“To be commercial? My uncle would not allow this degree of attention.”
“It’s already valuable. More valuable than you could imagine. The commercial part would simply be branding, franchising. And they’re on to it, Stella. Or at least one of them is, and he’s very clever. I know because I work for him.”
“You do?”
“Yes, but I’ve decided that I won’t tell him I found you. I won’t tell him who you are or where you are, or who Nora is, or anything else I’ve learned here. I won’t be working for him, now. But others will, and they’ll find you, and you have to be ready.”
“How, ready?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try to figure that out.”
“Thank you,” Stella says. “It gives me pleasure, that you have seen my sister work.”
“Thank you.”
They hug, Stella kissing her on the cheek.
“Your driver is waiting.”
“Send him away, please. I need to walk. To feel the city. And I haven’t seen the Metro.”
Stella produces a phone from her gray skirt and pushes a key. Says something in Russian.
38.
PUPPENKOPF
She finds herself on crowded Arbat.
Leaving the squat behind Georgievsky, she’d drifted, unmoored by her experience of the creation. That segment with the beach pan, she now knows, is mapped on the one jagged edge of the T-arm, unthinkable intimacy.
Through one street and the next, until she’d come upon the red M of a Metro station.
Descending, she’d purchased, with too large a bill and some difficulty, tokens of what appeared to be luminous plastic, the color of glow-in-the-dark toy skeletons, each with its own iconic M.
One of these had been sufficient for her voyage, whose directions and stations she now would never know.
She’d given herself to the dream, in this case to the eerie Stalinist grandeurs of Moscow’s underground, which had fascinated her father.
That sense she’d had, of some things here being grotesquely large, had doubled, underground, the lavishness of the stations exceeding even her childhood fantasies. Gilt bronze, peach marble shot with aquamarine, engine-chased Cartier lusters applied to the supporting columns of what seemed more like subterranean ballrooms than subway platforms, their chandeliers blazing, as if the wealth of what Win had called the final empire of the nineteenth century had come pouring in, all through the deepest, darkest thirties, to line these basilicas of public transport.
So overwhelming, so exceedingly peculiar in its impact, that it actually succeeded in distracting her, knocking her at least partially out of whatever it was that she’d been feeling as she’d descended those steep stairs to the clanging steel door, and out into a brightness that both startled and hurt.
She has no idea where she’d gone, riding for at least two hours, changing trains on impulse, taking madly majestic stairs and escalators at random. Until, finally, she’d emerged, here, to find herself on Arbat, broad and crowded, which her but-it’s-really-like module keeps trying to tell her is really like Oxford Street, though, really, it isn’t at all.
Thirsty, she enters a vaguely Italian-looking (the match-up module, failing again) establishment offering soft drinks and Internet access, and buys a bottle of water and half an hour, to check her mail.
The keyboard is Cyrillic; she keeps accidentally hitting a key that toggles it back from English-emulation, and then being unable to find it again, but she manages to retrieve a message from Parkaboy.
I like to think I’m as blasé as the next pretentious asshole, but your travel agent in London is, I’ve gotta say, the business. As in: I’m in Charles de Gaulle, in some kind of Air France cocoon hand-stitched from Hermès bridle-leather, watching CNN in French and waiting to get on their next flight to Moscow. Trouble is, no fault of Sylvie’s, something’s upfucked the bomb-sniffers here and even we of the uber-class have to wait until planes can fly. So they’ve put all five of us in here with what I sort of hate to admit is the best cold buffet I’ve ever tasted, and they keep opening champagne. I may not have mentioned it before but since the recent unpleasantness I’ve been one of those people not too happy at the thought of flying; why I took that train to visit Darryl. However, with the rush of events and the sheer level of cosseting, I haven’t until now been very aware of actually doing any. America sort of ended at check-in. And when they get the sniffers sorted here, I’m your way fast, though I may need to be taught to feed and wash myself again. You can help by arranging a supply of those little hot towels. Thanks again.
She tries to reply but hits that toggle again.
