Spook Country Read Free

Cantonese neither of them could read, was the color of a silver coin, misplaced for decades in a drawer.
    Alejandro was a literalist, highly talented but supremely practical. This was why he had been chosen to apprentice under gray Juana, their aunt, the family’s master forger. Tito had lugged ancient mechanical typewriters through the downtown streets for Alejandro, impossibly heavy machines purchased in dusty warehouses beyond the river. He had run errands for their inked-cloth ribbons and the turpentine Alejandro used to wash out most of their ink. Their native Cuba, Juana taught, had been a kingdom of paper, a bureaucratic maze of forms, of carbon copies in triplicate—a realm the initiate might navigate with confidence and precision. Always precision, in the case of Juana, who had herself been trained in the white-painted subbasements of a building whose upper stories afforded narrow views of the Kremlin.
    “He frightens you, this old man,” Alejandro said.
    Alejandro had learned Juana’s thousand tricks with papers and adhesives, watermarks and stamps, her magic in improvised darkrooms, and darker mysteries involving the names of children who had died in infancy. Tito had sometimes carried, for months on end, decaying wallets bulging with fragments of the identities Alejandro’s apprenticeship had generated, prolonged proximity to his body removing every trace of the new. He had never touched the cards and folded papers the heat and movement of his body sueded so convincingly. Alejandro, removing them from their stained envelopes of dead man’s leather, had worn surgical gloves.
    “No,” Tito said, “he doesn’t frighten me.” Though really he wasn’t sure; fear was a part of it, but he didn’t seem to fear the old man himself.
    “Perhaps he should, cousin.”
    The strength of Juana’s magic had faded, Tito knew, amid new technologies and an increasing governmental stress on “security,” by which was meant control. The family relied less now on Juana’s skills, obtaining most of their documents (Tito guessed) from others, ones more attuned to present needs. Alejandro, Tito knew, was not sorry about this. At thirty, eight years older than Tito, he had come to regard life in the family as at best a mixed blessing. The drawings Tito had seen, taped to fade in sunlight against the windows of Alejandro’s apartment, were a part of this. Alejandro drew beautifully, seemingly in any style, and there was an understanding between them, unspoken, that Alejandro had begun to carry the subtleties of Juana’s magic uptown, into a world of galleries and collectors.
    “Carlito,” Alejandro named an uncle now, carefully, passing Tito a small white china bowl of greasy, scented warmth. “What has Carlito told you about him?”
    “That he speaks Russian.” They were speaking Spanish. “That if he addresses me in Russian, I may reply in Russian.”
    Alejandro raised an eyebrow.
    “And that he knew our grandfather, in Havana.”
    Alejandro frowned, his white china spoon poised above his soup. “An American?”
    Tito nodded.
    “The only Americans our grandfather knew in Havana were CIA,” Alejandro said, more softly now, though there was no one else in the restaurant other than the waiter, who was reading a Chinese weekly on his stool behind the till.
    Tito remembered going with his mother to the Chinese cemetery behind Calle 23, shortly before he had come to New York. Something had been retrieved from an ossuary there, one of the small houses of bones, and Tito had delivered this elsewhere, proud of his tradecraft. And in the reeking toilet behind a Malecon restaurant he had flicked through the papers, in their mildewed envelope of rubberized fabric. He had no idea what they might have been, now, but he knew they had been typed in an English he’d scarcely known how to read.
    He had never told this to anyone, and now did not tell Alejandro.
    His feet, in black Red Wing boots, were very cold. He imagined