Surveillance

5

RAIN. LUCY, just back from the school run, coffee in hand, watched it from her window. She’d never seen such rain in Seattle. She was soaked from dashing across the street to the Acropolis, and the drive to school had been like a rough ocean-crossing in a small boat, with the Spider up to its axles in water half the time. She’d had to add a fresh set of dry clothes to Alida’s gym bag before they set out.

Seattle rain didn’t so much fall as precipitate in the air like mist, and you could walk an hour before feeling more than mildly damp. This was something else. From seven stories up, Lucy heard it hitting the streets, sounding like a forest fire and turning every surface on which it landed icing-sugar white. It was what she imagined an Indian monsoon must be like, or Noah’s flood — far beyond the wettest, windiest offerings the occasional Pineapple Express would blow through town once or twice a year. The whole city — or the very little she could see of it — appeared to be drowning in this astounding superfluity of water.

She was still watching when the phone rang.

“It’s Augie.” Just like that, as if they were old friends.

“D’you have this amazing rain, too?” she said.

“Yeah, it’s a frog-strangler.”

“I’m surprised the lines aren’t down.”

“No wind.”

That was true. It was falling in vertical bolts like densely packed steel bars. “I’m a dry-country Montana girl.” She was allowing herself to flirt a little. “I’m never cynical about rain. Even in Seattle I can’t separate it from the idea of goodness. Where I come from, every drop’s a gift. When people pray in eastern Montana, rain’s what they always pray for.” She had to raise her voice against the fiery crackle all around her.

“Then maybe some preacher got a tad too zealous on Sunday.”

Thinking of his “frog-strangler,” Lucy said, “In Montana, we’d call this a gullywasher.”

“Gullywasher. I like that.”

She could hear him, up there on the island in Thomas Jefferson’s library, adding “gullywasher” to his word hoard like a new postage stamp to a collection.

He’d looked at the forecast, he said, and they were calling for clear skies by tomorrow. “Why don’t you and Alida come for the weekend?”

How clever of him to recall her name. But then he was Mr. Memory, of course.

“And if you’d like to bring someone…”

A man, he meant. “No, it’s just Alida and me, and we’d love to.” Not quite true: Alida would have to be dragged, but Lucy didn’t want to ditch her with Tad again, and in any case he’d mentioned something about a weekend shoot for the MagiGro people.

“Minna will be so pleased. Minna loves children.”

He’d said that yesterday. Why be so emphatic about it? Because Minna actually didn’t like kids? In Lucy’s experience, too many positives were usually covering for a negative, and vice versa. “Alida will love meeting you,” she said. “She gets out of school at three on Friday, so if you like we could drive straight up to Whidbey then.”

“Wonderful. And plan on staying till Sunday. Does Alida like to kayak?”

“Who knows? I don’t think she’s ever tried it.”

“I’d get a kick out of showing her how.”

Listening to him on the phone, she could finally hear the ghost of old Europe in his voice — a faint guttural imperfection in his easy vernacular, like a hairline flaw in an otherwise perfect vase.

Putting down the phone, she marveled at what a snap this assignment was turning out to be. The prickly recluse was pure pussycat. She saw herself drawing him out, late at night, over wine, after Alida was in bed — and the piece would practically write itself. Remembering her elaborate campaigns to get face time with the likes of Gates and Cobain — the calls to friends of friends, the guileful negotiations with agents and PAs, the endless faxings of her cosmetically enhanced CV, the months-long waits for a reply — she wanted to give thanks for the sheer heaven-sent bounty of this frictionless commission: August Vanags had fallen into her lap, like rain.

The rain outside was getting even louder. Half an hour before, she’d just been able to make out the pale gray liquescent shape of the Smith Tower; now it was completely gone.

As she turned to the first page of Boy 381, she heard Tad’s trademark two-fingered triple tap on the door. “It’s open,” she called.

“I just swam to the store. That rain’s hot as bathwater.”

He looked like Neptune risen from the sea: a rather short and paunchy Neptune, not exactly godlike, but spectacularly dripping.

“You know a motorcyclist drowned out there? Down in Pioneer Square?”

“Drowned?”

“All the storm drains are choked, and water’s backing up behind the buildings. Apparently the bottom of King Street looks like Snoqualmie Falls. This biker guy — he was on a Harley — hit a submerged curb and fell off. People tried to get to him, but they were sloshing about doing no good at all, and when they finally managed to pull him out, he was dead. He probably wasn’t in too great a shape in the first place. He was an old hippie, you know, the white-ponytail faction. Poor sap.”

