Surveillance: A Novel

3

FOR ALIDA, her homework done, it was a happy surprise to be rescued from the after-school program by Tad in his ancient sky-blue Beetle. Alida loved Tad — an uncomplicated equation with no troubling variables. When he showed in the doorway of the classroom looking a bit lost, eyes swimming behind his rimless specs, sunlight glinting in his bristles, his denim shirt open to the tangle of gray hair on his chest, the few remaining kids all looked up. The two eighth-grade boys stopped their card game; girls suddenly lost interest in their books and work sheets and just stared at him. It was a knack Tad had: though he wasn’t handsome, he always attracted attention, as if he were somehow bigger, more alive, than other people.

Alida put this down to his being famous. He wasn’t really, really famous, but he was famous in Seattle. He was Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and he appeared in TV commercials all the time, as Mister Autoglass, George the Plumber saying “Just call George,” the crazy chef who juggled clams for Ivar’s restaurants, the MagiGro gardener. He didn’t look or sound like Tad when he was acting: he could change his voice, shape, face, age, and become a whole different person, so what strangers saw in Tad wasn’t the familiar face of a newsreader or a weatherman but the inner glow of fame itself — something that must come, Alida guessed, from all the lights, cameras, and clapping audiences he’d faced in his life as an actor.

Whenever Tad appeared in her life, questions followed. “Is he your dad?” That was easy to answer—“No, he’s Tad with a T, not Dad with a D.” But “Is he your mom’s boyfriend?” was harder. The thought of old Tad being a boy-anything was pretty funny, and her mom hadn’t had a boyfriend for years and years. She didn’t want to be disloyal and tell people he was gay, so usually she said, “MYOB,” making an enjoyable mystery of it.

In her own mind, though, both questions were a lot more complicated than she would ever let on, and they often teased her during the long strange hours when she couldn’t get to sleep and would click the light on her alarm to see midnight and then one or two o’clock in the morning. Because Tad was sort of like a dad. He gave her daddish presents, like her iPod, and though her laptop had been a joint birthday present with her mom, she bet Tad had paid for most of it, just as she knew he helped pay for her school fees. Like a dad, he often drove her to parties and sleepovers. If her mom went away to work on a story, she’d stay with Tad in his apartment, in the dark little spare room hung with old framed posters of the plays that he’d been in, in cities as far away as Minneapolis and St. Louis and Houston and Denver. Staying there was always fun. They ate out a lot in restaurants and went to movies and plays, where Tad took her backstage afterward to meet the actors and called her “my date,” which was kind of cool. On weekends, she had to make Tad’s breakfast for him — half a grapefruit, and eggs over easy on toast done just right. She hardly ever got to cook when her mom was home, and then it was only kid stuff like brownies.

The boyfriend question was an even trickier one: Tad and her mom never slept together or anything, but they did hug and sometimes late at night she heard them arguing like parents. When she tiptoed out of bed and put her ear to the door, she’d hear her own name — because something or other was “good for Alida” or “bad for Alida,” as if she were some kind of tender plant in the MagiGro gardener’s hothouse. After these arguments Tad sometimes went missing for a day or two, and Alida would have to knock on his door to roust him out. But mostly anyone who didn’t know them would think Tad and her mom were just another old married couple.

Loving Tad, Alida worried about him — a lot, and especially when he was out of her sight. But in his presence these worries seemed remote, like a half-remembered nightmare on a sunny morning. A word she’d lately discovered was “hypochondriac,” but true hypochondriacs were afraid of disease in themselves; she was a hypochondriac for Tad, and there must be another word for that.

As they walked up the hill outside the school toward the parked Beetle, Alida saw he was hiding a bandaged wrist beneath the cuff of his shirt. “What happened?”

“Oh, nothing, just a scratch. Had a close encounter with a shovel. I was in this stupid play all day — you saw the smoke? That was when the scenery caught on fire.”

“A play?”

“The Comedy of Errors,” Tad said, puffing uphill in the heat, his face even pinker than usual.

