Pattern Recognition

36. THE DIG

She opens her eyes to a wedge of light, dividing the darkened ceiling like the cross-section of a blade whose edge rests between the shadows of the ocher curtains.

She remembers watching the Maurice and Filmy edit on the iBook, after she'd returned from meeting Stella, and experiencing it in some entirely new way that she's still completely unable to describe or characterize.

She struggles out of the heavy sheets and drags one of the curtains aside. Light assails her, and the enormous, atrocious statue, on its island in the river.

In the bathroom, amid too many browns, she adjusts the taps in the shower. Knockoffs of Kohler, she notes automatically, minus the trademark. Unwraps a bar of soap and steps in.

Twenty minutes later, dressed, hair blown dry, she's downstairs, uneasily eyeing the breakfast buffet. Heaping platters of smoked meats, pyramids of preserved fish, silver bowls of red caviar, tureens of sour cream. Blinis. Things that aren't blinis but are filled with sweet cheese. Finally, at the far end, just as she's despairing, she finds granola and cornflakes and fresh fruit. Big pitchers of juice. Coffee in huge old pump-top nickel-plate thermos jugs.

She finds a table to herself. Eats methodically, eyes on her plate. French from a nearby table, light as birdsong against the dark weight of Russian.

She feels as though something huge has happened, is happening, but she can't define it. She knows that it's about meeting Stella, and hearing her story, and her sister's, but somehow she no longer is able to fit it to her life. Or rather she lives now in that story, her life left somewhere behind, like a room she's stepped out of. Not far away at all but she is no longer in.

Back upstairs, she phones Parkaboy in Chicago. “I'm going to level with you,” she hears him say, after the final, uneven ring. “I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pit hull's tested positive. Twice.”

She doesn't leave a message.

Does this mean he's already on his way?

She could phone Sylvie Jeppson and find out, but the idea of contact with Blue Ant, right now, does not appeal.

Stella trusts her. Whatever weird, sad, scary, deeply Russian scenario Stella and her twin are socketed into, she desperately doesn't want to betray whatever it is she's seen rise behind the stillness of that white face.

Parkaboy would get it. But who else would? Not, she's now certain, Boone. Bigend, probably, but in that way of his, in which he seems to somehow understand emotions without ever having partaken of them.

She opens a bottle of Russian mineral water.

Dorotea had been hired by a Russian from Cyprus, the one listed as the registrant of armaz.ru, a domain that Boone says has something to do with the Russian oil industry.

Were those Russians, she wonders, who somehow got their hands on Katherine McNally's notes from Cayce's sessions? Not necessarily, she decides, as the men Dorotea had used in Tokyo had been Italian. It's an equal-opportunity conspiracy, maybe.

But Baranov, come to think of it, is Russian too, or anyway Anglo-Russian. Though that doesn't seem to click with the linkage she's trying to braille, here. And neither does Damien, off in the boonies shooting his punk archaeology project, even though his girlfriend's father sounds like another candidate for mafia czar.

There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained.

When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there.

Russia. Something else…

She remembers, in mid-swallow, and lapses into a fit of coughing. That old post of hers, the one that had turned up when she'd searched Russia on the F:F:F CD-ROM.

She slots the CD-ROM. Repeats the search.

January. She'd still been seeing Katherine. She'd had no idea she'd be working for Blue Ant, or coming to London, or getting involved with Bigend.

Mafia.

Wherewithal.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Not a bent for self-expression: orphaned nieces.

If Baranov could still have even one favor-owing friend, somewhere in the bowels of Langley or Falls Church, willing and able to somehow pluck the stellanor address from traffic on the Net, or from wherever it was found, what might a very rich, very important Russian be afforded in his own country, or even, perhaps, in hers?

And what might “very rich, very important” not be a euphemism for, today, when it came to Russians?

She feels a knot of tension beginning to complicate, between her shoulders.

When the on-line Moscow Yellow Pages refuses to produce a Pilates studio, she puts on her workout clothes and goes up, one floor, to the hotel gym. Deserted save for an older, overweight Russian wearing an expression of near-religious sorrow as he plods heavily along on a treadmill.

The machines here look to Cayce like domestic product, though new, and Damien would definitely want to document them. She finds what might be a boxing mat in a far corner of the room and tries to remember the mat exercises she'd been taught at the very beginning.

She senses the Russian's sad gaze as she works through what she recalls of the mat program, but realizes, to her surprise, that she's actually glad he's here.

It's that kind of morning.

SHE desperately wants to go out, walk to the nearest Metro station, pay the famously tiny fare, and descend into a world of ornate mineral marvels. The only true palaces of the proletariat, those stations. And doing that, have some temporary release from waiting. But she can't, and doesn't.

She's waiting for a message from Stella.

Shortly after noon, her cell rings.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?” Bigend.

“Poole,” she lies reflexively, not exactly thinking on her feet.

“Swimming?”

“Silent 'e'. The city. Where are you?”

“Paris. Sylvie tells me you will be here soon?”

“I'm not sure, now. I'm following something up. I hope you aren't there only for my sake. I might not come.”

“Not at all. You won't share this something?”

“Not on a cell. When I see you.” Enough like a Boone reason, she hopes.

“You spoke with Boone.” Not a question.

“Yes.”

“He seemed to feel you weren't impressed with what he's been able to learn in Ohio.”

“He's too sensitive, that way”.

“The chemistry, it isn't working?”

“We're not dating, Hubertus.”

“You'll keep me informed, though, won't you?”

She's taking it for granted that there's no way he can know where he's reaching her phone, and she hopes that that's true, but there's really nothing she can do about it now. “Yes, of course. Have to go now, Hubertus. Bye.”

She imagines him looking at his phone.

Hers rings again. “Yes?”

“Hello. It is Stella. You wish still to visit?”

“Yes. I do. Very much.”

“Is not too early? You have slept?”

“Yes, thanks.” Wondering what sort of hours Stella keeps.

“If you will wait beside the guard booth, a car will come. Thirty minutes, will be good?”

“Yes! Please!”

“Goodbye.”

She stands up, in her underpants and a Fruit T-shirt, and starts dressing. She feels that this requires as formal an effort as she can muster, somehow, so it's the good hose from Japan, her French shoes, and Skirt Thing, rolled out to its full length and pulled up, creating a passable imitation of a dress. She goes into the bathroom and applies makeup, then returns to put on her thin black cardigan and quickly check her e-mail.

Damien.

She shakes her head, reads it again.

She starts to put the iBook back in the bag, but stops. It doesn't seem right to take it, somehow, to meet the maker. She'll carry her East German envelope instead, and as she's transferring her basic stuff from the Luggage Label she remembers that the desk hasn't returned her passport yet. She'll get it on the way out. Her hand strikes something cold, at the bottom of the envelope. She pulls it out: the metal piece from Damien's robot girl: her makeshift knuckle-duster in Camden. Good thing she'd had the envelope in checked luggage. She tosses it back in, for luck, makes sure she has the room key, and leaves, head full of the images from his message.

The driver who turns up for her has dark glasses and a closely shaven, interestingly sculpted head. Streamlined.

As they're driving away, in the direction she'd gone the evening before, she remembers she's forgotten to ask for her passport.