evolved irony. She has no way of securing the perimeter, here, once she leaves the flat, but this Blue Ant contract represents a good quarter of her anticipated year’s gross.
“PMS, Bernard. Not to put it too delicately.”
“Then you absolutely have to come. Helena has something completely marvelous, for that.”
“Have you tried it?”
“Tried what?”
She gives up. Company, of almost any kind, seems not entirely a bad idea. “Where are you?”
“Docklands. Seven. It’s casual. I’ll send a car. Delighted you can come. Bye.” Stonestreet rings off with an abruptness Cayce suspects hasrequired some learning in New York. There is ordinarily a singsong, almost tender cadence to the mirror-world termination of telephone conversations, a call-and-response of farewell she’s never mastered.
Psychological prophylaxis is shot to hell.
Three minutes later, having Googled “North London locksmith,” she’s on the phone with a man at something called Judge Advocate Locks.
“You don’t work on Saturdays,” she opens, hopefully.
“Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.”
“But you wouldn’t be able to get here before this evening, would you?”
“Where are you?”
She tells him.
“Fifteen minutes,” he says.
“You don’t take Visa.”
“We do.”
As she hangs up, she realizes that she’s lost Dorotea’s number by making this call. Not that she would necessarily-have been able to extract it from the phone, but it was the closest thing she had to evidence of the entire episode, other than Asian Sluts on the browser memory. She presses Redial, just to check, and gets the man at Judge Advocate. “Sorry,” she says, “hit Redial by mistake.”
“Fourteen minutes,” he says, defensive now, and the truck arrives in more like twelve.
An hour later, Damien’s door has two entirely new and very expensive German locks, with keys that look like something you might find if you took apart a very up-to-date automatic pistol. The Cube is back on the table in its accustomed place. She didn’t change the lock on the street door because she doesn’t know Damien’s tenants, or even how many there are.
Dinner with Bigend. She groans, and goes to change.
* * *
THE car and driver from Blue Ant are waiting when she exits the street door, the two new keys on a black shoestring around her neck. She’s hidden the set of spares behind one of Damien’s mixing consoles in the upstairs room.
Evening now, a light rain just beginning to fall.
She thinks of it thinning the Children’s Crusade still further, under the giant Fimo boots and aeroplanes and the streetlamps mounted with surveillance cameras.
Settled in the car’s rear seat, she asks the driver, a slender and immaculate African, for the name of the station nearest their destination.
“Bow Road,” he says, but she doesn’t know it.
She looks at the back of his meticulously shorn head, at the niobium stud in the upper curve of his right ear, then out at passing shop fronts and restaurants.
Stonestreet’s “casual” will translate as relatively dressy, by her standards, so she’s opted for the CPU Damien calls Skirt Thing, a long, narrow, anonymously made tube of black jersey, with only the most minimal hemming at either end. Tight but comfortable, rides the hips well, infinitely adjustable in terms of length. Under this, black hose; over it, a black DKNY cardigan un-Dikini-ed with a pair of nail scissors. New-old-stock pumps from a vintage place in Paris.
And finds herself thinking wistfully of racketing along in the Metro, and of the impossibly great way Parisian women have of wearing scarves. She decides that this is either another sign of serotonin normalization, daydreaming of another place, or a get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge reaction to Asian Sluts on the browser.
This increasingly massive and entirely unresolved issue she now has with Dorotea, someone she’d scarcely known existed. She’s searched hermemory for any way
“PMS, Bernard. Not to put it too delicately.”
“Then you absolutely have to come. Helena has something completely marvelous, for that.”
“Have you tried it?”
“Tried what?”
She gives up. Company, of almost any kind, seems not entirely a bad idea. “Where are you?”
“Docklands. Seven. It’s casual. I’ll send a car. Delighted you can come. Bye.” Stonestreet rings off with an abruptness Cayce suspects hasrequired some learning in New York. There is ordinarily a singsong, almost tender cadence to the mirror-world termination of telephone conversations, a call-and-response of farewell she’s never mastered.
Psychological prophylaxis is shot to hell.
Three minutes later, having Googled “North London locksmith,” she’s on the phone with a man at something called Judge Advocate Locks.
“You don’t work on Saturdays,” she opens, hopefully.
“Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.”
“But you wouldn’t be able to get here before this evening, would you?”
“Where are you?”
She tells him.
“Fifteen minutes,” he says.
“You don’t take Visa.”
“We do.”
As she hangs up, she realizes that she’s lost Dorotea’s number by making this call. Not that she would necessarily-have been able to extract it from the phone, but it was the closest thing she had to evidence of the entire episode, other than Asian Sluts on the browser memory. She presses Redial, just to check, and gets the man at Judge Advocate. “Sorry,” she says, “hit Redial by mistake.”
“Fourteen minutes,” he says, defensive now, and the truck arrives in more like twelve.
An hour later, Damien’s door has two entirely new and very expensive German locks, with keys that look like something you might find if you took apart a very up-to-date automatic pistol. The Cube is back on the table in its accustomed place. She didn’t change the lock on the street door because she doesn’t know Damien’s tenants, or even how many there are.
Dinner with Bigend. She groans, and goes to change.
* * *
THE car and driver from Blue Ant are waiting when she exits the street door, the two new keys on a black shoestring around her neck. She’s hidden the set of spares behind one of Damien’s mixing consoles in the upstairs room.
Evening now, a light rain just beginning to fall.
She thinks of it thinning the Children’s Crusade still further, under the giant Fimo boots and aeroplanes and the streetlamps mounted with surveillance cameras.
Settled in the car’s rear seat, she asks the driver, a slender and immaculate African, for the name of the station nearest their destination.
“Bow Road,” he says, but she doesn’t know it.
She looks at the back of his meticulously shorn head, at the niobium stud in the upper curve of his right ear, then out at passing shop fronts and restaurants.
Stonestreet’s “casual” will translate as relatively dressy, by her standards, so she’s opted for the CPU Damien calls Skirt Thing, a long, narrow, anonymously made tube of black jersey, with only the most minimal hemming at either end. Tight but comfortable, rides the hips well, infinitely adjustable in terms of length. Under this, black hose; over it, a black DKNY cardigan un-Dikini-ed with a pair of nail scissors. New-old-stock pumps from a vintage place in Paris.
And finds herself thinking wistfully of racketing along in the Metro, and of the impossibly great way Parisian women have of wearing scarves. She decides that this is either another sign of serotonin normalization, daydreaming of another place, or a get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge reaction to Asian Sluts on the browser.
This increasingly massive and entirely unresolved issue she now has with Dorotea, someone she’d scarcely known existed. She’s searched hermemory for any way
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