Ragged, browning palms lean on either side of an entrance ornately roofed with Japanese tiles, echoed by a pair of decaying stucco columns supporting nothing at all. One of these seems to have had its top gnawed off by something enormous. Turning to him. “What is it?”
“A prewar apartment building. Most of them went in the firebombing. Seventy units in this one. Communal toilets. Public bathhouse a block away.”
The balconies, she guesses, following him, are racks for airing bedding. They pass a dense low shrubbery of bicycles, climb three broad concrete steps, and enter a tiny foyer floored with shiny turquoise vinyl. Cooking smells she can’t identify.
Up a poorly lit flight of bare wooden stairs and along a corridor so narrow that she has to walk behind him. A single fluorescent tube flickers, somewhere ahead. He stops and she hears the rattle of keys. He opens a door, reaches for a light switch, and steps aside. Cayce steps in and finds herself trying to remember Win’s clever neurological explanation of déjà vu.
Strange but somehow familiar, the lighting consists of a few clear glass bulbs with dim, faintly orange filaments: reproduction Edison bulbs. Their light is inefficient, magical. Furniture low and somehow like the building itself: worn, strangely comforting, still in use.
He comes in behind her and closes the door, which is featureless and modern and white. She sees his little reddish-brown suitcase open on a low central table, his phones set out beside it and the laptop’s screen up but dark. “Who lives here?”
“Marisa. A friend of mine. She designs fabrics. She’s in Madrid now.” He crosses to a crowded kitchen alcove and flicks on a much brighter, whiter sort of light. She sees a pink Sanyo rice cooker on a small counter, and a narrow white plastic freestanding appliance connected to transparent tubing. A dishwasher? “I’ll make tea.” Filling a kettle from a bottle of water.
She walks to one of two sliding paper windows inset with central panes of partially frosted glass. Through the clear sections she looks out at gently sloping rooftops that seem, impossibly, to be partially covered in knee-deep moss, but then she sees that this is something like the kudzu on Win’s farm in Tennessee. No, she corrects herself, it probably is kudzu. Kudzu where it comes from. Kudzu at home.
The rooftops, in the light from surrounding windows, are corrugated iron, rusted a rich and uneven brown. A large tan insect strobes through the communal patch of light, vanishes. “This is an amazing place,” she says.
“There aren’t many left.” Rattling canisters in a search for tea.
She slides the window open. She hears the kettle coming to a boil.
“Do you know Dorotea Benedetti?”
“No,” he says.
“She works for Heinzi and Pfaff, the graphics people. She deals with Blue Ant for them. I think she had someone get into Damien’s apartment for her. They used his computer.”
“How do you know?”
She walks over to what she guesses was originally a storage alcove for bedding. This one has been converted into something closer to a Western closet. A woman’s clothes are hung there, along a wooden pole, and they make her feel somehow self-conscious. If there were a door, she’d close it. “Whoever did it called her from Damien’s phone. I redialed and heard her voice-mail message.” And she tells him the story then: Dorotea, the Rickson’s, Asian Sluts.
By the time she’s finished, they’re sitting cross-legged on cushions on the tatami, the kitchen light off, drinking green tea he pours from an earthenware pot. “So it might be that our Italians here aren’t about the fact that you’re working for Bigend, or about the footage,” he says. “The break-in predated that.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it a break-in,” she says. “Nothing broken. I don’t know how they got in.”
“A key-gun, if they were pros. Nothing you’d notice. You wouldn’t have noticed anyway, if they hadn’t used your browser and your phone. Neither of which is entirely professional, but we’ll let that pass. And Bigend told you she’d worked for someone in Paris who’d done industrial espionage?”
“Yes. But he thought she had it in for me because she assumed he was going to offer me a job she wants, at Blue Ant London.”
“And you didn’t tell him about the jacket, or your apartment?”
“No.”