When the boy from the counter sorts it for her, she writes: I went there. I met her. Well, saw her. Watched her work. Her. I’m in a Net café and I guess I’m still processing. Hard to write. No point, really: you’re almost here. I’m glad! Maybe you are, I haven’t been back to the hotel.
A distant crash, or explosion. She looks up. A siren starts to wail.
The counter boy has gone to the door and is looking out, up Arbat, and suddenly she’s back in the car on her way to Stonestreet’s, seeing the motorcycle rider on his back, neck probably broken, his face up to the rain. A rush of sheer mortality.
You should have this, because so far nobody else does: [email protected]. Stella. Not the maker, her sister.
Send.
She finishes the last of her water, logs out, slides off the stool. She can still hear the siren, but it seems to be moving away.
Now she has to find a cab. An official one.
NODDING to the Kevlar security boys, she remembers that she still hasn’t retrieved her passport from registration.
The lobby of The President is still as wide, and even less populated, and her request seems to trigger one of those deep and atavistic pockets of Soviet affect in the clerk. He becomes instantly expressionless, stares at her narrowly, turns, vanishes through a paneled door behind his counter, and remains absent for what her watch shows as the better part of ten minutes. But he returns with her passport, and hands it to her silently.
She checks to make certain that it is in fact her passport and, remembering Win’s stories, that all of its pages are still there, and that she hasn’t acquired any new travel history. All seems correct and unchanged. “Thank you.” She puts it in her Stasi envelope.
Time for a long hot bath, in a long brown tub, and then she’ll call down and ask whether a Mr. Gilbert has arrived.
When she turns, she finds herself facing Dorotea Benedetti.
“We must talk.” She’s in black, with more than a touch of actual gold at her throat, as perfectly groomed as ever but wearing more makeup.
“Dorotea?” It is, of course, but instinct says stall for time. A deeper instinct says: Flee.
“I know you’ve found them. Hubertus does not know, but they do.”
“Who?”
“Volkov’s apparat. The people who employed me. We must have a conversation now, you and I. Come with me, to the lounge.”
“I thought you were working for Hubertus.”
“I am taking care of myself, and of you as well. I will explain. There’s little time.” She turns, without waiting for an answer, and marches out across the brown-and-ocher parade ground, toward what Cayce takes to be the entrance to the lobby bar. Dorotea’s hose, from behind, reveal stylized serpents woven where a seam line would be, from heel to mid-calf.
Cayce follows her, in deepest distrust, a knot of fear tightening between her shoulders. But whatever this is about, she decides, she has to hear it out.
The lounge has the October theme in spades, haystack-sized arrangements of dried flowers flanking leaf-strewn sideboards piled with pale simulacra of gourds, worryingly skull-like. Much brownish mirror, darkly veined with gold.
The girl with green boots is here, though not wearing them; Cayce recognizes the snakeskin flames, deployed to maximum advantage atop a barstool. At least a dozen of this one’s colleagues seem to have negotiated se
curity as well, this evening, and attend to a clientele consisting entirely of large, clean-shaven, short-haired, remarkably square-headed men in dark suits. Like some lost America, down to blue strata of cigarette smoke and the completely un-ironic deployment of the Frank Sinatra, through both of which the gestures of these men are carving out the shapes of triumph and empire, defeat and frustration.
Dorotea is already seated at a table for two, a white-jacketed barman unloading drinks from his tray: a glass of white wine for Dorotea, a Perrier and a tumbler of ice for the place opposite her. “I ordered for you,” Dorotea says, as Cayce takes the other seat. “You are going to have to move, very quickly, so a drink is perhaps not the best idea.”
The barman pours the Perrier over the ice and departs.
“What do you mean?”
Dorotea looks at her. “I don’t expect you to like me. I am motivated in this by self-interest, of course, but my interests now are best served by aiding yours. You do not believe me, but please, entertain the possibility. What do you know of Andrei Volkov?”
Volkova. Stella Volkova. Stalling, Cayce takes a sip of Perrier. It seems flat.
