Pattern Recognition (22 page)

“But who would know that we’re your partners?” Cayce asks.

“Blue Ant is an advertising agency, not the CIA. People talk. Even the ones who’ve been hired not to. Secrecy, when we’re planning a campaign, for instance, can be of the utmost importance. But still things leak. I’ll look at that, at exactly who would have reason to believe the two of you are working for me, but now I’m more curious about these putative Italians.”

“We lost them,” Boone says. “Cayce had just received the code from her contact, and I thought it was the right time to get her out of there. When I had a look for them, later, they were gone.”

“And this contact?”

“Someone I turned up through the footagehead network,” Cayce says.

“Exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for.”

“We doubt he has anything further to offer us,” Boone says, causing Cayce to glance back at him, “but if this watermark is genuine, it may be a good start.”

Cayce looks straight ahead, forcing herself to concentrate on the arcing of the wipers. Boone is lying to Bigend, or withholding information, and now she feels that she is too. She briefly considers bringing up Dorotea and Asian Sluts at this point, just to send things in a direction Boone isn’t expecting, but she has no idea of his agenda in lying. He may be doing it for a reason she’d approve of. The next time they’re alone together, she needs to have this out with him.

She blinks, as they abruptly leave the motorway, entering London’s maze. Streetlights coming on.

After Tokyo, everything here feels so differently scaled. A different gauge of model railroad. Though if asked, she’d have to admit that the two do have something mysteriously in common. Perhaps if London had been built, until the war, primarily of wood and paper, and then had burned, the way Tokyo had burned, and then been rebuilt, the mystery she’s always sensed in these streets would remain somehow, coded in steel and concrete.

To her considerable embarrassment, and confusion, they have to wake her when the Hummer pulls up outside of Damien’s.

Boone carries her bag to the door. “I’ll go in with you.”

“It isn’t necessary,” she says. “I’m tired. I’ll be fine.”

“Call me.” On the plane, approaching Heathrow, he’d tapped his various cell numbers into her phone. “Let me know you’re okay.”

“I will,” she says, feeling like an idiot. She unlocks the front door, manages a smile, and goes in.

On the landing, she sees that the bundles of magazines have been removed, and with them the black bin liner.

She’s up the last flight and almost to Damien’s door, the second German key in hand, before she realizes that light is showing, from the crack at the foot of his door.

She stands there, the key in one hand, her bag in the other, hearing voices. One is Damien’s.

She knocks.

A young woman, taller than she is, opens the door. Enormous cornflower-blue eyes, tilted slightly above extraordinary cheekbones, regard her coldly. “Yes? What do you want?” the blonde asks, with what Cayce assumes is a stage accent, some aspect of a joke, but as this woman’s mouth, with its perfectly outlined, extravagantly full underlip, sets itself in grim distaste, she realizes that it isn’t.

Damien, stubble-headed after a recent shaving and for an instant quite unrecognizable, appears behind uber-bones and playfully squeezes her shoulders, grinning over one at Cayce.

“It’s Cayce, Marina. My friend. Where on earth have you been then, Cayce?”

“Tokyo. I didn’t know you were back. I’ll go to a hotel.”

But Damien will have none of that.

21.
THE DEAD REMEMBER

Marina Chtcheglova, whom Cayce quickly gathers is Damien’s Russian line producer, is not the first of his girlfriends to have taken an immediate dislike to her. Seeing the torsos of the robot girls again, she remembers that the one from whom those had been so fetchingly cast had been the most vicious of cows—till now, anyway.

Fortunately she and Marina are almost immediately separated, conversationally, by Voytek, whose presence here Cayce initially accepts as a function of the Great Whatever of multiply impacted jet lag, and by Fergal Collins, Damien’s Irish accountant and tax advisor, someone Cayce knows from several previous occasions. Voytek re-engages la Chtcheglova in whatever rant he must have embarked on prior to Cayce’s arrival, this conducted in what Cayce assumes is Russian, and with a tempo and apparent fluid assurance very unlike his delivery in English. Marina doesn’t seem to like this, particularly, but seems compelled to listen.

