Even her relationship to the footage is changing. Margot had called the footage Cayce’s hobby, but Cayce has never been a person who had hobbies. Obsessions, yes. Worlds. Places to retreat to. “But it’s no-name,” Margot had said, of the footage, “that’s why you like it. Isn’t it? Like your trademark thing.” Margot had discovered that most of the products in Cayce’s kitchen were generic, unlabeled, and Cayce had admitted that it wasn’t a matter of economics but of her sensitivity to trademarks. Now she glances ahead to see if the Asian man is still there, but she can’t see him. She checks her Casio-clone.
Time for Blue Ant. Time for Dorotea.
The receptionist sends her up to the third floor again, where she finds Stonestreet in one of his exquisitely slept-in suits, this one gray, red hair sticking up in several new directions. He’s smoking a cigarette and flipping through a document in a pink Blue Ant folder.
“Morning, dear. Lovely seeing you, Saturday. How was your ride home with Hubertus?”
“We went for a drink. In Clerkenwell.”
“That’s the real version of that place we’re in now. Some lovely spaces there. What did he have to say?”
“No shop. We talked about the footage.” Watching him carefully.
“What footage is that?” He looks up, as if concerned that he’s somehow lost the plot.
“On the web. The anonymous film that’s being released in bits and pieces. Do you know the one?”
“Oh. That.” What does he know? “Helena said you called and asked about Trans.”
“Yes.”
“Word-of-mouth meme thing. We don’t really know what it does, yet. Whether it does anything, really. Where did you hear about it?”
“Someone in a pub.”
“Haven’t had anything to do with it myself. Cousin of mine runs it, such as it is. I could arrange for you to meet her.”
“I was just curious, Bernard. Where’s Dorotea?”
“Due any minute, I’d imagine. She can be difficult, can’t she?”
“Hardly know her.” She checks her hair in a mirrored panel and takes a seat without removing her jacket. “Hubertus is in New York?”
“Yes. At the Mercer.”
“I saw him there, once, in the lobby bar. He was talking to Kevin Bacon’s dog.”
“His dog?”
“Kevin Bacon was there with his dog. Hubertus was talking to it.”
“Didn’t know he liked pets.”
“A celebrity dog. But he didn’t seem to be talking to Kevin Bacon.”
“What do you make of him?”
“Kevin Bacon?”
“Hubertus.”
“Are you serious?”
Stonestreet looks up from the faxes. “Moderately.”
“I’m glad I’m contract, Bernard, not salary.”
“Erm,” Stonestreet says, and seems relieved as Dorotea enters in serious Armani business drag, blackly deconstructed. This is, Cayce senses, for Dorotea, virtually an anti-fashion statement. A look that wouldn’t be out of place at an upscale execution. “Good morning,” she says. To Cayce: “You are feeling better, today?”
“Yes, thank you. And yourself?”
“I have been in Frankfurt with Heinzi, of course.” And it’s your fault. “But I think that Heinzi has worked his magic. He has nothing but good things to say about Blue Ant, Bernard. ‘A breath of fresh,’ he calls it.” She looks at Cayce. Blow me.
Cayce smiles back.
Dorotea takes her seat beside Stonestreet, producing another one of those expensive-looking envelopes. “I was in the studio with Heinzi when he did this. It’s such a privilege, to see him work.”
“Show it to me.”
“Of course.” Dorotea takes her time unfastening the envelope. She reaches inside. Pulls out a square of art board the size of the last one. On it is the Michelin Man, in one of his earliest, most stomach-churningly creepy manifestations, not the inflated-maggot de-shelled Ninja Turtle of the present day, but that weird, jaded, cigar-smoking elder creature suggesting a mummy with elephantiasis. “Bibendum,” says Dorotea, softly.
“The restaurant?” asks Stonestreet, puzzled. “In the Fulham Road?” He’s sitting beside Dorotea and can’t see what’s on the square of board.
Cayce is about to scream.
“Oh,” says Dorotea, “how stupid of me. Another project.”
