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Their drinks arrive, and he pays with a crisp twenty-pound note extracted from a broad wallet stuffed mainly with unreal-looking high-denomination euros.

The waitress pours Cayce’s beer and Bigend leaves the change on the table.

“Are you tired?” he asks.

“Jet lag.” Automatically returning Bigend’s toast, lager clinking kir.

“It shrinks the frontal lobes. Physically. Did you know that? Clearly visible on a scan.”

Cayce swallows some beer, winces. “No,” she says, “it’s because the soul travels more slowly, and arrives late.”

“You mentioned souls earlier.”

“Did I?” She can’t remember.

“Yes. Do you believe in them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.” He sips. “You don’t get along with Dorotea?”

“Who told you that?”

“Bernard felt you didn’t. She can be very difficult.”

Cayce is suddenly aware of her East German plastic envelope, where it rests beneath the table, across her thighs; its weight unaccustomed, uneven, because she’s tucked her solid little bit of robot girl knuckleduster in there, against she knows not what possibility.

“Can she?”

“Of course. If she feels that you are about to have something she has long coveted.” Bigend’s teeth seem to have multiplied, or metastasized perhaps. His lips, wet with the kir, are very red in this light. He shakes his dark forelock away from his eyes. She is on full sexual alert now, Bigend’s ambiguity having finally gotten to her. Is this all about that, then? Does Dorotea see her as a sexual competitor? Is she in the sights of Bigend’s desire, which she knows, from her friend Margot’s stories in New York, to be at once constant and ever-shifting?

“I don’t think I follow you, Hubertus.”

“The London office. She thinks I am going to hire you to run the London office.”

“That’s absurd.” And it is, huge relief, as Cayce is not someone you hire to run an agency in London. Not someone you hire to run anything. She is hyper-specialized, a freelancer, someone contracted to do a very specific job. She has seldom had a salary. She is entirely a creature of fees, adamantly short-term, no managerial skills whatever. But mainly she’s relieved if it isn’t sexual. Or at least that he seems to have indicated that it isn’t. She feels herself held by those eyes, against all conscious will. Progressively locked into something.

Bigend’s hand comes up with his glass, and he finishes his kir. “She knows that I’m very interested in you. She wants to work for Blue Ant, and she covets Bernard’s position. She’s been angling to leave H and P since well before they made her our liaison.”

“I can’t see it,” Cayce says, meaning replacing Stonestreet with Dorotea. “She’s not exactly a people person.” An insane bitch, actually. Burner of jackets and burglar of apartments.

“No, of course not. She’d be a complete disaster. And I’ve been delighted with Bernard since the day I hired him. Dorotea may be one of those people who aren’t going to make it through.”

“Through what?”

“This business of ours is narrowing. Like many others. There will be fewer genuine players. It’s no longer enough to simply look the part and cultivate an attitude.”

Cayce has imagined something like this herself, and indeed has been wondering whether she’s likely to make it through the narrowing, into whatever waits on the other side.

“You’re smart enough,” he says. “You can’t doubt it.”

She’ll take a page from his book, then. Caltrop time. “Why are you rebranding the world’s second-largest manufacturer of athletic shoes? Was it your idea or theirs?”

“I don’t work that way. The client and I engage in a dialogue. A path emerges. It isn’t about the imposition of creative will.” He’s looking at her very seriously now, and to her embarrassment she feels herself shiver. She hopes he didn’t notice. If Bigend can convince himself that he doesn’t impose his will on others, he must be capable of convincing himself of anything. “It’s about contingency. I help the client go where things are already going. Do you want to know the most interesting thing about Dorotea?”

“What?”

“She once worked for a very specialized consultancy, in Paris. Founded by a retired and very senior French intelligence type who’d done a lot of that sort of work on his government’s behalf, in Germany and the United States.”

“She’s . . . a spy?”

“ ‘Industrial espionage,’ though that’s sounding increasingly archaic, isn’t it? I suppose she may still know whom to call, to have certain things done, but I wouldn’t call her a spy. What interested me, though, was how that business seemed in some ways to be the inverse of ours.”

“Of advertising?”

