Cayce thinks of Billy Prion but restrains herself from saying that she’d seen him in Tokyo and knows he’s currently busy.
“When you met us,” Ngemi says to Cayce, “it seemed that Voytek’s funding problems were about to be alleviated. But alas, no. Not as it worked out.”
“How was that?” Cayce asks, with the intimation that she herself is being set up for a potential role as patron.
“Neither Hobbs nor I had anything sufficiently special to interest our Japanese collector on its own, but by combining available stock, we could employ the psychology of ‘the lot.’ Collectors behave differently then. ‘Konvolut,’ the German word for auction lot. I like this word; collectors approach it differently, become tangled in it. They want to believe there is hidden treasure, there.” He smiles, his dark and shaven head glinting with reflected candlelight. “If the sale had gone through, it was my intention to advance Voytek what he needs for the scaffolding.”
“But didn’t you say that it had all worked out,” Cayce asks, “in the meantime?”
“Yes,” says Ngemi, with quiet pride, “but now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King’s Wang.”
Cayce stares at him.
“The provenance,” Ngemi assures her, “is immaculate, the price high, but, I believe, reasonable. A huge thing, one of the early dedicated word processors. Shipping alone will require the funds I had earmarked for the scaffolding, and more.”
Cayce nods.
“And now I must deal with Hobbs Baranov,” Ngemi continues, less happily, “and he is in one of his moods.”
If he hadn’t been, when I saw him, Cayce thinks, I wouldn’t want to see him when he was.
“Hobbs wanted his share of the Curta sale in order to bid on a very rare piece that went up for auction in Den Haag this past Wednesday. A factory prototype of the earliest Curta, exhibiting a peculiar, possibly unique variation in the mechanism. It went to a Bond Street dealer instead, and for not a bad price. Hobbs will be difficult, when I see him.”
“But you’ve sold his, as well, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but once anything’s in Bond Street, it’s beyond the reach of mere mortals. Even Hobbs Baranov. Too dear.”
Magda, who’s been working her way through the retsina a little more determinedly than the rest of them, makes a bitter face. “This man is appalling. You should have nothing to do with him. If that is what American spies are like, they are worse even than the Russians they defeated!”
“He was never a spy,” Ngemi says, somberly, lowering his glass. “A cryptographer. A mathematician. If the Americans were as heartless, or as efficient, as people imagine them, they would never leave poor Hobbs to drink himself to death in a leaking caravan.”
Cayce, feeling neither particularly heartless nor very efficient, asks: “What would they do, then, if they were?”
Ngemi, about to put a forkful of the remaining calamari into his mouth, pauses. “I suppose,” he says, “they would kill him.”
Cayce, having been raised to some extent within the ghostly yet in her experience remarkably banal membrane of the American intelligence community, has her own set of likelihood-filters when it comes to these things. Win had never, as far as she knew, been an intelligence officer in his own right, but he had known and worked with them. He had shared a certain experiential core with them, partaking in his own way of the secret world and its wars. And very little Cayce ever hears of that world, as described by those with even less a sense of it than her own, sounds like anything but fantasy. “Actually,” she tells them, “it’s sort of traditional to let them drink themselves to death.”
Something about her tone stops the conversation, which she hadn’t intended. “What did you mean, in a caravan?” she asks Ngemi, to end the silence.
Win had lived long enough to bury a number of his colleagues, none of them, as far as she knew, felled by anything more sinister than stress and overwork, and perhaps by a species of depression engendered by too long and too closely observing the human soul from certain predictable but basically unnatural angles.
“He lives in a little trailer,” Ngemi says. “Squats, really. Near Poole.”
“But he has a bloody pension from the CIA,” protests Magda. “I don’t believe this caravan! And he buys those Curta things, they cost fortunes. He’s hiding something. Secrets.” Drinking deep of her retsina.
“NSA,” Ngemi corrects her. “Disability pension, I imagine, though I’d certainly never ask him. He has perhaps ten thousand pounds in net worth, I believe. Most of it, at any given time, in calculators. No fortune. Not even enough to keep them, really. A collector, he must buy, but a poor man, he must sell.” Ngemi sighs. “It is that way for many people, not least myself.”
