Pattern Recognition

I remember him: You used to say how funny he was, on that website. And he's not gay? A music producer from Chicago? And not, I take it, a Lombard? (If he's not a Lombard, just to be nosy, how can you be affording Paris?) Have to tell you I saw the Lombard of Lombards himself on CNN yesterday. He was between some Russian zillionaire and your Secretary of the Interior, and looked as though he'd just devoured the entrails of something clean-limbed and innocent: entirely pleased with himself. When are you coming home, anyway? Never mind! Enjoy yourself! Margot

Dear Cayce, There definitely are, in the literature, instances of panic disorders being relieved through the incidence of critical event stress, although the mechanism is far from understood. As for "Soviet psychiatric drugs," I have no idea. I did ask a friend in Germany who volunteered to work with Chernobyl radiation victims; he said that any substances thus described were probably best regarded as instruments of torture, and usually consisted of combinations of industrial chemicals that otherwise would never have been considered fit for use on human beings. Rather grim. Whatever it was, I hope you didn't have very much. As to the cessation of panic-reactions, my advice would simply be to see where it goes. If you should feel further need to talk about it, I have a few appointment times coming open in the fall. Sincerely, Katherine McNally

All done here, packing to go. It was brilliant to see you, and I really liked Peter, and you were both good to put up with Marina, whose pain-in-arse factor has never quite made it back down to baseline. You especially were good, as you knew I'd told her to piss off after the Stuka but you never rubbed my nose in it. As was probably more obvious once you were on site, there simply wouldn't have been any way I could have continued shooting, sans blat. I'm fairly certain we'd never have gotten the tape out of the country, had I stuck to my guns. I do feel a bit more of a sleaze than usual but on the other hand I know I owe something to history, as revealed here for us to record. I'll sort it out back in London, I imagine, when I get to work toward a first cut. You are coming back here, after Paris, aren't you? Your Pole is having an opening at a gallery owned by Billy Whatsit from BSE and he and his sister are mad to have you there. Have you met her, his sister? Henna and pop-out tops, good fun, sort of early post-Wall Berlin thing. I could fancy her, I think! XXX Damien

Hello! When are you coming to see us again? The segment you saw here will be soon complete. It goes to academy and returns many times. Nora never will say but I feel it will go out soon. We hope you will like it! Stella

SHE still has the iBook but never uses it for mail. She keeps it under the hotel bed, along with the Louis Vuitton attache, which, though she'd never buy or carry one, now causes her no discomfort at all. Nor had a section full of Tommy in Galleries Lafayette the week before, and even the Michelin Man now registers as neutral. She wonders whether this change, whatever it is, will affect her ability to know whether or not a given trademark will work, but there's no way to test that, short of going back to work, which she's in no hurry to do.

Peter says they're on vacation, and he himself hasn't had one, he says, for years. Various recording labels and groups have tried to reach him here, but he simply ignores them. He loves Paris, and says he hasn't been here since he was someone else, and very stupid.

She doubts that he was ever very stupid.

She goes alone to an Internet cafe every other day and checks the new hotmail account she's acquired with her new e-mail address, a .uk one that Voytek arranged.

She wonders about Bigend, and Volkov, and whether Bigend could somehow have known from the start that the maker, makers really, were Volkov's nieces, but she always comes back to Win's dictum of there needing always to be room left for coincidence.

She'd gone with Peter to visit Stella and Nora in the squat in Moscow, and then on to the dig, where Damien's shoot had been winding down, and where she'd found herself, out of some need she hadn't understood, down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gray muck and bones, her face streaked with tears. Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why, but she thinks now that if they had she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn't know.

And now it's late, close to the wolfing hour of soul-lack. But she knows, lying curled here, behind him, in the darkness of this small room, with the somehow liquid background sounds of Paris, that hers has returned, at least for the meantime, reeled entirely in on its silver thread and warmly socketed.

She kisses his sleeping back and falls asleep.

AUTHORS NOTE

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