“Hadn’t you better get changed?”

“D’you have Lee’s number handy? We ought to call him. There’s water pooling in the stairwell under the skylight.”

She went out to look. It wasn’t “pooling,” with maybe a dozen large drops on the peeling oxblood linoleum. Tad fussed over trivia. Sometimes dearest Tad could piss the shit out of her.

“It’s nothing much,” she said. “And he’s such an obsessive snoop, he’ll discover it for himself soon enough. Do you really want to see him twice in twenty-four hours? I don’t.”

“I don’t know.” He looked up to the skylight, where a drip was swelling at the corner; it slowly grew, detached itself from the woodwork, and plopped onto the floor, where a real pool was forming in a perfect circle around Tad’s feet. He stood there holding a single forlorn plastic bag, his thick wool overcoat resembling a sopping black sponge.

“Honey, please, just for me, will you go get changed?”

Tad, still gazing upward, conceded. “Okay, I’ll find a bucket.”

Back with Augie’s book, she found it altered since her last reading, the lines of print now infused with his voice, his blue eyes, his military mustache, his prosthetic grin.

Where before she’d heard a boy speaking, in a pure, heart-tugging treble, she now registered a man’s dry tenor, and fancied she could tell when he broke for lunch, went to the bathroom, or finished work for the day. This new, slightly embarrassing intimacy between author and reader dampened her pleasure somewhat, but it was authentically him.

Here he was in Lodz, in 1943, a pinched and hungry little waif hiding in a bombed-out house with two older girl orphans who’d taken him under their wing. Right across the street, fifth floor to fifth floor, they saw a gang of jackbooted Nazis clearing Jews from a rooming house. One, an elderly man with bad arthritis, couldn’t rise from his chair, so the Nazis threw it and him right out the window into the street.

For a second, the old man remained sitting in his leather armchair, riding on air. Then he fell out of it. We heard two separate thumps in the street: one was the chair, the other the heavy ker-flup of a human body landing unevenly on cobbles. None of us could speak. We stayed there, motionless at the window, unable to tear ourselves away from the scene below, too fascinated by what we saw to fear detection by the German soldiers.

He’d written the book in a month, he’d said. It was inconceivable to Lucy how anyone could bear to relive five years, packed solid with such harrowing brutalities, in just four weeks. Wouldn’t that drive a normal person to rank insanity? After a couple of days of starvation, rape, torture, and murder, Jews being slung to their deaths from high windows, Lucy would be screaming and ripe for a lobotomy. Yet August Vanags had spent more than sixty years without speaking to anybody of his childhood, rarely even thinking of it, if he was to be believed. What had he said of his book? “A lot of it was news to me.” And to have the whole ghastly accumulation of memories of evil pour out of him in a month — how could his brain and heart take it? And to write it down in such a cool, even-toned style? His shockproof composure was beyond her.

She had lunch — a can of chicken noodle soup and a cheese sandwich — at her desk, watching the city reemerge, building by building, as the rain eased.

She’d never lost touch with the exquisite stab of delight she’d felt when she first took in this raptor’s view over Seattle, on that late-summer afternoon when Schuyler Winslow’s managing agent showed her around the place. Since childhood, Seattle had been Lucy’s fabled Emerald City of Oz. It was where Montana people dreamed of going, if there was life after drought. Although Minneapolis was closer to Miles City, everyone she knew instinctively looked to Seattle when they thought of restaurants, theaters, Major League ballgames, all the fantastic, distant pleasures of the metropolis. They were fans of the Seahawks, the SuperSonics, the Mariners. They spoke of dinner at Canlis as if it were the Russian Tea Room or the Four Seasons. When her discontented mother opened her great travel business, Flights of Fancy, on Custer and Main, she put up posters of Paris, London, New York, and Venice, but her hottest tickets, after cattle sale and harvest time in a wet year, were for weekend getaways from Billings to Seattle: two nights at the Mayflower Park, a Seahawks game, lunch atop the Space Needle, a show at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. Returning visitors would be as starry-eyed about their Seattle adventures as if they’d been sung to by Venetian gondoliers and pictured with Beefeaters beside the Bloody Tower.

