Pattern Recognition

33. BOT

Aeroflot flight SU244, departing Heathrow at ten-thirty in the evening, proves to be a Boeing 737, not the Tupolev she'd been hoping for. She's never been to Russia before, and thinks of it primarily in the light of childhood stories of Win's; the world beyond the perimeters of the world he'd been dedicated to protecting; a world of toilet-navigating spy devices and ceaseless duplicity. In her childhood's Russia it's always snowing. Men wear dark furry hats.

She wonders, finding her aisle seat in coach, whether Aeroflot had had to compete to retain the hammer and sickle as its logo, and how exclusive that is. Massive recognition factor. It's a winged version, rendered with considerable delicacy, and she finds it curiously difficult to date: a sort of Victorian Futurist look. She has a neutral reaction to it, she finds, which is a great relief.

National icons are always neutral for her, with the exception of Nazi Germany's, and this not so much from a sense of historical evil (though she certainly has that) as from an awareness of a scary excess of design talent. Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well. Heinzi would have done just fine, back then, but she doubts that even he could have managed a better job of it.

Swastikas, and particularly the fact that there had been that custom type-slug for “SS,” induce a violent reaction, akin to her Tommy-phobia but in an even worse direction. She'd once worked for a month in Austria, where these symbols are not suppressed by law, as they are in Germany, and had learned to cross the street if she realized she was approaching the window of an antique shop.

The national symbols of her homeland don't trigger her, or so far haven't. And over the past year, in New York, she's been deeply grateful for this. An allergy to flags or eagles would have reduced her to shut-in status: a species of semiotic agoraphobia.

She stows her Rickson's in the overhead bin, takes her seat, and slides the bag with the iBook beneath the seat in front of her. The legroom isn't bad, and thinking this she experiences a kind of pseudo-nostalgia for Win's version of Aeroflot: vicious flight attendants flinging stale sandwiches at you, and small plastic bags provided in which to place pens, a thoughtful precaution against frequent depressurizations. He'd told her that Poland, from the air, looked like Kansas as farmed by elves; the patchwork fields so much smaller, the land as flat and vast.

Soon they are taxiing toward takeoff, the seats beside her empty, and it strikes her that, through luck, and for little more than she'd paid earlier for express service on a visa, she'll have almost as much space and privacy as she'd had to and from Tokyo.

Magda, who'd turned up in Voytek's stead to get the keys, knows where she's going, and her mother, on whom she's finally taken mercy with an e-mail, and Parkaboy. These three know she's going, but someone else, she doesn't know who, knows she's coming.

The Boeing's turbines shift pitch.

Reviewing these on the iBook, when they've reached cruising altitude, she doesn't want to think what she'll feel like, tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, if she receives no reply to this last one. Which she supposes is a real possibility.

Russia. Russia serves Pepsi. She sips some.

Dorotea's handler from Cyprus, who is also the registrant of armaz.ru. She wonders what other Russian elements may have come up on F:F:F, during consideration of the footage.

Slotting the F:F:F CD-ROM, which she still hasn't had copied for Ivy, she goes to its search function.

What comes up, to her surprise, is a very early post of her own, well down a thread that begins with someone entertaining the possibility that the maker is an established cineast working in anonymous secrecy.

She can barely remember posting this. She's never been able to go back and reread her own posts, before, and it probably wouldn't occur to her anyway. But now she reads on, following the thread to the end.

And sees that the next thread begins with what she now remembers had been Mama Anarchia's first post.

Well, Cayce thinks, Mama had gotten right down to it. And she had, Cayce notes, used the word “hegemony,” without which Parkaboy will not admit any Mama post as fully genuine. (For a full positive identification, though, he insists that they also contain the word “hermeneutics.”)

But Cayce Pollard Central Standard is saying it's time to try to sleep, so she ejects the CD-ROM, shuts down and puts the iBook away, and closes her eyes.

And dreams of large men, strangers but somehow Donny-like, in her New York apartment. She is there too, but they can't seem to see her, or hear her, and she wants them to get out.

IN Sheremetevo-2, once past the uniform, very seventies beige of customs and immigration, there seems to be advertising on virtually every surface. There are at least four advertisements on the luggage cart she's using, one Hertz and three others in Russian. As in Japan, she's realized, she's partially buffered by her inability to read the language. For which she's grateful, as the density of commercial language here, in this airport at least, rivals Tokyo.

One sign she can read is above an ATM, and says BANKOMAT, which she decides is what ATMs would have been called in America if they had been invented in the fifties. She uses her own card, rather than Blue Ant's, to obtain an initial supply of rubles, and pushes her cart out, finally, into her first breath of Russian air, heavily laden with yet another nationally specific flavor of petro-carbons. There's a disorderly looking scrum of taxis, and she knows that her job now is to find what Magda had called an “official” one.

Which she shortly does, leaving Sheremetevo-2 in a landlord-green diesel Mercedes of a certain age, its dashboard sanctified by some sort of small Orthodox shrine atop an intricate white doily.

This huge, slightly grim eight-lane highway, she decides, consulting the Lonely Planet Moscow she'd bought at Heathrow, is Leningradskii Prospect, traffic solid either way, but moving right along. Huge muddy trucks, luxury cars, many buses, all changing lanes in a way that gives her little confidence, aside from which her driver seems to be simultaneously having a phone conversation via the headset screwed into one ear and listening to music from the CD-player earphones covering both. She gets the idea that the concept of lanes is a fluid one, here, as perhaps is attention to the road. Tries to concentrate on the grassy median, where wildflowers grow.

She glimpses smokestacks in the distance, and tall orange buildings, but the smokestacks, pouring white smoke, seem to rise from among those buildings in some unfamiliar way, suggesting alien or perhaps nonexistent concepts of zoning.