“And our boys speak Italian. But we don’t know whether they were here to begin with, or whether they were sent here. They weren’t on our flight, I’m sure of that. I watched them watch you, today. Hard to say if they know the city or not. They had a car and a Japanese driver.”
She studies his face in the glow of the bamboo filaments, the Edison bulbs. “Dorotea knows something about me,” she says. “Something very personal. A phobia. Something that only my parents, my therapist, a few close friends would know. That worries me.”
“Could you tell me what it is?”
“I’m allergic. To certain trademarks.”
“Trademarks?”
“Since I was a kid. It’s the downside of my ability to judge the market’s response to new logo designs.” She feels herself blushing, and hates that.
“Can you give me an example?”
“The Michelin Man, for one. There are others. Some are more contemporary. It’s not something I’m very comfortable talking about, actually.”
“Thank you,” he says, very seriously. “You don’t need to. Do you think Dorotea knows about this?”
“I know she does.” She tells him about the second meeting, Bibendum, the doll hung from Damien’s doorknob.
He frowns, says nothing, pours more tea. Looks at her. “I think you’re right.”
“Why?”
“Because she knows something about you, something she couldn’t easily have found out. But she has. That means someone’s gone to a lot of trouble. And she was the one who pulled that image out of the envelope and showed it to you. Then she left the doll, or had someone leave it. But I think the doll was supposed to help make you go away, back to New York. But you didn’t, and then I turned up, and now we’re both here, and my guess is that the men who were watching you are working for her.”
“Why?”
“Unless we can find them, which isn’t very likely now, and convince them to tell what they know, which very likely isn’t much, I have no idea. And less idea who she might be working for. Will you let me have a look at your computer now?”
She gets the iBook out of the bag, where it lies on the matting beside her, and passes it to him. He puts it on the low table beside his own and takes a neatly coiled cable from his suitcase. “Don’t mind me. I can do this and talk.”
“Do what?”
“I want to make sure this isn’t sending your every keystroke to a third party.”
“Can you do that?”
“These days? Not absolutely.” Now both computers are cabled together, and on, and she watches as he turns to his and inserts a CD-ROM. “Things have been different in computer security, since last September. If the FBI were doing what they admit they can do, to your laptop, I might be able to spot it. If they were doing what they don’t tell you they can do, that would be another story. And that’s just the FBI.”
“The FBI?”
“Just an example. Lots of people are doing lots of different things, now, and not all of them are American, or government agencies. The ante’s been upped right across the board.” He does things to her keyboard, watching his screen.
“Whose apartment is this?”
“Marisa’s. I told you.”
“And Marisa is?”
He looks up. “My ex.”
She’d known that, somehow, and hadn’t liked it, and doesn’t like it that she doesn’t like it.
“Just friends now,” he says, and looks back to the screen.
She raises her hand and opens it, palm out, exposing Taki’s number. “So what can you do with this?”
He looks up. Seems to brighten. “Find the company that did the watermarking, if it was done by a company. Then see w
hat we can find out from them. If they’ve marked each segment, there should be an account. The client would be that much closer to your maker.”
“Would they tell you?”
“No. That’s not the same as my finding out, though.”
She lets him work, and sips her tea, and looks around at the eight-mat apartment in the amber glow of the Edison bulbs, and wonders, though she doesn’t want to, about the woman who lives here.
She has a lump on her forehead, and the fabulous fanny stuff is probably a disaster now, and she wants to find a well-lit mirror and check the damage, but she doesn’t.
She doesn’t feel tired, though, or lagged, mirrored-out, or anything at all. Whatever else is going on, she seems to have graduated to a more serious league of soul-displacement. Wherever her serotonin levels are, right now, it’s like she lives there.
19.
INTO THE MYSTIC
The night security man at her hotel looks like a younger, slightly less approachable version of Beat Takeshi, the Japanese actor whose existential gangster films have been the favorites of two former boyfriends. Ferociously upright and tightly buttoned into an immaculate black blazer, he leads her into the elevator and up to her room.