Voytek wears his usual orphaned skateboard gear, but Marina is wearing what Cayce is trying not to admit to herself is probably this season’s Prada exclusively, everything black. Her cheekbones actually make Voytek’s look relatively non-Slavic. It’s as though she somehow has an extra pair folded in, behind the first set; Caucasian in some primordial, almost geological sense.

She looks, Cayce decides, like a prop from one sequel or another of
The Matrix;
if her boobs were bigger she could get work on the covers of role-playing games for adolescent boys of any age whatever.

Fergal, some genially carnivorous species of businessman draped in
the pelt of an art-nerd, works mainly in music but has been with Damien for as long as Cayce has known him. “What’s it like in Tokyo, after the devaluations?” he asks, seated beside her on Damien’s brown couch.

“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,” Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower’s that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer. Fergal frowns slightly. “Sorry, Fergal. I was hardly even there. Has Damien finished his film?”

“Would to God he had, but no. He’s back to re-up financing, collect three more cameras and additional crew, and, I think,” he lowers his voice slightly, “because herself fancied a visit to the capital.”

“She’s his line producer?”

“We call her that but really it’s more post-Soviet. She’s the blat girl.”

“The what?”

“Blat. What the old boys in your country called juice, I think. She’s connected, Marina is. Her father was the head of an aluminum plant, back in the dreamtime. When they privatized, somehow he wound up owning it outright. Still does, and a brewery and a merchant bank as well. The brewery’s been a godsend, actually. They’ve been trucking beer to the site since the day we started shooting. Makes Damien a very popular fellow, and otherwise they’d be drinking vodka.”

“Have you been there?”

“For an afternoon.” He winces.

“What’s it like?”

“Somewhere between a three-month 1968 rock concert, mass public grave-robbing, and
Apocalypse Now.
Hard to say, really, which is of course the big draw for our boy here. Do you know that Pole, there?”

“Voytek.”

“Who is he?”

“An artist. I’ve been staying here, and when I went to Tokyo I left the keys with him.”

“He can certainly occupy Marina in her native tongue, which keeps her out of ours, but do you think he’s chatting her up?”

“No,” Cayce says, seeing Voytek produce one of his notebooks from his pouch, “he’s trying to get her to fund a project.” Marina makes a dismissive gesture and goes into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Voytek crosses to the couch, smiling, notebook in one hand, bottle of beer in the other. “Casey, where have you been?”

“Away. Have you met Fergal?”

“Yes!” He sits on the couch. “Damien calls me from airport, asks me to meet here with keys and tandoori and beer. This producer, Marina, she is very interesting. Has gallery connections in Moscow.”

“You speak Russian?”

“Of course. Magda, she was born there. Myself, Poland. Our father was Moscow civil engineer. I do not remember Poland.”

“Christ,” cries Damien from the kitchen, “this khoorma is heaven!”

“Excuse me,” Cayce says, standing. She goes into the yellow kitchen and finds Damien transfixed with joy, half a dozen foil dishes open on the counter in front of him.

“It’s not fucking stew,” Damien says. “At the dig we live on stew. No refrigeration. Stew’s been simmering for the better part of two months. Just keep tossing things in. Lumps of mystery meat and boiled potato in what looks like gray Bisto. That and bread. Russian bread’s brilliant, but this khoorma—”

She gives him a hug. “Damien, I can’t stay here.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“No. I’m pissing off your girlfriend, being here.”

Damien grins. “No you aren’t. It’s her default setting. Nothing to do with you.”

“You aren’t making a lot of progress in your relationship choices, since I last saw you, are you?”

“I can’t make this film without her.”

“Don’t you think it might be easier if you weren’t in a relationship as well?”

“No. In fact, it wouldn’t be at all. She’s like that. When are you coming?”

“Where?”

“The dig. You have to see this. It’s amazing.”

The tower of gray bone. “I can’t, Damien. I’m working.”

“For Blue Ant again? I thought you said that that was over, when you e-mailed me about the keys.”

“This is something else.”