You could always see Tad’s car from miles away: it was older than anyone else’s, and its backside was plastered with an untidy collage of fading stickers. The battered VW, with its rust patches, with the door that had to be wiggled just right to get it open, with the mouthlike gash in the front passenger seat that sprouted tickly stuffing, was named “the heap,” and Alida found it hard to understand why he was so proud of it. When his mom died last year, he’d inherited her big white car, which was spooky to ride in because it really belonged to a dead person, but it still smelled new, and Alida luxuriated in its mondo-comfortable seats, the soft red glow of the dials at night, the clock with hands on the dash, and the expensive hush inside even when it prowled through the streets — a silence she’d fill by sliding her Green Day CD into the stereo, which made the whole car shiver deliciously with the thunder of the bass. She’d just decided she could probably get over the car’s spookiness when Tad sold it. Asked why, he said that compared with the heap it was a gas-guzzler and got too many caribous to the gallon.

“Think Globally, Act Locally” and “Support Your Local Planet” were two of the bumper stickers on the heap, along with “Just Because You’re Paranoid It Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t Out to Get You,” the names of old, forgotten politicians who’d once run for president, and the mystifying “Sack the Cox-Sacker.” You could always get Tad going by asking “Who was Jerry Brown?” or “Who was George McGovern?” It seemed like nobody he’d voted for had ever won — something else that Tad took a strange pride in, as if losers were better than winners, and Alida had the feeling that if his hero Ralph Nader had actually become president, it wouldn’t have taken Tad any time at all to despise him. He was always saying “He sold out” about some politician, and in Tad’s language winning appeared to be the surefire way of selling out.

When Alida herself won — like taking first place in the individual section of the interschool sixth-grade Math Olympiad, which was filmed on community TV — she had to be careful about how she delivered the news to Tad. She didn’t want him to think she was a sellout. It probably would’ve been better to come in third, but Tad seemed happy enough with her first place and bought her the iPod the next day as a reward.

Windows rolled down, the Beetle jounced and rattled into the crawl of traffic on Boren. Alida’s seat was unpleasantly, intimately hot. Falling away below them, the city looked as if it were melting: tall buildings trembling in the heat like columns of gas, cars afloat like boats in streets of liquid haze, skinny gold rectangles of water showing in the gaps between the office towers. When Tad turned right into the low sun, Alida caught the sudden blaze through the grimy windshield and covered her face with her hands. “It’s kind of like enervating,” she said, trying the word out aloud for the first time.

“Enervating, right. Be glad you’re not a sockeye salmon.”

“Why?”

“They were talking about it on the radio this morning. Know what temperature a sockeye gets stressed out with heat exhaustion? Sixty-eight degrees. Last week they measured the temperature of Lake Washington — sixty-nine degrees. It should be like fifty this time of year. By June, when the sockeye come in from the sea, they’re saying it could be eighty. Which means that every stupid fish that makes it through the locks is going to die of asphyxiation.”

“That’s so sad,” Alida said, keeping to herself the fact that salmon was her absolute least favorite food.

“Imagine Lake Washington full of angelfish and guppies.”

“We did the greenhouse effect. I wrote a lab report about it. We used a heat lamp and soda bottles, black construction paper and water and thermometers and Alka-Seltzer. It was cool.”

“Alka-Seltzer?”

“Yeah. It gives off carbon dioxide when it fizzes.”

The tang of smoke from the morning fire grew thicker as they drove down over the bridge across the freeway, where the packed miles of cars and trucks were at a growling standstill, toxic gunk spilling into the air from every tailpipe. Alida counted off emissions on the fingers of her left hand: sulfur, carbon, nitrous oxide, ozone. “It’s so obvious,” she said. “Why can’t they just get it?”

“All the usual reasons: greed, arrogance, stupidity, blind denial. Lobbyists. President Reagan — he was the one before Bush’s dad — said that cow farts did more damage to the atmosphere than the entire automobile industry.”

“The president said that?”

“I expect some flack for General Motors dreamed that bright thought up for him.”

“But the president said farts?”

