Pattern Recognition

35. КОФЕИН

Bolshoy Kamennii Most, Big Stone Bridge, is big indeed, though probably many incarnations on from the bridge that had originally acquired the name.

No trouble finding it, and no trouble finding Caffeine, either, with the map she'd copied from the attachment on that last e-mail. She'd drawn it on a sheet of President letterhead, folded in quarters.

Definitely the place here, though Caffeine is КОФЕИН.

“He took a duck in the face…“ she whispers, as she does a walk-by, checking it out.

It looks more like a bar filled with high-backed armchairs than a coffeehouse, but then she remembers coffeehouses in Seattle, when she'd started in board-wear. More like that, but without the Goodwill sofas.

It's crowded.

Yet another of those undercover police cars goes bombing past, blue light flashing, maybe the fifth she's seen, all of them shiny and new and expensive.

The duck mantra doesn't seem to be helping, tonight.

“Walk through the fear,” she tells herself, something Margot had said a lot when she'd still been going to her codependency group. That doesn't seem to help either.

“Fuck it.” An older, deeper invocation perhaps. That gets her turned around and headed back through the door.

A cozy, crowded room, highlights of copper and polished wood. Where every table is occupied, it seems, except for one, flanked by two enormous, empty, wingback armchairs, and there, quite clearly, is the fish: a large, freestanding sculpture, its scales cut from one-pound Medaglia d'Oro coffee cans like the ones Wassily Kandinsky used, but assembled in a way that owes more to Frank Gehry.

She's moving too fast to get a read on the crowd here, but is aware of a number of glances as she beelines through and seats herself in one of the wingback chairs.

A waiter materializes instantly. Young and quite beautiful, white-jacketed, a white cloth folded across his arm, he looks none too happy to see her there. He brusquely says something, in Russian, that clearly isn't a question.

“I'm sorry,” she says, “I only speak English. I'm meeting a friend. I'll have coffee, please.”

As soon as she speaks, there's an instant change in his demeanor, and not, she senses, out of any love of the English language.

“Of course. Americano?”

Guessing that Italian is the default language of coffee here, and that she's not being queried as to her nationality. “Please.”

When he's gone, she does a crowd-scan. If there were visible logos on the clothes these people are wearing, she'd be in trouble. Lots of Prada, Gucci, but in a Moneyed Bohemian modality too off-the-shelf for London or New York. LA, she realizes: except for two goth girls in black brocade, and a boy gotten up in impeccable High Grunge, it's Rodeo Drive with an extra helping of cheekbones.

But the young woman crossing from the entrance now wears nothing that isn't matte and the darkest of grays. Pale. Dark eyes. Center-parted hair, unfashionably long.

Her white face, angular yet somehow soft, eclipses everything. Cayce realizes that she's gripping the arms of her chair so hard that her fingers hurt.

“You are the one who writes, yes?” Only lightly accented, a low voice but very clear, as though she were speaking with perfect enunciation from a distance.

Cayce starts to rise, but the stranger waves her back and takes the other chair. “Stella Volkova.” She offers Cayce her hand.

“Cayce Pollard,” taking it. Is this the maker? Is the maker named Stella? Is Stella a Russian name?

Stella Volkova squeezes her hand and releases it. “You are the first.”

“The first?” Cayce feels as though her eyes are about to pop out of her head.

The waiter arrives with coffee for two, pouring it into fine white china cups.

“The coffee is very good here. When I was a child, only the nomenklatura had good coffee, and that was not as good as this. You take the sugar? Cream?”

Unable to trust her hands, Cayce shakes her head.

“I too. Black.” Stella raises her cup, inhales the fragrance, then sips. She says something appreciative, in Russian. “Do you like it, Moscow? You are here, before?”

“No,” Cayce says. “It's new to me.”

“I think it is new for us. Every day, now.” Unsmiling, eyes wide.

“Why are there so many police cars?” It's all she can think to ask, this pathetic attempt to prevent a silence that she somehow fears might kill her. Ask the next question. “They're always speeding by, but no sirens.”

