Automatically, she checks for mail.
Timing out, empty.
A woman jogs past, crunching gravel, breathing like a piston.
MECHANICALLY consuming a bowl of Thai salad in an all-Asia's restaurant across the street. She hasn't had breakfast today, and maybe this will calm her down.
She doubts it, after what she's done.
Accept that it happened, she tells herself. Table all questions of in-tentionality.
She almost feels as though something in the park had made her do it. Genius loci, Parkaboy would say. Too much sun. Convergence of lines. (Convergence of something, certainly, she guesses, but in some part of herself she can't access.)
The iBook is open again, on the table in front of her. She's just looked up the name and address of the person responsible (whatever that might mean) for the domain armaz.ru: one A. N. Polakov, in what she takes to be an office building, in Cyprus.
If she smoked, she thinks, she'd be giving Baranov a run for his money. Right now she almost wishes she did.
She looks at her anti-Casio and tries to do time-zone math for Ohio. Remembers that little map that Macs have, but it's too much trouble to remember where to find it.
She'll call Boone. She has to tell him what's happened. She shuts down the iBook and uncables the phone. Something tells her that it means something, that she isn't calling Parkaboy first, but she chooses to ignore that.
Sends the first of the cell numbers he'd loaded for her on the flight from Tokyo.
"Boone?"
A woman giggles. "Who's calling, please?" In the background she hears Boone say, "Give me that."
Cayce looks at her mug of steaming green tea, remembering the last time she drank green tea, in Hongo, with Boone.
"Cayce Pollard."
"Boone Chu," he says, having taken the phone from the woman.
"It's Cayce, Boone." Remembering the kudzu on the iron roof. Thinking: You said she was in Madrid. "Just checking in."
Marisa.
Damien has a Marina. Someone will turn up with a Marika' soon.
"Good," he says. "News on your end?"
She looks out at traffic passing on the High Street. "No."
"I may be getting somewhere, here. I'll let you know."
"Thanks." Stabbing the button. "I'm sure you are."
A server, apparently noticing Cayce's expression, looks alarmed. Cayce forces a smile, looks down at her bowl. Puts the phone down with exaggerated calm and picks up her chopsticks. "Fuck," she says, under her breath, willing herself to continue eating.
How is it that she still sets herself up for these things? she asks herself.
When the noodles and chicken are gone, and the server's brought more tea, feeling a need to do something for herself, and on her own, she phones Bigend's cell.
"Yes?"
"Cayce, Hubertus. Question."
"Yes?"
"The man from Cyprus. Did Dorotea have a name?"
"Yes. Hold on. Andreas Polakov."
"Hubertus?"
"Yes?"
"Did you just look that up?"
"Yes."
"In what?"
"The transcript of the conversation."
"Did she know you were recording it?"
"Where are you?"
"Don't change the subject."
"I just did. Do you have any news for me?"
"Not yet."
"Boone is in Ohio."
"Yes. I know that. Bye."
She reconnects the phone to the iBook and boots up again. She needs to tell Parkaboy what she's learned, what she's done.
She checks for incoming.
One.
She chokes on her tea, coughing. Almost upsets it across the keyboard.
Forces herself to open it, just open it, as if it were any other e-mail; As if—
Hello! This is very strange mail.
Cayce closes her eyes. When she opens them, the words are still there.
I am in Moscow. I also have lost my father in a bomb. My mother too. How do you have this address? Who are these people you are telling me? Segments, you mean the parts of the work?
And nothing more.
"Yes," she says to the iBook, "yes. The work."
The work.
"CAYCE again, Hubertus. Who do I call for travel?"
"Sylvie Jeppson. At the office. Where are you going?"
"Paris, next Sunday." She's on her third green tea and they're starting to begrudge her the table.
"Why?"
"I'll expain tomorrow. Thanks. Bye."
She calls Blue Ant and is put through to Sylvie Jeppson.
"Do I need a visa for Russia?"
"Yes, you do."
"How long does that take?"
"It depends. If you pay more, they'll do it in an hour. But they tend to leave you sitting in an empty room for an hour beforehand. A sort of Soviet nostalgia thing. But we have an in with their Department of Foreign Affairs."
"We do?"
"We've done some work for them. Quietly. Where are you?"
"Kensington High Street."
"That's convenient. Do you have your passport?"
'Yes."
"Can you meet me in thirty minutes? Five, Kensington Palace Gardens. At Bayswater. Queensway tube's closest. You need three passport-sized photographs."
"Can you do that?"
"Hubertus wouldn't want you to wait. And I know who to speak to, there. But you'll have to hurry. They don't stay open in the afternoon."
LEAVING the visa section of the Russian Consulate, the tall, pale, unflappable Sylvie asks, "When do you want to go?"
"Sunday. In the morning. To Paris."
"That'll be BA, unless you prefer Air France. You wouldn't rather take the train?"
"No, thanks."
"And when to Russia?"
"I don't know yet. It's really just an outside possibility, at this point, but I wanted to have the visa ready. Thank you for your help."
"Anything," says Sylvie, smiling. "I've been told to take extremely good care of you."
"You have."
"I'm taking a cab back to Soho. Like a lift?"
Cayce sees two approaching, both vacant.
"No, thanks. I'm going to Camden."
She lets Sylvie take the first one.
"Aeroflot," she says, when the driver of the second asks where she's going.
"Piccadilly," he says.
She phones Voytek.
"Hello?"
"It's Cayce, Voytek."
"Cayce! Hello!"
"I'm going out of town again. I need to give you Damien's keys. Can you come by the flat? Say four-thirty? I'm sorry for the short notice." She promises herself she'll buy him his scaffolding.
"No problem, Casey!"
"Thanks. See you."
She'll buy the scaffolding with Bigend's card. But she'll use her own, at Aeroflot.
"I've got your participation mystique right here," she says, though whether to Parkaboy, London, or the general or specific mysteries of her life today, she doesn't know.
She sees the cabbie glance at her in his mirror.
33. BOT
- /
Aeroflot flight SU244, departing Heathrow at ten-thirty in the evening, proves to be a Boeing 737, not the Tupolev she'd been hoping for. She's never been to Russia before, and thinks of it primarily in the light of childhood stories of Win's; the world beyond the perimeters of the world he'd been dedicated to protecting; a world of toilet-navigating spy devices and ceaseless duplicity. In her childhood's Russia it's always snowing. Men wear dark furry hats.
She wonders, finding her aisle seat in coach, whether Aeroflot had had to compete to retain the hammer and sickle as its logo, and how exclusive that is. Massive recognition factor. It's a winged version, rendered with considerable delicacy, and she finds it curiously difficult to date: a sort of Victorian Futurist look. She has a neutral reaction to it, she finds, which is a great relief.
National icons are always neutral for her, with the exception of Nazi Germany's, and this not so much from a sense of historical evil (though she certainly has that) as from an awareness of a scary excess of design talent. Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well. Heinzi would have done just fine, back then, but she doubts that even he could have managed a better job of it.