Pattern Recognition (41 page)

She smells disinfectant, or insecticide.

She still has the envelope in her hand.

She turns and faces Bigend.

“Boone was reading my e-mail.”

“I know,” he says.

“But did you know it before?”

“Not until after he’d called from Ohio to tell me we needed to go immediately to Moscow. I had a friend’s Gulfstream pick him up and bring him to Paris. He admitted it to me on our way here.”

“Is that why he didn’t stay?”

“No. He left because I no longer wanted to be in partnership with him.”

“You didn’t? I mean, you don’t?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because he pretends to be better at what he does than he is. I prefer people who are better at what they do than they think they are.”

“Where’s Dorotea?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you asked?”

“Yes. Once. They say they don’t know.”

“Do you believe them?”

“I think it’s better left unasked.”

“What was she trying to do?”

“Change sides. Again. She really did want the position in London, and she’d told them she’d still be working for them as well. Which I had discussed with her, of course. But when your e-mail reached Stella Volkova, and Stella replied, it caused a number of things to happen very quickly. All of the armaz.ru traffic is monitored by Volkov’s security, of course. They immediately contacted Dorotea, who, in the course of what must have been a very intense conversation, realized for the first time who she had ultimately been working for—and who she was in the process of betraying, by coming over to my side. She must also have understood that if she could get to you first, and discover how you had obtained that address, she would have something very important to offer them. She might even be rewarded, and perhaps retain her job at Blue Ant as well.”

“But how did she know I’d gone to Moscow?”

“I imagine she’d instantly hired replacements for the last two, or perhaps there were more to begin with. I doubt if she ever called off your surveillance, even after Tokyo. She would have needed to continue reporting on you. She isn’t a very imaginative woman in any case. If they saw you check in at Heathrow, they knew you were going to be landing in Moscow. There are no other destinations, for Aeroflot, at that time of the evening. She could easily have arranged to have you followed, on this end. Not by Volkov’s people, though. She still had connections from her previous job.” He shrugs. “She’d been posting on your website, as someone else. Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Amazing. She had no more idea who the maker actually was than we did, until they revealed it to her in an effort to facilitate her stopping you. But you’re dead on your feet, aren’t you? I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Hubertus? Boone hadn’t been able to get anything, in Ohio?”

“No. He got the domain name from your e-mail to Stella. He had the entire address, of course, but nothing he could do with it. By telling you he’d at least learned the domain, in Ohio, he thought he might be able to garner partial credit, with me, after the fact. But in order to move as quickly as he knew we needed to move, he had to tell me the truth, all of it.” He shrugs. “You weren’t telling me what you were up to either, but at least you weren’t lying to me. How did you get that address, by the way?”

“Through someone with NSA connections. I have absolutely no idea how he got it, and no way to ever find out.”

“I knew I’d picked a winner, as soon as I met you.”

“Do you know where Boone’s gone?”

“To Tokyo, I imagine. To that designer girlfriend, the one he stayed with when you were there. Did you meet her?”

“I saw her apartment,” she says, after a pause.

“I think it’s all actually about money, for him.” He grimaces. “Ultimately I find that that was the whole problem, with most of the dot-com people. Good night.”

He’s gone.

She sits down on the sixties-orange bedspread and opens Wiktor Marchwinska-Wyrwal’s white envelope.

It contains, on three pieces of blue bond paper, something that seems to be the précis or closing summation of some longer document. She reads through it quickly, struggling with the translations peculiarities of syntax, but somehow it won’t register.

An account of her father’s last morning in New York.

She reads it again.

The third time through, it begins to cohere for her.

Win had come to New York to meet with a rival crowd-safety firm. His patents would be secure, soon, and he’d become unsatisfied with the firm he’d been developing them with. There were potential legal complications inherent in a move, and he had arranged to meet with the president of the rival firm, in their offices at 90 West Street, on the morning of September 11, to discuss this.

He had, as the Mayflower bellman had always maintained, gotten a cab.

