"There might be. But we'd have to advertise, wouldn't we?"

He's right.

He checks the time on his phone again. "I've got to go."

"Where?"

"Selfridge's. I need a suit, fast."

"I can't imagine you in a suit."

"You don't need to," he says, standing, small leather suitcase already in his hand. "You're unlikely to ever see me in one." He smiles.

But I'll bet you'd look good in one, something in her says. It makes her blush. Now it's her turn to stand, feeling incredibly awkward. "Good luck in Ohio," she offers, reaching to shake hands.

He squeezes, rather than shakes, simultaneously leaning quickly forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek. "Take care of yourself. I'll be in touch."

And then she's watching him go out the door, past a girl with Ma-harishi parachute pants embroidered with tigers who, seeing the expression, whatever it is, on Cayce's face, smiles at her and winks.

26. S I G I N T

- /

Cleaning Damien's flat becomes more of a project than she'd anticipated, but she keeps at it, trusting that manual labor, and the effort required to stay on task, somehow furthers soul-retrieval. Several video cameras have been unpacked, here, leaving the main room littered with abstract white foam shapes, innumerable foam peanuts, torn and crumpled shrink-wrap, empty Ziploc bags, warranties and instruction manuals. It looks as though a spoiled child has torn through a stack of very expensive presents, and she supposes that that might actually be seen to be the case, depending on how one looked at Damien.

Beer bottles, a saucer serving as an impromptu ashtray for lipsticked Marlboros, dirty dishes with remains of the tandoori take-away a pair of very expensive-looking panties that she cheerfully bins, ditto various discarded makeup articles in the bathroom. She changes the sheets on the downstairs bed, straightens the giant oven mitt, dusts, and does a pass with a bright red upright German vacuum that's obviously never seen use before.

Goes upstairs to see what needs to be done, and a big cartoon hammer of sheer exhaustion comes down on her, slamming her into the waiting softness of the futon.

When she wakes, the phone is ringing, downstairs, and the light outside is different. She looks at her watch and sees that it's eight hours later.

She hears the phone stop ringing, then start again.

When she gets to it, it's Magda, asking if she'd like to have dinner.

EXPECTING only Magda, she sees Voytek and the large African as well, when she reaches the agreed meeting point near the station. They all seem wonderfully cheerful to her, but she supposes that that's because they aren't lagged and don't have lives as complicated as hers has recently become. Ngemi in particular, hugely zipped into his tight coat of black faux leather, is grinning enormously, and as they walk to a Greek restaurant somewhere behind the station, she hears why.

He has sold the calculators she'd seen near Portobello to the expected representative of that same Japanese collector, for what is evidently a very nice sum. He has the air of a man whose lost cause has most unexpectedly panned out, although at one point he does sigh, hugely. "Now I must go to Poole, and collect them from Hobbs."

She remembers the unpleasant man with the filthy little car.

"I don't like him," Magda says, bluntly, and seems to Cayce to be addressing mainly Voytek.

"He is a brilliant man," Voytek responds, shrugging.

"A horrid drunken old spy."

Attuned now to words like "spy," Cayce notes this but almost immediately forgets it.

The restaurant they've chosen is a homey, quiet little Greek place that shows every sign of predating the Children's Crusade. With its white-painted walls, bits of Aegean blue, and utterly characteristic Greek tourist tat, it somehow reminds Cayce of the experience of being in a Chinese restaurant in Roanoke, Virginia.

"I love your hair," Magda tells her, as retsina is being poured, and she quite evidently does. "Did you have it cut in Tokyo?"

"Thank you. I did."

"But you were only there for such a short time."

"Yes. Business." Cayce stifles a yawn that seems to come out of nowhere. "Excuse me."

"Are you still on their time? You must be exhausted."

"I think I'm all on my own time, now," Cayce says. "But I don't know what time that is."

Ngemi brings up yen devaluation, as this might affect his business, and that leads into a conversation about a classmate of Magda's who's recently been hired as part of a team designing clothing for the characters in a new Japanese video game. Ngemi and Voytek both find this slightly unbelievable, but Cayce assures them that it's utterly normal; that in fact it's a rapidly growing aspect of the design industry.

"But they don't wear hats, these anime characters," Magda laments, pouring herself another glass of the resinous yellow wine, then wincing at its bite. "They all have haircuts—exactly like yours!" She's laced into a leather bodice in a color called Turbo Blue, more traditionally used for painting large pieces of electrical equipment in factories. Her eye shadow matches.

"Life is more difficult for the serious artist," allows Voytek, who's seeming morose now. "Time is money, but also money is money."

"You'll get your scaffolding," Magda says. "It will work out." She explains to Cayce that her brother, having assembled close to three hundred ZX 81s, faces the daunting task of individually altering their cases to accept connections of some kind, each connection having to be painstakingly soldered into the actual Sinclair circuitry, such as it is. Voytek listens keenly, taking an evident pleasure in hearing his sister recount the tribulations of the serious artist.

He is creating, Cayce is starting to gather, some sort of lungfish-primitive connection machine. He draws it on a napkin for her: a representation of a three-dimensional grid, this to be made up from a batch of third-hand builder's scaffolding that Ngemi has located in Bermondsey.

She watches the lines of ink spread into the paper, widening, and thinks of Taki, in the little bar in Roppongi.

It is very rusty, paint-spattered scaffolding, Ngemi has assured him, exactly what he wants for the texture of the piece. But if he's to do each Sinclair modification himself, he faces weeks if not months of work. The scaffolding is not expensive, but neither is it free, and must be transported, measured, sawed, assembled, probably re-sawed, then assembled again, then stored somewhere until a gallery can be secured. "A patron must be found," he says.

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.