Pattern Recognition (30 page)

Mostly she manages to ignore it, though there’s a certain way they can have, on first meeting, of sniffing one another’s caste out, that gives her the willies.

Katherine, her therapist, had suggested that it might in fact be because it was such a highly codified behavior, as were all of the areas of human activity around which Cayce suffered such remarkable sensitivity. And it is, highly codified; they look at one another’s shoes first, she’s convinced, and Lucian Greenaway has just done that to Ngemi.

And doesn’t like them.

Slightly dusty black DMs, their fat-proof (as advertised) air-cushioned soles now planted firmly before this counter in Greenaway’s shop, which is known simply as
L. GREENAWAY
. Quite large, Ngemi’s DMs, Cayce thinks, estimating a British size eleven. She can’t see Greenaway’s shoes, behind the counter, but if he were American, she guesses, they might be toe-cleavage loafers with tassels. Though they wouldn’t be that here. Something by a Savile Row maker, but, she guesses, not bespoke.

She’s met people here who can distinguish workable button holes on a suit cuff at twenty feet.

“I have to ask you, Miss Pollard, if you’re entirely serious about this?”

L. GREENAWAY
is the sort of shop you must be buzzed into, and Greenaway himself looks as though his toe might be hovering over a button that would summon large, helmeted men, with truncheons.

“Yes, Mr. Greenaway, I am.”

He looks at her black nylon flight jacket. “You are a collector?”

“My father.”

Greenaway considers this. “I don’t recognize the name. Curtas are rather a small field.”

“Mr. Pollard,” says Ngemi, “a retired American government official with a background in the sciences, has a number of Type Ones, all dating from 1949 and of course numbered below three hundred. And several Type Twos as well, chosen primarily for condition and case variety.” The thumbnail of Win, not inaccurate, is the result of his gentle questioning on the pavement outside.

Greenaway glares at him.

“May I ask you a question?” Ngemi inquires, inclining slightly forward, with an audible creak.

“A question?”

“A question of provenance, Herzstark was known to keep three prototypes in his home in Nendeln, Liechtenstein. Upon his death, in 1988, they are known to have been sold to a private collector.”

“Yes?”

“Would the one on offer be one of those, Mr. Greenaway? I found the description on your website somewhat ambiguous, in that regard.”

Cayce watches Greenaway redden slightly. “No, it would not. It is from the estate of a master machinist, and comes with extensive documentation, including photographs of it in the hands of both Herzstark and the machinist, its fabricator. The three from the house in Nendeln are numbered one, two, and three, in romans. The one on offer is numbered four.” His expression perfectly neutral, he continues to stare at Ngemi with what Cayce takes to be absolute loathing. “In romans.”

“May we see it, please?” Cayce asks.

“Master machinist,” says Ngemi. “Fabricator.”

“I beg you pardon?” says Greenaway, who clearly doesn’t.

“When exactly was this prototype fabricated, then?” Ngemi smiles blandly.

“And what are you implying by that?”

“Nothing at all.” Ngemi raises his eyebrows. “In nineteen forty-six? ’Forty-seven?”

“Nineteen forty-seven.”

“Please show it to us, Mr. Greenaway,” Cayce tries again.

“And how would you propose to pay, were you to decide to purchase? I’m sorry, but I can’t accept a personal check unless I’m acquainted with the buyer.”

The Blue Ant Visa, ready in her hand, is withdrawn from the Rick-son’s pocket and placed on the rectangular blotter-like suede pad atop Greenaway’s counter. He peers at it, obviously puzzled by the Egyptianate ant, but then, she guesses, makes out the name of the issuing bank. “I see. And your credit is adequate, for the price of the piece, plus VAT?”

“That’s a very insulting question,” says Ngemi, levelly, but Greenaway ignores him, watching Cayce.

“Yes, Mr. Greenaway, but I suggest you check, now, with the issuer.” Actually she isn’t entirely sure, but vaguely remembers Bigend mentioning that she is authorized to buy automobiles but not aircraft. Whatever other faults Bigend has, she doubts he’s prone to exaggeration.