“Police cars?”

“Unmarked. With blue lights.”

“Police cars, no! Those are the cars of important people, of the rich, or those who work for them. They have purchased a permit allowing ignorance of traffic regulations. Blue lights are courtesy to others, a warning. It seems strange, to you?”

Everything does, Cayce thinks. Or nothing does.

“Stella? May I ask you something?”

“Yes?”

“Are you the maker?”

Stella tilts her head. “I am twins.” If she demonstrates some literal power of physical bilocation, now, it won't surprise Cayce. “My sister, she is the artist. I, I am what? The distributor. The one who finds an audience. It is not so great a talent, I know.”

“My God,” says Cayce, who doesn't think she has one, “it's really true.”

Stella's eyes, already large, widen. “Yes. It is true. Nora is the artist.” Cayce feels herself starting to lock up again. Next question. Anything. “Are Stella and Nora Russian names?”

“Our mother was great admirer of your literature. Particularly of Williams, and of Joyce.”

“Williams?”

“Tennessee.”

Stella. And Nora.

“My father lived in Tennessee,” Cayce says, feeling she sounds like a talking doll whose string has been pulled.

“You write he died, in the fall of the towers.”

“Went missing, yes.”

“Our parents died. A bomb. In Leningrad. My sister and I, my mother as well, lived in Paris. Nora studied film, of course. I, business. My father would not have us in Russia. The dangers. He worked for his brother, my uncle, who had become a powerful man. He told us in Paris we should be prepared never to return. But our grandmother died, his mother, and we returned, for the funeral. Three days only, it was to be.” Her great sad eyes stare darkly into Cayce's. “The bomb is in a tree, as we leave our house, all of us in black, to the funeral. They detonate it with a radio. Our parents die instantly, a mercy. It hurt Nora badly. Very badly. I had only dislocations, my shoulders, my jaw, and many small wounds.”

“I'm sorry…”

“Yes.” Stella nods, though in affirmation of what Cayce isn't sure. “Since then, we live in Moscow. My uncle is often here, and Nora needs many things. Who are your friends?”

“Pardon me?”

“You write you look for Nora's art with your friends. Passionately.” The smile, when it breaks through Stella's pale calm, is a miracle. Or not calm, Cayce thinks, but some hyper-vigilant stillness. Do not move and they will not see us. “Who is 'Maurice'? It is a beautiful name.”

“He works in a bank, in Hong Kong. British. I haven't met him, but I like him a lot. You understand we do this through a website, and e-mail?”

“Yes. I have seen it, perhaps. I have software. I watch Nora's art move, through the Sigil numbers. It is very good, this software. Sergei found it for us.”

“Who is Sergei?”

“He is employed to facilitate. A star at the Polytechnic. I worry that he will miss his career, because my uncle pays him too well. But also he loves what Nora does. Like you.”

“Is the footage… Is Nora's art computer-generated, Stella? Are there live actors?” In fear that this is too direct, too blunt.

“At the film school, in Paris, she made three short films. The longest, sixteen minutes. This was shown at Cannes to good acclaim. You have been? The Croisette?”

Cayce bookmarking like the shutter of a camera. “Only once.”

“After the bomb we were taken to Switzerland. Nora required operations. The blood here is not good. We were fortunate, there has been nothing from the first transfusions, done in Russia. I stayed with her, of course. She could not talk, at first. She did not recognize me. When she did talk, it was only to me, and in a language that had been ours in childhood.”

“'Twin talk'?”

“The language of Stella and Nora. Then other language returns. The doctors had asked me her interests and of course there was only film. Shortly, we were shown an editing suite which our uncle had caused to have assembled there, in the clinic. We showed Nora the film she had been working on, in Paris, before. Nothing. As if she could not see it. Then she was shown her film from Cannes. That she saw, but it seemed to cause her great pain. Soon she began to use the equipment. To edit. Recut.”

Cayce, hypnotized, is nearing the bottom of her cup. The waiter arrives, to silently refill it.