“He is their uncle,” Dorotea says, impatiently. “I know where you have been today. I know that you have met with them. Soon Volkov will know as well.”
“I’ve never heard of him.” Throat dry, she takes another sip.
“The invisible oligarch. The ghost. Very probably the richest of them all. He rode out the Bankers’ War in ’ninety-three, untouched, then emerged to take even more. His roots are in organized crime, of course; it is natural here. Like many, he has suffered personal losses. His brother. That had more to do with what you think of as politics, than crime, but to make that distinction here has always been naive.” Dorotea takes a sip of wine.
“Dorotea, what are you doing here?” Cayce wonders what she would be feeling, now, if she were having this encounter on any other day. Against her recent experience of the actual creation of the footage, it’s difficult to feel frightened, or angry, though she remembers having felt both those emotions toward Dorotea. The knot in her upper back, relaxing.
“You are in danger now. From Volkov’s apparat. You threaten them because you have met his nieces. That is not supposed to happen.”
“But they can’t be that tightly guarded. I sent an e-mail. Stella answered.”
“How did you get the address?”
Baranov’s glasses flash in the caravan, in a beam of British sunlight through some tiny hole. The depths of cold and utter distrust in his eyes. “From Boone,” Cayce lies.
“It’s not important,” Dorotea says, and Cayce is glad it isn’t, though she wants to tell Dorotea that Boone is in Ohio, at Sigil.
“Tell me about your father,” Dorotea says. “That is more important. What was his name?”
“Win,” Cayce says. “Wingrove Pollard.”
“And he vanished, the day of the towers, in New York?”
“He checked into a hotel, the night before, and in the morning he took a cab. But we’ve never found the driver, and we can’t find him.”
“Perhaps I can help you find him,” Dorotea says. “Finish your water.”
Cayce drinks the rest of the Perrier, the ice hurting her front teeth when it clicks against them, hard. “I hurt my teeth,” she says, putting down the glass.
“You should be more careful,” Dorotea says.
Cayce looks across the bar and sees the snakeskin panels on the girl’s dress crawling, wet and glistening. The flame-shaped cutouts in the taut fabric revealing the living greenish-black serpent skin beneath. She wants to tell Dorotea but somehow it might be embarrassing. She feels awkward, and very shy.
Dorotea pours the rest of the Perrier into Cayce’s glass. “Did you ever guess,” Dorotea says, “that I might also be Mama Anarchia?”
“You couldn’t be,” Cayce says, “you never say anything’s hegemonic.”
“What do you mean?”
Cayce feels herself blushing. “You’re fluent, but I don’t think you could make all that up. The stuff that Parkaboy hates.” But maybe she shouldn’t be saying this? “Could you?”
“No. Drink your water.” Cayce does, being careful of the ice. “But I have a little puppenkopf, to help me. I say what I need to say, and he translates it into the language of Anarchia, to so annoy your most annoying friend.” Dorotea smiles.
“Puppen—?”
“Puppet-head. A graduate student, in America. That is how I am able to be the Mama. And now I think you are my little puppenkopf as well.” She reaches across the table to stroke Cayce’s cheek. “And I think we will have no more trouble from you, none at all. You are my very good girl, now, and you will tell me where you got the e-mail address, won’t you?”
But there are skulls atop the sideboard, and as she’s opening her mouth to tell Dorotea about them, she sees Bibendum himself behind the bar, the rolls of his pallid, rubbery flesh like the folds of a partially deflated blimp, greasy and vile. Cayce’s mouth freezes open, no sound at all emerging, as the terrible eyes of the Michelin Man fix her with a truly dire regard—and she experiences, perhaps, her sole and only brush with EVP—as from some deep and hidden eddy in the river of Sinatra’s voice emerges a strange bright cartoon-like whirling snarl of sound, which executes the sonic equivalent of a back flip and becomes, as though compressed for transmission over unimaginable distances, her father’s voice.
“She’s drugged the water. Scream.”
Which she does.
So that, when things go black, she’s just curling her fingers around something smooth and cold, at the very bottom of the Stasi envelope.
