Free Spook Country by William Gibson Page B

York altar, as tidily dusted as the rest of her apartment. Those who didn’t know would only think it a shelf, but Tito saw that her oldest bottles were there, the ones with ancient weather trapped in their cores.
    He had just finished describing the old man.
    Juana no longer smoked cigars. Nor danced, he supposed, though he wouldn’t bet on it. She reached forward and from a small plate on her altar took four pieces of coconut meat. She passed the fingers of her other hand across the floor, before kissing the fingertips and their wholly symbolic dust. She closed her eyes, praying briefly in the language that Tito could not understand. She asked a question in that language, her tone firm, shook the coconut pieces in her cupped hands, and tossed them down. She sat, elbows on her knees, considering them.
    “All have fallen meat to heaven. It speaks of justice.” She collected them and threw them again. Two up, two down. She nodded. “Confirmation.”
    “Of what?”
    “I asked what comes with this man who troubles you. He troubles me as well.” She tossed the four shards of coconut into a tin Dodgers wastebasket. “The orishas may sometimes serve us as oracles,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean they’ll tell us much, or even that they’ll know what will happen.”
    He moved to assist her, when she rose, but she brushed his hands away. She wore a dull-gray dress with a zippered front, like a uniform, and a matching kerchief, or babushka, beneath which she was largely bald. Her eyes were dark amber, their whites yellowed like ivory. “I will make your breakfast now.”
    “Thank you.” It would have been useless to decline, though he had no desire to do that. She shuffled slowly toward her kitchen in gray slippers that seemed to match her institutional dress.
    “Do you remember your father’s place at Alamar?” Over her shoulder from the kitchen.
    “The buildings looked like plastic bricks.”
    “Yes,” she said, “they wanted it as much like Smolensk as possible. I thought it perverse of your father, to live there. He had his choice, after all, and so few did.”
    He stood, the better to watch her old hands patiently slice and butter the bread for the toaster oven, fill the tiny stovetop aluminum espresso maker with water and coffee, put milk in a steel jug.
    “He had choices, your father. More perhaps than had your grandfather.” She looked back, meeting his eyes.
    “Why was that?”
    “Your grandfather was very powerful, in Cuba, though secretly, while the Russians stood to remain. Your father was a powerful man’s first son, his favorite. But your grandfather had known, of course, that the Russians would be going, that things would change. When they left, in 1991, he anticipated the ‘special period,’ the shortages and deprivation, anticipated Castro reaching for the very symbol of his archenemies, the American’s dollar, and of course he anticipated his own subsequent loss of power. I will tell you a secret, though, about your grandfather.”
    “Yes?”
    “He was a Communist.” She laughed, a startlingly girlish sound in the tiny kitchen, as though someone else might be there. “More a Communist than a santero. He believed. All the ways things failed, and in the ways we knew, that the ordinary people could not know, and still, in his way, he believed. He, like myself, had been to Russia. He, like myself, had had eyes to see. Still, he believed.” She shrugged, smiling. “I think that it allowed him some extra degree of leverage, some special grasp, on those to whom we, through him, had become fastened. They had always sensed that about him, that he might believe. Not in the tragic, clownish fashion of the East Germans, but with something like innocence.” The smell of toasting bread filled the kitchen. She used a small bamboo whisk to froth the milk, as it neared boiling. “Of course, they had no way to prove it. And everyone purported to believe, at least publicly.”
    “Why do you