Cayce sits looking at the license number of that cab now, at the Cambodian driver’s name, his registration, telephone.

The collision had occurred in the Village, the cab pulling south into Christopher.

Minor damage to the cab, more damage to the other vehicle, a caterer’s van. The driver of the cab, whose English was minimal, had been at fault.

And she herself, headed downtown by train, to arrive early for her own meeting—how close might she have passed? And had he seen the towers, as he’d climbed from the cab, the morning beautiful and clear?

He’d handed the cabdriver five dollars and gotten into an off-duty limo, the Cambodian anxiously copying the limo’s plate number. He knew that Win, his fare, would know that he had been at fault.

In court, the driver had lied, successfully, and gotten off, and then he’d lied again to the police, when they’d interviewed cabbies, looking for Win, and again to the detectives Cayce had hired. He’d picked up no fare at the Mayflower. He hadn’t seen the man in the picture.

Cayce looks at the name of the Dominican driver of the limo. More numbers. The name, address, and telephone number of his widow, in the Bronx.

The limo had been excavated from rubble, three days later, the driver with it.

He had been alone.

There was still no evidence, the unknown and awkwardly translated writer concluded, that Win was dead, but there was abundant evidence placing him on or near the scene. Additional inquiries indicated that he had never arrived at 90 West.

The petal falling from the dried rose.

Someone raps lightly on the door.

She gets up stiffly, unthinking, and opens it, the blue papers in her hand.

“Party time,” says Parkaboy, holding up a liter bottle of water. “Remembered I hadn’t told you the tap’s a bad bet.” His smile fades. “What’s up?”

“I’m reading about my father. I’d like some water, please.”

“Did they find him?” He knows the story of Win’s disappearance from their correspondence. He goes into the bathroom and she hears him pouring water into a tumbler. He comes back out and hands it to her.

“No.” She drinks, splutters, starts to cry, stops herself. “Volkov’s people tried to find him, and got a lot further than we ever did. But he’s
not here,” she holds up the blue sheets, “he’s not here either.” And then she starts to cry again, and Parkaboy puts his arms around her and holds her.

“You’re going to hate me,” he says, when she stops crying.

She looks up at him. “Why?”

“Because I want to know what Volkov’s Polish spin doctor gave you as a souvenir. Looks to me like it might be a set of steak knives.”

“Asshole,” she says. Sniffs.

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

She puts the crumpled blue report down and explores the beige envelope’s flap, which she finds is secured with two tiny gold-plated snaps. She lifts it, works the fabric back.

A Louis Vuitton slim-line attaché, its gold-plated clasps gleaming.

She stares at it.

“You’d better open it,” says Parkaboy.

She does, exposing, in tightly packed rows, white-banded sheaves of crisp new bills.

“What’s that?”

“Hundreds. Brand-new, sequentially numbered. Probably five thousand of them.”

“Why?”

“They like round numbers.”

“I mean why is it here?”

“It’s for you.”

“I don’t like it.”

“We can put it on eBay. Somebody in Miami might want it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The briefcase. It’s not your style.”

“I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Let’s talk about it in the morning. You need to get some sleep.”

“This is absurd.”

“Its Russia.” He grins at her. “Who gives a shit? We found the maker.”

She looks at him. “We did, didn’t we?”

He leaves her the water.

She uses one fingertip to gingerly close the case, then drapes it with its beige dustcover. Carries the water into the bathroom to rinse with after she’s brushed her teeth.

Sitting on the bed, she removes the slippers, seeing that her left foot has bled slightly, through its bandages. Her ankles look swollen. She takes off the cardigan, rolls Skirt Thing over her head, and tosses them both over the attaché and its obscene tray of cash.

She turns down the bed, turns off the light, and limps back, crawling in and pulling the orange spread and the coarse sheets up to her chin. They smell the way sheets can smell at the start of cabin season, if they haven’t been aired.

She lies there, staring up into the dark, hearing the distant drone of a plane.

