William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

“Yes.”

“Amazing. She had no more idea who the maker actually was than we did, until they revealed it to her in an effort to facilitate her stopping you. But you're dead on your feet, aren't you? I'll see you in the morning.”

“Hubertus? Boone hadn't been able to get anything, in Ohio?”

“No. He got the domain name from your e-mail to Stella. He had the entire address, of course, but nothing he could do with it. By telling you he'd at least learned the domain, in Ohio, he thought he might be able to garner partial credit, with me, after the fact. But in order to move as quickly as he knew we needed to move, he had to tell me the truth, all of it.” He shrugs. “You weren't telling me what you were up to either, but at least you weren't lying to me. How did you get that address, by the way?”

“Through someone with NSA connections. I have absolutely no idea how he got it, and no way to ever find out.”

“I knew I'd picked a winner, as soon as I met you.”

“Do you know where Boone's gone?”

“To Tokyo, I imagine. To that designer girlfriend, the one he stayed with when you were there. Did you meet her?”

“I saw her apartment,” she says, after a pause.

“I think it's all actually about money, for him.” He grimaces. “Ultimately I find that that was the whole problem, with most of the dot-com people. Good night.”

He's gone.

She sits down on the sixties-orange bedspread and opens Wiktor Marchwinska-Wyrwal's white envelope.

It contains, on three pieces of blue bond paper, something that seems to be the précis or closing summation of some longer document. She reads through it quickly, struggling with the translation's peculiarities of syntax, but somehow it won't register.

An account of her father's last morning in New York.

She reads it again.

The third time through, it begins to cohere for her.

Win had come to New York to meet with a rival crowd-safety firm. His patents would be secure, soon, and he'd become unsatisfied with the firm he'd been developing them with. There were potential legal complications inherent in a move, and he had arranged to meet with the president of the rival firm, in their offices at 90 West Street, on the morning of September 11, to discuss this.

He had, as the Mayflower bellman had always maintained, gotten a cab.

Cayce sits looking at the license number of that cab now, at the Cambodian driver's name, his registration, telephone.

The collision had occurred in the Village, the cab pulling south into Christopher.

Minor damage to the cab, more damage to the other vehicle, a caterer's van. The driver of the cab, whose English was minimal, had been at fault.

And she herself, headed downtown by train, to arrive early for her own meeting — how close might she have passed? And had he seen the towers, as he'd climbed from the cab, the morning beautiful and clear?

He'd handed the cabdriver five dollars and gotten into an off-duty limo, the Cambodian anxiously copying the limo's plate number. He knew that Win, his fare, would know that he had been at fault.

In court, the driver had lied, successfully, and gotten off, and then he'd lied again to the police, when they'd interviewed cabbies, looking for Win, and again to the detectives Cayce had hired. He'd picked up no fare at the Mayflower. He hadn't seen the man in the picture.

Cayce looks at the name of the Dominican driver of the limo. More numbers. The name, address, and telephone number of his widow, in the Bronx.

The limo had been excavated from rubble, three days later, the driver with it.

He had been alone.

There was still no evidence, the unknown and awkwardly translated writer concluded, that Win was dead, but there was abundant evidence placing him on or near the scene. Additional inquiries indicated that he had never arrived at 90 West.

The petal falling from the dried rose.

Someone raps lightly on the door.

She gets up stiffly, unthinking, and opens it, the blue papers in her hand.

“Party time,” says Parkaboy, holding up a liter bottle of water. “Remembered I hadn't told you the tap's a bad bet.” His smile fades. “What's up?”

“I'm reading about my father. I'd like some water, please.”

“Did they find him?” He knows the story of Win's disappearance from their correspondence. He goes into the bathroom and she hears him pouring water into a tumbler. He comes back out and hands it to her.

“No.” She drinks, splutters, starts to cry, stops herself. “Volkov's people tried to find him, and got a lot further than we ever did. But he's not here,” she holds up the blue sheets, “he's not here either.” And then she starts to cry again, and Parkaboy puts his arms around her and holds her.

“You're going to hate me,” he says, when she stops crying. She looks up at him.

“Why?”

“Because I want to know what Volkov's Polish spin doctor gave you as a souvenir. Looks to me like it might be a set of steak knives.”

“Asshole,” she says. Sniffs.

“Aren't you going to open it?”

She puts the crumpled blue report down and explores the beige envelope's flap, which she finds is secured with two tiny gold-plated snaps. She lifts it, works the fabric back.

A Louis Vuitton slim-line attaché, its gold-plated clasps gleaming. She stares at it.

“You'd better open it,” says Parkaboy.

She does, exposing, in tightly packed rows, white-banded sheaves of crisp new bills.

“What's that?”

“Hundreds. Brand-new, sequentially numbered. Probably five thousand of them.”

“Why?”

“They like round numbers.”

“I mean why is it here?”

“It's for you.”

“I don't like it.”

“We can put it on eBay. Somebody in Miami might want it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The briefcase. It's not your style.”

“I don't know what to do with it.”

“Let's talk about it in the morning. You need to get some sleep.”

“This is absurd.”

“It's Russia.” He grins at her. “Who gives a shit? We found the maker.”

She looks at him. “We did, didn't we?”

He leaves her the water.

She uses one fingertip to gingerly close the case, then drapes it with its beige dustcover. Carries the water into the bathroom to rinse with after she's brushed her teeth.

Sitting on the bed, she removes the slippers, seeing that her left foot has bled slightly, through its bandages. Her ankles look swollen. She takes off the cardigan, rolls Skirt Thing over her head, and tosses them both over the attaché and its obscene tray of cash.

She turns down the bed, turns off the light, and limps back, crawling in and pulling the orange spread and the coarse sheets up to her chin. They smell the way sheets can smell at the start of cabin season, if they haven't been aired.

She lies there, staring up into the dark, hearing the distant drone of a plane.

“They never got you, did they? I know you're gone, though.” His very missingness becoming, somehow, him.

Her mother had once said that when the second plane hit, Win's chagrin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist. She doesn't believe it, but now she finds it makes her smile.

“Good night,” she says to the dark.

My brother, up to his knees in dirty old pipe in Prion's gallery, sends loud and most amazed thanks. I told him you said it had been given to you by Russian gangsters and you didn't want to keep it, and he just stared at me, mouth open. (Then he becomes worried that it is not real, but Ngemi often accepts cash from American collectors and helped him with that.) But really it's absurdly good of you, because it looked as if he would have to give up his “studio” (ugh) and move in with me, in order to pay for it, the scaffolding, and he is filthy, a pig, leaving hairs. Of course it is much more than cost of the scaffolding but he is using the rest to rent a huge plasma display for the show. We are locking down date of opening with Prion now and you absolutely must come. Prion now has some connection with a Russian yogurt drink that is about to launch here, purchased I think by the Japanese. I know because it is part of my briefing for work now, this drink. Also because he has it in a cooler at the gallery — revolting! I think he will try to serve it at the opening but absolutely NO! So mystery Internet movie is out, yogurt drink is in, also some Russian oil magnate: how surprisingly cultured he is, “alternative,” a sort of Saatchi-like patron figure, nothing nouveau riche or mafia or otherwise foul. This is what they are paying me to spread now in the clubs. O well. In the day I still make hats. Enjoy Paris!