“Maybe he said ‘flatulence,’ I don’t remember. He had it in for trees, too. Very dangerous things, trees. Fouling up the air with their horrible hydrocarbons. Like a Douglas fir is a whole lot worse than a Chevy Suburban or a Ford Expedition, and a whole forest is a frigging ecological disaster.” Stopped at a light, Tad was doing his actor thing, assembling his face into a new shape. His cheeks bulged, his upper teeth were exposed in a slightly crooked grin, and when he spoke it was in a solemn, rusty-sounding grandpa voice: “And so, my fellow Americans, today I ask you to join with me in saluting the heroes of the timber industry, the loggers who daily risk their lives to preserve this blessed land, this last and greatest bastion of freedom, from the deadly pollution of trees.”

“No he didn’t.” Tad was a good actor, but his exaggerations could be pretty silly. “He never said that.”

“Well, not in so many words, maybe, but he thought it.”

Which was not, Alida thought, a satisfactory explanation. She didn’t like fantasy — had totally hated The Lord of the Rings, for instance, which they’d had to read last semester. The trouble with fantasy was that you could always see how everything could just as easily have been otherwise, and Tad’s tall stories suffered from the same problem. Like her mom said, though she meant something a little different, Tad’s weakness was his tendency to be “unrealistic,” and Alida was hungry for realism. Most of her favorite books were nonfiction, like Anne Frank’s diary, and Peg Kehret’s memoir of the year she had polio as a kid — books where stuff happened because there was no other way for it to happen, however much the author might have wanted it to happen differently.

The Beetle turned the corner onto Adams Street; then Tad wrestled the gear stick into reverse and began to back into a parking spot. “You’ve got your prosecuting attorney’s face on, Ali. What’s up?”

“I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

Alida unbuckled her seat belt and wound up the window. “Fiction and nonfiction.”

Adams Street was where the city lost its fuzziness and noise, swelling into sudden sharp focus like that picture by the famous Dutch artist where everything — housemaids, cobblestones, kids, brooms, chimney pots — was part of a complicated pattern. “It’s all in the composition,” Mr. McNeil, her art teacher, said, and it was as a composition that Alida saw Adams Street: its chubby pigeons, its yellow fire hydrant, the cracks in the sidewalk, the telephone pole silvered with staples where it wasn’t wrapped around with notices of rock concerts and lost cats, the ancient iron manhole cover embossed with the head of an Indian chief, and the rosy purple brick and molded gray terra-cotta of the Acropolis building. She wasn’t much good at art, unlike Gail, who always got A’s, but Alida could imagine herself painting Adams Street like — what was the guy’s name? Jan something. Vermeer.

To Alida, who loved facts, no fact was more reliable than Apt. #701, 420 Adams Street, Seattle, WA 98104, USA, Planet Earth, the Universe. She’d been driven there straight from Swedish Hospital as a one-day-old, and the building held her entire past like a box. Schools and teachers changed, friends were made and lost, people died, but the Acropolis, old as the city, went on being the Acropolis. It always smelled the same, of overbaked cookies and Lysol. She knew every moan and grumble of the narrow elevator that was a tight squash for three. She was comforted by the rusty jungle gym of fire escapes at the back of the building, on which she’d always been strictly forbidden to play. She was strangely proud of the decaying remains of the advertisement that had been painted long ago on the building’s west side. Nothing was left of the picture except a few dim flakes of color that clung to the brick. Nowadays, nobody could make out the letters of the message, but when Alida was a little kid, still learning to read, she and her mom had decoded it. It said, or used to say:

COLD OR HOT SPAM HITS THE SPOT

Recently, Alida had tried it out on Gail, who peered at it for a long time, put on her glasses, peered some more, and shook her head, giving up. Being the knowledgeable guardian of the building’s history made Alida feel she was its owner. Then she’d noticed a can of Spam on a supermarket shelf and talked her mom into buying it. The taste was repulsive, like slimy cat food, but she saved the can as evidence and used it as a crayon holder on her homework desk. When the last ghostly letter finally faded from the wall, she’d still see the slogan there: “Cold or Hot, Spam Hits the Spot,” as much a part of the character of the Acropolis as the “Semper Excelsior” grandly painted in gold on blue over the arched entrance to her school.

