walked on, never looking back, confident that he wasn’t being followed by anyone who wasn’t a relative; had it been otherwise, he would have been alerted by one or another family member from the team he knew was keeping pace with him, scattered along a constantly moving two-block stretch of either sidewalk, continually trading off positions according to a KGB protocol older than Juana.
Now he saw his cousin Marcos stepping off the curb, half a block ahead. Marcos the conjuror, the pickpocket, with his dark curls.
He walked on.
HAVING DISCARDED his phone, he began to check the time on clocks, through the windows of banks and dry cleaners, as he neared the southern end of Union Square. Clock time was not for the orishas. It would be up to him to coordinate his arrival.
Fifteen to one. On East Fourteenth, beneath the weird art numbers frantically telling a time nobody could read, he looked with Oshosi toward the distant canvas stalls of the market.
And then they passed him, laughing, his two freerunners from the summer and Washin
gton Square. They hadn’t seen him. He remembered, now, that they lived in NYU dorms, here in Union Square. He watched them go, wishing he could go with them, while around him the orishas briefly and very faintly rippled the air, like heat rising above August pavement.
38. TUBAL
She lay very still, on her back, the sheet forming a cool dark tunnel, and gave her body explicit permission to relax. This made her remember doing the same thing in an overhead berth on a tour bus, but with a sleeping bag instead of sheets, and foam earplugs instead of asking the desk to hold her calls, and setting the ring on her cell to silent.
Inchmale had called it womb-return, but she knew it was the opposite, really; not so much the calm of not yet having been born, but the stillness of already having died. She didn’t want to feel like a fetus, but like the recumbent figure carved atop a sarcophagus, cool stone. When she’d explained that to Jimmy Carlyle, once, he’d cheerfully told her that was pretty much exactly what he was after with heroin. Something about that exchange had left her very glad she’d never been much attracted to drugs, other than garden-variety cigarettes.
But anything that shook her sufficiently, really hard, could get her into tube mode, preferably in a darkened room. The departures of serious boyfriends had done it, as had the end of the Curfew, her initial major losses when the dot-com bubble had popped (the fact of those holdings having been residue of a serious boyfriend, if you wanted to look at it that way) had done it, and her subsequent (and she supposed possibly final, the way things were headed) major financial loss had done it as well, when her friend Jardine’s ambitious shot at an indie music emporium in Brooklyn had not so unexpectedly failed. Investment in that had initially seemed like a sort of hobby move, something fun and open-ended and potentially even profitable, that she could afford to take a chance on, given the dot-coms had briefly made her worth some single-digit number of millions, at least on paper. Inchmale, of course, had lobbied for her to dump the start-up stocks at what she now knew had been their white-hot and utterly evanescent peak. Inchmale, being Inchmale, had by then already dumped his own, which had driven acquaintances crazy, as they’d all believed he was throwing away the future. Inchmale had told them that some futures needed throwing away, badly. And Inchmale, of course, had never sunk a quarter of his net worth into founding a large, aggressively indie, bricks-and-mortar retail establishment. Selling music on the full variety of what were, after all, Inchmale had insisted, dead platforms.
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