But Magda isn’t having it. “He’s a spy. He sells secrets. Voytek told me.”
Flustered, her brother looks from Cayce to Ngemi, back to Cayce. “Not a spy. Not government secrets. You should not say this, Magda.”
“Then what does he sell?” Cayce asks.
“Sometimes,” Voytek says, lowering his voice slightly, “I think he locates information for people.”
“He’s a spy!” declares Magda, gleefully.
Voytek winces.
“He perhaps has retained certain connections,” Ngemi qualifies, “and can find certain things out. I imagine there are men in the City . . .” His wide black brow creases with seriousness. “Nothing illegal, one hopes. Old-boy networks are something one understands, here. One doesn’t ask. We assume Hobbs has his own, still.”
“Sig-int,” Magda says, triumphantly. “Voytek says he sells sig-int.”
Voytek stares gloomily at his glass.
SIGINT, Cayce knows. Signals intelligence.
She decides to change the subject. Whatever this is about, it’s detracting from what pleasure she’s able to take in the evening.
AFTER leaving the restaurant, they stop at a crowded pub near the station. Cayce, remembering from college that retsina is not a good mix with any other species of alcohol, orders a half shandy and leaves most of it.
Sensing that the patronage-hustle is probably about to be more overtly launched in her direction, she opts for preemptive action. “I hope you find a backer soon, Voytek. I’m sure you will. It makes me wish I had that sort of money myself, but I don’t.”
As she’d somehow expected, they all glance at one another.
It’s Ngemi who decides to have a shot. “Is your employer perhaps in a position to—”
“I couldn’t ask. Haven’t been there long enough.” Thinking, however, not of Bigend but of his credit card, in her wallet. She could indeed buy Voytek’s load of rusty scaffolding for him. She will, she decides, if it looks like nothing else is going to turn up. Let Dorotea’s Russians, who she isn’t quite sure she believes in, figure that one out.
27.
THE SHAPE OF THE ENTHUSIAST
Climbing the stairs, she reflects on how she feels no interest now in doing the Bond thing.
No spit-secured hair waiting to be checked. Less a matter of faith in the German locks than a sort of fatalism. Anyone able to get into Katherine McNally’s Fifth Avenue office and steal or copy her notes on Cayce’s sessions would be able get past those locks, she seems to have decided. But could that really have happened? Had some figure entered, in the dead of night, and crept past the low table in the small reception area, with its three-year-old copies of Time and Cosmopolitan?
She unlocks the door, twice. Opens it, seeing she’s forgotten to leave a light on. “Fuck you,” she calls, to anyone who might be waiting.
Turning on the light. Locking the door behind her, she has a look upstairs.
Cayce Pollard Central Standard indicating that sleep is not yet worth attempting.
She powers up Damien’s G4, opens Netscape, and goes to F:F:F, watching the keystrokes required to get there. If Dorotea is telling the truth, her Asian Sluts boy had installed software on this machine that records the user’s every keystroke. The r
ecorded sequences can be retrieved from elsewhere, via some sort of back door. Does it give them mouse-clicks as well? She wonders. But how would they know what you were clicking on? Perhaps all they see is keystrokes, or keystrokes and URLs?
F:F:F is starting to look unfamiliar, after her relatively long absence. She doesn’t recognize most of the handles of the posters on the current page. She remembers something about a recent television special having generated a wave of newbies. Are these unfamiliar names then? She scans a few threads without opening any posts, judging them by titles alone. Segment 78 is still a hot topic, as is the Brazilian Satanic Footage thing.
She sits back and stares at the screen, hands in her lap (the keyboard spooks her, now) and imagines more shadowy figures, in another room, a sort of Man from U.N.C.L.E. room, seated, staring at a huge screen on which there is nothing but this page of F:F:F, waiting for Cayce to open a post.
She lets them wait, then closes Netscape and powers down.