She and Tad were goofing around in his place when her mom showed up, looking damp and frazzled from the heat. The ferry had been late, she’d got stuck at a roadblock, there’d been an accident…Alida knew that voice — the rapid, weary, one-note rat-a-tat-tat that meant her mom was losing it. Tad took charge. Switching character on the instant, he became a cool, soft-spoken ship’s captain, or the wise old doctor in the ER. He ordered up food from the Chinese restaurant they liked, told her mom to take a shower, opened a bottle of wine, and asked Alida to set the table in the apartment across the hall.

She’d watched Tad do these split-second makeovers on himself a million times, but was still always a little fazed by how someone she usually thought of as gentle and bumbly could just turn it on, like that, as if flicking a hidden switch in his pocket. Big question: did Tad think of what he did as faking, putting on a phoney act, or did he believe that he’d actually become this new masterful-type guy?

Suddenly handsome, with tight lips and squared-back shoulders, he said, “Too hot for candles, but let’s do flowers,” and scooped up a vase of stinky lilies and carried them through to her and her mom’s place. “Root beer for you, kiddo: it’s in the fridge.”

The lilies helped to mask the smell of smoke in the apartment, whose windows had been left open all day, and Alida, admiring her handiwork, thought the blue cloth, place mats, napkins, glasses, and chopsticks made the table look just like one in a magazine, everything just so, a model of order in an untidy world, like the rooms in Gail’s house, which always looked as if they were waiting to be photographed for Martha Stewart Living or something. Seeing the table, you’d never guess what a mess the rest of the apartment was.

Her mom showed, smiling, smelling of shampoo, and wearing the splashy muumuu that made her look like a walking flower shop. “You did the table, Rabbit? That’s beautiful.”

Alida wrinkled her nose and shrugged like it was nothing special, but she was pleased her mom had noticed.

When the food came, Tad tipped the contents of the greasy white-card boxes into bowls. It was only Chinese takeout, but between them Alida and Tad had made the meal into a fancy feast. With the hot city going dark outside, and the lamp by the table throwing the rest of the room into shadow, their dinner had the glowing promise of a lighted stage just before the actors step in to start the play.

Her mom was the first to sit down. “You’re such geniuses, you two — thank you. I had the weirdest day.” She slopped wine into her glass and passed the bottle to Tad.

Alida, watching the level drop against the side of the label, reckoned that her mom had taken 250 milliliters and Tad barely 150, which was typical. They were drinking zinfandel: 15 percent alcohol, it said, which was a lot. Alida, who’d done her research on the Internet and in the kitchen with a measuring cup, knew that binge drinking for women began at 600 milliliters of wine in one evening, so her mom was almost halfway to a whole binge with one of her big glasses, and maybe even closer with this high-alcohol stuff she was chugging down now. Stored in the Drafts folder of Outlook Express on Alida’s laptop was a message to her mom about her drinking, which she’d never quite found the courage to send, even though she’d edited it many times, trying to make it more loving and less stern.

Alida helped herself to four small spoonfuls of rice, lemon chicken, scallops in garlic sauce, and Buddhist Delight vegetables, which she chased around her plate for a while with chopsticks before she gave up, as she always did, and got a fork out of the drawer.

Her mom was saying, “When you knew him, did Augie Vanags have an accent?”

“Augie?” Tad put down his glass. “So we’re on pet-name terms now? Sure he did. He talked like a Nazi in a British World War II movie. The kids called him Dr. K.”

“He knew Kissinger. He worked for the National Security Council, the dark-arts people. Henry took a brief shine to him, then he messed up with Nixon and Henry dropped him.”

Alida switched off, letting her mind address the baffling love life of Jessica King and Steve Kunz, until she heard Tad say, “He used to hit on his students.”

“He hit his students?”

“Just an expression,” Tad said. “He tried to date them. He—”

Someone started banging on the door. “Land lord!”—two words, not one.