“Yes. I want to make the public aware of something they don’t quite yet know that they know—or have them feel that way. Because they’ll move on that, do you understand? They’ll think they’ve thought of it first. It’s about transferring information, but at the same time about a certain lack of specificity.”

Cayce tries to put this together with what she’s seen of Blue Ant campaigns. It makes a degree of sense.

“I imagined,” he continues, “that the sort of business Dorotea had been involved in would be about absolutely specific information.”

“And was it?”

“Sometimes, yes, but just as often it was simply ‘black PR.’ Painting the competition with the ugly-brush. It wasn’t really very interesting.”

“But you were considering her for a position?”

“Yes, though not one she would have chosen for herself. But now we’ve made it clear we aren’t interested. If she thinks that you may get the position she wanted, she could be very angry.”

What’s he trying to tell her? Should she tell him about the jacket, about Asian Sluts? No. She doesn’t trust him, not at all.

Dorotea as corporate spook? Bigend as someone who’d be interested in someone like that? Or who claimed he’d been interested. Or claimed he wasn’t still interested. None of it might be true.

“Well,” Bigend says, leaning slightly forward, “let’s hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“The kiss. What you think about it.”

Cayce instantly knows what kiss he’s talking about, but the contextual shift required to reframe Bigend as a footagehead is so peculiar, so vast a rotation, that she can only sit there, feeling her diaphragm responding slightly to the bottom end of the music—which until an instant ago she’d ceased entirely to be aware of. Someone, a woman, laughs brightly at another table.

“What kiss?” Reflex.

Bigend responds by reaching inside the raincoat he hasn’t taken off and pulling out a dapper-looking matte-silver cigarette case, which when he places it on the table becomes a titanium DVD player that opens as of its own accord, a touch of his fingertip calling up segment #135. She watches the kiss, looks up at Bigend. “That kiss,” he says.

“What’s your question, exactly?” Stalling for time.

“I want to know how significant you think it is, in terms of previous uploads.”

“Since we can only speculate about its position in a hypothetical narrative, how can we judge its relative significance?”

He turns the player off, closes it.

“That’s not my question. I’m not asking vis-à-vis segments of a narrative, but in terms of the actual sequential order of uploaded segments.”

Cayce isn’t used to thinking of the footage in those terms, although she recognizes them. She thinks she knows where Bigend is probably heading with this, but opts to play dumb. “But they clearly aren’t in a logical narrative sequence. Either they’re uploaded randomly—”

“Or very carefully, intending to provide the illusion of randomness. Regardless, and regardless of everything else, the footage has already been the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever. I’ve been tracking hits on enthusiast sites, and searching for mentions elsewhere. The numbers are amazing. Your friend in Korea—”

“How do you know about that?”

“I’ve had people look at all the sites. In fact we monitor them on a constant basis. Your contributions are some of the more useful material we’ve come across. ‘CayceP,’ when you start to know the players, is obviously you. Your interest in the footage is therefore a matter of public record, and to be interested, in this case, is to be involved to whatever extent in a subculture.”

The idea that Bigend, or his employees, have been lurking on F:F:F will take some getting used to. The site had come to feel like a second home, but she’d always known that it was also a fishbowl; it felt like a friend’s living room, but it was a sort of text-based broadcast, available in its entirety to anyone who cared to access it.

“Hubertus,” carefully, “what exactly is the nature of your interest in this?”

Bigend smiles. He should learn not to do that, she thinks, otherwise he was undeniably good-looking. Or perhaps there were oral surgeons capable of artful downsizing? “Am I a true believer? That is your first question. Because you are one yourself. You care passionately about this thing. It’s completely evident in your posts. That is what makes you so valuable. That and your talents, your allergies, your tame pathologies, the things that make you a secret legend in the world of marketing. But am I a believer? My passion is marketing, advertising, media strategy, and when I first discovered the footage, that is what responded in me. I saw attention focused daily on a product that may not even exist. You think that wouldn’t get my attention? The most brilliant marketing ploy of this very young century. And new. Somehow entirely new.”