She no longer has to devote any thought to cabling the iBook to the cell phone. If Boone was right, back in Tokyo, this one isn’t passing any keystrokes to the Man from U.N.C.L.E. room. Although, she thinks, entering hotmail, what if they came round while she was out for Greek food, and . . . ?
“Fuck it,” aloud, to Damien’s robot girls. She can’t live that way. Refuses.
Hotmail has three, for her.
The first is from Boone.
Hi. Greetings from LGA, the land of Very Intense Security. Out of here shortly for Colombus and initial meeting with The Firm In Question. Will have to play that completely by ear, of course. How are you? Let me know.
You are not, she thinks, the most eloquent of correspondents. But what, she asks herself, is she expecting? Shakespeare, from a layover at LaGuardia?
Hi yourself. On my laptop, as per our discussion. Okay here. Nothing to report.
Parkaboy next, opening on:
Jesus. (My mother was very religious, in her dysfunctional way. Have I told you that? Hence all my fear-words are blasphemous, I suppose.) Darryl is letting Judy script the Keiko mail, as you said we had no choice other than to do. She’s virtually moved in with him now, and has phoned in sick two nights running. She’s mesmerized by the extent (she says the heartbreaking purity) of Taki’s passion for her. This in spite of the fact that she knows Taki thinks she’s a petite Japanese college girl, and that Darryl is translating for her both ways. Actually he indicates to me he’s trying as much as possible to tone Judy’s script down, and has told her that he doesn’t really have that thorough a command of Japanese sexual vernacular. (Not true.) Says she’s starting to cry a lot, and to say that the love Taki has to offer her is the love she’s waited for all her life. This is, frankly, some of the weirdest shit to wash up my alley in a while, and I suppose it would be darkly funny if only we weren’t trying to . . . BTW, what ARE we trying to do here? By insisting we let Judy do this, we’ve lost our fulcrum for extracting more Mystic material. Aside from which, we could lose Taki altogether—terminal priapism. Yrs, PB
Next up, Ivy, F:F:F’s founder and owner, whom she hasn’t heard from since she left New York.
Hello Cayce. Long time no see on the forum. Are you in Japan? Am still here in Seoul, in big numbered building!
Ivy had once sent Cayce a jpeg of her high-rise, with a ten-story “4” painted up the side. Behind it, receding into the distance, you could make out buildings 5 and 6, identical.
Mama Anarchia does not write to me often. That is fine with me. You know she has always gotten on my nerves.
Ivy and Cayce have sometimes had to coordinate diplomacy, to prevent the friction between Parkaboy and la Anarchia from polarizing the site, or simply taking up too much space. . . .
She freezes.
Are you in Japan?
Unless Parkaboy has told Ivy about Cayce’s trip, which Cayce cannot imagine him doing, under the circumstances, something is very wrong here.
Today I had a very strange e-mail from her. Very friendly. Thanking me for F:F:F etc. Then asking about you like she is your old friend. From this I think you are in Tokyo? But something about this makes me worry. Here is the only part of her message referring to you. I can send the rest if you want.
> And how is CayceP? She is not posting, recently. You know of
> course that I was an avid lurker, before I began to post, and
> CayceP’s insights struck me, from the first post of hers I read, as
> the very shape of the enthusiast. That was the one in which she
> suggested that the maker had the resources of the Russian mafia,
> or some similarly secretive organization. Do you remember it?
> One day I hope to meet her in person, perhaps when she returns
> from Tokyo.
Cayce scowls at the screen. Feels like hurling it at the nearest robot girl. No fair. No fucking fair. She doesn’t need this.
But if Mama Anarchia is somehow involved in the recent weirdness, why would she tip her hand this way to Ivy? To send a message to Cayce? Or?
Because Mama made a mistake? Freudian slip: meant to type “London,” not “Tokyo”? The restraint of pen and tongue that Win always advised is difficult to maintain in a medium that involves neither, Cayce knows, and mistakes happen.
She and Mama Anarchia are not friends by any means.
