第 22 页

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 reno 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 185. 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.

23.

DICKHEADS

Leaving Neal’s Yard and the Pilates studio, she tries to become just another lost tourist, though she knows she’ll never be one. Like Magda going out to spread whatever shabby micro-meme her Blue Ant subsidiary requires her to, Cayce knows that she is, and has long been, complicit. Though in what, exactly, is harder to say. Complicit in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror-worlds.

She knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned, in the world, and sometimes she finds herself doubting that there is much else going on. But this is a mood, she tells herself, a bad one in its low-key way, dealt by soul-delay. Somewhere that lagging part of her is being wound in, and her job here is simply to walk, to be in London and let her body know that she is here.

The rain has stopped but drops still fall from ledges and awnings, beading on the nylon of her new Rickson’s. Absently she reaches to touch the place where the tape should be, but it isn’t there. No hole. History erased via the substitution of an identical object.

Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn’t right. However odd things seem, mustn’t it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one’s own, and no one else’s? Hers has never been without its share of oddness, but something in its recent texture seems to belong to someone else. She’s never lived her life in such a way as to generate sliding doors and secret passages, the hallmarks, she believes, of some basis in bullshit, of an underlying lack of honesty that she doesn’t believe has been hers. She hasn’t ever, previously, been a person to be burgled, followed, assaulted with intent to rob. All the time she’s spent in the world’s various streets, scouting cool for the commodifiers, these things hadn’t happened. Why now? What has she done wrong?

Or is it, she considers, simply that the world had gone in such a different direction, in the instant of having seen that petal drop, that nothing really is the same now, and that her expectations of the parameters of how life should feel are simply that, expectations, and increasingly out of line the further she gets from that window in the SoHo Grand.

Pausing now to stare through a sheet of glass at a Duffer of St. George anorak, weirdness of serotonin-lack coursing through her, she suddenly shivers, remembering the hard grip of the man in Roppongi, the one who’d come from behind. She hasn’t really felt the fear in that, before now, and now it comes up from her core, a cold thing and hard.

“He took a duck in the face.” Well, the other had, really. Took Cayce herself in the face, at however many sudden knots.

Food. In the prolonged absence of: craziness. She moves along until she finds a sandwich shop, small and preglobalized, but also rather smart, as she’s in St. Martin’s Lane by now. She gets egg salad on a narrow baguette, a cup of filter coffee, and carries them to a small table by the window, where she sits, looking out into the street and eating her sandwich.

She’d first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win’s, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.

The Blue Ant cell rings, from the Luggage Label bag. Annoyed that she’s left it on to ring, interrupting her thoughts, she fumbles it out, expecting Boone.

“Hello?”

“Cayce. How are you? Have you slept?” Bigend.

“Yes, I did.”

“Where are you?”

“Saint Martin’s Lane.”

“Very close then. Come to Blue Ant. We need to talk.”

Basic business instinct suppresses the groan, but only barely. “When?”

“As soon as you can.”

“I’m having my breakfast.”

“When you’re done, then. I’ll send a car.”

“No,” wanting as much time as possible in which to get herself up to something like Bigend-speed. “I need to walk.”

“As soon as you can.” He clicks off.

It rings again, immediately.

“Hello?”

“Parkaboy. Where are you?”

“Saint Martin’s Lane.”

“London? I need to run something by you. We’re having a problem. With Judy.”

“Judy?”

“Judy Tsuzuki. Keiko.”

“The girl in the picture?”

“All five-eleven of her. She likes to drink, after work, so she started going over to Darryl’s place, and Darryl, he’s challenged in the girl department. So he gives her drinks and tries to impress her with how big his computer is. That doesn’t work, he demonstrates what a great linguist he is, and the effect her picture’s having on this dork in Japan. He reads her parts of Taki’s e-mails. She’s fucking furious with him, all five-eleven in a leather mini-skirt from the bar. Because he’s a dickhead to do this to this guy in Japan, this guy who’s saying things to her that no man has ever said before—”

“But he thinks she’s a schoolgirl—”

“I know, but she’s had a few drinks, so Darryl is a dickhead—”

“You’re a dickhead too. I’m a dickhead myself for going along with this.” Two older British women look at her as they enter. Look away.

“Let’s save the metaphysics for later. The problem is, Judy feels sorry for the guy, she’s pissed at Darryl, and by extension with us, and she wants to write him back. She wants to send him more pictures, attachments this time, and make him happy. That’s what she says she wants, and if Darryl doesn’t want to go along with it, she says she’ll go to this journalist from the Chronicle she was dating, before, and tell him about this pervy hacker in the Mission who’s working this scam on this guy in Tokyo—because the guy in Tokyo knows something big about that footage in the Net.”

“She knows it’s about that?”

“It’s evident from the translations of Taki’s e-mails. She got them away from Darryl and read them herself.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“How do we make her go away? Tell me.”

“You don’t. You can’t. Let her write to Taki.”

“You serious?”

“Of course I am. Try to keep her in character, if you want to keep it going. Remember, Taki’s in love with who you’ve told him she is.”

“I was afraid of that. Actually I’d pretty much come to the same conclusion. It’s just I hate the loss of control, you know?”

“It was probably an illusion that you were ever in control in the first place.”

“With a dickhead of Darryl’s caliber around, no fucking kidding. What’s happening on your end with that T-thing?”

“It’s being looked at.”

“Who by?”

“Friends of a friend. I don’t really know.”

“You okay, there? You sound tired.”

“I am, but I’m okay.”

“Keep in touch. Bye.”

She looks at the phone and wonders who Parkaboy is. Other, that is, than Parkaboy, ascerbic obsessive theorist of the footage. What does he do when he’s not doing this? She has no idea, and no idea what he looks like or, really, how he came to be as devoted as she knows he is to pursuing any further understanding of the footage. But now, in some way she can’t quite grasp, the universe of F:F:F is everting. Manifesting physically in the world. Darryl Musashi’s pissed-off Japanese-Texan barmaid seems to be an aspect of this.

But she’s glad that someone else dislikes what they’ve done to Taki.

THE phone rings again when she’s nearing Blue Ant.

“Where are you?”

“Almost there. Two minutes.”

He hangs up.

She walks on, past the window of a gallery where the central blue shape in a large abstract canvas reminds her of Taki’s T-bone. What is that? Why bury it in that flare of light? What else might be hidden in other segments?

As she’s reaching out to push the button on the Blue Ant intercom, the door is opened by a dark-haired man in sunglasses, his nose elaborately braced with flesh-colored fabric tape. He freezes for an instant, does an odd little duck-and-weave, then pushes suddenly past her outstretched arm and sprints off down the street, in the direction she’s just come.

“Hey,” Cayce says, catching the door before it can close, the back of her neck prickling.

She steps inside.

“They’re waiting for you upstairs,” says the young receptionist, smiling, a stud glinting on the side of her nose.

“Dickheads,” Cayce says, and looks back at the door. “Who was that who just left?”

The girl looks puzzled.

“Tape on his nose.”

The girl brightens. “Franco. He drives Dorotea, from Heinzi and Pfaff. Been in an accident.”

“She’s here?”

“Waiting for you.” The girl smiles. “Third floor.”

24.

CYPRUS

Bernard Stonestreet, uncharacteristically sour and distracted, is passing the head of the stairs as she reaches the third floor, his upthrust thatch and immaculately disheveled black suit reminding her all too clearly of her previous visit.