Pattern Recognition

22. TARN

Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface. To lie there in the dark, heart thumping, eyes wide.

By the light in her watch she sees that she's been asleep for no more than forty-five minutes.

The flat below is silent. She remembers they've gone to the Brasserie, a restaurant in Camden High Street, Damien's favorite.

She gets up, pulls on jeans and sweater, and hobbles barefoot down the narrow stair, moving as she imagines she might move if she lived to be eighty. This is beyond soul-delay metaphors, now; it's into physical collapse.

Glancing into Damien's bedroom, she sees that Marina's luggage is the Louis Vuitton stuff with the repeating monograms, the real and loathsome thing, to which she is intensely allergic. Two very new suitcases are open, spilling what she takes to be black Prada exclusively. On the twisted sheets, the silver oven-mitt comforter tossed aside on the floor, she sees a crumpled military garment in a camouflage pattern that she seems to recall is called tarn — information garnered during her time in the skateboard-clothing industry. She knows most of the patterns, and even that the most beautiful is South African, smoky mauve-toned Expressionist streaks suggesting a sunset landscape of great and alien beauty. Is tarn German camouflage, or Russian? English? She can't remember. It means something else as well. A Poe word. Dead lakes?

In the bathroom she avoids looking at herself altogether, fearing what might seem to be revealed at this level of serotonin-lack. Showers quickly, towels, puts her clothes back on, spreads the used towel neatly on the rack (Marina is clearly a pig) and wrinkles her nose at the number of expensive cosmetic products spread around Damien's sink. But here, she discovers, spotting a bit of non-beauty packaging, is a bottle of fine California melatonin, a prescription drug in the UK but not in America. She helps herself to half a dozen of the large beige gelatin capsules, washing them down with weirdly flavored London tap water, and creeps back upstairs, desperately pretending that she's someone very tired (which she supposes she is) who is about to fall deeply and soundly asleep (which she very much doubts she will).

But she does, to her subsequent amazement: a shallow but mercifully uninhabited sleep, though with a certain sense of sound and fury walled off behind the neurological dryer lint of the melatonin.

SHE opens her eyes and sees Damien's head there again, at the top of the stairs. He's wearing that tarn jacket, buttoned to the neck. “Sorry. Just checking. Didn't mean to wake you,” he says, almost a whisper.

She looks at her watch. It's seven in the morning. “No,” she says, “this is good. I'm awake.”

“Marina's not. She'll sleep in. If we're quiet, we can go out without waking her, have coffee and a talk.”

“Five minutes.”

His head disappears.

Flecktarn. That's what it's called. Like chocolate chips sprinkled on confetti the color of last autumn's leaves.

YOU pay more, here, to sit with your coffee. Take-away is less expensive. They probably do that in Tokyo, too, but she hadn't noticed.

It's raining, and Damien's worn a black hooded sweatshirt under his flecktarn. He keeps the hood up, here, seated in the back of this Star-bucks clone, and she's glad of that, as his stubbled scalp disorients her. She's always known him as someone with a shoulder-brushing, center-parted shoe-gazer anti-haircut.

It feels like old times, to sit here with him, diagonally opposite Camden Town station, wearing damp clothing and nursing large multi-shot lattes.

“What about your father?” he asks, brown eyes peering from beneath the black cotton cowl.

“No sign. My mother's in Hawaii, picking up messages from him on dead-air sections of audiotape, so she's convinced he's gone.” This sounds odd even to her, but how do you say these things?

“Fucking hell,” he says, with such evident and simple sympathy that she feels like hugging him. “That must be horrible.”

She nods. Sips from the tall paper cup. “Problems with the insurance, but that's probably just a matter of time.”

“But you think he's dead?”

“I've never doubted it, really. I don't know why…” She looks out from this brightly lit urban cave, past the queue of customers and the sounds of steam, to the strangers passing steadily in the rain.

“And you're over here working for Blue Ant?” He's shot several commercials for them. A Bigend favorite, she's heard. “And in Tokyo?”

She turns back to him. “They wanted me here to tell them whether or not a new logo worked.” She names the company and he nods. “Then it all went sideways.”

“Can't say you sound happy about the kind of sideways.”

“No. You haven't asked me why I changed your locks.”

“I wondered.”

“Visitor. Uninvited. I wasn't there.”

“Someone broke in?”

“Nothing broken, that I could see. But the door was locked when they got in. Any chance anyone else had a key?”

