Pattern Recognition

34. ZAMOSKVARECH

But she doesn't phone Parkaboy. She's too excited, too anxious.

But this is a dressy city, in some way she wouldn't care for if she were to be here very long, so she changes into her Parco outfit, and even tries her luck with the makeup the Tokyo spa issued her. The result, she suspects, would have the spa girls trying not to laugh, but at least it's evident she's wearing makeup. She could probably be mistaken, she decides, for the correspondent for some obscure sub-NPR cultural radio operation. Definitely not television.

Making sure she has the room's magnetic key, she puts on her Rickson's, shoulders the Luggage Label bag containing iBook and phone, and finds her way back to the mini-lobby fronting the elevator banks. A uniformed woman sits there, she assumes, twenty-four hours a day, beneath an enormous arrangement of flowers and dried leaves. Cayce nods to her, but she doesn't nod back.

There is a large window between the two elevators, draped ceiling to floor in nubby ocher fabric. Beside this is an upright glass cooler stocked with champagne, mineral water, what must be several exceptionally well-chilled bottles of burgundy, and much Pepsi. Waiting for the elevator, Cayce edges the ocher nubbiness aside and sees ancient-looking apartment buildings, white spires, and one amazing crenellated orange-and-turquoise bell tower. In the deeper distance, golden onion domes.

This, she decides, is the direction she's going now.

No one at all in the vast main lobby, not even a girl in green boots. She finds her way out, past the security cave with its wide boys in Kevlar, and tries to walk around the block, so that she'll be headed in the direction of those onion domes.

And is lost, almost immediately. But doesn't mind, as she's only out here to walk off an excess of nerves. And at some point, she reminds herself, to phone Parkaboy.

But why is she hesitating to do that? The reason, she admits, is that she knows she'll have to tell him about Bigend, and Boone, and the rest of it, and she's afraid to, afraid of what he might say. But if she doesn't, their friendship, which she values deeply, will start to cease to feel genuine.

She stops, staring at the streetscape of this old residential neighborhood, and is acutely aware of her mind doing the but-really-it's-like thing it does when presented with serious cultural novelty: but really it's like Vienna, except it isn't, and really it's like Stockholm, but it's not, really…

She wanders on, feeling like a child anxiously playing hooky, occasionally glancing up in case she finds the golden onions, until her phone starts to ring.

Feeling guilty, she answers. “Yes?”

“Everything. Now.”

“I was just going to call you.”

“Have you met him?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“This evening, five o'clock, in either a restaurant or a coffee bar, I'm not sure.”

“You can't meet him in Starbucks.”

“It's not a Starbucks. I'm not sure they even have Starbucks.”

“They will.”

“Parkaboy?” It feels strange, to say his name. His handle, really. Suddenly it feels stranger still to remember that she doesn't know his name.

“Yes?”

“I have to tell you something.”

A pause, on his end. “You're carrying our child.”

“This is serious —”

“I'll say. It's probably an Internet first.”

“No. I'm working for somebody.”

“I thought you were working for that lethally porno ad agency.”

“I'm working for someone who has an interest in finding the maker. Someone who's backing me. That was how I could afford to go to Tokyo, and meet with Taki.”

“So? Who?”

“Do you know who Hubertus Bigend is?”

“Spelled 'big', and 'end'?”

“Yes.”

“Founder and owner of said agency?”

“Yes.”

“'Bullshit baffles brains' taken to new levels in the celebrity interview?”

“That's the one. And I'm working for him. Or, he says, with him. But it's gotten me here. It gave me the money I needed to get the address that got me here.”

Silence.

“I've been afraid you'd hate me,” she tells him.

“Don't be ridiculous. You're still having our child, aren't you?”

“I feel like a shit for not having told you.”

“If you're about to meet the maker, and you're still talking to me, I really don't care what manner or number of goats you've had to blow to get there. And anyone you've had to kill in the process, I'll help get rid of the bodies.”

“You're not just saying that?”

“I'm saying it, aren't I? What else do you want? Should I be carving it into my arm with a broken acrylic nail?” He falls silent. Then: “But what does your Mr. Bigend want with our maker?”

“He says he doesn't know. He says that the footage is the cleverest example of marketing the century's seen so far. He says he wants to know more. I think he might even be telling the truth.”

“Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Least of my worries, right now.”

“What are your worries, then?”

“How I'm going to get there. Whether my passport, when I find it, if I can find it, is still valid. Whether I can swing a deal for a quick ticket that won't require a mortgage.”

“Are you serious?”

“What do you think?”

A blond, entirely Californian-looking nanny passes Cayce, leading a small, dark-haired Russian boy with a red balloon. She glances at Cayce and hurries the child along.

