Pattern Recognition

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. “Email 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 chub 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.

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

Cayce looks at her hand, which has closed Cynthia's message as if of its own accord.

It isn't that her mother is mad (Cayce doesn't believe that) or that her mother believes in this stuff (though she does, utterly) or even the banal, inchoate, utterly baffling nature of the supposed messages (she's used to that, when EVP are quoted) but that it leaves Win somehow doubly undead.

To have someone disappear in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, with no proven destination in the vicinity of the WTC, not even a known reason why they might have gone there, is proving to be an ongoing nightmare of its own peculiar sort. They had only been alerted to the fact of Win's disappearance on the nineteenth, ordinary police procedures having been disrupted, and Win's credit card company having been slow to provide next-of-kin information. Cayce herself had dealt alone with all of the initial phases of the hunt for her father, Cynthia having stayed in Maui, afraid to fly, until well after commercial flights had resumed. On the nineteenth, Win's face had joined the others, so many of them, that Cayce had been living with daily in the aftermath, and very likely his had been among those the CCNY anthropology student had been surveying when (in Cynthia's universe) Win had whispered through the membrane from whatever Other Side it was that Cynthia and her cronies in Hawaii imagined for him. Cayce herself had put up several, carefully sheathed in plastic, near the barricade at Houston and Varick, having run them off at the Kinko's nearest her apartment uptown. Win, deeply and perhaps professionally camera-shy, had left remarkably few full-face images, and the best she'd been able to do had been one that her friends had sometimes mistaken for the younger William S. Burroughs.

Still more missing strangers had become familiar, then, as she'd made the stations of some unthinkable cross.

She had, while producing her own posters, watched the faces of other people's dead, emerging from adjacent copiers at Kinko's, to be mounted in the yearbook of the city's loss. She had never, while putting hers up, seen one face pasted over another, and that fact, finally, had allowed her to cry, hunched on a bench in Union Square, candles burning at the base of a statue of George Washington.

She remembered sitting there, prior to her tears, looking from the monument that was still taking shape at the base of Washington's statue to that odd sculpture across Fourteenth Street, in front of the Virgin Megastore, a huge stationary metronome, constantly issuing steam, and back again to the organic accretion of candles, flowers, photographs, and messages, as though the answer, if there was one, lay in somehow understanding the juxtaposition of the two.

And then she had walked home, all the way, to her silent cave with its blue-painted floors, and had trashed the software that had allowed her to watch CNN on her computer. She hadn't really watched television since, and never, if she could help it, the news.

But Cayce's missing person, it had developed, was missing in some additional and specially problematic way.

Where was her father? He had left the Mayflower and hadn't returned, and that was all that anyone seemed to know. On the advice of her mother's lawyers, she had hired private investigators, who had interviewed cabdrivers, but the city seemed to have acquired a very specific amnesia with regard to Wingrove Pollard, a man gone so thoroughly and quietly missing that it might be impossible to prove him dead.

The dead, her mother had forever been fond of saying, remember. Remember what? Cayce had never wanted to ask.

“Are you awake?” Damien's stubbled head appearing at the top of the stairs. “We're going out to the Brasserie. You're welcome.”

“No,” she says, “I'm going to sleep.” And desperately hopes it's true.