"It's beautiful," his offer finally giving her a context for this baffling exchange: These men are dealers, come here to do business in these things. "But I wouldn't know what to do with it."
"You've had me out for nothing, you silly cunt," snarls the gray man, snatching the thing from the black one's hands, but Cayce knows that it's the black man this is meant for, not her. He looks, just then, like a scary portrait of Samuel Beckett on a book she owned in college. His nails are black-edged and there are deep orangey-brown stains of nicotine on his long fingers. He turns with the calculator and bends over the open trunk, to furiously repack the black, grenade-like machines.
Hobbs," the black man says, and sighs, "you lack all patience. She will come. Please wait."
Bugger," says Hobbs, if that's his name, closing a cardboard box and spreading the old sweater over it with a quick, practiced, weirdly mater-nal gesture, like a mother adjusting the blanket over a sleeping child. He bangs the lid down and tugs at it, checking to see that it's closed. "Waste my bloody time…" He hauls the driver-side door open with a startling creak.
She glimpses filthy mouse-colored upholstery and an overflowing ashtray that protrudes from the dash like a little drawer.
"She will come, Hobbs," the black man protests, but without much force.
The one called Hobbs folds himself into the driver's seat, yanks the door shut, and glares at them through the dirty side window. The car's engine starts with an antique, asthmatic shudder, and he puts it into gear, still glaring, and pulls away, toward Portobello. At the next corner, the gray car turns right, and is gone.
"He is a curse to know, that man," says the black man. "Now she will come, and what am I to tell her?" He turns to Cayce. "You disappointed him. He thought that you were her."
"Who?"
"The buyer. Agent for a Japanese collector," the blond boy says to Cayce. "Is not your fault." He has those straight-across cheekbones she thinks of as Slavic, the open look that comes with them, and the sort of accent that comes with learning English here but not yet too thoroughly. "Ngemi," indicating the black man, "is only upset."
"Well then," Cayce ventures, "goodbye." And starts toward Portobello. A middle-aged woman opens a green-painted door and steps out in black leather jeans, her large dog on a lead. The appearance of this Netting Hill matron feels to Cayce as though it frees her from a spell. She quickens her stride.
But hears footsteps behind her. And turns to see the blond boy with his flapping pouch, hurrying to catch up.
The black man is nowhere to be seen.
"I walk with you, please," he says, drawing even with her and smiling, as if delighted to offer her this favor. "My name is Voytek Biroshak."
"Call me Ishmael," she says, walking on.
"A girl's name?" Eager and doglike beside her. Some species of weird nerd innocence that somehow she accepts.
"No. It's Cayce."
"Case?"
"Actually," she finds herself explaining, "it should be pronounced 'Casey, like the last name of the man my mother named me after. But I don't."
"Who is Casey?"
"Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach."
"Why does she, your mother?"
"Because she's a Virginian eccentric. Actually she's always refused to talk about it." Which is true.
"And you are doing here?" /
"The market. You?" Still walking.
"Same."
"Who were those men?"
"Ngemi sells to me ZX 81."
"Which is?"
"Sinclair ZX 81. Personal computer, circa 1980. In America, was Timex 1000, same."
"Ngemi's the big one?"
Dealing in archaic computer, historic calculator, since 1997. Has shop in Bermondsey."
"Your partner?"
"No. Arrange to meet." He lightly slaps the pouch at his side and plastic rattles. "ZX 81."
But he was here to sell those calculators?"
"The Curta. Wonderful, yes? Ngemi and Hobbs hope for combined sale, Japanese collector. Difficult, Hobbs. Always."
"Another dealer?"
"Mathematician. Brilliant sad man. Crazy for Curta, but cannot afford. Buys and sells."
"Didn't seem very pleasant." Cayce puts her facility with entirely left-field conversations down to her career of actual on-the-street cool-hunting, such as it's been, and as much as she hates to call it that. She's done a bit, too. She's been dropped into neighborhoods like Dogtown, which birthed skateboarding, to explore roots in hope of finding whatever the next thing might be. And she's learned it's largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She's met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question. She's that good. "What does this ZX 81 look like?"
He stops, rummages in his pouch, and produces a rather tragic-looking rectangle of scuffed black plastic, about the size of a videocas-sette. It has one of those stick-on keypads that somehow actually work, something Cayce knows from the cable boxes in the sort of motel where guests might be expected to try to steal them.
"That's a computer?"
"One K of RAM!"
"One?"
They've come out into a street called Westbourne Grove now, with a sprinkling of trendy retail, and she can see a crowd down at the intersection with Portobello. "What do you do with them?"
"Is complicated."
"How many do you have?"
"Many."
"Why do you like them?"
"Of historical importance to personal computing," he says seriously, "and to United Kingdom. Why there are so many programmers, here."
"Why is that?"
But he excuses himself, stepping into a narrow laneway where a battered van is being unloaded. Some quick exchange with a large woman in a turquoise raincoat and he is back, tucking two more of the things into his pouch.
Walking on, he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek's opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them. "Like hackers in Bulgaria," he adds, obscurely.
"But if Timex sold it in the United States," she asks him, "why didn't we get the programmers?"
'You have programmers, but America is different. America wanted Nintendo. Nintendo gives you no programmers. Also, on launch of product in America, RAM-expansion unit did not ship for three months. People buy computer, take it home, discover it does almost nothing. A disaster."
Cayce is pretty certain that England wanted Nintendo too, and got it, and probably shouldn't be looking too eagerly forward to another bumper crop of programmers, if Voytek's theory holds true. "I need coffee," she says.
He leads her into a ramshackle arcade at the corner of Portobello and Westbourne Grove. Past small booths where Russians are laying out their stocks of spotty old watches, and down a flight of stairs, to buy her a cup of what turns out to be the "white" coffee of her childhood visits to England, a pre-Starbucks mirror-world beverage resembling weak instant bulked up with condensed milk and industrial-strength sugar. It makes her think of her father, leading her through the London Zoo when she was ten.
They sit on folding wooden chairs that look as though they date from the Blitz, taking tentative sips of their scalding white coffee.
But she sees that there is a Michelin Man within her field of vision, its white, bloated, maggot-like form perched on the edge of a dealer's counter, about thirty feet away. It is about two feet tall, and is probably meant to be illuminated from within.