Greenaway is looking at them, now, as though they were in the process of robbing him at gunpoint, assuming that that process would cause him neither fear nor anxiety, just a sort of irritated amazement at their effrontery. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “We’ll find out during the authorization process.”

“May we see it now, please?” Ngemi places his fingertips on the counter, as if laying claim to something.

Greenaway reaches beneath it, coming up with a gray cardboard box. It is square, perhaps six inches on a side, and has two U-shaped wire fasteners that protrude through slots at the edges of the lid. It is probably much older than she is. Greenaway pauses, and she imagines him counting, silently. Then he lifts the lid away and puts it to the side.

The calculator is cushioned in funereal gray tissue paper. Greenaway reaches into the box, draws it carefully out, and places it on the suede pad.

It looks, to Cayce, very similar to the ones she’d seen in Baranov’s trunk, though perhaps less finely finished.

Ngemi has produced a loupe, and screws it carefully into his left eye. He leans forward, creaking, and gives the Curta his full and Cyclopean attention. She can hear his breath, now, and the ticking of the dozens of clocks all around her, which before she’d not been aware of.

“Um,” says Ngemi, and more deeply, “Um.” Sounds she imagines are quite unconscious. He seems in that moment to be very far away, and she feels alone.

He straightens, removing the loupe. Blinks. “I will need to handle it. I will need to perform an operation.”

“You’re entirely certain you’re serious about this? You wouldn’t simply be winding me up, you two, would you?”

“No, sir,” says Ngemi, “we are serious.”

“Then go ahead.”

Ngemi picks up the calculator, first turning it over. On its round base Cayce glimpses “IV,” stamped into metal. Righting it, his fingers slide over it, moving those studs or flanges in their slots or tracks. He pauses, closes his eyes as if listening, and works the little pepper-mill crank at the top. It makes a slithering sound, if a mechanism can be said to slither.

Ngemi opens his eyes, looks at the numbers that have appeared in small circular windows. He looks from them to Greenaway. “Yes,” he says.

Cayce indicates the Blue Ant card. “We’ll take it, Mr. Greenaway.”

*  *  *

A
block from
L. GREENAWAY
, Ngemi carrying the boxed calculator against his stomach as though it contained the ashes of a relative, Baranov is waiting, a half-inhaled cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth. “That’s it?”

“Yes,” says Ngemi.

“Authentic.”

“Of course.”

Baranov takes the box.

“These are interesting as well.” Ngemi unzips his black coat and withdraws a brown envelope. “Documentation of provenance.”

Baranov tucks the box beneath his arm and takes the envelope. He hands Cayce a business card.

The Light of India Curry House. Poole.

She turns it over. Rust-colored fountain pen. Neat italics.

[email protected]

The eyes behind the round lenses fix Cayce with contempt, dismissal. “Baltic oil, is it? Thought you might be a bit more interesting than that.”

He flicks his cigarette down and walks on, in the direction they’ve just come, the Curta prototype beneath his arm and the brown envelope in his hand.

“Do you mind my asking,” Ngemi says, “what he meant?”

“No,” she says, looking from the dung-colored back of Baranov’s retreating jacket to the rust-colored e-mail address, “but I don’t know.”

“This is what you wanted?”

“It must be,” she says. “I suppose it must be.”

32.
PARTICIPATION MYSTIOUE

Ngemi departs by tube from Bond Street Station, leaving her, in suddenly bright sunlight, with no idea where she might be going, or why.

A cab takes her to Kensington High Street, the card from Baranov’s curry house zipped into the pocket on the sleeve of the Rickson’s, the one originally designed to hold a pack of American cigarettes.

Liminal, she thinks, getting out of the cab by what had been the musty, multileveled cave of Kensington Market, with its vanished mazes of punk and hippy tat. Liminal. Katherine McNally’s word for certain states: thresholds, zones of transition. Does she feel liminal, now, or simply directionless? She pays the driver, through the window, and he drives away.

Oil, Baranov had said?

She walks in the direction of the park. Bright gilt of the Albert Memorial, never quite real to her since they cleaned it. When she’d first seen it, it had been a black thing, funereal, almost sinister. Win had told her that the London he’d first seen had been largely as black as that, a city of soot, more deeply textured perhaps for its lack of color.

