Pattern Recognition

  Cayce starts to rise, but the stranger waves her back and takes the other chair. “Stella Volkova.” She offers Cayce her hand.

  “Cayce Pollard,” taking it. Is this the maker? Is the maker named Stella? Is Stella a Russian name?

  Stella Volkova squeezes her hand and releases it. “You are the first.”

  “The first?” Cayce feels as though her eyes are about to pop out of her head.

  The waiter arrives with coffee for two, pouring it into fine white china cups.

  “The coffee is very good here. When I was a child, only the nomen-klatura had good coffee, and that was not as good as this. You take the sugar? Cream?”

  Unable to trust her hands, Cayce shakes her head.

  “I too. Black.” Stella raises her cup, inhales the fragrance, then sips. She says something appreciative, in Russian. “Do you like it, Moscow? You are here, before?”

  “No,” Cayce says. “It’s new to me.”

  “I think it is new for us. Every day, now.” Unsmiling, eyes wide.

  “Why are there so many police cars?” It’s all she can think to ask, this pathetic attempt to prevent a silence that she somehow fears might kill her. Ask the next question. “They’re always speeding by, but no sirens.”

  “Police cars?”

  “Unmarked. With blue lights.”

  “Police cars, no! Those are the cars of important people, of the rich, or those who work for them. They have purchased a permit allowing ignorance of traffic regulations. Blue lights are courtesy to others, a warning. It seems strange, to you?”

  Everything does, Cayce thinks. Or nothing does.

  “Stella? May I ask you something?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you the maker?”

  Stella tilts her head. “I am twins.” If she demonstrates some literal power of physical bilocation, now, it won’t surprise Cayce. “My sister, she is the artist. I, I am what? The distributor. The one who finds an audience. It is not so great a talent, I know.”

  “My God,” says Cayce, who doesn’t think she has one, “it’s really true.”

  Stella’s eyes, already large, widen. “Yes. It is true. Nora is the artist.”

  Cayce feels herself starting to lock up again. Next question. Anything. “Are Stella and Nora Russian names?”

  “Our mother was great admirer of your literature. Particularly of Williams, and of Joyce.”

  “Williams?”

  “Tennessee.”

  Stella. And Nora.

  “My father lived in Tennessee,” Cayce says, feeling she sounds like a talking doll whose string has been pulled.

  “You write he died, in the fall of the towers.”

  “Went missing, yes.”

  “Our parents died. A bomb. In Leningrad. My sister and I, my mother as well, lived in Paris. Nora studied film, of course. I, business. My father would not have us in Russia. The dangers. He worked for his brother, my uncle, who had become a powerful man. He told us in Paris we should be prepared never to return. But our grandmother died, his mother, and we returned, for the funeral. Three days only, it was to be.” Her great sad eyes stare darkly into Cayce’s. “The bomb is in a tree, as we leave our house, all of us in black, to the funeral. They detonate it with a radio. Our parents die instantly, a mercy. It hurt Nora badly. Very badly. I had only dislocations, my shoulders, my jaw, and many small wounds.”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “Yes.” Stella nods, though in affirmation of what Cayce isn’t sure. “Since then, we live in Moscow. My uncle is often here, and Nora needs many things. Who are your friends?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You write you look for Nora’s art with your friends. Passionately.” The smile, when it breaks through Stella’s pale calm, is a miracle. Or not calm, Cayce thinks, but some hyper-vigilant stillness. Do not move and they will not see us. “Who is ‘Maurice’? It is a beautiful name.”

  “He works in a bank, in Hong Kong. British. I haven’t met him, but I like him a lot. You understand we do this through a website, and e-mail?”

  “Yes. I have seen it, perhaps. I have software. I watch Nora’s art move, through the Sigil numbers. It is very good, this software. Sergei found it for us.”

  “Who is Sergei?”

  “He is employed to facilitate. A star at the Polytechnic. I worry that he will miss his career, because my uncle pays him too well. But also he loves what Nora does. Like you.”

  “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 dome
stic 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.”