At best they have exchanged a few strained messages. Cayce is too obviously Parkaboy’s friend, on the site, and Parkaboy’s loathing for Mama Anarchia has been far too vocal, from his scathing assaults on the French philosophers she quotes to deliberately absurd personal attacks (considering he’s never met her, and has no idea of what she might look like). This e-mail to Ivy is a fishing expedition of some kind, and a clumsy one. Although Mama Anarchia has no way, that Cayce knows of, to know that she and Ivy are friends, and discuss the site and its more prominent participants in private, and fairly frequently.
Creepy. She takes a deep breath. “He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots.”
Reflexively, like a slot player pulling the lever in hope of bringing down a better reality, she clicks hotmail in case another message has arrived in the meantime.
Margot. Her Australian friend in New York, former Bigend girlfriend, currently assigned to visit Cayce’s apartment on a frequent basis, pick up mail, check that all is well. Margot lives two blocks closer to Harlem proper, but still within the psychological footprint of Columbia.
‘Lo dear. Bit of worry here. Went to your place today, as usual. Saw your super sweeping steps and he wasn’t visibly pissed, but that isn’t the unusual I have to report. Actually I wish I could be more certain about this, but I think someone else had been in your flat since I was last there. Two things: the toilet was running, when I went in. I’d used it, last time I was there, and it kept running, so I took the lid off the cistern and jiggled the bit that stops it running, and it did. Running again, this time, when I came in, but I didn’t notice that at first. Everything fine, neat as a pin (how do you do that?) then I noticed the toilet running again. Gave me a shiver. But of course your plumbing was old when the Boer War was news, so it might just start, the way plumbing does sometimes. But it spooked me, a bit. Then I’m walking around looking at everything, and of course I can’t remember exactly how everything was, but you’ve got so little in there, and it’s so tidy, and really it all looked the same. But it was a sunny day, lovely really, sun coming in through your white drapes in the living room, open just a bit, and I was trying to remember how I’d placed the mail, day before yesterday. When I put it down beside your computer. You hadn’t had any, today. And in that sunlight I could see how dusty things were getting, and thinking I’d be a pal and dust for you, and then I saw that I could just make out a rectangle, in the dust, where your mail had been when I put it there, last time! Your mail was just to the side, now. I could see that a bit more dust had settled there since. Am I the only one with the keys? Your drunken super, come to fix the toilet? Let me
know, and if you think I should do anything about it. Are you coming back soon? I thought it was only a short one. Have you seen The World’s Biggest Shit? No, don’t tell me. Margot
Cayce closes her eyes and sees her blue-floored cave, her $1,200-a- month rent-stabilized apartment on 111th, secured when her former roommate, the previous lease holder, had moved back to San Francisco. Home. Who’s been there? Not the super, not without a bribe.
How she hates this. How faint and peripheral somehow, these little things, yet how serious. A weight on her life, like trying to sleep under Damien’s silver oven mitt.
And suddenly she’s dead tired, as if Cayce Pollard Standard Time had clicked forward five hours. Trembling with it, though at the same time she doesn’t trust that she’ll be able to sleep. Shuts down the iBook, disconnects the cell phone, checks the locks. Looks in the bathroom for more melatonin but of course that’s gone to Russia.
She feels like crying, though for no particular reason. Just this invasive weirdness that seems increasingly a part of her world, and she doesn’t know why.
She turns off lights, undresses, crawls into bed, grateful for her own foresight in having removed and put away the oven mitt earlier in the day.
And has utterly no memory, subsequently, of any transition to West Broadway, where she stands in the middle of empty, white-coated pavement, a thin inch of fresh snow, in some deep and deeply silent hour of the night, the hour of waking alone, and she is alone, neither pedestrians nor traffic, and no light in any window, nor streetlights, and yet she can see, as though the snow of this Frozen Zone is sufficient illumination. Neither footprints nor tire tracks mar it, and as she turns to look behind she sees no footprints there either, not even her own. To her right the brick face of the SoHo Grand. To her left a bistro where she remembers taking Donny, once. And then, down at the corner, middle distance, she sees him. The black coat that may or may not be leather, its collar turned up. The body language she knows from uncounted viewings of seventy-eight segments of footage.