“Don’t let him in,” Tad said. “He has to give a week’s notice, it’s state law. Tell him to put it in writing. Jesus, what an hour!”

“Maybe he smelled the food,” her mom said. “Rabbit, let him in, will you?” Then, to Tad, in an urgent whisper: “There’s no point in needlessly antagonizing the guy.”

Alida unlocked the door. The new landlord walked in, beaming, like a celebrity guest on a late-night talk show.

“Hi, how ya doin’? Eatin’, huh? Don’t mind me. Just checkin’ in. Gotta make sure everybody’s happy, right? Hey, Mr. MagiGro!” But as he spoke Alida saw his eyes roaming impatiently from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, as if one sidelong glimpse of the people at the table had exhausted his interest in them. He stood frowning in front of the tall bookcases that her mom had built with old wooden Pepsi crates. Without turning his head, he asked, “You got them things fixed to the wall?”

“No.”

Alida could hear the defensiveness in her mom’s voice.

“Get somebody killed. Next earthquake, them suckers fly all over like goddam ducks. Hit somebody on the head, like little Missy there. Pow!” He reached to an upper shelf, and Alida saw the Pepsi crate wobble ever so slightly under the pressure of his forefinger. “Brain damage,” he said, looking disapprovingly at her mom’s collection of old novels. He snatched one out — a paperback called Beloved—and peered into the space he’d made. “Yeah. What you want is masonry screws. Two-and-a-half-inch. And plugs. You got power drill?”

Tad laughed at the question. Her mom said, “No, I don’t.”

“I got cordless, heavy duty. You get all them books out, maybe I get that shit fixed on the weekend.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Lee — if you’re sure you r-really have the t-t-time.” Her mom was blushing, suddenly awkward in the face of the landlord’s offer.

“Not a problem.” He waved an imaginary drill at the piled crates. “Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom: take a coupla minutes.” He stood back from the shelves, shaking his head. “Wah! You got death trap there.”

“I didn’t think.”

“People don’t.” He riffled through the pages of Beloved, squinting at the blocks of print like a kid with dyslexia. “Story book,” he said, and wedged it back into the shelf.

Her mom, wine bottle in hand, said, “Mr. Lee?” But he was at the open window, back turned, hands planted on the sill, looking down into the dark alley that ran along the side of the building. “Riffraff,” he said. “Scumbags. Dirt balls.”

“Homeless people,” Tad said.

The alley had always been off-limits to Alida, and the line of overflowing Dumpsters, the open-air club of unshaven men with bedrolls and dogs on string leashes, held for her the romantic fascination of forbidden territory. When she walked past, sometimes men would call out to her — not in a scary way, just sort of saying hi. Schooled by her mother, she’d quicken her step and focus frigidly on the middle distance, making like an automaton. This was what her mom called street smarts: shoulders back, look straight ahead, and walk with purpose, always stay on the outside of the sidewalk, never make eye contact with strangers. Alida usually failed to observe these rules for more than about thirty seconds because street smarts made you look so weird that people would stare like you were some kind of retard.

“Scumbags,” the landlord said, turning around to answer Tad. “Lowlifes. They got weapons out there. I could show you. All kind of weapons.”

That was another thing. Twice in the last year, Alida had heard the crack of what sounded like gunshots. “Just a car backfiring,” her mom said, but so quickly that Alida knew she was lying. One morning, the alley had been cordoned off with yellow tape, and police cars with flashing lights were blocking both ends. Though nobody said anything, Alida guessed there’d been a murder. From her bedroom window, she scrutinized the paving stone for bloodstains, but they’d obviously hosed the alley clean. She hugged this knowledge to herself: what parents would let their kids come over to a house on such intimate terms with murder? Yet she was proud of her scary secret. “Yeah, we had a homicide,” she’d think, and the thought felt satisfyingly grown-up and sophisticated; it put her in a place where stuff happened that ordinary people only read about in books or saw on TV — though she never told anybody, not even Tad, because she wasn’t one hundred percent sure that it was true.

