“A traditionalist, yes. Her handler.”
Cayce looks from Sergei to Marchwinska-Wyrwal to Bigend, then to Parkaboy, feeling much of the recent weirdness of her life shift beneath her, rearranging itself according to a new paradigm of history. Not a comfortable sensation, like Soho crawling on its own accord up Primrose Hill, because it has discovered that it belongs there, and has no other choice. But, as Win had taught her, the actual conspiracy is not so often about us; we are most often the merest of cogs in larger plans.
The waiters are clearing the main course now, and bringing smaller glasses, and pouring some sort of dessert wine.
It occurs to her then that the meal has been entirely free of toasts, and that she’s always heard that a multitude of them are to be expected at a Russian meal. But perhaps, she thinks, this isn’t a Russian meal. Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing. But as she’s thinking this, Marchwinska-Wyrwal taps his glass with the edge of a spoon.
“I wish to offer a toast to Miss Pollard’s father, the late Wingrove Pollard. It is an easy thing, for those of us who remember how it was, to lapse for a moment into old ways of thought, old rivalries. I did that myself, earlier, and now I must apologize for it. Had there not been men like her father, on the side of democracy and the free market, where would we be today? Not here, certainly. Nor would this establishment serve the purpose it does today, assisting the progress of art while bettering the lives and futures of those less fortunate.” He pauses, looking around the table, and Cayce wonders exactly what it is he’s doing, and why? Is it a way of covering his ass with Volkov, after having upset her? Can he actually mean this, any of it?
“Men like Wingrove Pollard, my friends, through their long and determined defense of freedom, enabled men like Andrei Volkov to come at last to the fore, in free competition with other free men. Without men like Wingrove Pollard, Andrei Volkov might languish today in some prison of the Soviet state. To Wingrove Pollard.”
And they all, including Cayce, repeat these last three words, raise their glasses, and drink, beneath the shadowed ICBMs and Sputniks of the faded mural high above.
AS they’re leaving, Parkaboy and Bigend to accompany Cayce to the guest house, originally for visiting academicians, where the three of them are to stay the night, Marchwinska-Wyrwal excuses himself to the others and takes her aside. From somewhere he has produced a large rectangular object, about three inches thick, enclosed in what appears to be a fitted envelope of fine beige wool.
“This is something Andrei Volkov wishes you to have,” he says. “It is only a token.” He hands it to her. “I apologize again for pressing you, earlier. If we were to know how you obtained the address, we could mend a gap in the security of the Volkovas. We are very concerned now, with Sigil. But Sigil has become essential to the Volkovas’ project.”
“You suggested my father might still be alive. I don’t believe that.”
“Neither do I, I’m sorry to say. Our people in New York have studied the matter, very closely, and have been unable to prove his death, but I myself believe that he is gone. Are you certain that you will not help us, in the matter of Sigil?”
“I can’t tell you because I don’t know. But it wasn’t any weakness or betrayal at Sigil. Someone with intelligence connections did me a favor, but I don’t know its exact nature. Whatever it was, it took almost no time at all.”
His eyes narrow. “Echelon. Of course.” Then he smiles. “A friend of your father’s. I had guessed as much.”
She says nothing.
He reaches into his jacket and extracts a plain white envelope. “This also is for you,” he says. “This gift is mine. Traditionalists have their uses. Our people in New York are talented, extremely thorough, and have many options at their disposal.” He places the envelope on the rectangular woolen parcel, which she’s still holding before her as though it were a tray.
“What is it?”
“All that is known of your father’s last morning, after he left his hotel. Good night, Miss Pollard.” And he turns away and walks back into the shadows of the oval room, where she sees Sergei has reseated himself at the candlelit table, and has removed his tie, and is lighting a cigarette.
42.
HIS MISSINGNESS
Aside from looking as though they all shop at The Gap and nowhere else, the inmates of Volkov’s rendering farm don’t seem to be required to wear a uniform. Cayce sees several, in the halls, as she’s leaving with Bigend and Parkaboy, and several more as they make their way to the guest house.