“No. I'd been careful with that. Had them changed just as the repo was completed.”

“And there's a chance your computer's been compromised somehow.” Thinking of Boone checking her iBook.

“A lot of good that will do anyone. Any idea who it was?” More curious than angry. In fact not angry at all. She'd known he wouldn't be. People fascinate him, in some peculiarly abstract way: the things they do, though not so much why they do them.

She tells him about Dorotea and the Rickson's and Asian Sluts. The changing of the locks. Then her second encounter with Dorotea. The Michelin Man in the meeting, and then the doll on the doorknob.

“Wait a minute. You don't talk about that, really, do you?”

“No.”

“Who knows, then?”

“Well — you, a very few other close friends, three or four ex-boyfriends I regret having told, a psychiatrist, and two psychologists.”

“And why were you in Tokyo?”

“Bigend. He's after the maker of the footage.”

She watches him take that one in. He's one of those people apparently immune to the lure of the footage; in his case, she knows, it has to do with his being his own maker, with his own obsessive need to generate his own footage. “Does he say why?”

“Not exactly, but he's convinced that it's big, in some entirely new way, and he wants to get in on the ground floor.”

“So you're working for Blue Ant, on that?”

“No. Bigend describes it as a partnership. With him. And an American computer security consultant named Boone Chu.”

“Boonchoo?”

“Boone as in Daniel. C-h-u.”

“And you're getting somewhere with it?”

“Irritated, mainly, though if I weren't so jet-lagged I'd have room for serious paranoia.” She quickly outlines her experience in Japan, not going into detail about Parkaboy or Taki, just a thumbnail of the supposed Italians, and Boone.

“You nutted him?”

“No, I smashed him in the face with my forehead.”

“No, that's what we call that, here. Or used to, I think. Amazing. Never imagined you'd have it in you.”

“Neither did I.” Around them, people with damp, loosely furled umbrellas are chatting and sipping coffee. Over them, now, she hears an amazing Glaswegan accent order a quadruple-shot latte. Damien hears it too, and grins.

“What about you?” she asks. “You're obviously fully engaged in project, more than somewhat with producer.”

“Sometimes I think it would be easier if I could sleep with her father instead. He's an old New Russian. Made it looting his own economy, basically, but there's no long-term future in that. Russia's had a GNP on par with Holland, but that's changing. The new New Russians are into transparency: companies that actually have books, pay taxes. They've figured out that you can make even more money, that way. It's no accident that Putin always describes himself as a lawyer. He is. But Marina's dad is old school, and that's what we need in this particular situation. Square it with the people who actually control the land we're digging on, keep the local militia away.” He raises one hand, fingers crossed. Raises his cup with the other, to sip.

“Fergal said you were back for re-funding?”

“Done. We met with the moneymen at the Brasserie.”

“You don't want old New Russian funding?”

“Very last thing I want. I think we've got another three weeks, shooting.”

“You aren't worried, getting hooked up with the don's daughter?”

“He's not mafia,” Damien says, very seriously, though she'd meant it only jokingly. “A lesser oligarch. We're okay, Boris and I. I think he's glad to have her out of his hair, actually.”

“Then you don't want him to get too used to it, do you?”

“You're scaring me.” He finishes the last of his latte. “But I'd be more worried if I were you. Working with Hubertus Bigend would be a scary proposition at the least complicated of times.” He stands up, then, and so does she, taking her Luggage Label bag from the back of her chair.

“What's the rest of your day?”

“We're on Aeroflot to Saint Petersburg this afternoon. I have to get our freight on, plus the additional cameramen. Plus Marina. It's a TU 154. Getting Marina on a Russian plane can take some doing. Fergal's got a very tight rein on budget. I have to come out of this owning the film, and that's a stretch. What about you?”

“I'm going to a Pilates studio. When's your flight?”

“Two twenty-five.”

“I'm going to stay out of your way, then. You don't mind me being there, with people breaking in?”

“Wouldn't have you anywhere else.”

Outside, under the awning, he puts his hands on her shoulders. “Are you going to be all right? You have a lot going on, all of it very weird.” “I'll be okay. It's great to see you.”

“I know,” hailing a black cab. “I mean yes — it is, both ways!” The cab pulls over, he opens the door for her, gives her a quick kiss on the cheek. She gets in and he closes the door.

“Neal's Yard,” she says.