I meant to include this with my review of Pattern Recognition... This is a small except from chapter 35. I love the way he makes this work:
Yet another of those undercover police cars goes bombing past, blue light flashing, maybe the fifth she's seen, all of them shiny and new and expensive.
The duck mantra doesnt seem to be helping, tonight.
“Walk through the fear,“ she tells herself, something Margot had said a lot when seh'd still been going to her codependency group. That doesn't seem to help either.
“Fuck it.” An older, deeper invocation perhaps. That gets her turned around and headed back through the door.
A cozy, crowded room, highlights of copper and polished wood.
Where every table is ocupied, it seems, except for one, flanked by two enormous, empty, wingback armchairs, and there, quite clearly, is the fish: a large, freestanding sculpture, its scales cut from one-pound Mdeaglia d'Oro coffee cans like the ones Wassily Kandinsky used, but assembled in a way that owes more to Frank Gehry.
She's moving too fast to get a read on the crowd here, but is aware of a number of glances as she beelines through and seats herself in one of the wingback chairs.
A waiter materializes instantly. Young and quite beautiful, white-jacketed, a white cloth folded across his arm, he looks none too happy to see her there. He brusquely says something, in Russian, that clearly isn't a question.
“I'm sorry,” she says, “I only speak English. I'm meeting a friend, I'll have coffee, please”
As soon as she speaks, there's an instant change in his demeanor, and not, she senses, out of any love of the English language.
“Of course. Americano?”
Guessing that Italian is the default language of coffee here, and that she's not being queried as to her nationality. “Please.”
When he's gone, seh does a crowd-scan. If there wree visible logos on the clothes these people are wearing, she'd be in trouble. Lots of Prada, Gucci, but in a Moneyed Bohemian modality too off-the-shelf for London or New York. LA, she realizes: except for two goth girls in black brocade, and a boy gotten up in impeccable High Grunge, it's Rodeo Drive with an extra helping of cheekbones.
But the young woman crossing from the entrance now wears nothing that isn't mate and the darkest of grays. Pale. Dark eyes. Center-parted hair, unfashionably long.
Her white face, angular yet somehow soft, eclipses everything.
Cayce realizes that seh's gripping the arms of her chair so hard that her fingers hurt.
The whole book is so beautifully written. I occasionally would have to stop reading simply to marvel at the writing. Simply awesome. Anyhow, I'm off to bed now! (No pager this week, so a full night's sleep is in order). :)