She concentrates on bubbles rising through her almost untouched Pils. Trying to remember everything she’s ever heard or Googled about Bigend’s origins, the rise of Blue Ant: the industrialist father in Brussels, summers in the family’s villa at Cannes, the archaic but well-connected British boarding school, Harvard, the foray into independent production in Hollywood, some sort of brief self-finding hiatus in Brazil, the emergence of Blue Ant, first in Europe, then in the UK and New York.

The stuff of lifestyle pieces, many of which she’s read. And Margot’s experience, which Cayce had shared, secondhand but real time, all this having to dovetail now with the knowledge that Bigend is himself some sort of follower of the footage, for what reason she can only guess. Though she finds that she is starting to guess, and doesn’t like it.

She looks up. “You think it’s worth a lot of money.”

Bigend looks at her with absolute seriousness. “I don’t count things in money. I count them in excellence.”

And somehow she believes him, though it’s no comfort.

“Hubertus, what are you getting at? I’m contracted to Blue Ant to evaluate a logo design. Not to discuss the footage.”

“We’re being social.” And that’s an order.

“No we’re not. I’m not sure that you ever are.”

Bigend smiles, then, a smile she hasn’t seen before, less teeth and perhaps more genuine. It is a smile she suspects is meant to indicate that she has made it across at least the first moat of his persona, has become to some extent an insider. That she knows a realer Bigend: lateral-thinking imp of the perverse, thirty-something boy genius, seeker after truth (or at least functionality) in the markets of this young century. This is the Bigend that invariably emerges in the articles, no doubt after he’s gotten to the journalist with this smile and his other tools. “I want you to find him.”

“Him.”

“The maker.”

“ ‘Her’? ‘Them’?”

“The maker. Whatever you need will be put at your disposal. You will not be working for Blue Ant. We will be partners.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know. Don’t you?”

Yes. “Have you considered that if we find ‘him,’ we might interrupt the process?”

“We don’t have to tell her she’s been found, do we?”

She starts to speak, then realizes she has no idea what she’s about to say.

“Do you imagine that no one else is looking? Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films. That is why I founded Blue Ant: that one simple recognition. In that regard alone, the footage is a work of proven genius.”

BIGEND drives her back to Camden Town, or rather in that direction, because at some point she realizes he’s gone past Parkway and is switchbacking up the streets of what she recognizes as Primrose Hill, the closest thing London has to a mountain. Blue plaque territory, although the only name she remembers from walking here with Damien is Sylvia Plath’s. A more upscale area than Camden. She’d had friends who’d lived here, once, and had sold their attic flat for enough to buy an Arts and Crafts in Santa Monica, a few blocks from Frank Geary.

She isn’t feeling easy with any of this. She doesn’t know quite what to do with Bigend’s proposition, which has kicked her into one of those modes that her therapist, when last she had one, would lump under the rubric of “old behaviors.” It consisted of saying no, but somehow not quite forcefully enough, and then continuing to listen. With the result that her “no” could be gradually chipped away at, and turned into a “yes” before she herself was consciously aware that this was happening. She had thought she had been getting much better around this, but now she feels it happening again.

Bigend, a formidable practitioner of the other side of this dance, seems genuinely incapable of imagining that others wouldn’t want to do whatever it is that he wants them to. Margot had cited this as both the most problematic and, she admitted, most effective aspect of his sexuality: He approached every partner as though they already had slept together. Just as, Cayce was now finding, in business, every Bigend deal was treated as a done deal, signed and sealed. If you hadn’t signed with Bigend, he made you feel as though you had, but somehow had forgotten that you had.

There was something amorphous, foglike, about his will: It spread out around you, tenuous, almost invisible; you found yourself moving, mysteriously, in directions other than your own.

“You’ve seen the guerilla re-edit of the most recent Lucas?” The Hummer rounds a corner set with a pub of such quintessential pub-ness that she assumes it is only a few weeks old, or else recently reconfigured to attract a clientele its original builders could scarcely have comprehended. A terrifyingly perfect simulacrum, its bull’s-eye panes buffed to an optical clarity. Glimpsing, inside, a red-haired woman in a green sweater, open-mouthed, raising a glass in apparent joyous toast. Then gone, the Hummer galloping up a short and darker stretch of residential, then another corner. “They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films.” Another corner, tight. “Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”