Bibendum, for Cayce knows that that is his name, goes back into the envelope.
Dorotea produces Heinzi’s revised design, which she shows to Cayce, and then, almost casually, to Stonestreet.
The sixties sperm Dorotea showed on Friday has mutated into a sort of looping comet, a loosened-up, energized version of the manufacturer’s logo of the past decade or so.
Cayce tries to open her mouth, to say something. How did Dorotea know? How does she know?
The silence lengthens.
She watches Stonestreet’s red eyebrows go up, a millimeter at a time, wordlessly and incrementally interrogative. They reach a point of maximum ratchet. “Well?”
Bibendum. That’s his name. And also the name of a restaurant in the retrofitted Michelin House, where of course Cayce has never gone.
“Cayce? Are you feeling well? A glass of water?”
The first time she’d seen Bibendum had been in a magazine, a French magazine. She’d been six. She’d thrown up. “He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots.”
“What?” An edge of alarm in Stonestreet’s voice. He’s starting to rise.
“It’s fine, Bernard.” She’s clutching the edge of the table. “You don’t want water?”
“No. I mean, the design is fine. It works.”
“You looked as though you’d seen a ghost.”
Dorotea smirks.
“I . . . It was Heinzi’s design. It . . . affected me.” She manages a mechanical grimace, something like a smile.
“Really? That’s marvelous!”
“Yes,” Cayce says, “but we’re done now, aren’t we? Dorotea can go back to Frankfurt, and I can go back to New York.” She gets up from her chair, feeling unsteady. “I’ll need the car, please.” She doesn’t want to look at Dorotea. Dorotea’s the one with the jack move, this morning. Dorotea’s won. Cayce is spooked now, to the core, and this is nothing like the Asian Sluts flat-invasion feeling. This is way worse. Very few people have any idea of the extent of her most problematic trademark phobias, and fewer still of the specific triggers. Her parents, a number of doctors, therapists of various kinds, over the years a very few very close friends, no more than three of her former lovers.
But Dorotea knows.
Her legs feel wooden. She gets to the door, somehow. “Goodbye, Bernard. Goodbye, Dorotea.”
Stonestreet looks puzzled.
Dorotea’s beaming.
AND now all those rushing eager people are gone from the streets of Soho, and thank God the car is waiting.
In Parkway she starts to pay the driver, then remembers it’s the Blue Ant car. Unlocks the street door with Damien’s big brass key, takes the steps two at a time, the two black German keys at the ready.
And finds a Michelin Man, its white rolls executed in felt, garroted to the doorknob with a thick black cord.
Starts to scream but catches herself.
Breathe.
“He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots.”
She checks for the hair. It’s still there. The powder dusted around the knob will be gone, but the perimeter is still secure.
She avoids looking at the thing lashed to the knob. It’s just a doll. A doll. She uses the German keys.
Inside. Locking and chaining the door.
The phone rings.
She screams.
Answers on the third ring. “Hello?”
“It’s Hubertus.”
“Hubertus . . .”
“Yes. Of course. And?”
“And what?”
“You’ve slept on it.”
She opens her mou
th but nothing comes out.
“You’ve signed off on Heinzi’s logo,” he says. “That’s a wrap, then. Congratulations.”
She can hear a piano in the background. Lounge stuff. What time is it in New York?
“I’m packing, Hubertus. Car to Heathrow, first flight home.” Exactly what she most wants to do, now she hears herself say it.
“That’s very good. We can discuss it when you arrive.”
“Actually I was thinking of Paris.”
“I’ll meet you there tomorrow, then. I’ve the use of a client’s Gulfstream. Haven’t taken them up on it yet.”
“Really there’s nothing to discuss. I told you that on Saturday night.”
“You got over your difficulties with Dorotea?” He’s changing the subject.
“You’re changing the subject, Hubertus.”
“Bernard said you looked ill, when she first showed you the design.”
“You’re changing it again. Will I work for you to determine the source of the footage, the identity of the maker or makers? No. I won’t.”
