Pattern Recognition (35 page)

Back upstairs, she phones Parkaboy in Chicago. “I’m going to level with you,” she hears him say, after the final, uneven ring. “I’m away for a while. But there’s no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pit bull’s tested positive. Twice.”

She doesn’t leave a message.

Does this mean he’s already on his way?

She could phone Sylvie Jeppson and find out, but the idea of contact with Blue Ant, right now, does not appeal.

Stella trusts her. Whatever weird, sad, scary, deeply Russian scenario Stella and her twin are socketed into, she desperately doesn’t want to betray whatever it is she’s seen rise behind the stillness of that white face.

Parkaboy would get it. But who else would? Not, she’s now certain, Boone. Bigend, probably, but in that way of his, in which he seems to somehow understand emotions without ever having partaken of them.

She opens a bottle of Russian mineral water.

Dorotea had been hired by a Russian from Cyprus, the one listed as the registrant of armaz.ru, a domain that Boone says has something to do with the Russian oil industry.

Were those Russians, she wonders, who somehow got their hands on Katherine McNally’s notes from Cayce’s sessions? Not necessarily, she decides, as the men Dorotea had used in Tokyo had been Italian. It’s an equal-opportunity conspiracy, maybe.

But Baranov, come to think of it, is Russian too, or anyway Anglo-Russian. Though that doesn’t seem to click with the linkage she’s trying to braille, here. And neither does Damien, off in the boonies shooting his punk archaeology project, even though his girlfriend’s father sounds like another candidate for mafia czar.

There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained.
When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there.

Russia. Something else…

She remembers, in mid-swallow, and lapses into a fit of coughing.

That old post of hers, the one that had turned up when she’d searched Russia on the F:F:F CD-ROM.

She slots the CD-ROM. Repeats the search.

Why couldn’t it, say, be some Russian mafia kingpin, with a bent for self-expression, a previously undiscovered talent, and the wherewithal to generate and disseminate the footage?

January. She’d still been seeing Katherine. She’d had no idea she’d be working for Blue Ant, or coming to London, or getting involved with Bigend.

Mafia.

Wherewithal.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Not a bent for self-expression: orphaned nieces.

If Baranov could still have even one favor-owing friend, somewhere in the bowels of Langley or Falls Church, willing and able to somehow pluck the stellanor address from traffic on the Net, or from wherever it was found, what might a very rich, very important Russian be afforded in his own country, or even, perhaps, in hers?

And what might “very rich, very important” not be a euphemism for, today, when it came to Russians?

She feels a knot of tension beginning to complicate, between her shoulders.

When the on-line Moscow Yellow Pages refuses to produce a Pilates studio, she puts on her workout clothes and goes up, one floor, to the hotel gym. Deserted save for an older, overweight Russian wearing an expression of near-religious sorrow as he plods heavily along on a treadmill.

The machines here look to Cayce like domestic product, though new, and Damien would definitely want to document them. She finds what might be a boxing mat in a far corner of the room and tries to remember the mat exercises she’d been taught at the very beginning.

She senses the Russian’s sad gaze as she works through what she recalls of the mat program, but realizes, to her surprise, that she’s actually glad he’s here.

It’s that kind of morning.

SHE
desperately wants to go out, walk to the nearest Metro station, pay the famously tiny fare, and descend into a world of ornate mineral marvels. The only true palaces of the proletariat, those stations. And doing that, have some temporary release from waiting

But she can’t, and doesn’t.

She’s waiting for a message from Stella.

Shortly after noon, her cell rings.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?” Bigend.

“Poole,” she lies reflexively, not exactly thinking on her feet.

“Swimming?”

“Silent ‘e.’ The city. Where are you?”

“Paris. Sylvie tells me you will be here soon?”

“I’m not sure, now. I’m following something up. I hope you aren’t there only for my sake. I might not come.”

“Not at all. You won’t share this something?”

“Not on a cell. When I see you.” Enough like a Boone reason, she hopes.

“You spoke with Boone.” Not a question.

“Yes.”

“He seemed to feel you weren’t impressed with what he’s been able to learn in Ohio.”