The fence she’d climbed, Bigend says, has been only recently installed to prevent teenagers from the surrounding countryside from sneaking in to pilfer things.
There are usually sixty people here, he says, fulfilling their debt to Russian society by rendering, as they have been taught to do, the rough segments of footage that arrive from the Moscow studio. The physical plant, formerly a technical college, is intended to accommodate a hundred and fifty, which accounts, she supposes, for its dozy summer-session atmosphere.
“What sort of crimes did they commit?” she asks, scuffing along in her slippers, Parkaboy carrying Volkov’s gift.
“Nothing violent,” Bigend says. “That’s a requirement. Generally, they simply made a mistake.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“Miscalculated the extent of blat required, or who had it. Paid off the wrong official. Or made the wrong enemy. Sergei’s recruiters keep track of court calendars, sentencing. . . . It’s essential to get them before they’ve been exposed, literally, to the standard prison system. Then they undergo testing elsewhere, medical and psychological, before coming here. I suppose some don’t make it.”
Moths are whirling around the light atop a steel pole, beside the concrete path, and the sense of being on the summer campus of some down-at-heels community college is eerie.
“What happens when they graduate?” she asks.
“I don’t believe any have, so far. The facility’s quite new, and their actual sentences are generally of three to five years’ duration. It’s all being made up as it goes along. As are many things in this country.”
The path climbs to a sparsely planted grove of young pines, screening a one-story orange brick building that resembles a very small motel. It presents them with four identical entrances and four windows. Ornate white lace curtains are drawn across the darkened windows, but there are lights on above three of the doors.
“You look bagged,” Parkaboy says, handing her the cloth-covered rectangle. “Get some sleep.”
“I know you’re exhausted,” Bigend says to her, “but we need to talk, if only briefly.”
“Don’t let him keep you up,” Parkaboy advises. He turns and enters one of the doors, without using a key. She sees the lights come on behind the lace curtains.
“They aren’t locked,” Bigend says, leading the way into the one to the left. An overhead fixture comes on as she shuffles in after him, bandaged feet smarting.
Cream walls, brown tile floor, hand-woven Armenian rug, ugly forties-looking furniture in dark veneer. She puts the woolen package down on a bureau with a mirror whose borders are decorated with frosted grooves carved into the glass.
She smells disinfectant, or insecticide.
She still has the envelope in her hand.
She turns and faces Bigend.
“Boone was reading my e-mail.”
“I know,” he says.
“But did you know it before?”
“Not until after he’d called from Ohio to tell me we needed to go immediately to Moscow. I had a friend’s Gulfstream pick him up and bring him to Paris. He admitted it to me on our way here.”
“Is that why he didn’t stay?”
“No. He left because I no longer wanted
to be in partnership with him.”
“You didn’t? I mean, you don’t?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because he pretends to be better at what he does than he is. I prefer people who are better at what they do than they think they are.”
“Where’s Dorotea?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you asked?”
“Yes. Once. They say they don’t know.”
“Do you believe them?”
“I think it’s better left unasked.”
“What was she trying to do?”
“Change sides. Again. She really did want the position in London, and she’d told them she’d still be working for them as well. Which I had discussed with her, of course. But when your e-mail reached Stella Volkova, and Stella replied, it caused a number of things to happen very quickly. All of the armaz.ru traffic is monitored by Volkov’s security, of course. They immediately contacted Dorotea, who, in the course of what must have been a very intense conversation, realized for the first time who she had ultimately been working for—and who she was in the process of betraying, by coming over to my side. She must also have understood that if she could get to you first, and discover how you had obtained that address, she would have something very important to offer them. She might even be rewarded, and perhaps retain her job at Blue Ant as well.”
“But how did she know I’d gone to Moscow?”