“Why not?”
That stops her. Because she has an acquired and highly generalized dislike for him? Because she absolutely doesn’t trust him? Because she doesn’t want to know what the footage is, is about, where it’s going, who’s behind it? This last is a stretch, because she really does want to know all these things, and has spent a huge amount of time discussing them with other footageheads. No, it’s more that footage plus Bigend just seems such a bad idea on the face of it. Not Bigend the man, wearing his cowboy hat wrong, but Bigend the force behind Blue Ant. Bigend the genius at what he does, of these new ways of doing it. Any junction of the two seems dire, to her.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he says. “I had him come into the office, this morning, and Bernard was arranging lunch for the two of you, but you left so quickly.”
“Who? What for?”
“He’s American. His name is Boone Chu.”
“Bunchoo?”
“Boone. As in Daniel. Chu. C-h-u. I think you could do something together. I want to facilitate that.”
“Hubertus, please. This is pointless. I’ve told you I’m not interested.”
“I have him on the other line. Boone? Where did you say you were?”
“Outside Camden tube,” says a male voice, cheerful, American, “looking toward Virgin.”
“You see,” says Bigend, “he’s right there.”
Hang up, Cayce tells herself. She doesn’t.
“Parkway, right?” The American voice. “Straight up from the station.”
“Hubertus, this is really pointless—”
“Please,” Bigend says, “meet with Boone. It can’t hurt. If there’s no chemistry, you can go to Paris.”
Chemistry?
“A vacation. On Blue Ant. I’ll have the office arrange the hotel. A bonus for vetting the H and P job. We knew we could rely on you. The client is going to the new logo for the spring line. We’ll need you then, of course, to check each intended implementation.”
He’s doing it again. She realizes that it might actually be easier to meet this man, this Boone, and then go to the airport. She can always avoid Bigend in New York. She hopes.
“Is he still on the line, Hubertus?”
“Right here,” says the American voice. “Heading up Parkway.”
“Ring twice,” she says, and gives him the street number and the number of the flat. Hangs up.
She goes into the kitchen and gets Damien’s brand-new German paring knife and a black bin liner, as they call them here. Unlocks the door. It’s still there, on the knob. She grits her teeth and bunches the black plastic around it, hiding it. Uses the knife to cut through the black cord. It falls into the bag. She puts the bag on the floor, just outside the door, closes the door, returns the knife to the kitchen. Back to the door. She takes a deep breath, steps outside. Takes the black keys from around her neck and carefully locks the door. Gingerly picks up the black bag, the thing deep within it now, like a dead rat but not as heavy, and descends to the landing, where she stuffs it down behind the stacked fashion magazines waiting to be carted away.
She sits down with her back to the wall and wraps her arms around her knees. The knot is back, and now she realizes, to her considerable annoyance, that her period has arrived.
Back upstairs to deal with that, and things barely under control when she hears the doorbell ring, twice. “Shit. Shit. Fuck . . .”
Forgetting to relock the door, she goes down.
This will take one minute, if that. She’ll apologize for Bigend’s having pushed their meeting, but she’ll be firm: She isn’t going to embark on any Bigend-financed search for the maker of the footage. It’s that simple.
The street door is white-painted oak, but the enamel is yellowed, chipped and smudged, pre-reno. The spy-tube set into it hasn’t been clean enough to see through since World War II.
She unlocks and opens it.
“Cayce? I’m Boone Chu. Glad to meet you.” Extending his hand.
He’s still wearing the leather car coat with the faded seams. Right hand extended, his left around the leather handle of the little suitcase, battered and buffed, that she’d noticed a few hours earlier, in Soho.
“Hello,” she says, and shakes his hand.
11.
BOONE CHU
Boone Chu kicks back cowboy-style, legs crossed, on Damien’s new brown couch. “You’ve worked for Blue Ant before?” He looks somewhat gimlet-eyed now, though maybe she’s misreading some Chinese-American nerd thing, an unabashed intensity of focus.
“A few jobs in New York.” From her perch on the workstation chair.
