Spook Country Read Free Page B

his speakers stood a small blue vase from a Chinese department store on Canal, a fragile thing he had secretly dedicated to the goddess Ochun, she whom Cuban Catholics knew as Our Lady of Charity, at Cobre.
    He cabled his Casio keyboard, added warmer water to the rinsing socks, pulled a long-legged folding director’s chair close to the sink, and climbed up into it. Perched in the tall, unsteady chair, from that same Canal Street department store, he settled into the sling of black canvas and lowered his feet into the water. With the Casio across his thighs, he closed his eyes and touched the keys, searching for a tone like tarnished silver.
    If he played well, he would fill Ochun’s emptiness.

3. VOLAPUK
    M ilgrim, wearing the Paul Stuart overcoat he’d stolen the month before from a Fifth Avenue deli, watched Brown unlock the oversized steel-sheathed door with a pair of keys taken from a small transparent Ziploc bag, exactly the sort of bag that Dennis Birdwell, Milgrim’s East Village dealer, used to package crystal.
    Brown straightened up, fixing Milgrim with his habitual look of alert contempt. “Open it,” he ordered, shifting slightly on his feet. Milgrim did, keeping a fold of overcoat between his hand and the knob. The door swung open on darkness and the red power indicator of what Milgrim assumed was a computer. He stepped in before Brown had a chance to shove him.
    He was concentrating on the tiny tablet of Ativan melting beneath his tongue. It had reached that stage where it was there but not there, merely a focal point of grittiness, reminding him of the microscopic scales on the wings of a butterfly.
    “Why do they call it that?” Brown asked, absently, as the uncomfortably bright beam of his flashlight began a methodical interrogation of the room’s contents.
    Milgrim heard the door click shut behind them.
    It was uncharacteristic of Brown to ask anything absently, and Milgrim took it to indicate tension. “Call it what?” Milgrim resented having to speak. He wanted to concentrate fully on that instant when the sublingual tablet phase-shifted from being to not-being.
    The beam came to rest on one of those director’s-chair barstools, standing beside some kind of janitorial sink.
    The place smelled of someone living there, but not unpleasantly.
    “Why do they call it that?” Brown repeated, with a deliberate and ominous calm. Brown was not the sort of man to willingly voice words or names he found beneath him, either for reasons of their insufficient gravitas or because they were foreign.
    “Volapuk,” said Milgrim, feeling the Ativan finally do its not-there trick. “When they text, they’re keying in a visual approximation of Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. They use our alphabet, and some numerals, but only according to the Cyrillic letters they most closely resemble.”
    “I asked you why they call it that.”
    “Esperanto,” Milgrim said. “That was an artificial language, a scheme for universal communication. Volapuk was another. When the Russians got themselves computers, the keyboards and screen displays were Roman, not Cyrillic. They faked up something that looked like Cyrillic, out of our characters. They called it Volapuk. I guess you could say it was a joke.”
    But Brown was not that sort of man. “Fuck that,” he said flatly, his definitive judgment on Volapuk, on Milgrim, on these IFs he was so interested in. IF was Brown-speak, Milgrim had learned, for Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.
    “Hold this.” Brown passed Milgrim the flashlight, which was made of knurled metal, professionally nonreflective. The pistol Brown wore beneath his parka, largely made of composite resin, was equally nonreflective. It was like shoes and accessories, Milgrim thought; someone does alligator, the next week they’re all doing it. It was the season of this nonreflective noncolor, in Browntown. But a very long season, Milgrim guessed.
    Brown was