Pattern Recognition

5. WHAT THEY DESERVE

She finds the Children's Crusade just as she remembers it.

Damien's expression for what descends on Camden Town on a Saturday, this shuffling lemming-jam of young people, clogging the High Street from below the station up to Camden Lock.

As she comes up out of the rattling, sighing depths of the station, ascending vertiginous escalators with step grids cut from some pale and grimy heartwood that must be virtually indestructible, the pack starts to thicken and make itself known.

On the sidewalk outside, she is abruptly in it, the crowd stretching away up the High Street like some Victorian engraving of a public hanging or race day.

The facades of the modest retail buildings on either side are encrusted with distorted, oversized representations of vintage airplanes, cowboy boots, a vast six-eyelet Dr. Martens. These all have a slightly queasy handmade quality, as though they've been modeled from carloads of Fimo by the children of giants.

Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the world's leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home.

Nothing at all like the crowd in Portobello; this one is differently driven, flavored with pheromones and the smoke of clove cigarettes and hashish.

Striking a course for the convenient landmark of the Virgin Mega-store, she wonders whether she shouldn't go with the flow and try to put herself on another sort of professional footing today. There is cool to be hunted, here, and she still has clients in New York willing to pay for a Cayce Pollard report on what the early adaptors in this crush are doing, wearing, or listening to. She decides against it. She's technically under contract to Blue Ant, and anyway she's feeling less than motivated. Damien's flat feels like a better idea, and she can reach it, with a minimum of jostling, via the fruit and vegetable stalls in Inverness Street, where she can lay in additional supplies.

This she does, finding fresher produce than the local supermarket offers, and walking home with a transparent pink bag of oranges from either Spain or Morocco.

Damien's flat has no security system, and she's glad of that, as setting off someone's alarm, be it silent or otherwise, is something she's done in the past and has no desire to do again. Damien's keys are as big and solid and nearly as nicely finished as the chunky pound coins: one for the street door, two for the door into the flat.

When she reenters the place, she has a moment's benchmark as to the extent of her ongoing improvement in affect. Most of her soul must already have arrived, she thinks, remembering her predawn horrors; now it's just Damien's place, or a recently redecorated version of Damien's place, and if anything it makes her miss him. If he weren't off scouting a documentary in Russia, they could ford through the Camden crowd and up Primrose Hill.

Her encounter with Voytek and his friends and their little black calculators from Buchenwald, whatever that might have been, seems like last night's dream.

She locks the door and crosses to the Cube, which sits there blank-screened, its illuminated static switches pulsing softly. Damien has cable, so his service is never really off, or not supposed to be. It's time to check in on Fetish:Footage:Forum and see what Parkaboy and Filmy and Mama Anarchia and her other co-obsessives have made of that kiss.

There will be much to catch up on, taking it from the top, getting the drift of things.

Parkaboy is her favorite, on F:F:F. They e-mail when the forum really gets going, and sometimes when it's dead as well. She knows almost nothing about him, other than that he lives in Chicago and, she assumes, is gay. But they know one another's passion for the footage, their doubts and tentative theories, as well as anyone in the world does.

Rather than retype the unbookmarked forum URL, she goes to the browser history.

SEE ASIAN SLUTS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE!

FETISH:FOOTAGE:FORUM

She freezes, hand on mouse, looking at this last logged site.

Then she starts to feel it, that literal folkloric prickle in the scalp.

And she can't, through sheer mental effort, make Asian Sluts and F:F:F reverse their order on the screen. She desperately wants Asian Sluts to be below F:F:F, but it stays where it is. She sits there, unmoving, peering at the browser history the way she once peered at a brown recluse spider in a rose garden in Portland, a drab little thing her host reliably informed her contained enough neurotoxin to kill them both, and horribly.

Damien's flat is suddenly not a friendly place, not familiar at all. It has become a sealed and airless territory in which very bad things might happen. And it has, she now remembers, a second floor, to which, this trip, she has not yet even ascended.

She looks up at the ceiling.

And finds herself remembering the experience of lying more or less happily, or at least pleasantly abstracted, beneath a boyfriend named Donny.

Donny had been more problematic than most other Cayce Pollard boyfriends, and she has come to believe that this had all been signaled in the first place by the fact that he was called Donny. Donny was not something, a woman friend had pointed out, that the men they went out with were usually called. Donny was of Irish-Italian extraction, from East Lansing, and had both a drinking problem and no visible means of support. But Donny was also very beautiful, and sometimes very funny, though not always intentionally, and Cayce had gone through a period of finding herself, though she never really planned to, under Donny, and Donny's big grin, in the none-too-fresh bed in his apartment on Clinton Street, between Rivington and Delancey.

But this final and particular time, watching him phase-shift into what she'd learned to recognize as the run-up to one of his ever-reliable orgasms, she'd for some reason stretched her arms above her head, perhaps even luxuriously, her left hand sliding accidentally under the cockroach-colored veneer of the headboard. Where it encountered something cold and hard and very precisely made. Which she brailled, shortly, into the square butt of an automatic pistol — held there, probably, with tape very similar to the tape she'd used here, this morning, to conceal the hole in her Buzz Rickson's.