“But you’ve just gotten off the plane from Tokyo. You’re here, there’s a bed upstairs, and I’m back tomorrow. If you go to a hotel, we won’t see one another at all. Go upstairs, sleep if you can, and I’ll deal with Marina.” He smiles. “I’m used to it.”

Suddenly the idea of actually having to find a hotel room and go there seems far too difficult. “You’ve convinced me. I can’t see straight. But if you go back to Russia without waking me, I’ll kill you.”

“Go up and lie down. Where did you find this Voytek, anyway?”

“Portobello Row.”

“I like him.”

Cayce’s legs feel like they belong to someone else, now. She’ll have to try to communicate with them more deliberately, to get them to carry her upstairs. “He’s harmless,” she says, wondering what that means, and heads for her bag and the stair to the room overhead.

She manages to get the futon unfolded, up there, and collapses on it. Then remembers Boone asking her to phone him. She gets out her cell and speed-dials the first of his numbers.

“Hello?”

“Cayce.”

“Where are you?”

“Damien’s. He’s here.”

A pause. “That’s good. I was worried about you.”

“I was worried about me too, when I heard you bullshitting Bigend on the way in from Heathrow. What was that about?”

“Playing it by ear. There’s a chance he knows, you know.”

“How?”

“How is academic. It’s possible. Who gave you the cell you’re using?”

He’s right. “And you thought he might give something away?”

“I thought I’d take the chance.”

“I don’t like it. It makes me complicit, and you didn’t give me the opportunity to decide whether or not I wanted to be.”

“Sorry.” She doesn’t think he is. “I need that jpeg,” he tells her. “E-mail it to me.”

“Is that safe?” she asks.

“Taki’s e-mailed it to your friend, and your friend e-mailed it to you. If anyone is keeping track of us that way, they already have it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Count angels on pinheads, with a friend of mine.”

“Seriously.”

“Improvise. Poke at it. Show it to a couple of people smarter than I am.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t like the way she winds up doing what he tells her to do. “Your address in the iBook?”

“No. This one. Chu-dot-B, at…” She writes it down. “What’s that domain?”

“My former company. All that’s left of it.”

“Okay. I’ll send it. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Sending the jpeg to Boone requires getting out the iBook and cabling
it to the phone. She does this on automatic pilot, apparently remembering how to do it correctly, because her message to chu.b sends immediately.

Automatically, she checks her mail. Another from her mother, this one with unfamiliar-looking attachments.

Without really thinking about it, she opens Cynthia’s latest.

These four ambient segments were accidentally recorded by a CCNY anthropology student making a verbal survey of missing-person posters and other signs near the Houston and Varick barricade on September 25th. We’ve found this particular tape to be remarkably rich in EVP, and have recovered several dozen messages by a variety of methods.

“He took a duck in the face,” Cayce says, closing her eyes. Eventually she has to open them.

Four of them, I believe, are from your father. I know that you aren’t a believer, but it seems to me that Win is addressing you, dear, and not me (he quite clearly, twice, says “Cayce”) and that there’s some urgency to whatever it might be that he’s trying to tell you.

Messages of this sort do not yield very easily to conventional studio techniques; those on the other side are best able to modulate those aspects of a recording that we ordinarily think of as “noise,” so improvement of the signal to noise ratio amounts to the erasure of the message. However, if you use headphones, and concentrate, you will be able to hear your father say the following:

File #1: Grocery store… [??] The tower of light… [life?]

File #2: Cayce… One hundred and… [start of your address?]

File #3 Cold here… Korea… [core error?] Ignored…

File #4 Cayce, the bone… In the head, Cayce… [headcase, someone here suggested, but frankly it isn’t an expression your father would have used]

I know this isn’t your reality but I’ve long since come to accept that. It doesn’t matter. It’s mine, though, and that’s why I’m here at ROTW, doing what I can to help with this work. Your father is trying to tell you something. Frankly, at this point, I wish he would tell us exactly when, and how, and most importantly exactly where he crossed over, as we’d then have a shot at some DNA and proof that he is in fact gone. The legal aspects of his disappearance are not progressing, although I’ve changed lawyers and had them obtain a writ of…