Pattern Recognition

"Hard to explain." She looks in another direction, discovering a stall selling what seem to be Victorian surgical instruments.

The keeper of this stock is a very old man with a high, mottled fore-head and dirty-looking white eyebrows, his head sunken buzzard-like between his narrow shoulders. He stands behind a counter topped and fronted with glass, things glittering within it. Most of them seem to be displayed in fitted cases lined with faded velvet. Seeing him as offering a distraction, for both herself and Voytek, else she be asked to explain the duck, Cayce takes her coffee and crosses the aisle, which is floored with splintery planking.

"Could you tell me what this is, please?" she asks, pointing at something at random. He looks at her, at the object indicated, then back at her. "A trepanning set, by Evans of London, circa 1780, in original fish-skin case."

"And this?"

"An early nineteenth-century French lithotomy set with bow drill, by Grangeret. Brass-bound mahogany case." He regards her steadily with his deep-set, red-rimmed, pinkish eyes, as if sizing her up for a bit of a go with the Grangeret, a spooky-looking contraption broken down to its component parts in their slots of moth-eaten velvet.

"Thankyou," Cayce says, deciding this isn't really the distraction she needs, right now. She turns to Voytek. "Let's get some air." He gets cheerfully up from his seat, shouldering his now-bulging pouch of Sin-clairs, and follows her up the stairs and into the street.

Tourists and antiques-fanciers and people-watchers have been steadily arriving from stations in either direction, many of them her countrymen, or Japanese. A crowd dense as a stadium concert is contriving to move in either direction along Portobello, in the street itself, the sidewalks having been taken up by temporary sellers with trestles and card tables, and by the shoppers clustered around them. The sun has come fully and unexpectedly out, and between the sun and the crowd and the residual wonky affect of soul-delay, she feels suddenly dizzy.

No good now, for finding," Voytek says, clutching his pouch protec-lively under his arm. He downs the last of his coffee. "I must be going. Have work."

"What do you do?" she asks, mainly to cover her dizziness.

But he only nods toward the pouch. "I must evaluate condition. Have pleasure in meeting you." He takes something from one of the top front pockets of his jean jacket and hands it to her. It is a scrap of white cardboard with a rubber-stamped e-mail address.

Cayce never has cards, and has always been reluctant to give out particulars. "I don't have a card," she says, but on impulse tells him her current hotmail address, sure he'll forget it. He smiles, goofy and somehow winningly open under his ruler-straight Slavic cheekbones, and turns away into the crowd.

Cayce burns her tongue on her still-scalding coffee. Gets rid of it in an already overflowing bin.

She decides to walk back to that Starbucks near the Netting Hill tube, have a latte made with mirror-world milk, and take the train to Camden.

She's starting to feel like she's really here.

"He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots," by way this time of an expression of gratitude, and starts back toward Netting Hill station.

5. WHAT THEY DESERVE

- /

She finds the Children's Crusade just as she remembers it.

Damien's expression for what descends on Camden Town on a Saturday, this shuffling lemming-jam of young people, clogging the High Street from below the station up to Camden Lock.

As she comes up out of the rattling, sighing depths of the station, ascending vertiginous escalators with step grids cut from some pale and grimy heartwood that must be virtually indestructible, the pack starts to thicken and make itself known.

On the sidewalk outside, she is abruptly in it, the crowd stretching away up the High Street like some Victorian engraving of a public hanging or race day.

The facades of the modest retail buildings on either side are encrusted with distorted, oversized representations of vintage airplanes, cowboy boots, a vast six-eyelet Dr. Martens. These all have a slightly queasy handmade quality, as though they've been modeled from carloads of Fimo by the children of giants.

Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the world's leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home.

Nothing at all like the crowd in Portobello; this one is differently driven, flavored with pheromones and the smoke of clove cigarettes and hashish.