“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 cre
ativity, 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.”
“Is the footage?” She can’t help herself.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? The maker has been positioned, via the strategy, outside of that. You can assemble the segments, but you can’t reassemble them.”
“Not at this point. But if he ever assembles them, then they can be reassembled.”
“ ‘He’?”
“The maker.” She shrugged.
“You believe that the segments are parts of a whole?”
“Yes.” Zero hesitation.
“Why?”
“It doesn’t feel so much like a leap of faith as something I know in my heart.” Strange to hear herself say this, but it’s the truth.
“The heart is a muscle,” Bigend corrects. “You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.”
Cayce takes him in, a sidewise glance. In that moment’s silence seeing him unsmiling, and perhaps very much who he is.
“When I founded Blue Ant, that was my core tenet, that all truly viable advertising addresses that older, deeper mind, beyond language and logic. I hire talent on the basis of an ability to recognize that, whether consciously or not. It works.”
She has to admit to herself that it evidently does, as he brings the Hummer to a halt at the verge of the steep park. Grass soft-looking under mirror-world lamps. The legend Damien told her, which she can’t now recall: a sort of English Icarus, who flew from here, or crashed here, long before the Roman city. The hill a place of worship, of sacrifice, of executions: Greenberry, prior to Primrose. That Druid thing.
Bigend doesn’t bother to unfold his parking permission, surely the truest modern equivalent of the freedom of the city, but climbs out, putting on his Stetson in that same fussy way, and marches toward the hill’s unseen crest. Lost for a moment in darkness between lamps. Cayce follows him, hearing the Hummer’s chopped-off security-groan as he thumbs the button on his key. No path for Bigend, but straight on, climbing, Cayce bringing up the rear, hurrying to catch up, mentally kicking herself for letting him play her this way. Fool: Walk away into the night, down to the canal and along it to the locks. Past homeless men drinking cider on benches. But she doesn’t. The grass, longer than it looks, wets her ankles. Not a city feeling.
There’s a bench there, at the very top, and Bigend is already seated, looking down and out, across the Thames valley, a fairylit London winking through a lens of climate in large part generated by the vast settlement itself.
“Tell me ‘no,’ ” he says.
“What?”
“Tell me you won’t do it. Get it out of the way.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You need to sleep on it.”
She tries to frown, but she suddenly finds him unexpectedly comic. He knows exactly how much of a pain he can be, and something in his delivery lets her in on that; a technique for disarming people, but one that works.
“What would you do with him, if I found him for you, Hubertus?”
“I don’t know.”
“Become the producer?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s a title, yet, for doing whatever it is that would be required. Advocate, perhaps? Facilitator?” He seems to be gazing out over London, hunched attentively in his fawn raincoat, but then she sees the DVD in his hand. The kiss starts to replay.
“You’ll have to do it without me.”
He doesn’t look up. “Sleep on it. Things look different, in the morning. There’s someone I’d like you to talk with.”
“Here,” she says, removing his cowboy hat. She takes it in her left hand, allowing the creases at the front of her hand to align her thumb and fingers, first and second fingers along the central depression, and tips it onto her own head. She leaves it there, but uses her forefinger to lower the brim with a single measured tap. “Like that.” She looks at him from under the brim. “Remove it this way.” Tipping it off. She replaces it on his head. “The way you do it, it looks like you’d need a stepladder to get on the horse.”
He tilts his head back, to see her from beneath the brim. “Thank you,” he says.
Cayce takes a last look, out toward the fairy city. “Now drive me home. I’m tired.”
AND in Damien’s hallway, she stands on tiptoe to see that her single dark Cayce Pollard hair is still there, spit-pasted across the gap between door and frame, then removes her seldom-used compact from her envelope, fingers brushing the hard smooth cylinder from the robot girl. On her knees, then, to use the mirror to check that the powder she’d brushed across t
he underside of the doorknob is still there, undisturbed.
Thank you, Commander Bond.
8.
WATERMARK
After carefully checking that a number of other sub-miniature booby traps, follicular and otherwise, are intact and as she left them, she checks her e-mail.
One from Damien, one from Parkaboy.
She opens Damien’s.
Hello and greetings from six feet down in the currently unfrozen swamps past Stalingrad. I am all bugbites and stubble but still do not fit in, as I am not drunk sufficiently constantly, tho am working at it. Most amazing scene here, hadn’t time to tell you before I left. It’s about the dig, which perhaps is my version of the footage now. The dig is a post-Soviet summer ritual involving feckless Russian youth, male, from all over, tho mostly Leningrad boys, who come out here to these infested pine forests to excavate the site of some of the largest, longest-running, and most bitterly contested firefights of WWII. Trench stuff, and the line moved back and forth forever, with unimaginable loss of life, so that when one finds a trench and digs, one digs through, well, strata of Germans, Russians, Germans. Who all of them are now bone of a peculiarly dark gray, everything having buried itself in this sticky-silty gray mud, which in winter is frozen solid. This mud is, I think the term is, anaerobic. Flesh is long gone, I’m glad to say, but bone remains, and also artifacts, in brilliant condition when you get the mud off, which is what brings the diggers. Weapons of all kinds, watches, one boy found an unopened bottle of vodka yesterday, but then it was thought that this might have been poisoned, left as a booby trap. Very strange. But visually, wow! All of it: drunken shaven-headed diggers, the things they bring up, and everywhere the rising pyramids of gray bone. And most of this we are getting on video, though the trick is that we have to drink enough to be felt a part of it, the party atmosphere you understand, but not enough to be too legless to shoot and remember to change batteries. Which is why you haven’t heard from me, 24-7 on the dig. I had thought of course that this would be an exploratory foray toward a full shoot next summer, but (1) I can’t imagine that this level of weirdness can repeat itself, even in Russia, and (2) I’m pretty sure I’ll want never to see this place or these particular people again, once I get out of here. Mick the Irish camera has developed a persistent cough that he’s convinced is drug-resistant tuberculosis, and Brian the Australian camera passed out drinking with the dig boys and woke up with a bloody, very ugly and authentically prison-style spiderweb motif etched into his left shoulder with something more like a knife than a tattooing instrument. Having survived this, tough bugger, Brian now enjoys the most status with the diggers (also he apparently broke someone’s jaw in the aftermath) and he and I both think Mick’s full of balls about the TB, whingeing little cunt, but we won’t go near him anyway. And how are you??? Are you watering my plants and feeding the goldfish? Are those advertising wanks in Soho treating you in any way at all like a human being? I would kill someone to have a shower right now. I think I have scabies, and that’s after shaving my bloody head so I won’t get lice. Brian’s been painting his balls every night with clear nail polish, says that it kills them (scabies) but I think it’s really because he’s a queen in the most massive denial and an outback masochist and he likes the way it looks.