Spook Country Read Free Page A

himself slipping luxuriously into a deep Japanese bath of this same duck soup. “He looks like the men who used to stand in the hardware stores along this street,” he said to Alejandro. “Old men in old coats, with nothing else to do.” The hardware stores of Canal were gone now, replaced by cellular shops and counterfeit Prada.
    “If you were to tell Carlito that you had seen the same van twice, or even the same woman,” Alejandro told the steaming surface of his soup, “he would send someone else. The protocol demands it.”
    Their grandfather too was gone, the author of that protocol, like those old men along Canal Street. His complexly illegal ashes had been flung, one chilly April morning, from a Staten Island Ferry, the uncles shielding ritual cigars against the wind, while the vessel’s resident pickpockets hung well back, away from what they rightly perceived to be a most private activity.
    “There has been nothing,” Tito said. “Nothing to indicate any interest.”
    “If someone pays us to pass this man contraband—and by the nature of our business we pass nothing else—then someone else is surely interested.”
    Tito tested the joints of his cousin’s logic, finding them sound. He nodded.
    “You know the expression ‘get a life,’ cousin?” Alejandro had switched to English. “We all need lives, Tito, eventually, if we’re to stay here.”
    Tito said nothing.
    “How many deliveries, so far?”
    “Four.”
    “Too many.”
    They ate their soup in silence then, hearing trucks rumble over metal, along Canal.

    LATER TITO STOOD before the deep sink in his single tall room in Chinatown, washing winter socks with Woolite. Socks were no longer quite so foreign in themselves, but the weight of these, wet, still amazed him. And still his feet were sometimes cold, in spite of a variety of insulated insoles from the surplus store on Broadway.
    He remembered the sink in his mother’s apartment in Havana. The plastic bottle filled with the henequen sap she used as a detergent, the pad of coarse fibers from the interior of the same plant, and a small can of charcoal. He remembered the tiny ants, speeding along the edge of his mother’s sink. In New York, Alejandro had once pointed out, ants moved much more slowly.
    Another cousin, relocated from New Orleans in the wake of the flood, had spoken of seeing a swarming, glittering ball of red ants in the water. This was how ants avoided drowning, it seemed, and Tito, hearing the story, had thought that his family was like that as well, afloat in America, less numerous but supported by one another on their invisible raft of tradecraft, the protocol.
    Sometimes he watched the news in Russian, on the Russian Network of America, on his Sony plasma screen. The voices of the presenters had begun to acquire a dreamlike, submarine quality. He wondered if this was what it felt like, to begin to lose a language.
    He rolled his socks, squeezed water and suds from them, emptied and refilled the sink, put them back in to rinse, and dried his hands on an old T-shirt he used as a towel.
    The room was square, windowless, with a single steel door and white-painted plasterboard walls. The high ceiling was raw concrete. He sometimes lay on his mattress, staring up, and traced the edges of vanished sheets of plywood there, fossil impressions dating from the pouring of the floor above. There were no other live-in residents. His floor-neighbors were a factory where Korean women sewed children’s clothing, and another, smaller firm, something to do with the Internet. His uncles held the lease here. When they required a place to do certain kinds of business, Tito sometimes slept at Alejandro’s, on his cousin’s Ikea couch.
    His own room had a sink and toilet, a hotplate, a mattress, his computer, amp, speakers, keyboards, the Sony television, an iron, an ironing board. His clothing hung on an ancient wheeled iron rack, rescued from the sidewalk on Crosby Street. Beside one of