Pattern Recognition

18. HONGO

She holds a chilled can of vending-machine tonic water against the bump. Most of a pack of Kleenex-analog, splashed with tonic, has been used to sponge her forehead.

The cab negotiates a narrow lane. The back of a concrete apartment building, bristling unevenly with dozens of air conditioners. Motorcycles shrouded under gray fabric.

Boone Chu saying something in Japanese, but not to the driver. Speaking to his cellular headset. He looks back, through the cab's rear window. More Japanese.

“Have they found them?” she asks.

“No.”

“Where did Taki go?”

“Up the street, walking fast. Hung a left. He was the guy with the number?”

She resists the urge to check the palm of the hand holding the sweating can. What if the ink is running? “When did you get here?” Meaning Japan.

“Right behind you. I was in coach.”

“Why?”

“We were followed, when we left the restaurant in Camden Town.” She looks at him.

“Young guy, brown hair, black jacket. Followed us to the canal. Watched us from up on the locks. With either a camera or a small pair of binoculars. Then he walked us back to the tube and stuck with me. Lost him in Covent Garden. He didn't make the lift.”

This makes her think of the first time she'd read Sherlock Holmes. A one-legged Lascar seaman.

“Then you followed me?”

He says something in Japanese, into his headset. “I thought it would be a good idea to establish some kind of baseline in terms of what we've got here. Start from scratch. We're working for Bigend. Are the people following us working for Bigend? If not?…”

“And?”

“No idea, so far. I coasted past our two here, last night, and they were speaking Italian. That was when you were on your way to the pink zone.”

“What were they saying?”

“I don't speak Italian.”

She lowers the tonic water. “Where are we going now?”

“The bike is following us, to make sure nobody else is. When we're positive of that, we'll go to a friend's apartment.”

“They didn't find those men?”

“No. The one you head-butted is probably in a clinic now, getting his nose taped hack into shape.” He creases his forehead. “You didn't learn that studying marketing, did you?”

“No.”

“They might be Blue Ant, for all we know. You might have just broken the nose of a junior creative director.”

“The next junior creative director who tries to mug you, you might break his nose too. But Italians who work in Tokyo ad agencies don't wear Albanian Prada knockoffs.”

The cab is on some kind of metropolitan freeway now, curving past woods and ancient walls: the Palace. She remembers the paths she'd imagined, that morning, looking down from her room. She turns and looks back, trying to see the scooter, and discovers that her neck is painfully stiff. The walls and trees are beautiful but blank, concealing a mystery.

“They were trying to get your bag? The laptop from Blue Ant?”

“My purse is in there, my phone.”

As if on cue, the Blue Ant phone starts to ring. She digs it out. “Hello?” “Parkaboy. Remember me?”

“Things got complicated.”

She hears him sigh, in Chicago. “It's okay. I live for fatigue poisons.”

“We did meet,” she tells him, wondering if Boone Chu can hear his side of the conversation. She's left the volume cranked, against Tokyo street noise, and regrets it.

“No doubt about that. He hasn't even waited to get back home. Straight into an Internet café and pouring out his heart to Keiko.”

“I want to talk, but it has to be later. I'm sorry.”

“He told Keiko he'd given it to you, so I wasn't too worried. E-mail me.” Click.

“Friend?” Boone Chu takes the tonic water and helps himself to a sip. “Footagehead. Chicago. He and his friend found Taki.”

“You did get the number?”

No getting around it, now. Either she lies to him because she doesn't trust him, or tells him, because, relatively speaking, she does.

She shows him her palm, the numerals in blue fiber tip.

“And you didn't enter it in the laptop? E-mail it to anyone?”

“No.”

“That's good.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to have a look at that laptop.”

HE has the driver stop in what he tells her is Hongo, near Tokyo University. He pays, they get out, and as the cab pulls away, the silver scooter arrives.

“I'd like my jacket back, please.”