“You got a nice life here,” the landlord said, and the sweep of his hand took in the patterned rugs, the stereo, the desktop computer, the pine furniture, everything stripped and varnished by her mom, the big old leather couch on which they’d snuggle up to watch movies on DVD.

For a split second, Alida saw it all as the landlord must see it — its warmth and coziness, its tan and scarlet colors, not just anybody’s home, but one that was unique to her and her mom.

“Penthouse apartment. City view, water view. Whole lot of people want what you got here, and you know what? Them scumbags down there hate you for it. They kill for what you got. How often you get break-ins, huh?”

“Never,” Tad said with a fierceness that took Alida by surprise.

“Touch wood.” Her mom, laughing too loud, made a big show of slapping her palm on the tabletop.

From her window, Alida had often seen Tad talking to the men who slept in the alley. Sometimes he went with food, sometimes with money. So was he like buying protection from them?

“Hey, you guys, I’ll show you something. Missy there — you lock me out, okay?”

Alida resented being called Missy but did as she was told, shutting the door on him and hearing the decisive double clunk of the lock spring shut. The moment she was back in her seat, though, the door opened on Mr. Lee, smiling modestly, hands behind his back, tipping his head in a little ceremonial bow to the people at the table.

“No key!” He showed the empty palm of his left hand, then held up a card in his right. “Driver’s license.” He wriggled it through the air — a quick, falling shimmer of green. “See?”

“Nice trick,” Tad said. “I wish I could do that. But I guess they didn’t offer Robbery 101 when I was in college.” He was using his “gay” voice — nasal, a pitch higher than normal, ending each sentence like it was a question. It was the voice he put on to talk to people he didn’t like. Alida saw her mom cast him a warning glance, like he’d better watch it, or else.

The grinning landlord, deaf to Tad’s hostility, said, “That’s how much security you got. Make you feel real safe, huh? First thing I’m gonna get you locks that lock, not like that chickenshit you got there.”

Chickenshit? In Alida’s mind, the word “landlord” conjured someone who’d never, ever say “chickenshit,” and the more she saw of Mr. Lee, the more he seemed like an imposter. The old landlord — the real landlord — had been an incredibly ancient, fragile bag of bones in a black topcoat and checkered scarf, his mottled scalp shining under a thin fluff of silvery hair, with the voice of a wheezing bird. Every year, just before Christmas, Mr. Winslow would look in for a ten-minute chat, always bringing a wrapped box of candy for Alida. He talked in a roundabout, flowery way, like a character in one of those boring PBS series that her mom liked to watch, where everybody wore costumes and the women had huge fake butts tucked into the backs of their skirts, which was gross. They spent most of their time wandering around gardens speaking in Olde English and never getting anywhere, so far as Alida could make out. Yet she liked Mr. Winslow, even if — or maybe because — he did belong in a wax museum.

Last Christmas he failed to show up, and a few days later they heard that he was dead. Then his kids — a man and a woman who looked almost as old as he did — put the Acropolis building up for sale. The first time Alida had met Mr. Lee, he was standing below her in the stairwell. He looked up, said, “Bang! Bang!” and for one appalled moment she’d thought he was holding a real gun. It turned out to be a laser gun for measuring distances, and the new landlord let her play with it for a minute or two: you pointed it at a wall, clicked the trigger, and the LCD readout showed “008' 5.75''” or whatever, which was kind of cool. But for that one moment on the stairs, Mr. Lee had looked like her every crazy fear come true.

Now her mom was asking him if he’d like a drink. Mr. Lee shook his head at the bottle of wine but said, “I’ll take water,” and sat in the empty chair beside Alida. She saw him inspecting each bowl of food on the table like he was giving it a grade — a C for this, a D for that, to judge by his pursed lips and severe eyes.

“Can I get you a plate?” her mom said from the sink, where she was filling his glass. “There’s plenty for four.”

“I ate already.”