Billboards for computers, luxury goods, and electronics appear, increasing in number and variety as they approach the city. The sky, aside from the plumes of the smokestacks and a yellow-brown smudge of petro-carbons, is cloudless and blue.

Her first impression of Moscow itself is that everything is far larger than it could possibly have any need to be. Cyclopean Stalin-era buildings in burnt orange brick, their detailing vaguely maroonish. Built to humble, and terrify. But lampposts, fountains, plazas, all partake of this exaggerated scale.

As they cross the eight lanes of the traffic-packed Garden Ring, the high-urban factor goes up several notches, and the advertising thickens. Off to the right, she sees an enormous Art Nouveau train station, a survival from an earlier era still, but on a scale to dwarf London's grandest. Then a McDonald's, seemingly as large.

There are more trees than she'd expected, and as she begins to adjust to the scale of things, she notices smaller buildings, all remarkably ugly, which probably date from the sixties. If so, these are easily the worst sixties buildings she's ever seen, and visibly crumbling at the edges. Quite a few are being torn down, and indeed there is scaffolding everywhere, much renovation under way, and in what she guesses is Tverskaya Street the crowds are thick as the Children's Crusade, but moving far more determinedly.

Huge advertising banners are slung across the street, and billboards top most buildings.

An incredible number of blue-and-white electric buses here, a vintage Dinky Toy blue that she's never seen on a real vehicle before. A lot of them don't seem to be going anywhere.

Her sole previous experience of the Soviet, or post-Soviet, had been a single evening in the former East Berlin, a few months after the Wall's fall.

Back in her hotel, safely in the West, she'd come very close to weeping, appalled at the manifest cruelty, not to mention sheer boneheaded stupidity of what she'd seen, and had been moved to call Win in Tennessee.

“Those sons of bitches had been cooking their own books for so long, they didn't even know it themselves,” he'd explained. The CIA, he'd said, had done an assessment of East German industry, just prior to the nation's collapse, and had declared it the most viable industrial base in the Communist bloc. “That was because we were looking at their figures. Say a tire factory looked pretty good. Not up to our standards but better than Third World. Wall comes down, we go in there, whole factory's clapped out. Half of it hasn't been used for ten years. Worth its weight in scrap, basically. They were lying to themselves.”

“But they were so nasty to their own people,” she'd protested, “so petty. They only allowed two colors of paint, one dead gray and a brown that looked as much like shit as it's possible for brown to look. A brown you can smell.”

“Not a lot of advertising to bother you, though, is there?”

She'd had to laugh. “Was it like that when you were in Moscow?”

“Certainly not. Germans doing communism? That even put the wind up the Russians. Like they saw the East Germans really believed in it, all of it. You could see they thought that was crazy.”

Her cab drives under a vast Prada logo. She resists the urge to cringe.

A few of the billboards, amazingly, are in that antique Socialist Realist style, flat reds and whites and grays overshot with the black of absolute authority.

And looking up at these, she sees, or thinks she sees, grinning unevenly down at her, the familiar and half-paralyzed face of Billy Prion.

THE lobby of The President could easily accept a military review stand, with Lenin's tomb fitting handily in a corner. Four small groupings of couches are arranged in a space half the size of a football field, a carpeted expanse across which Cayce, waiting out extended check-in formalities requiring the surrender of her passport, watches a young woman pace angrily back and forth, in thigh-high, high-heeled, emerald-green boots, boots suggesting the collaboration of Florentine glove makers with Frederick's of Hollywood. This girl has the same improbable cheekbones as Damien's line producer, their elegant angularity echoed in hipbones accentuated by a very tight, very short skirt, a sort of Miami-period Versace homage with appliquéd snakeskin hotrod flames accentuating each ass cheek.

It's ten in the morning now, and Cayce knows that three girls in similar outfits are arguing, outside, in the hotel's security corridor, with the four large, Kevlar-jacketed young men stationed there. Lobbying to be allowed in, Cayce decides, in order to join their impatient coworker.

When she tires of watching the green boots, which have a sort of fairy-tale quality against the autumnal palette of the lobby, she glances instead through an English-language brochure on offer at the beige marble check-in counter. This explains the oranges and browns, as she sees the place had formerly been The Oktobryskaya. And is still, she gathers, reading between the lines, owned by the Kremlin.

HER room, on the twelfth floor, is larger than she had expected, with a deep bay window offering a sweeping view of the Moscow River and the city beyond. On the far shore, a vast cathedral, and on its own little island a statue of quite unthinkable awfulness. Her Lonely Planet tells her it's Peter the Great, and must be guarded, else local aesthetes blow it up. It looks like a champagne fountain rented from caterers for an old-fashioned working-class wedding.

She turns back to the room: more autumnal murkiness and a mud-dark bedspread. A nagging low-level dissonance, as though everything was designed by someone who'd been looking at a picture of a Western hotel room from the eighties, but without ever having seen even one example of the original. The bathroom is tiled in three shades of brown (though none, she's thankful, East German) with a shower, a bathtub, a bidet and toilet, each with its own paper banner declaring it DISINFEKTED.

There is a sign on the desk inviting her to use her laptop from her room, or, if she prefers, to visit the BISNIZ SENTR in the lobby.

She gets out the iBook and cables it to the socket beside the desk. If what she remembers Pamela Mainwaring having said about her phone is right, that'll probably work here, but she's not sure. It's already occurred to her that she hasn't given the cell number to her latest and most mysterious correspondent, and she wonders if there isn't something subconscious going on, there. The link is slow, but finally she gets to hotmail.

Two.

Parkaboy and stellanor.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out as slowly as she can.

“Fish,” says Cayce.