“They never got you, did they? I know you’re gone, though.”

His very missingness becoming, somehow, him.

Her mother had once said that when the second plane hit, Win’s chagrin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist. She doesn’t believe it, but now she finds it makes her smile.

“Good night,” she says to the dark.

43.
MAIL

My brother, up to his knees in dirty old pipe in Prion’s gallery, sends loud and most amazed thanks. I told him you said it had been given to you by Russian gangsters and you didn’t want to keep it, and he just stared at me, mouth open. (Then he becomes worried that it is not real, but Ngemi often accepts cash from American collectors and helped him with that.) But really it’s absurdly good of you, because it looked as if he would have to give up his “studio” (ugh) and move in with me, in order to pay for it, the scaffolding, and he is filthy, a pig, leaving hairs. Of course it is much more than cost of the scaffolding but he is using the rest to rent a huge plasma display for the show. We are locking down date of opening with Prion now and you absolutely must come. Prion now has some connection with a Russian yogurt drink that is about to launch here, purchased I think by the Japanese. I know because it is part of my briefing for work now, this drink. Also because he has it in a cooler at the gallery—revolting! I think he will try to serve it at the opening but absolutely NO! So mystery Internet movie is out, yogurt drink is in, also some Russian oil magnate: how surprisingly cultured he is, “alternative,” a sort of Saatchi-like patron figure, nothing nouveau riche or mafia or otherwise foul. This is what they are paying me to spread now in the clubs. O well. In the day I still make hats. Enjoy Paris! Magda

REALLY,
dear, I’m sure it’s illegal to do that. It says so right on the side of the FedEx box, that you mustn’t enclose cash. But it did come through, thank you very much. And very timely, too, as the lawyers say that we can now prove Win’s presence there at the time of the attack, and the declaration of legal death will be automatic, which means no more problems over the insurance or the pension. But it may take a month, so I’m very glad to have this in the meantime. They said that every last thing you told them proved absolutely correct, and they were very curious about how you’d found all that out, after the police and the detective agency hadn’t been able to. I explained our work here at Rose of the World to them. Obviously you must have had help from your father, in order to obtain such a detailed account of his final hour, but I will honor your need, whatever it may be, to not share that with me, though I would hope that you will, eventually. Your loving mother, Cynthia

Hello, Cayce Pollard! Sorry we never had a chance to meet when you were here, but I’m writing to thank you for bringing Judy Tsuzuki to our attention. She met with us today, at HB’s suggestion after hearing from you, and of course we’ll be able to find something for her. Her enthusiasm for the city (and her boyfriend!) is completely engaging, and I’m sure she’ll bring a real freshness to whatever it is she’ll be doing for us. Regards, Jennifer Brossard, Blue Ant Tokyo (cc to HB)

I remember him: You used to say how funny he was, on that website. And he’s not gay? A music producer from Chicago? And not, I take it, a Lombard? (If he’s not a Lombard, just to be nosy, how can you be affording Paris?) Have to tell you I saw the Lombard of Lombards himself on CNN yesterday. He was between some Russian zillionaire and your Secretary of the Interior, and looked as though he’d just devoured the entrails of something clean-limbed and innocent: entirely pleased with himself. When are you coming home, anyway? Never mind! Enjoy yourself! Margot

Dear Cayce, There definitely are, in the literature, instances of panic disorders being relieved through the incidence of critical event stress, although the mechanism is far from understood. As for “Soviet psychiatric drugs,” I have no idea. I did ask a friend in Germany who volunteered to work with Chernobyl radiation victims; he said that any substances thus described were probably best regarded as instruments of torture, and usually consisted of combinations of industrial chemicals that otherwise would never have been considered fit for use on human beings. Rather grim. Whatever it was, I hope you didn’t have very much. As to the cessation of panic-reactions, my advice would simply be to see where it goes. If you should feel further need to talk about it, I have a few appointment times coming open in the fall. Sincerely, Katherine McNally