“I imagine she’d instantly hired replacements for the last two, or perhaps there were more to begin with. I doubt if she ever called off your surveillance, even after Tokyo. She would have needed to continue reporting on you. She isn’t a very imaginative woman in any case. If they saw you check in at Heathrow, they knew you were going to be landing in Moscow. There are no other destinations, for Aeroflot, at that time of the evening. She could easily have arranged to have you followed, on this end. Not by Volkov’s people, though. She still had connections from her previous job.” He shrugs. “She’d been posting on your website, as someone else. Do you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Amazing. She had no more idea who the maker actually was than we did, until they revealed it to her in an effort to facilitate her stopping you. But you’re dead on your feet, aren’t you? I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Hubertus? Boone hadn’t been able to get anything, in Ohio?”
“No. He got the domain name from your e-mail to Stella. He had the entire address, of course, but nothing he could do with it. By telling you he’d at least learned the domain, in Ohio, he thought he might be able to garner partial credit, with me, after the fact. But in order to move as quickly as he knew we needed to move, he had to tell me the truth, all of it.” He shrugs. “You weren’t telling me what you were up to either, but at least you weren’t lying to me. How did you get that address, by the way?”
“Through someone with NSA connections. I have absolutely no idea how he got it, and no way to ever find out.”
“I knew I’d picked a winner, as soon as I met you.”
“Do you know where Boone’s gone?”
“To Tokyo, I imagine. To that designer girlfriend, the one he stayed with when you were there. Did you meet her?”
“I saw her apartment,” she says, after a pause.
“I think it’s all actually about money, for him.” He grimaces. “Ultimately I find that that was the whole problem, with most of the dot-com people. Good night.”
He’s gone.
She sits down on the sixties-orange bedspread and opens Wiktor Marchwinska-Wyrwal’s white envelope.
It contains, on three pieces of blue bond paper, something that seems to be the précis or closing summation of some longer document. She reads through it quickly, struggling with the translation’s peculiarities of syntax, but somehow it won’t register.
An account of her father’s last morning in New York.
She reads it again.
The third time through, it begins to cohere for her.
Win had come to New York to meet with a rival crowd-safety firm. His patents would be secure, soon, and he’d become unsatisfied with the firm he’d been developing them with. There were potential legal complications inherent in a move, and he had arranged to meet with the president of the rival firm, in their offices at 90 West Street, on the morning of September 11, to discuss this.
He had, as the Mayflower bellman had always maintained, gotten a cab.
Cayce sits looking at the license number of that cab now, at the Cambodian driver’s name, his registration, telephone.
The collision had occurred in the Village, the cab pulling south into Christopher.
Minor damage to the cab, more damage to the other vehicle, a caterer’s van. The driver of the cab, whose English was minimal, had been at fault.
And she herself, headed downtown by train, to arrive early for her own meeting—how close might she have passed? And had he seen the towers, as he’d climbed from the cab, the morning beautiful and clear?
He’d handed the cabdriver five dollars and gotten into an off-duty limo, the Cambodian anxiously copying the limo’s plate number. He knew that Win, his fare, would know that he had been at fault.
In court, the driver had lied, successfully, and gotten off, and then he’d lied again to the police, when they’d interviewed cabbies, looking for Win, and again to the detectives Cayce had hired. He’d picked up no fare at the Mayflower. He hadn’t seen the man in the picture.
Cayce looks at the name of the Dominican driver of the limo. More numbers. The name, address, and telephone number of his widow, in the Bronx.
The limo had been excavated from rubble, three days later, the driver with it.
He had been alone.
There was still no evidence, the unknown and awkwardly translated writer concluded, that Win was dead, but there was abundant evidence placing him on or near the scene. Additional inquiries indicated that he had never arrived at 90 West.
The petal falling from the dried rose.
Someone raps lightly on the door.
She gets up stiffly, unthinking, and opens it, the blue papers in her hand.
“Party time,” says Parkaboy, holding up a liter bottle of water. “Remembered I hadn’t told you the tap’s a bad bet.” His smile fades. “What’s up?”