“Freelance?”
“That’s right.”
“Me too.”
“What do you do?”
“Systems.” He waits a beat. “University of Texas, Harvard, then I had a start-up. Which tanked.”
He doesn’t sound bitter, though people who say this seldom do, she’s noticed, which she finds a little creepy. They generally know better. She hopes he isn’t one of those. “I Google you, I get . . . ?”
“Sound of relatively high-profile start-up, tanking loudly. Certain amount of ‘white-hat hacker’ coverage, before that, but that’s media.” He looks over at the robot girls propped against the wall, but doesn’t ask.
“What was your start-up about?”
“Security.”
“Where do you live?”
“Washington state. I’ve got a cliff on Orcas with a ’fifty-one Airstream propped up against it on railroad ties. It’s held together with mold, and something that eats aluminum. I was going to build a house, but now I can’t bring myself to spoil the view.”
“You’re based there?”
“I’m based in this.” He toes the child-sized antique suitcase. “Where do you live, Cayce?”
“West One Hundred and Eleventh.”
“Actually I knew you lived in New York.”
“You did?”
“I Googled you.”
She hears the kettle start to boil. She’s left the whistle off. She gets up. He gets up too and follows her into the kitchen. “Nice yellow,” he says.
“Damien Pease.”
“Pardon?”
“Pease. Porridge hot. The video director. Know his work?”
“Not offhand.”
“It’s his flat. What did Bigend offer you, exactly, Boone?”
“Partnership, he said.”
She watches him watching her expression as he speaks.
“With him,” he continues. “Whatever that means. He wants me to work with you. To find the person or persons uploading the video clips. We’d have as much as we needed for expenses, but I’m not sure what the payoff might consist of.” He has one of those tall, impossibly dense Chinese-guy brush cuts, and a long face that might seem feminine if it weren’t tempered, she guesses, by having grown up in Tulsa having to deal with being a Chinese-American named
Boone.
“Did he tell you why he wants us to work together? Or why he’d want me at all?” She tosses tea-sub into the pot and pours water over the bags. “Sorry. Forgot to ask if you wanted coffee.”
“Tea’s fine.” He goes to the sink and starts rinsing out two mugs she’s left there. Something about his movements reminding her of a chef she’d once dated. The way he briskly refolds the tea towel before using it to dry the mugs. “He said that you don’t need to reinvent any wheels.” He puts the mugs down, side by side. “He said that if anyone could figure out where this stuff comes from, it would be you.”
“And you?”
“I’m supposed to facilitate. You have an idea, I make it happen.”
She looks at him. “You can do that?”
“I’m not magic, but I’m handy. Hands-on generalist, you might say.”
She pours. “Do you want to do it?”
He picks up his tea-sub. Sniffs. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s Damien’s. No caffeine, though.”
He blows to cool it, then sips. Winces. “Hot.”
“Well, do you? Want to do it?”
Looks at her, steam rising from the cup he still holds close to his mouth. “I’m of two minds.” He lowers the cup. “It’s an interesting problem, from a theoretical point of view, and as far as we know no one’s solved it yet. I’m available, and Bigend has a lot of money to throw at it.”
“That’s your upside?”
He nods, sips more tea-sub. Winces again. “Downside is Bigend. Hard to quantify that, isn’t it?” He goes to the kitchen window and seems to be looking out, but then he points to the round transparent ventilator fan set into a six-inch hole in one pane of glass. “We don’t have those things. They’re everywhere, here. Always have been. I’m not even sure what they’re supposed to do.”
“They’re part of the mirror-world,” Cayce says.
“Mirror-world?”
“The difference.”
“My idea of a mirror-world is Bangkok. Asia somewhere. This is just more of our stuff.”
“No,” she tells him, “different stuff. That’s why you noticed that vent. They invented that here, probably, and made it here. This was an industrial nation. Buy a pair of scissors, you got British scissors. They made all their own stuff. Kept imports expensive. Same thing in Japan. All their bits and pieces were different, from the ground up.”