39.
RED DUST
There must be, though she’s never noticed it before, a band of steel, cunningly fashioned, that ordinarily follows the exact irregularities of the inner circumference of her skull.
It seems, now that she’s aware of it, to be made from rod no thicker than the wire of a coat hanger, but much stronger, and of enormous rigidity. She knows that because she can feel it, now that someone has been turning a central key, also of metal, which is T-shaped, and engraved, very finely, on one side only, with the map of a city whose name she once knew, though it escapes her now in her wretchedness at the band’s expansion. With each turn of the key, it widens, causing her excruciating pain.
Opening her eyes, she finds that they don’t work, not as she expects them to.
I’ll have to have glasses, she thinks, closing them again. Or contact lenses. Or that operation they do with lasers. That had come from Soviet medicine, she knew, and by accident, the first patient having suffered cuts to the retina in a car crash, in Russia—
Opening them again.
She’s in Russia.
She tries to raise her hands to her aching head, but finds she can’t.
Spatial inventory. She’s on her back, probably on a bed, and can’t move her arms. She carefully raises her head, as she’d do in Pilates in preparation for the Hundred, and sees that her arms at least are there, or seem to be, beneath a thin gray blanket and a folded edge of white sheet, but that there are two restraining bands of gray webbing, one just below her shoulders and the other just below her elbows.
This seems not a good thing.
She lowers her head and groans, because this has caused the key to be turned at least twice, and quickly.
The ceiling, which she finds she can focus on now, is blank and white. Rolling her head gingerly to the right, she sees an equally blank wall, also white. To the left, the ceiling’s light fixture, which is rectangular and featureless, and then a row of beds, three at least, which are empty, and made of white-painted metal.
All of that seems a lot to do, because it makes her very tired.
A gray-haired woman, wearing a gray cardigan over a shapeless gray dress, is there with a tray.
The bed has been cranked up to partial sitting position and the restraints are gone. So, she finds, is the expanding interior skull ring.<
br />
“Where am I?”
The woman says something, no more than four syllables, and places the tray, on wire supports, across Cayce’s stomach. There is a plastic bowl of something that looks like thick clam chowder, perhaps minus the clams, and a plastic tumbler of grayish-white fluid.
The woman hands Cayce a strangely blunt-looking spoon that proves to be made of some rubbery, flexible plastic, rigid enough to eat soup with but soft enough to bend until its two ends meet. Cayce uses it to eat the soup, which is warm, and thick, and very good, and more heavily spiced than anything she’s eaten in a hospital before.
Cayce eyes the gray beverage suspiciously. The woman points to it and utters a single syllable.
It tastes, Cayce finds, not entirely unlike Bikkle. An organic Bikkle.
When she’s finished, and has returned the tumbler to the tray, she’s rewarded with another monosyllable, neutral in tone. The woman takes the tray, crosses the floor, opens the room’s single door, which is cream-colored, and goes out, closing the door behind her.
The position of her bed has prevented Cayce from seeing anything of what might be beyond that door, but the geography of hospitals suggests a corridor.
She sits up, discovering that she’s wearing a backless hospital gown, though one made of some thin, extensively laundered flannel print that seems once to have been decorated with small pink-and-yellow clown figures on a pale blue background.
The ceiling fixture fades abruptly, but doesn’t go entirely out.
She tugs blanket and sheet aside, discovering a remarkable assortment of bruises on the front of both thighs, and swings her legs off the bed. She suspects that actually standing will be an experiment, but finds she doesn’t do too badly.
The room, or ward, is floored with something seamless and gray and rubbery, faintly gritty beneath her feet.
She places her feet together now and finds the “magnets” from the Pilates towel exercises, points of focus, pulling the muscles of her legs together, into internal isometric alignment. Makes her spine as long as possible. A wave of vertigo. She waits for it to pass. She tries a roll-down, rolling her head forward one vertebra at a time, while bending slowly at the knees until she’s in a crouch, head dangling . . .
Pattern Recognition Page 29