She waits at a signal, crosses the High Street.

Her Parco boots crunch gravel as she turns into the Gardens. Cayce Pollard Central Standard might now be approaching its own hour of the wolf, she thinks. Soul too long in a holding pattern.

The park is scribed with reddish gravel, paths wide as rural highways in Tennessee. These bring her to the statue of Peter Pan, bronze rabbits at its base.

She takes off the Luggage Label bag, puts it down, and removes the Rickson’s, spreading it on the short-cut grass. She sits on it. A jogger passes, on the gravel.

She unzips the cigarette pocket on the Rickson’s sleeve and looks at Baranov’s card.

[email protected].
Looking faded in this light, as though Baranov had written it years ago.

She puts it carefully away again, zips up the little pocket. Opens her bag and removes the iBook and phone.

Hotmail. Timing out. Empty.

She opens a blank message, outgoing.

My name is Cayce Pollard. I’m sitting on the grass in a park in London. It’s sunny and warm. I’m 32 years old. My father disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York, but we haven’t been able to prove he was killed in the attack. I began to follow the footage you’ve been

That “you” stops her. Pecks at the delete key, losing “you’ve been.”

Katherine McNally had had Cayce compose letters, letters which would never, it was understood, be sent, and which in some cases couldn’t be, the addressee being dead.

Someone showed me one segment and I looked for more. I found a site where people discussed it, and I began to post there, asking questions. I can’t tell you

This time, it doesn’t stop her.

why, but it became very important to me, to all of us there. Parkaboy and Ivy and Maurice and Filmy, all the others too. We went there whenever we could, to be with other people who understood. We looked for more footage. Some people stayed out surfing, weeks at a time, never posting until someone discovered a new segment.

All through that winter, the mildest she’d known in Manhattan, though in memory the darkest, she’d gone to F:F:F—to give herself to the dream.

We don’t know what you’re doing, or why. Parkaboy thinks you’re dreaming. Dreaming for us. Sometimes he sounds as though he thinks you’re dreaming us. He has this whole edged-out participation mystique: how we have to allow ourselves so far into the investigation of whatever this is, whatever you’re doing, that we become part of it. Hack into the system. Merge with it, deep enough that it, not you, begins to talk to us. He says it’s like Coleridge, and De Quincey. He says it’s shamanic. That we may all seem to just be sitting there, staring at the screen, but really, some of us anyway, we’re adventurers. We’re out there, seeking, taking risks. In hope, he says, of bringing back wonders. Trouble is, lately, I’ve been living that.

She looks up, everything made pale and washed-out by the light. She’s forgotten to bring her sunglasses again.

I’ve been out there, out here, seeking. Taking risks. Not sure exactly why. Scared. Turns out there are some very not-nice people, out here. Though I guess that was never news.

She stops, and looks over at Peter Pan, noticing how the bronze ears of the rabbits at his base are kept polished by the hands of children.

Do you know we’re all here, waiting for the next segment? Wandering up and down the web all night, looking for where you’ve left it for us? We are. Well, not me personally, lately, but that’s because I seem to have followed Parkaboy’s advice and started trying to find another way to hack in. And I guess I have—we have—because we’ve found those codes embedded in the footage, that map of the island or city or whatever it is, and we know that you, or someone, could use those to track the spread of a given segment, to judge the extent of dissemination. And through finding those codes, the numbers woven into the fabric, I’ve been able to get to this e-mail address, and now I’m sitting in this park, beside the statue of Peter Pan, writing to you, and

And what?

What I want to ask you is

Who are you?

Where are you?

Are you dreaming?

Are you there? The way I’m here?

She reads what she’s written. Like most of the letters Katherine had had her write—to her mother, to Win both before and after his disappearance, to various ex’s and one former therapist—her letter to the maker ends with question marks. Katherine had thought that the letters Cayce most needed to write wouldn’t end in question marks. Periods were needed, if not exclamation points, in Katherine’s view, and Cayce had never felt particularly successful with either.

Sincerely yours,