“Three months, she recut. Five operations in that time, and still she worked. I watched it grow shorter, her film. In the end, she had reduced it to a single frame.”

In chilling apparent synchronicity, Caffeine falls momentarily silent. Cayce shivers. “What was the image?”

“A bird. In flight. Not even in focus. Its wings, against gray cloud.” She covers her own empty cup, when the waiter moves to refill it. “She went inside, after that.”

“Inside?”

“She ceased to speak, then to react. To eat. Again they fed her with tubes. I was crazy. There was talk of taking her to America, but American doctors came. In the end they said they could do nothing. It could not be removed.”

“What could not be removed?”

“The last fragment. It rests between the lobes, in some terrible way. It cannot be moved. Risk is too great.” The dark eyes bottomless now, filling Cayce's field of vision. “But then she notices the screen.”

“The screen?”

“Monitor. Above, in hallway. Closed circuit, showing only the reception at the front of that private ward. The Swiss nurse sitting, reading. Someone passing. They saw her watching that. The most clever of the doctors, he was from Stuttgart. He had them put a line from that camera into her editing suite. When she looked at those images, she focused. When the images were taken away, she began to die again. He taped two hours of this, and ran it on the editing deck. She began to cut it. To manipulate. Soon she had isolated a single figure. A man, one of the staff. They brought him to her, but she had no reaction. She ignored him. Continued to work. One day I found her working on his face, in Photoshop. That was the beginning.”

Cayce presses her head against the high back of the chair. Forces herself to close her eyes. When she opens them, she will see her old Rickson's, draped across the shoulders of Damien's robot girl. Or the open bedding closet in the apartment in Hongo, stuffed with a stranger's clothing.

“You are tired? Unwell?”

She opens her eyes. Stella is still there. “No. Only listening to your story. Thank you for telling it to me.”

“You are welcome.”

“Stella?”

“Yes?

“Why did you tell it to me? Everything you and your sister do seems to be surrounded by so much secrecy. And yet, when I find your address, finally, which was very hard to do, and e-mail you, you reply immediately. I come here, you meet me. I don't understand.”

“You are the first. My sister, she has no interest in an audience. I do not think she understands what I do with her work, that I make it possible for the world to see. But I suppose I had been waiting, and when you wrote to me, I decided you were real.”

“Real?”

“My uncle is a most important man, a very big businessman, bigger now even than when our parents died. We do not see him often, but his apparat protects us. They are afraid of him, you see, and so they are very careful. It is a sad way to live, I think, but that is what it is like to be very rich in this country. I wished the world to see my sister's work, but they insisted it be anonymous.” The sad gentle smile surfacing, through the stillness of the long white face. “When you told me your father was lost, I did not think you would hurt us.” A troubled look. “She was very upset, my sister. She hurt herself.”

“Because I came?”

“Of course not. She doesn't know. When we saw the attack, in New York.” But she is looking not at Cayce but toward the entrance now, where Cayce sees two young men waiting, in dark slacks and black leather coats. “I must go now. Those are my drivers. There is a car, to return you to your hotel.” Stella stands. “It is not good, a woman at night to walk alone.”

So Cayce stands, seeing that Stella is several inches taller than she is. “Will I see you again?”

“Of course.”

“Will I be able to meet your sister?”

“Yes, of course.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. I will contact you. I will send a car. Come.” And leads the way, without asking for the bill, or paying, but the beautiful waiter bows low as they pass, as does an older man in a white apron. Ignoring the two in their leather coats, Stella steers her out into the street. “Here is your car.” A black Mercedes. She takes Cayce's hand, squeezes it. “A great pleasure.”

“Yes,” Cayce says, “thank you.”

“Good night.”

One of the young men opens the passenger door for her. She gets in. He closes it. Walks around the back, opens the driver-side, and gets in.

They pull away, and Cayce looks back, to see Stella wave goodbye.

When the black Mercedes reaches the big stone bridge, the driver touches something on the dashboard and the blue light goes on, flashing. He accelerates, working smoothly through the gears, up the great stone hump of it and down, into Zamoskvareche.