第 32 页

“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.

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 bull’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.

Why couldn’t it, say, be some Russian mafia kingpin, with a bent for self-expression, a previously undiscovered talent, and the wherewithal to generate and disseminate the footage?

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.

Hard day. I must’ve told you, probably fifty times, how deeply I believe in documentary. I know people don’t believe I do, because I’m the master of artifice and nothing’s ever what it seems, blah fucking blah but it’s true because they say it in those little boxes in The Face. Well I’m questioning it tonight because today we got that Stuka completely dug out. Did I tell you? It’s a whole plane, and for some fucking reason it wound up four feet under the muck, but this Guru character knew where it was. He claims it’s dreams and visions but I think he walks around in the winter with a metal detector. So he’d said here, this plane is here, dig, and before we came back to London they’d sunk a trench, and hit it. But bribery and threats prevailed, at least till we got back with the extra cameras and crew, because I wanted this plane emerging to be the climax of the film. No idea it would be a Stuka; blew me away; it’s just this most Nazi-looking aircraft, amazing. Dive-bomber, they used them on the Spanish, Guernica and that. Absolutely iconic. So there it is, finally, today, and it’s sitting there, all caked in the gray stuff, like an airplane done up as New Guinea Mud Man, at the bottom of this great fucking hole they’d dug. By far the biggest excavation yet attempted here, as far as we know, and quite the feat of social engineering, to get it done without them opening the canopy and getting into the cockpit. We’d had Brian and Mick stand guard over it, the past two nights, and the diggers hadn’t touched it. But come the day, we knew they would, and we’d be set to shoot, what we’re here for. So a couple of the big ones with the spiderweb tattoos get boosted up, onto the wings, which are slippery with muck, but where their boots slip in it, looking down from the edge of the dig, I can see the thing’s in museum condition. Just eerie, how well it was preserved. And then Brian gets boosted up to shoot handheld, close, and they’re squeegeeing the gray off the canopy with the edges of their hands. And the fucking pilot’s there. You can see the outline of his head, goggles it looked like. Never seen Brian pull his eye off the viewfinder when he’s shooting but he did, just turned around with this WHAT THE FUCK　?!!! look and I signal GO FOR IT, GET IT. So he did. All of it: them yanking the canopy open, and how they simply tore him apart, the pilot. Just came to pieces. They got a watch, a compass from the other wrist and a pistol, and they were fighting over them, falling off the wing, and he just came apart. And Brian got it all, plus Mick was second camera and he got a lot, plus the new guys. I mean coverage, lots. And at some point I look around at Marina and she’s fucking laughing. Not your hysterics of horror, she’s just fucking laughing at the humor of it. So I’m sitting here in the tent by myself, writing this, because with one thing and another I told her to just fuck off. And Mick and Brian are drunk, and I’m afraid to look at what they shot. I know I won’t be, maybe even tomorrow, but now I think I will go and get well pissed. And how the fuck did he get under there with his airplane? So thank you, as they say, for listening, and don’t forget to water the fucking goldfish. I hope you are okay with that shit you had happening. I love you.