38. PUPPENKOPH

- /

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 blase 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 Hermes 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 cafe 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, tuins, 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 negoti-ated security 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 Per-rier 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.