Pattern Recognition

26. SIGINT

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.

“The provenance,” Ngemi assures her, “is immaculate, the price high, but, I believe, reasonable. A huge thing, one of the early dedicated word processors. Shipping alone will require the funds I had earmarked for the scaffolding, and more.”

Cayce nods.

“And now I must deal with Hobbs Baranov,” Ngemi continues, less happily, “and he is in one of his moods.”

If he hadn't been, when I saw him, Cayce thinks, I wouldn't want to see him when he was.

“Hobbs wanted his share of the Curta sale in order to bid on a very rare piece that went up for auction in Den Haag this past Wednesday. A factory prototype of the earliest Curta, exhibiting a peculiar, possibly unique variation in the mechanism. It went to a Bond Street dealer instead, and for not a bad price. Hobbs will be difficult, when I see him.”

“But you've sold his, as well, haven't you?”

“Yes, but once anything's in Bond Street, it's beyond the reach of mere mortals. Even Hobbs Baranov. Too dear.”

Magda, who's been working her way through the retsina a little more determinedly than the rest of them, makes a bitter face. “This man is appalling. You should have nothing to do with him. If that is what American spies are like, they are worse even than the Russians they defeated!”

“He was never a spy,” Ngemi says, somberly, lowering his glass. “A cryptographer. A mathematician. If the Americans were as heartless, or as efficient, as people imagine them, they would never leave poor Hobbs to drink himself to death in a leaking caravan.”

Cayce, feeling neither particularly heartless nor very efficient, asks: “What would they do, then, if they were?”

Ngemi, about to put a forkful of the remaining calamari into his mouth, pauses. “I suppose,” he says, “they would kill him.”

Cayce, having been raised to some extent within the ghostly yet in her experience remarkably banal membrane of the American intelligence community has her own set of likelihood-filters when it comes to these things. Win had never, as far as she knew, been an intelligence officer in his own right, but he had known and worked with them. He had shared a certain experiential core with them, partaking in his own way of the secret world and its wars. And very little Cayce ever hears of that world, as described by those with even less a sense of it than her own, sounds like anything but fantasy. “Actually,” she tells them, “it's sort of traditional to let them drink themselves to death.”

Something about her tone stops the conversation, which she hadn't intended. “What did you mean, in a caravan?” she asks Ngemi, to end the silence.

Win had lived long enough to bury a number of his colleagues, none of them, as far as she knew, felled by anything more sinister than stress and overwork, and perhaps by a species of depression engendered by too long and too closely observing the human soul from certain predictable but basically unnatural angles.

“He lives in a little trailer,” Ngemi says. “Squats, really. Near Poole.”

“But he has a bloody pension from the CIA,” protests Magda. “I don't believe this caravan! And he buys those Curta things, they cost fortunes. He's hiding something. Secrets.” Drinking deep of her retsina.

“NSA,” Ngemi corrects her. “Disability pension, I imagine, though I'd certainly never ask him. He has perhaps ten thousand pounds in net worth, I believe. Most of it, at any given time, in calculators. No fortune. Not even enough to keep them, really. A collector, he must buy, but a poor man, he must sell.” Ngemi sighs. “It is that way for many people, not least myself.”

But Magda isn't having it. “He's a spy. He sells secrets. Voytek told me.”

Flustered, her brother looks from Cayce to Ngemi, back to Cayce. “Not a spy. Not government secrets. You should not say this, Magda.”

“Then what does he sell?” Cayce asks.

“Sometimes,” Voytek says, lowering his voice slightly, “I think he locates information for people.”

“He's a spy!” declares Magda, gleefully.

Voytek winces.

“He perhaps has retained certain connections,” Ngemi qualifies, “and can find certain things out. I imagine there are men in the City…” His wide black brow creases with seriousness. “Nothing illegal, one hopes. Old-boy networks are something one understands, here. One doesn't ask. We assume Hobbs has his own, still.”

“Sig-int,” Magda says, triumphantly. “Voytek says he sells sig-int.” Voytek stares gloomily at his glass.

SIGINT, Cayce knows. Signals intelligence.

She decides to change the subject. Whatever this is about, it's detracting from what pleasure she's able to take in the evening.

AFTER leaving the restaurant, they stop at a crowded pub near the station. Cayce, remembering from college that retsina is not a good mix with any other species of alcohol, orders a half shandy and leaves most of it.

Sensing that the patronage-hustle is probably about to be more overtly launched in her direction, she opts for preemptive action. “I hope you find a backer soon, Voytek. I'm sure you will. It makes me wish I had that sort of money myself, but I don't.”

As she'd somehow expected, they all glance at one another.

It's Ngemi who decides to have a shot. “Is your employer perhaps in a position to —”

“I couldn't ask. Haven't been there long enough.” Thinking, however, not of Bigend but of his credit card, in her wallet. She could indeed buy Voytek's load of rusty scaffolding for him. She will, she decides, if it looks like nothing else is going to turn up. Let Dorotea's Russians, who she isn't quite sure she believes in, figure that one out.