“He’s too sensitive, that way.”

“The chemistry, it isn’t working?”

“We’re not dating, Hubertus.”

“You’ll keep me informed, though, won’t you?”

She’s taking it for granted that there’s no way he can know where he’s reaching her phone, and she hopes that that’s true, but there’s really nothing she can do about it now. “Yes, of course. Have to go now, Hubertus. Bye.”

She imagines him looking at his phone.

Hers rings again. “Yes?”

“Hello. It is Stella. You wish still to visit?”

“Yes. I do. Very much.”

“Is not too early? You have slept?”

“Yes, thanks.” Wondering what sort of hours Stella keeps.

“If you will wait beside the guard booth, a car will come. Thirty minutes, will be good?”

“Yes! Please!”

“Goodbye.”

She stands up, in her underpants and a Fruit T-shirt, and starts dressing. She feels that this requires as formal an effort as she can muster, somehow, so it’s the good hose from Japan, her French shoes, and Skirt Thing, rolled out to its full length and pulled up, creating a
passable imitation of a dress. She goes into the bathroom and applies makeup, then returns to put on her thin black cardigan and quickly check her e-mail.

Damien.

Hard day. I must’ve told you, probably fifty times, how deeply I believe in documentary. I know people don’t believe I do, because I’m the master of artifice and nothing’s ever what it seems, blah fucking blah but it’s true because they say it in those little boxes in The Face. Well I’m questioning it tonight because today we got that Stuka completely dug out. Did I tell you? It’s a whole plane, and for some fucking reason it wound up four feet under the muck, but this Guru character knew where it was. He claims it’s dreams and visions but I think he walks around in the winter with a metal detector. So he’d said here, this plane is here, dig, and before we came back to London they’d sunk a trench, and hit it. But bribery and threats prevailed, at least till we got back with the extra cameras and crew, because I wanted this plane emerging to be the climax of the film. No idea it would be a Stuka; blew me away; it’s just this most Nazi-looking aircraft, amazing. Dive-bomber, they used them on the Spanish,
Guernica
and that. Absolutely iconic. So there it is, finally, today, and it’s sitting there, all caked in the gray stuff, like an airplane done up as New Guinea Mud Man, at the bottom of this great fucking hole they’d dug. By far the biggest excavation yet attempted here, as far as we know, and quite the feat of social engineering, to get it done without them opening the canopy and getting into the cockpit. We’d had Brian and Mick stand guard over it, the past two nights, and the diggers hadn’t touched it. But come the day, we knew they would, and we’d be set to shoot, what we’re here for. So a couple of the big ones with the spiderweb tattoos get boosted up, onto the wings, which are slippery with muck, but where their boots slip in it, looking down from the edge of the dig, I can see the thing’s in museum condition. Just eerie, how well it was preserved. And then Brian gets boosted up to shoot handheld, close, and they’re squeegeeing the gray off the canopy with the edges of their hands. And the fucking pilot’s there. You can see the outline of his head, goggles it looked like. Never seen Brian pull his eye off the viewfinder when he’s shooting but he did, just turned around with this WHAT THE FUCK???!!! look and I signal GO FOR IT, GET IT. So he did. All of it: them yanking the canopy open, and how they simply tore him apart, the pilot. Just came to pieces. They got a watch, a compass from the other wrist and a pistol, and they were fighting over them, falling off the wing, and he just came apart. And Brian got it all, plus Mick was second camera and he got a lot, plus the new guys. I mean coverage, lots. And at some point I look around at Marina and she’s fucking laughing. Not your hysterics of horror, she’s just fucking laughing at the humor of it. So I’m sitting here in the tent by myself, writing this, because with one thing and another I told her to just fuck off. And Mick and Brian are drunk, and I’m afraid to look at what they shot. I know I won’t be, maybe even tomorrow, but now I think I will go and get well pissed. And how the fuck did he get under there with his airplane? So thank you, as they say, for listening, and don’t forget to water the fucking goldfish. I hope you are okay with that shit you had happening. I love you.

