She doesn't leave a message.
Does this mean he's already on his way?
She could phone Sylvie Jeppson and find out, but the idea of contact with Blue Ant, right now, does not appeal.
Stella trusts her. Whatever weird, sad, scary, deeply Russian scenario Stella and her twin are socketed into, she desperately doesn't want to betray whatever it is she's seen rise behind the stillness of that white face.
Parkaboy would get it. But who else would? Not, she's now certain, Boone. Bigend, probably, but in that way of his, in which he seems to somehow understand emotions without ever having partaken of them.
She opens a bottle of Russian mineral water.
Dorotea had been hired by a Russian from Cyprus, the one listed as the registrant ofarmaz.ru, a domain that Boone says has something to do with the Russian oil industry.
Were those Russians, she wonders, who somehow got their hands on Katherine McNally's notes from Cayce's sessions? Not necessarily, she decides, as the men Dorotea had used in Tokyo had been Italian. It's an equal-opportunity conspiracy, maybe.
But Baranov, come to think of it, is Russian too, or anyway Anglo-Russian. Though that doesn't seem to click with the linkage she's trying to braille, here. And neither does Damien, off in the boonies shooting his punk archaeology project, even though his girlfriend's father sounds like another candidate for mafia czar.
There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained.
When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there.
Russia. Something else…
She remembers, in mid-swallow, and lapses into a fit of coughing.
That old post of hers, the one that had turned up when she'd searched Russia on the F:F:F CD-ROM.
She slots the CD-ROM. Repeats the search.
Why couldn't it, say, be some Russian mafia kingpin, with a bent for self-expression, a previously undiscovered talent, and the wherewithal to generate and disseminate the footage?
January. She'd still been seeing Katherine. She'd had no idea she'd be working for Blue Ant, or coming to London, or getting involved with Bigend.
Mafia.
Wherewithal.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Not a bent for self-expression: orphaned nieces.
If Baranov could still have even one favor-owing friend, somewhere in the bowels of Langley or Falls Church, willing and able to somehow pluck the stellanor address from traffic on the Net, or from wherever it was found, what might a very rich, very important Russian be afforded in his own country, or even, perhaps, in hers?
And what might "very rich, very important" not fee a ettpüernisinrfor, today, when it came to Russians?
She feels a knot of tension beginning to complicate, between her shoulders.
When the on-line Moscow Yellow Pages refuses to produce a Pilates studio, she puts on her workout clothes and goes up, one floor, to the hotel gym. Deserted save for an older, overweight Russian wearing an expression of near-religious sorrow as he plods heavily along on a treadmill.
The machines here look to Cayce like domestic product, though new, and Damien would definitely want to document them. She finds what might be a boxing mat in a far corner of the room and tries to remember the mat exercises she'd been taught at the very beginning.
She senses the Russian's sad gaze as she works through what she recalls of the mat program, but realizes, to her surprise, that she's actually glad he's here.
It's that kind of morning.
SHE desperately wants to go out, walk to the nearest Metro station, pay the famously tiny fare, and descend into a world of ornate mineral marvels. The only true palaces of the proletariat, those stations. And doing that, have some temporary release from waiting
But she can't, and doesn't.
She's waiting for a message from Stella.
Shortly after noon, her cell rings.
"Hello?"
"Where are you?" Bigend.
"Poole," she lies reflexively, not exactly thinking on her feet.
"Swimming?"
"Silent 'e.' The city. Where are you?"
"Paris. Sylvie tells me you will be here soon?"
"I'm not sure, now. I'm following something up. I hope you aren't there only for my sake. I might not come."
"Not at all. You won't share this something?"
"Not on a cell. When I see you." Enough like a Boone reason, she hopes.
"You spoke with Boone." Not a question.
"Yes."
"He seemed to feel you weren't impressed with what he's been able to learn in Ohio."
"He's too sensitive, that way."
"The chemistry, it isn't working?"
"We're not dating, Hubertus."
"You'll keep me informed, though, won't you?"
She's taking it for granted that there's no way he can know where he's reaching her phone, and she hopes that that's true, but there's really nothing she can do about it now. "Yes, of course. Have to go now, Hubertus. Bye."