He was too young to be a landlord — years and years younger than her mom. His Beatle haircut made him look sort of like George Harrison, if you could imagine a Korean or a Vietnamese George Harrison. He had a pierced ear but no ring in it. His gray suit, riddled through with glittering threads like silver wire, would’ve fit a much fatter man; its double-breasted jacket, open at the front, sagged over his narrow shoulders and hung in loose folds by his sides. He reeked of perfume, a sharp, waxy, leathery scent that reminded her of Tad’s mother’s car, and she bet that the label on the bottle said something like Mercedes-Benz.

“Use a fork, huh?” he said suddenly, confidentially, into Alida’s ear. “No chopsticks?” He picked up the pair beside her plate, and in his hand they turned into the clacking beak of a fierce bird. She’d never seen chopsticks move so fast and nimbly. They hovered, ospreylike, a foot above her plate, then plunged to snatch a scallop. She thought the landlord was going to put it in his mouth — gross! — but the poor scallop stayed aloft, a single drop of garlic sauce landing on her Buddhist vegetables.

“You want I teach you?”

“It’s okay,” Alida said.

He let the scallop fall back on the plate and returned the chopsticks to her place mat. “K’why-dzer!” he said.

“What?”

“Kw-eye…dzuh. Chopsticks.”

“Are you from China?”

“Family come from over there.” He said fambly. “Once. Long time ago.” He picked up his water glass, held it beneath his nose, sniffed long and deep, then took a sip, which he swilled around in his mouth exactly as Alida had occasionally seen Tad doing with wine in a restaurant. This strange performance had both Tad and her mom gazing at Mr. Lee and swapping undercover glances. After many seconds of noisy tooth- and cheek-rinsing, the landlord swallowed, and said, “Old pipes.”

Tad said, “It’s an old building.”

“Them Winslow folks, they ever do any maintenance?”

“Schuyler Winslow always fixed what needed fixing.”

“Wah!” It was not quite a laugh and not quite a sneer. “You better believe it, I’m going to show you a thing or two ’bout what need fixing.” Ting for thing. “I tell you, I got plans you gonna like. Gonna take this neighborhood upscale, clean out all them bums. This ought to be class part of town, but ain’t nothing won’t happen here without you get them toerags off of the street.”

“And what are you planning to use, Mr. Lee? Rat poison? Gas?”

Mr. Lee stared at Tad for a full five seconds, then turned to Alida’s mom. “Funny guy,” he said. “Why they let this neighborhood go? Downtown so close, it don’t make sense. Where’s the business? This block, all you got’s that old TV store and the antics — and nobody go in there, don’t nobody want to buy that crap.”

That wasn’t fair. When Alida and her mom needed something like a homework desk or a chest for camp, they always went across the street to Mr. Kawasuki’s Almost Antiques. Alida had spent hours alone in there, browsing the bookshelves at the back, petting Mr. Kawasuki’s two cats, and digging for treasures in the 50¢ and $1.00 boxes. Her jewelry box came from Almost Antiques, and so did most of the jewelry inside it.

“What I see long term?” Mr. Lee was speaking softly, facing her mom but almost talking to himself. “I see you go out the door and you got the restaurant, nice restaurant, right there. You got the grocery store. You got the dry cleaners. And Starbucks. You got to have the Starbucks.”

On Adams Street?

“You go out a night, and it’s real safe, lotta people there, good people. You got the condo blocks, just like in Belltown.”

Alida was confused. Adams Street wouldn’t be Adams Street, wouldn’t be home. For a moment she saw Mr. Kawasuki’s store boarded over, wrecking balls swinging through the sky, the street filled with the threatening fog of construction dust. Yet she couldn’t help but warm to some of his ideas; she had a particular weakness for iced mocha.

“Like I say, long term. Short term, you got to think security. Way you are now, you come back some afternoon and it ain’t gonna be your apartment no more, you know that? You gonna have the riffraff living here, cooking up your food, music on your stereo, shooting up right in your bathroom. Big party, lot of scumbag fun. You show up, they say ‘You go!’—and you gonna be looking at thirty-eight automatic pistol. Junkie with the gun, he got the shakes, he don’t know what his finger do.”

