"It's already valuable. More valuable than you could imagine. The commercial part would simply be branding, franchising. And they're on to it, Stella. Or at least one of them is, and he's very clever. I know because I work for him."
"You do?"
"Yes, but I've decided that I won't tell him I found you. I won't tell him who you are or where you are, or who Nora is, or anything else I've learned here. I won't be working for him, now. But others will, and they'll find you, and you have to be ready."
"How, ready?"
"I don't know. I'll try to figure that out."
"Thank you," Stella says. "It gives me pleasure, that you have seen my sister work." /
"Thank you."
They hug, Stella kissing her on the cheek.
"Your driver is waiting."
"Send him away, please. I need to walk. To feel the city. And I haven't seen the Metro."
Stella produces a phone from her gray skirt and pushes a key. Says something in Russian.
- /
She finds herself on crowded Arbat.
Leaving the squat behind Georgievsky, she'd drifted, unmoored by her experience of the creation. That segment with the beach pan, she now knows, is mapped on the one jagged edge of the T-arm, unthinkable intimacy.
Through one street and the next, until she'd come upon the red M of a Metro station.
Descending, she'd purchased, with too large a bill and some difficulty, tokens of what appeared to be luminous plastic, the color of glow-in-the-dark toy skeletons, each with its own iconic M.
One of these had been sufficient for her voyage, whose directions and stations she now would never know.
She'd given herself to the dream, in this case to the eerie Stalinist grandeurs of Moscow's underground, which had fascinated her father.
That sense she'd had, of some things here being grotesquely large, had doubled, underground, the lavishness of the stations exceeding even her childhood fantasies. Gilt bronze, peach marble shot with aquamarine, engine-chased Cartier lusters applied to the supporting columns of what seemed more like subterranean ballrooms than subway platforms, their chandeliers blazing, as if the wealth of what Win had called the final empire of the nineteenth century had come pouring in, all through the deepest, darkest thirties, to line these basilicas of public transport.
So overwhelming, so exceedingly peculiar in its impact, that it actually succeeded in distracting her, knocking her at least partially out of whatever it was that she'd been feeling as she'd descended those steep stairs to the clanging steel door, and out into a brightness that both startled and hurt.
She has no idea where she'd gone, riding for at least two hours, changing trains on impulse, taking madly majestic stairs and escalators at random. Until, finally, she'd emerged, here, to find herself on Arbat, broad and crowded, which her but-it's-really-like module keeps trying to tell her is really like Oxford Street, though, really, it isn't at all.
Thirsty, she enters a vaguely Italian-looking (the match-up module, failing again) establishment offering soft drinks and Internet access, and buys a bottle of water and half an hour, to check her mail.
The keyboard is Cyrillic; she keeps accidentally hitting a key that toggles it back from English-emulation, and then being unable to find it again, but she manages to retrieve a message from Parkaboy.
I like to think I'm as blase as the next pretentious asshole, but your travel agent in London is, I've gotta say, the business. As in: I'm in Charles de Gaulle, in some kind of Air France cocoon hand-stitched from Hermes bridle-leather, watching CNN in French and waiting to get on their next flight to Moscow. Trouble is, no fault of Sylvie's, something's upfucked the bomb-sniffers here and even we of the uber-class have to wait until planes can fly. So they've put all five of us in here with what I sort of hate to admit is the best cold buffet I've ever tasted, and they keep opening champagne. I may not have mentioned it before but since the recent unpleasantness I've been one of those people not too happy at the thought of flying; why I took that train to visit Darryl. However, with the rush of events and the sheer level of cosseting, I haven't until now been very aware of actually doing any. America sort of ended at check-in. And when they get the sniffers sorted here, I'm your way fast, though I may need to be taught to feed and wash myself again. You can help by arranging a supply of those little hot towels. Thanks again.
She tries to reply but hits that toggle again.
When the boy from the counter sorts it for her, she writes: I went there. I met her. Well, saw her. Watched her work. Her. I'm in a Net cafe and I guess I'm still processing. Hard to write. No point, really: you're almost here. I'm glad! Maybe you are, I haven't been back to the hotel.
A distant crash, or explosion. She looks up. A siren starts to wail.