Boone says something in Japanese to the passenger, who unzips and removes Cayce's Rickson's without getting off the scooter. He tosses it to her and grins, unreassuringly, beneath the lowered visor of the flaming-eye helmet. Boone takes a white envelope from the waistband of his black jeans and passes it to the driver, who nods and stuffs it into the pocket of the fishtail parka. The scooter whines and they're gone.

The Rickson's smells faintly of Tiger Balm. She slides the tonic can into a convenient recyc canister and follows Boone, her forehead aching.

A minute later she's staring up at a three-story clapboard structure that seems to float above the narrow street, dilapidated and impossibly flimsy-looking. Clapboard doesn't quite describe it; the silvered wooden planks look as though they might be the blades of a giant venetian blind. She's almost never seen anything genuinely old, in Tokyo, let alone in this state of casual disrepair.

Ragged, browning palms lean on either side of an entrance ornately roofed with Japanese tiles, echoed by a pair of decaying stucco columns supporting nothing at all. One of these seems to have had its top gnawed off by something enormous. Turning to him. “What is it?”

“A prewar apartment building. Most of them went in the firebombing. Seventy units in this one. Communal toilets. Public bathhouse a block away”

The balconies, she guesses, following him, are racks for airing bedding. They pass a dense low shrubbery of bicycles, climb three broad concrete steps, and enter a tiny foyer floored with shiny turquoise vinyl. Cooking smells she can't identify.

Up a poorly lit flight of bare wooden stairs and along a corridor so narrow that she has to walk behind him. A single fluorescent tube flickers, somewhere ahead. He stops and she hears the rattle of keys. He opens a door, reaches for a light switch, and steps aside. Cayce steps in and finds herself trying to remember Win's clever neurological explanation of déjà vu.

Strange but somehow familiar, the lighting consists of a few clear glass bulbs with dim, faintly orange filaments: reproduction Edison bulbs. Their light is inefficient, magical. Furniture low and somehow like the building itself: worn, strangely comforting, still in use.

He comes in behind her and closes the door, which is featureless and modern and white. She sees his little reddish-brown suitcase open on a low central table, his phones set out beside it and the laptop's screen up but dark. “Who lives here?”

“Marisa. A friend of mine. She designs fabrics. She's in Madrid now.” He crosses to a crowded kitchen alcove and flicks on a much brighter, whiter sort of light. She sees a pink Sanyo rice cooker on a small counter, and a narrow white plastic freestanding appliance connected to transparent tubing. A dishwasher? “I'll make tea.” Filling a kettle from a bottle of water.

She walks to one of two sliding paper windows inset with central panes of partially frosted glass. Through the clear sections she looks out at gently sloping rooftops that seem, impossibly, to be partially covered in knee-deep moss, but then she sees that this is something like the kudzu on Win's farm in Tennessee. No, she corrects herself, it probably is kudzu. Kudzu where it comes from. Kudzu at home.

The rooftops, in the light from surrounding windows, are corrugated iron, rusted a rich and uneven brown. A large tan insect strobes through the communal patch of light, vanishes. “This is an amazing place,” she says.

“There aren't many left.” Rattling canisters in a search for tea.

She slides the window open. She hears the kettle coming to a boil. “Do you know Dorotea Benedetti?”

“No,” he says.

“She works for Heinzi and Pfaff, the graphics people. She deals with Blue Ant for them. I think she had someone get into Damien's apartment for her. They used his computer.”

“How do you know?”

She walks over to what she guesses was originally a storage alcove for bedding. This one has been converted into something closer to a Western closet. A woman's clothes are hung there, along a wooden pole, and they make her feel somehow self-conscious. If there were a door, she'd close it. “Whoever did it called her from Damien's phone. I redialed and heard her voice-mail message.” And she tells him the story then: Dorotea, the Rickson's, Asian Sluts.

By the time she's finished, they're sitting cross-legged on cushions on the tatami, the kitchen light off, drinking green tea he pours from an earthenware pot. “So it might be that our Italians here aren't about the fact that you're working for Bigend, or about the footage,” he says. “The break-in predated that.”

“I don't know if I'd call it a break-in,” she says. “Nothing broken. I don't know how they got in.”