She’s told them at the desk that she’s left her key in the room, and so is accompanied there by this stern man, who produces his own key, a real metal one, sturdily chained to his belt, and unlocks her door. He opens it for her, turns on the lights, and gestures her in.
“Thank you. Just a moment, please, while I find my key.” Actually it’s in the pocket of her Rickson’s, ready to be palmed when needed, but she checks the bathroom, the closet, glances behind the black furniture, then notices a large gray carrier bag, with the Blue Ant logo on the side, at the foot of her bed. She kneels to look under the bed, discovers that it isn’t the kind you can look under, and comes up, still kneeling, with the key, a plastic mag-strip card, in her hand. “I’ve found it. Thank you very much.”
He bows and goes, closing the door behind him. She locks and chains it. Just to be sure, she manages to scoot the large black armchair close enough that the door can be only partially opened. This hurts her neck. She resists the urge to curl up, there, and become unconscious. Instead she goes back to the bed and looks in the Blue Ant bag. It contains, carefully folded in black tissue, an unworn black Rickson’s MA-1. The morning seems a very long time ago.
She becomes aware of the smell of Tiger Balm from her own Rickson’s. She stuffs the new one back into its bag, removes the Luggage Label bag, and undresses.
In the bathroom mirror, clinically illuminated, her forehead looks only lightly bruised. The remains of the fabulous fanny job, she thinks, have come to resemble the first attempts of a trainee mortician. She unwraps a bar of soap, reminds herself not to use the hotel’s shampoo, which will have the wrong pH for gaijin hair, remembers to carefully copy Taki’s number from her palm onto a Park Hyatt notepad, and shuts herself in the glass-walled shower, which is approximately the size of Boone’s girlfriend’s kitchen in Hongo.
Feeling much cleaner, if no less exhausted, she wraps herself in a terry robe and checks the room-service menu, deciding on a small pizza and a side of mashed potatoes. Non-Japanese comfort food.
The pizza turns out to be very good, though very Japanese, but the potatoes are amazing, a Rickson’s-like super-simulacrum of a Western classic. She’s also ordered two bottles of Bikkle, opening her second as she finishes the potatoes.
She needs to check her e-mail. She needs to phone Pamela Mainwaring about getting out of here as soon as possible. And really she should phone Parkaboy.
She slugs back her Bikkle and plugs her iBook into the room’s dataport.
One e-mail. As it pops up in her in-box she sees that it’s from Parkaboy.
Wondrous Strange
She opens it. There is an attachment titled WS.jpg.
No rest for the wicked. After e-mailing us, or rather Keiko, from two separate cafes, as soon as Taki got home he sent the attached.
She clicks on the jpeg.
A map. A broken T scribed with city streets and strings of numbers. It reminds her of a steak’s T-bone, the upright tapering raggedly, the left cross-arm truncated. Within its outline are avenues, squares, circles, a long rectangle suggesting a park. The background is pale blue, the T-bone gray, the lines black, the numbers red.
If Taki was in love before, he is now in lust. Or maybe the other way around. But in his new frenzy of adoration and desire to please, he has sent this, which he explains to Keiko is the latest from Mystic. Darryl, who has otaku DNA himself, is convinced that Taki is not a member of this Mystic, but a peripheral character of some kind—possibly, since he designs games for a Japanese phone system, one of their sources of information. Darryl says that the highest level of play, for techno-obsessives, is always and purely about information itself, and he thinks that Mystic may have battened on the footage not in a footagehead way but simply for the sake of solving a puzzle that no one else has solved. He posits a cell of professional info-theorists, of some kind, who are also, in this ultimate otaku sense, info-junkies. Perhaps employed in the R&D arm of one or more large corporations. Perhaps they need something that Taki knows. It doesn’t matter, really, since Taki seems somehow to have reversed the flow of data, and the psychosexual cruise missile that is Judy, tweaked, has found its mark. To save you the trouble of counting them, there are one hundred and thirty-five numbers, here, each number consisting of three groups of four digits.