Donny, she knew, was left-handed, and had so positioned this so that he could reach it conveniently as he lay in bed.

Some very basic computational module instantly had completed the simplest of equations: if boyfriend sleeps with gun, Cayce does not share bed, or bod, with (now abruptly former) boyfriend.

And so she'd laid there, her fingertip against what she assumed was the checkered hardwood of the gun's grip, and watched Donny take his last ride on that particular pony.

But here, in Camden Town, in Damien's flat, up a narrow flight of stairs, there is a room. It is the room where she's slept on previous visits, and she knows that Damien has now converted it to a home studio, where he indulges his passion for mixing.

Up there, she wonders, now, mightn't there be someone?

The someone who somehow got in here in her absence and idly took a look at those Asian sluts? It seems bizarre, and impossible, and yet horribly, if barely, possible. Or is it all too very possible?

She makes herself look around the room again, and notices the roll of black tape on the carpet. It is upright, as though it had rolled there. And remembers, very clearly, placing it, when she'd finished with it, on its side, so that it wouldn't roll off, on the edge of the trestle table.

Something takes her into the kitchen, then, and she finds herself looking into a drawer containing Damien's kitchen knives. Which are new, and not much used, and probably quite sharp. And, while she is not uncertain that she could defend herself with one of these if required, the idea of introducing sharp edges into the equation seems not entirely a good one. She tries another drawer and finds a square cardboard box of machine parts, heavy-looking and precise and slightly oily, which she assumes are leftovers from the robot girls. One of these, thick and cylindrical, fits neatly and solidly into her hand, squared-off edges just showing at either end of her closed fist. What you can do with a roll of quarters, she remembers, Donny coming in handy after all.

She takes this with her as she mounts the stairs to Damien's home recording studio. Which proves to be just that, and unoccupied, with no hiding places whatever. A futon, narrow and new, that would be her bed if Damien were here.

Back down the stairs.

She goes through the space carefully, holding her breath as she opens both of the two closets. Where there is very little at all, Damien being not a clothes person.

She looks into each of the lower cabinets in the renovated kitchen, and in the space beneath the sink. Where no prowler crouches, but the repo crew have left a big yellow metric measuring tape.

She puts the chain on the locked door to the hallway. It is not much of a chain, by New York standards, and she's lived in New York long enough to put very little trust in chains, regardless. But still.

She examines the windows, all of which are closed, and all but one of which are so thoroughly painted shut that she estimates it would take a carpenter three very expensive hours and a fair number of tools to open one. The one that has been opened, no doubt by that same expensive carpenter, is presently secured by a pair of mirror-world sash bolts, their hidden tongues to be extended and retracted by a sort of key-like wrench or driver, with an oddly shaped head. She has seen these used in London before, and has no idea where Damien keeps his. Since this can only be done from within, and the glass is intact, she rules out the windows as points of entry.

She looks back at the door.

Someone has a key. Two keys, she remembers, for this door, and possibly a third for the street door.

Damien must have a new girlfriend, someone he hasn't mentioned. Or else an old one, someone who's retained the keys. Or a cleaner perhaps, someone who forgot something and returned for it while Cayce was out.

Then she remembers that the keys are new, the locks having been changed after completion of the renovation, causing hers to have had to be FedExed to New York on the eve of her departure. This by Damien's assistant, the one who'd come in to put the place back together. And she remembers this woman on the phone with her in New York, concerned because the keys she'd just sent off were the only set she had, and apologizing that Damien currently had no housecleaner.

She goes into the bedroom and examines her things. Nothing seems to have been disturbed. She remembers an eerily young Sean Connery, in that first James Bond film, using fine clear Scottish spit to paste one of his gorgeous black hairs across the gap between the jamb and the door of his hotel room. Off to the casino, he will know, upon returning, whether or not his space has been violated.

Too late for that.

She goes into the other room and looks at the Cube, which has gone back to sleep, and at the roll of tape on the carpet. The room is clean and simple, semiotically neutral, Damien having charged his decorators, on threat of dismissal, with the absolute avoidance of shelter magazine chic of any kind.

What else is there, here, that might retain information?

The telephone.

On the table beside the computer.

It is an unusually simple mirror-world telephone, none of the usual bells or whistles. It doesn't even have call-display, Damien viewing such things as time-sinks and needless recomplications.

It does, however, have a redial button.

She picks up the handset and looks at it, as though expecting it to speak.

She presses the redial button. Listens to a sequence of mirror-world rings. She is waiting for the voice mail at Blue Ant to pick up, or perhaps a weekend receptionist, because she hasn't used this phone since calling them, Friday morning, to confirm that her car was on the way.

“Lasciate un messaggio, risponderò appena possibile.”

A woman's voice, brisk and impatient.

Tone.

She almost screams. Hangs frantically up. Leave a message. I will reply as soon as I can. Dorotea.