“I’m reading about my father. I’d like some water, please.”
“Did they find him?” He knows the story of Win’s disappearance from their correspondence. He goes into the bathroom and she hears him pouring water into a tumbler. He comes back out and hands it to her.
“No.” She drinks, splutters, starts to cry, stops herself. “Volkov’s people tried to find him, and got a lot further than we ever did. But he’s not here,” she holds up the blue sheets, “he’s not here either.” And then she starts to cry again, and Parkaboy puts his arms around her and holds her.
“You’re going to hate me,” he says, when she stops crying.
She looks up at him. “Why?”
“Because I want to know what Volkov’s Polish spin doctor gave you as a souvenir. Looks to me like it might be a set of steak knives.”
“Asshole,” she says. Sniffs.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
She puts the crumpled blue report down and explores the beige envelope’s flap, which she finds is secured with two tiny gold-plated snaps. She lifts it, works the fabric back.
A Louis Vuitton slim-line attaché, its gold-plated clasps gleaming.
She stares at it.
“You’d better open it,” says Parkaboy.
She does, exposing, in tightly packed rows, white-banded sheaves of crisp new bills.
“What’s that?”
“Hundreds. Brand-new, sequentially numbered. Probably five thousand of them.”
“Why?”
“They like round numbers.”
“I mean why is it here?”
“It’s for you.”
“I don’t like it.�
�
“We can put it on eBay. Somebody in Miami might want it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The briefcase. It’s not your style.”
“I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning. You need to get some sleep.”
“This is absurd.”
“It’s Russia.” He grins at her. “Who gives a shit? We found the maker.”
She looks at him. “We did, didn’t we?”
He leaves her the water.
She uses one fingertip to gingerly close the case, then drapes it with its beige dustcover. Carries the water into the bathroom to rinse with after she’s brushed her teeth.
Sitting on the bed, she removes the slippers, seeing that her left foot has bled slightly, through its bandages. Her ankles look swollen. She takes off the cardigan, rolls Skirt Thing over her head, and tosses them both over the attaché and its obscene tray of cash.
She turns down the bed, turns off the light, and limps back, crawling in and pulling the orange spread and the coarse sheets up to her chin. They smell the way sheets can smell at the start of cabin season, if they haven’t been aired.
She lies there, staring up into the dark, hearing the distant drone of a plane.
“They never got you, did they? I know you’re gone, though.”
His very missingness becoming, somehow, him.
Her mother had once said that when the second plane hit, Win’s chagrin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist. She doesn’t believe it, but now she finds it makes her smile.
“Good night,” she says to the dark.
43.
MAIL
My brother, up to his knees in dirty old pipe in Prion’s gallery, sends loud and most amazed thanks. I told him you said it had been given to you by Russian gangsters and you didn’t want to keep it, and he just stared at me, mouth open. (Then he becomes worried that it is not real, but Ngemi often accepts cash from American collectors and helped him with that.) But really it’s absurdly good of you, because it looked as if he would have to give up his “studio” (ugh) and move in with me, in order to pay for it, the scaffolding, and he is filthy, a pig, leaving hairs. Of course it is much more than cost of the scaffolding but he is using the rest to rent a huge plasma display for the show. We are locking down date of opening with Prion now and you absolutely must come. Prion now has some connection with a Russian yogurt drink that is about to launch here, purchased I think by the Japanese. I know because it is part of my briefing for work now, this drink. Also because he has it in a cooler at the gallery—revolting! I think he will try to serve it at the opening but absolutely NO! So mystery Internet movie is out, yogurt drink is in, also some Russian oil magnate: how surprisingly cultured he is, “alternative,” a sort of Saatchi-like patron figure, nothing nouveau riche or mafia or otherwise foul. This is what they are paying me to spread now in the clubs. O well. In the day I still make hats. Enjoy Paris! Magda
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