Her scalp prickles. She gets up, goes into the bathroom, returns with the notepad.
8304 6805 2235
She puts the pad beside her iBook and peers into the red cloud cover of numbers partially masking the T-city.
There it is. The streets directly beneath it are small and twisted, down toward the bottom of the peninsula that forms the T’s upright. Although, she reminds herself, she has no reason to believe this the representation of any island, actual or imaginary. It might be a T-shaped segment extracted from some larger map. Though the streets, if they are streets, align with its borders. . . .
Remember the whiteout, when they kiss? As though something explodes, overhead? If you’ve been following F:F:F you’ll know that that set off major Blitz reverb in our British posters. Various proofs that our story is set in London in the 40s, none ultimately convincing. But that whiteout. Blank screen. Taki says that “Mystic” decrypted this graphic from that whiteness. As to how blankness can yield image, I do not pretend to know, though I suppose that is the question, ultimately, that underlies the entire history of art. Nonetheless, where are we, with this thing? If each segment is watermarked with one of these numbers, then the action in each segment seems to be mapped here, and we have, for the first time, a geography of sorts, and possibly, if we knew the numbers for each segment, a formal order. (I’ve entered them all in a database and don’t see that they are sequential. Suspect random generation and/or random assignment.) Darryl is looking into a graphics bot that only searches maps. Meanwhile, exhausted, baffled, but unhealthily excited, I remain, Parkaboy.
She stares at the T-bone city. She phones Pamela Mainwaring.
20.
UBER-BONES
Her watch wakes her, chirping mercilessly. She sits up in the huge bed, uncertain where she is.
Six in the morning. Pamela Mainwaring has her on a flight out of Narita just after noon.
She makes sure the red light is on, on the oversized kettle-analog, wraps herself in last night’s white robe, goes to the window, powers open the drapes, and dimly discovers Tokyo at the bottom of an aquarium of rainy light. Gust-driven moisture shotguns the glass. The lavish lichen of the wooded palace grounds tosses darkly.
Her cell rings. She goes back to the bed, roots through the covers, finding it.
“Hello?”
“Boone. How’s your head?”
“Tired. I called Pamela . . .”
“I know. So did I. I’ll meet you in the lobby at eight
-thirty. JR reservations for both of us.”
Something about a lack of autonomy here that bothers her.
“See you,” he says.
The water reaching boil as she’s rummaging through the snacks atop the minibar, looking for a shrink-wrapped filter-coffee unit.
THE hotel’s fitness center, a room so large that it seems designed primarily to illustrate interior perspective, has its own Pilates reformer, a faux-classical Japanese interpretation in black-lacquered wood, upholstered with something that looks like sharkskin. She’s able to get in her workout, then shower and wash her hair, pack, and make the lobby by eight-thirty.
Boone arrives minutes later, in his black horsehide coat, carrying his small leather suitcase and one of those Filson outfitter bags that look like L.L. Bean on steroids.
She picks up her own black generic Korean nylon and they walk out, past the bamboo grove and into the elevator.
SHE wakes to the offer of a hot washcloth. For an instant believes she’s still on her way to Tokyo, and that it’s all been a dream.
This is terrifying, and she hurts her neck, so quickly does she crane around, to find that Boone Chu is in fact in the nearest seat-nest, in full recline and apparently asleep, looking as strangely canceled as anyone does when wearing a black blindfold.
They hadn’t had much to say to each other, on the train to Narita. She’d slept in the lounge, after security measures including a sort of CAT scan for their shoes and answering questions in front of an infrared device that registered minute changes in the temperature of the skin around the eyes, the theory being that lying about having packed one’s own bag induced a sort of invisible and inevitable micro-blush. Though the Japanese also believe that personality is determined by blood type, or had when she was last here. Boone had been impressed, though, and had told her to expect the blush machines soon in America.
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