Tad said, “I think—”

“I know,” the landlord said. “I know them low-life assholes, and what they want is what you got. See here!” He was out of his seat and by the door in a single movement that reminded Alida of a hummingbird’s mysterious ability to transfer itself invisibly from one space to another. “Okay, you got real lock in here with deadbolt. Now what, huh? What you need? Surveillance. Up here, bell ring — you got visitors. Who down there? You don’t know. Oh, sure, you got intercom, but intercom ain’t no security. Maybe friend says, ‘Is me,’ but maybe you got lowlife down there waiting to get in door with friend. Maybe friend don’t see lowlife, maybe lowlife hold a gun to friend. How you know what going on down there? Easy, ’cause right here”—he shaped a rectangle with his hands at shoulder height beside the door—“you got TV that show you the street, show everybody who there, fish-eye view!”

“Cool!” Alida said, the word escaping her involuntarily.

“Cool,” the landlord echoed. “See? Now you got security. Now you sleep good, not listen all the night for scumbag on stairs.” Grinning, he replanted himself in his chair. To Alida, he said, “Hey, maybe I get you a doorman. How you like that, huh?”

Alida tried and failed to imagine a doorman — fitted out in a blue uniform with silver braid — guarding the entrance to the Acropolis. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Mr. Lee, uh, do you have other apartment buildings in the city?”

Alida heard the incredulity in Tad’s voice, and watched the landlord as he inspected the question from every conceivable angle before he supplied an answer.

“Apartment block? No, first time.” He was speaking to her mom again, not Tad. “I got a bunch of parking lots, though. Get one, then two, you know how it goes. Right now I got seven. Downtown, Capitol Hill, Lower Queen Anne, all over. Nearest to you, I got one on Yesler and Second. Excellent Parking — ever go there?”

“Oh, that one,” her mom said. “The rates just went way up.”

The landlord shuffled his shoulders inside his too-big jacket. “What market will stand, hey?” He laughed, as if this was a kind of joke between him and her mom. “Go to New York City, know what you pay there? Fifteen bucks one hour, what somebody from New York tell me. Like in Seattle, I give you half-price, see?” That laugh again. Never in Alida’s hearing had anyone come quite so close to actually going tee-hee-hee.

He swung around in his chair to face her. “I’m like you,” he said. “Got to go back to school, study up to be land lord. Parking lots I know, apartments whole new ball game, got to learn a lot. You give me feedback, I see what I can do. Lesson One: got to keep tenant happy, right? So you help me and I help you.”

“Okay.” That seemed a fair deal to Alida, who was still thinking of how cool it would be to see every visitor on a TV monitor, caught by the camera unawares.

“Hey, I gotta question. Mr. MagiGro!” Arms folded on the tabletop, he leaned forward, grinning at Tad. “I been thinking about the lobby.”

“Lobby? The hallway?” Tad sounded distant, disdainful, and Alida wished that the landlord would stop annoying him with the Mr. MagiGro thing.

“Need new paint down there. Whole building need new paint. But what I think is to make nice with green, like what I see is palm tree in bucket. Would grow okay in lobby?”

“A palm tree, in a bucket.” Tad took off his glasses, wiped the lenses against his shirtfront, and put them back, perching them on the tip of his nose and peering over their tops, exactly as he did in the MagiGro commercials. All traces of irritation were gone from his voice when he looked earnestly at Mr. Lee and said, “You’d be looking at a pygmy Laotian date palm, tolerant of shade.”

Alida had no idea that Tad actually knew something about this gardening stuff. She and her mom had two big window boxes of flowers; he had none. True, he often brought cut flowers home, like the lilies, but he’d never shown interest in growing anything at all.

“Loamy soil,” he said. “You might want to add a little lime to raise its pH.”

Amazing.

“I’d use quite a bit of peat moss. And charcoal. Charcoal’s very good for palms.”

The landlord was nodding slowly, nodding and blinking, like he understood what Tad was talking about, which Alida was sure he didn’t.

“You’d need to keep an eye out for leaf blotch, down there in the…lobby. Then you’ve got to think about winter mulching.”