“A key-gun, if they were pros. Nothing you'd notice. You wouldn't have noticed anyway, if they hadn't used your browser and your phone. Neither of which is entirely professional, but we'll let that pass. And Bigend told you she'd worked for someone in Paris who'd done industrial espionage?”

“Yes. But he thought she had it in for me because she assumed he was going to offer me a job she wants, at Blue Ant London.”

“And you didn't tell him about the jacket, or your apartment?”

“No.”

“And our boys speak Italian. But we don't know whether they were here to begin with, or whether they were sent here. They weren't on our flight, I'm sure of that. I watched them watch you, today. Hard to say if they know the city or not. They had a car and a Japanese driver.”

She studies his face in the glow of the bamboo filaments, the Edison bulbs. “Dorotea knows something about me,” she says. “Something very personal. A phobia. Something that only my parents, my therapist, a few close friends would know. That worries me.”

“Could you tell me what it is?”

“I'm allergic. To certain trademarks.”

“Trademarks?”

“Since I was a kid. It's the downside of my ability to judge the market's response to new logo designs.” She feels herself blushing, and hates that.

“Can you give me an example?”

“The Michelin Man, for one. There are others. Some are more contemporary. It's not something I'm very comfortable talking about, actually.”

“Thank you,” he says, very seriously. “You don't need to. Do you think Dorotea knows about this?”

“I know she does.” She tells him about the second meeting, Bibendum, the doll hung from Damien's doorknob.

He frowns, says nothing, pours more tea. Looks at her. “I think you're right.”

“Why?”

“Because she knows something about you, something she couldn't easily have found out. But she has. That means someone's gone to a lot of trouble. And she was the one who pulled that image out of the envelope and showed it to you. Then she left the doll, or had someone leave it. But I think the doll was supposed to help make you go away, back to New York. But you didn't, and then I turned up, and now we're both here, and my guess is that the men who were watching you are working for her.”

“Why?”

“Unless we can find them, which isn't very likely now, and convince them to tell what they know, which very likely isn't much, I have no idea. And less idea who she might be working for. Will you let me have a look at your computer now?”

She gets the iBook out of the bag, where it lies on the matting beside her, and passes it to him. He puts it on the low table beside his own and takes a neatly coiled cable from his suitcase. “Don't mind me. I can do this and talk.”

“Do what?”

“I want to make sure this isn't sending your every keystroke to a third party”

“Can you do that?”

“These days? Not absolutely.” Now both computers are cabled together, and on, and she watches as he turns to his and inserts a CD-ROM. “Things have been different in computer security, since last September. If the FBI were doing what they admit they can do, to your laptop, I might be able to spot it. If they were doing what they don't tell you they can do, that would be another story. And that's just the FBI.”

“The FBI?”

“Just an example. Lots of people are doing lots of different things, now, and not all of them are American, or government agencies. The ante's been upped right across the board.” He does things to her keyboard, watching his screen.

“Whose apartment is this?”

“Marisa's. I told you.”

“And Marisa is?”

He looks up. “My ex.”

She'd known that, somehow, and hadn't liked it, and doesn't like it that she doesn't like it.

“Just friends now,” he says, and looks back to the screen.

She raises her hand and opens it, palm out, exposing Taki's number. “So what can you do with this?”

He looks up. Seems to brighten. “Find the company that did the watermarking, if it was done by a company. Then see what we can find out from them. If they've marked each segment, there should be an account. The client would be that much closer to your maker.”

“Would they tell you?”

“No. That's not the same as my finding out, though.”

She lets him work, and sips her tea, and looks around at the eight-mat apartment in the amber glow of the Edison bulbs, and wonders, though she doesn't want to, about the woman who lives here.

She has a lump on her forehead, and the fabulous fanny stuff is probably a disaster now, and she wants to find a well-lit mirror and check the damage, but she doesn't.

She doesn't feel tired, though, or lagged, mirrored-out, or anything at all. Whatever else is going on, she seems to have graduated to a more serious league of soul-displacement. Wherever her serotonin levels are, right now, its like she lives there.