Spook Country by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

overview. And Juana, Tito knew, was the deepest of them all, the calmest, most patient. He often visited her, here. She took him to El Siglo XX Supermarket to buy malanga and boniato. The sauces she prepared for these were of a potency he already found alien, but her empanadas made him feel as if he were blessed. She had never told him about this Semenov, but she had taught him other things. He glanced toward the vessel holding Ochun. “What did Carlito say, about the old man?”
    Alejandro looked over his knees. “Carlito said there is a war in America.”
    “A war?”
    “A civil war.”
    “There is no war in America.”
    “When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?”
    “That was the ‘cold war.’”
    Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. “A cold civil war.”
    Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun’s vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.
    “You don’t follow politics, Tito.”
    Tito thought of the voices on the Russian Network of America, drowning somehow, taking his Russian with them. “A little,” he said.
    The kettle began to whistle. Tito took it off the element and dashed some boiling water into the tchainik. Then he added the two tea bags and poured the water with a habitual fast flourish. He put the lid on.
    The way that Alejandro sat on his bed reminded Tito of crouching with his schoolmates, at dawn, to whip a wooden top from one cobble to the next, the day’s heat gathering in the street around them. They had worn pressed white shorts and red scarves. Did anyone spin tops, in America?
    Leaving the tchainik to steep, he sat beside Alejandro on the mattress.
    “Do you understand how our family came to be what it is, Tito?”
    “It began with Grandfather, and the DGI.”
    “He wasn’t there long. The KGB needed its own network in Havana.”
    Tito nodded. “On Grandmother’s side, we had always been in Barrio de Colón. Juana says before Batista.”
    “Carlito says that people in the government are looking for your old man.”
    “What people?”
    “Carlito says that it reminds him of Havana here now, of the years before the Russians left. Nothing now is business as usual. He tells me that this old man was instrumental in bringing us here. That was a big magic, cousin. Bigger than our grandfather could have worked alone.”
    Tito suddenly remembered the smell of the English-language papers, in their mildewed case. “You told Carlito you thought it was dangerous?”
    “Yes.”
    Tito got up to pour two glasses of tea from the tchainik. “And he told you that our family is under an obligation?” He was guessing. He looked back at Alejandro.
    “And that you were specifically requested.”
    “Why?”
    “You remind him of your grandfather. And of your father, who was working for this same old man when he died.”
    Tito passed Alejandro a glass of tea.
    “Gracias,” said Alejandro.
    “De nada,” said Tito.

10. NEW DEVONIAN
    M ilgrim was dreaming of the Flagellant Messiah, of the Pseudo Baldwin and the Master of Hungary, when Brown reached down into the hot shallows of his sleep, dug his thumbs into his shoulders, and shook him, hard.
    “What is this?” Brown kept asking, a question Milgrim had taken to be purely existential, until Brown had wedged those same thumbs into the junctures of Milgrim’s jaw and skull, hard, producing a degree of discomfort so severe that Milgrim was initially unable to recognize it as pain. Milgrim seemed to levitate through no will of his own, mouth opening to scream, but Brown, green-gloved as ever for these more intimate moments, clapped a hand over it.
    He smelled the fresh latex covering Brown’s index finger.
    The other hand presented the screen of a BlackBerry. “What is this?”
    A personal digital assistant, Milgrim was on the brink of answering, but then squinted through tears, recognizing, on the