She shakes her head, reads it again.

I love you too. Can’t write more now. Later. I’m okay. And I’m in Russia too, Moscow, I’ll tell you later.

She starts to put the iBook back in the bag, but stops. It doesn’t seem right to take it, somehow, to meet the maker. She’ll carry her East German envelope instead, and as she’s transferring her basic stuff from
the Luggage Label she remembers that the desk hasn’t returned her passport yet. She’ll get it on the way out. Her hand strikes something cold, at the bottom of the envelope. She pulls it out: the metal piece from Damien’s robot girl: her makeshift knuckle-duster in Camden. Good thing she’d had the envelope in checked luggage. She tosses it back in, for luck, makes sure she has the room key, and leaves, head full of the images from his message.

The driver who turns up for her has dark glasses and a closely shaven, interestingly sculpted head. Streamlined.

As they’re driving away, in the direction she’d gone the evening before, she remembers she’s forgotten to ask for her passport.

37.
KINO

They turn onto a wide street, one that Cayce, from her mornings Moscow Yellow Pages map foray, tentatively identifies as Tverskaya. Her driver, with a phone plugged into his ear now, is wearing cologne.

They stick to Tverskaya, if it is Tverskaya, and stay with the traffic flow He doesn’t use the blue light.

They pass beneath a banner in English:
WAXEN FIGURES EXHIBITION.

Street-level signage offers snippets of the non-Cyrillic:
BUTIQUE, KODAK
, a drugstore called
PHARMACOM.

As they turn left, she asks “What street is this?”

“Georgievsky,” the driver says, though it might as easily be his name. He turns again, into an alley, and stops.

She starts to tell him that she hadn’t meant for him to stop, but he gets out, walks around, opens the door for her. “Come.”

Gray, distempered concrete. Cyrillic skaters tags, their letters bulging in clumsy homage to New York and Los Angeles.

“Please.” He hauls open a large, anciently battered steel door, which reaches the limits of a restraining chain with a dull boom. Within is darkness. “Here.”

“Stella is here?”

“Kino,” he says. Film. Cinema.

Stepping past him, she finds herself in a dim, indeterminate space. When the door crashes shut behind them, the only light is from above. A bare bulb, visible up a forbiddingly steep flight of narrow concrete stairs that seems to have no railing.

“Please.” He gestures toward the stairs.

She sees now that there is a railing, the spidery ghost of one: a single length of half-inch steel. Supported by only two uprights, it droops between them, seemingly lank as rope, and sways when she grips it.

“He took a duck in the face…”

“Up, please.”

“Sorry.” She starts to climb, aware of him behind her.

There is another steel door, narrower, beneath the forty-watt bulb. She opens it.

A kitchen, bathed in red light.

Like the kitchens in the oldest, still-unrenovated tenements of New York, but larger, the stove a squatting pre-Stalinist presence wider than the car that brought her here. Coal-burning, or wood.

Where the tenement kitchen would have offered a central bathtub, there is a shower: a square of raised tile surrounding a slightly lower concrete space for drainage. The ancient galvanized showerhead, looking either agricultural or veterinary in intent, is suspended from a sixteen-foot ceiling gone sepia with decades of smoke and soot. The source of the red glow is a stolen Metro sign, propped against one wall, with a bulb inside.

“You are here,” says Stella, opening a door, light behind her. She says something in Russian to the driver. He nods, stepping back through the door to the stairs and closing it behind him.

“Where’s here?”

“Come.” Stella leads her into another room, this one with tall, unwashed windows, looking as though they might originally have been internally shuttered. “The Kremlin,” Stella says, pointing out a view between the nearer buildings, “and the Duma.”

Cayce looks around. The walls, unpainted since Soviet days at least, remind her of the nomiya in Roppongi, decades of nicotine deposited over what may once have been cream. Cracked, uneven. The individual planks of the wooden floor are lost under layers of paint, most recently maroon. There are two very new, very white Ikea desks, with articulated
swivel chairs, a pair of PCs, and baskets of papers. On the wall above, a long, complex chart is being maintained across three adjoining whiteboards.