Cayce remembers Sylvie Jeppson, the two of them leaving the Russian Consulate. “You'll need a visa,” she tells Parkaboy, “and you can get one fast if you pay extra, but you won't need a ticket. There's a woman named Sylvie Jeppson, at Blue Ant in London. I'm going to call her and give her your number. She'll find the quickest flight and have your ticket waiting at O'Hare. And I know this seems completely insane, but I need your name. I don't actually know it.”

“Thornton Vaseltarp.”

“Sorry?”

“Gilbert.”

“Gilbert?”

“Peter Gilbert. Parkaboy. You'll get used to it. What's the bottom line on this flight to Moscow?”

“There isn't any. I'm covered for expenses. You just became one. Need you here. That simple.”

“Thank you.”

“But don't let her find out I'm already here. She thinks I'm coming in a week.”

“Were you always this complicated?”

“No, but I'm learning. Parkaboy — Peter — I'm going to call her now.” A silence.

“Thank you. You know I have to be there.”

“I know. I'll call you later. Bye.”

She walks on, phone in hand, until she finds a sort of thick, truncated granite bollard thrust up from the pavement. She has no idea what it might once have been, but she sits on its edge, the stone warm through the fabric of her skirt, and phones Blue Ant in Soho. There's an extra level of hiss to Moscow cellular, but she gets through, if only to Sylvie's voice mail. “Cayce Pollard, Sylvie. I have someone in Chicago I need to send to Moscow, ASAP. Peter Gilbert.” The name feels strange on her tongue. She recites Parkaboy's number, twice. “Book him a room at The President Hotel. Get him there as soon as you can, please. It's important. Thank you. Bye.”

An unmarked police car goes roaring past, a very new Mercedes, with a flashing blue light off to the side of the windshield. She watches it take a tight medieval corner, tires shrieking.

She puts away the phone, gets up, walks on.

She hasn't gone much farther when a great wave of exhaustion rolls in, seemingly from the direction of the river, Cayce Pollard Central Standard announcing from some deep organic level that it is time to be unconscious. She thinks she'd better go with that, so turns around and starts tracing her route back to The President.

HER phone wakes her, rather than the call she's requested from the desk or the alarm she's set on her watch as backup. She sits up naked under thick white sheets and the mud-colored President bedspread, trying to remember where she is. Sunlight through the crack in the drawn curtains, as if from some odd direction.

She gets out of bed, fumbles with the zip on her bag.

“Hello?”

“It's Boone. Where are you?”

“Just waking up. Where are you.”

“Still in Ohio. Getting somewhere, though.”

“Where's that?” She sits on the edge of the bed. Checks her watch.

“A domain name. Armaz-dot-ru.”

She can't think of anything to say.

“Nazran,” he says.

“What's that?”

“Capital of the Republic of Ingushetia. It's an ofshornaya zona.”

“A what?”

“An offshore tax haven. For Russia. They liked Cyprus so much, for that, they decided to grow their own. Set it up in Ingush. The guy the domain is registered to is in Cyprus, but he works for some ofshornaya outfit in Ingush. That's probably where Dorotea's Russian flavor is coming from.”

“How do you know he's from… Ingush?”

“Google.”

She hadn't thought of that.

“And this is… “ She hesitates, on the brink of lying. Lies. “This domain is where the footage comes from?”

“You got it.”

“But you just have a domain, no address?”

“Hey, it's better than nothing.” He sounds disappointed. “I've got something else, too.”

“What's that?”

“Oil.”

“Meaning?”

“I'm not sure. But I ran this guy past my friend from Harvard, State Department. He says the outfit our boy is with has links to some of the players who're looking central to Russian oil.”

“Russian oil?”

“Saudi oil has not been looking so good to the really big guys, globally, since nine-eleven. They're tired of worrying about the region. They want a stable source. Russian Federation's got it. Means huge changes in the flow of global capital. Means we're going to be running on Russian oil.”

“But what's that got to do with the footage?”

“If I find out, I'll let you know. How about you? Any progress on your end?”

She takes a deep breath, then hopes he hasn't heard her take it. “No. Nothing. Boone?”

“Yes?”

“Who was that you were with, when I phoned?”

A pause. “Someone who works for Sigil.”

“Did you… know her, before?” It's the wrong question and she knows it, but she's still thinking of Marisa and the apartment in Hongo and something in his voice then.

“I met her in the lounge they all go to after work.” There's a flatness to his tone now that she somehow knows he isn't aware of. “I don't like doing that, but she's in accounting, and that turned out to be what we needed.”

“Oh.” And remembers her hand finding the pistol behind Donny's bedstead. “Another date, you might get the whole address?” Immediately wishing she hadn't said it.

“That makes me sound pretty shitty, Cayce.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to. But I've got to go. I'm meeting someone at five. We'll talk. Bye.”

“Well… Bye.” He doesn't sound happy.

Click.

She sits there in the dark, wondering what just happened.

Then her watch starts to beep, and the room phone rings, a strange foreign ring she's never heard before.