Pattern Recognition

She turns back to the room: more autumnal murkiness and a mud-dark bedspread. A nagging low-level dissonance, as though everything was designed by someone who'd been looking at a picture of a Western hotel room from the eighties, but without ever having seen even one example of the original. The bathroom is tiled in three shades of brown (though none, she's thankful, East German) with a shower, a bathtub, a bidet and toilet, each with its own paper ba

There is a sign on the desk inviting her to use her laptop from her room, or, if she prefers, to visit the BISNIZ SENTR in the lobby.

She gets out the iBook and cables it to the socket beside the desk. If what she remembers Pamela Mamwaring having said about her phone is right, that'll probably work here, but she's not sure. It's already occurred to her that she hasn't given the cell number to her latest and most mysterious correspondent, and she wonders if there isn't something subconscious going on, there. The link is slow, but finally she gets to hotmail.

Two.

Parkaboy and stellanor.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out as slowly as she Can.

You are in Zamoskvareche, it means across Moskow river from Kremlin, district of old apartments, churches. Hotel is on Bolshaya Yaki-manka street, it means little Yakimanka. If you will follow Bolshaya Yakimanka toward Kremlin, see map I have made, you will cross Bol-shoy Kame

"Fish," says Cayce.

Yeah well sure yes I do indeed want to know EVERYTHING and preferably yesterday but you are probably in the air and anyway that number you gave me has this really a

34. ZAMOSKCVARECH

- /

But she doesn't phone Parkaboy. She's too excited, too anxious.

But this is a dressy city, in some way she wouldn't care for if she were to be here very long, so she changes into her Parco outfit, and even tries her luck with the makeup the Tokyo spa issued her. The result, she suspects, would have the spa girls trying not to laugh, but at least it's evident she's wearing makeup. She could probably be mistaken, she decides, for the correspondent for some obscure sub-NPR cultural radio operation. Definitely not television.

Making sure she has the room's magnetic key, she puts on her Rick-son's, shoulders the Luggage Label bag containing iBook and phone, and finds her way back to the mini-lobby fronting the elevator banks. A uniformed woman sits there, she assumes, twenty-four hours a day, beneath an enormous arrangement of flowers and dried leaves. Cayce nods to her, but she doesn't nod back.

There is a large window between the two elevators, draped ceiling to floor in nubby ocher fabric. Beside this is an upright glass cooler stocked with champagne, mineral water, what must be several exceptionally well-chilled bottles of burgundy, and much Pepsi. Waiting for the elevator, Cayce edges the ocher nubbiness aside and sees ancient-looking apartment buildings, white spires, and one amazing crenellated orange-and-turquoise bell tower. In the deeper distance, golden onion domes.

This, she decides, is the direction she's going now.

No one at all in the vast main lobby, not even a girl in green boots.

She finds her way out, past the security cave with its wide boys in

Kevlar, and tries to walk around the block, so that she'll be headed in the direction of those onion domes.

And is lost, almost immediately. But doesn't mind, as she's only out here to walk off an excess of nerves. And at some point, she reminds herself, to phone Parkaboy.

But why is she hesitating to do that? The reason, she admits, is that she knows she'll have to tell him about Bigend, and Boone, and the rest of it, and she's afraid to, afraid of what he might say. But if she doesn't, their friendship, which she values deeply, will start to cease to feel genuine.

She stops, staring at the streetscape of this old residential neighborhood, and is acutely aware of her mind doing the but-really-it's-like thing it does when presented with serious cultural novelty: but really it's like Vie

She wanders on, feeling like a child anxiously playing hooky, occasionally glancing up in case she finds the golden onions, until her phone starts to ring.

Feeling guilty, she answers. "Yes?"

"Everything. Now."

"I was just going to call you."

"Have you met him?"

"No."

"Are you going to?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"This evening, five o'clock, in either a restaurant or a coffee bar, I'm not sure."

"You can't meet him in Starbucks."

"It's not a Starbucks. I'm not sure they even have Starbucks."

"They will."

"Parkaboy?" It feels strange, to say his name. His handle, really. Suddenly it feels stranger still to remember that she doesn't know his name.

"Yes?"

"I have to tell you something."

A pause, on his end. "You're carrying our child."

"This is serious—"

"I'll say. It's probably an Internet first."

"No. I'm working for somebody."

"I thought you were working for that lethally pomo ad agency."

"I'm working for someone who has an interest in finding the maker. Someone who's backing me. That was how I could afford to go to Tokyo, and meet with Taki."

"So? Who?"

"Do you know who Hubertus Bigend is?"

"Spelled 'big,' and 'end'?"

"Yes."

"Founder and owner of said agency?"

"Yes."

"'Bullshit baffles brains' taken to new levels in the celebrity interview?"