Lucy bought into the dream. At college in Missoula, she thought as longingly of Seattle as Chekhov’s Three Sisters did of Moscow, and when the Post-Intelligencer offered her a job as the most junior of reporters, she knew she’d arrived. The view from the top floor of the Acropolis had set the seal on her big-city success, and now that the impossible new landlord was threatening to take it away, she treasured it even more fiercely.

Yet since 2001 she’d felt increasingly guilty about being here. In February, when the building was rocked by the Ash Wednesday earthquake, she was terrified for Alida, then twelve blocks away from home in her preschool classroom. And after 9/11, dire warnings of earthquakes had been replaced by government-sponsored rumors that Seattle was a prime target for dusky, hook-nosed, towel-headed bogeymen in beards.

Driving back from school this morning, she’d caught the latest news about the Algerian Safeco terrorist on the radio. Still in custody, he claimed that he’d left the game early to spend the night with his brother in Tacoma. An FBI SWAT team had raided the place only to find the brother gone. His American wife had been taken in for questioning, his children put in the care of Child Protective Services, and a nationwide APB had been issued for him and his white Jetta — and all this, Lucy was certain, because the Mariners had lucked out over the Blue Jays. One disillusioned baseball fan and his panicked brother constituted an “active cell,” even though no trace of a bomb had been found at the stadium. Again, she thought of calling the police — but why would they have any interest in a one-sided two-minute conversation on a ferry? Much like them, she had no evidence at all. They’d just blow her off, so why bother?

Too often lately, Lucy had felt she owed Alida the true security of the boondocks, instead of the muted daily terrors of Security. Of course Alida would hate the move — and so would she. But was it responsible to go on living in a city likely to collapse in an 8.0 temblor and possibly destined to be blown up by a thermonuclear “device,” or infected with a germ cloud capable of killing millions? How often did she and Alida go to the Fifth Avenue Theatre? Hardly ever. And they’d never eaten at Canlis. As the dream city became the dangerous city, Lucy was forced to admit that her prized view might be, like smoking, an unjustifiably selfish indulgence.

There was also the question of where to go. Once, she’d’ve returned to Montana — to Missoula, most likely, or Bozeman, maybe Livingston. But the entire state was tainted now by the presence of Lewis Olson. Even in Seattle, she was frightened of finding him at the door downstairs, piously wheedling, forgiving her her sins. And in Montana he could easily get to her and install himself in her life, ambushing Alida coming home from school, and doing his horrible Jesus stuff to her. No, they couldn’t risk Montana, not as long as Lewis—“We have a bond, you and me”—Olson was alive.

From these thoughts, Boy 381 was a welcome escape. Better to starve in the ragged costumes of faraway history than to think too much about the present. In the pages of the book, a peasant woman writhed and thrashed in her last agonies, strafed by a passing Messerschmitt, while Lucy, quite content now, reached for the peppermints in her bag.

SOME OF HIS STUDENTS were coming to stay for the weekend, so she’d have to air out the sheets in their bedrooms.

Minna Vanags, carrying an empty basket, walked the soggy path through the wide-open reach of waste ground and fenced pasture that backed onto Sunlight Beach Road. These days, she and Augie faced in opposite directions: he looked to the beach and the sea, while she looked instinctively inland. She’d been six when her deckhand uncle Max had drowned when his crab boat went down in a storm up in Alaska. She’d never learned to swim, and the sight of water, rough or calm, roused in her a childish terror of the sea’s deep-seated wickedness. It was like being afraid of the dark, and her first thought when she saw the house on Useless Bay was Too much sea.

On these daily walks, her favorite moment was when the wind, rustling through the tall grasses and Scotch broom, won out over the sound of waves breaking on sand. From there on in, she was on safe ground, with blackberries and salmonberries, flowering thistles and creeping salal. Names came back to her in a rush from her girlhood, when she would escape alone to the wild ravine of Schmitz Park in West Seattle: willowherb, skunk cabbage, stream violet, foam flower, the piggyback plant.

The path led past a small stand of trees that Minna thought of as her forest, in whose damp shade she foraged happily for mushrooms. She never met another soul on these walks. With no one to disturb the riverlike flow of her daydreaming, she effortlessly reentered that past world, before high-school graduation, before Seafirst Bank, before Augie. Squatting, garden knife in hand, among familiar plants, she’d find herself at the prom, or in the passenger seat of Gerry Dexter’s little primrose-yellow Crosley convertible, or hanging out at Zesto’s with the gang, or kissing Dennis Lundke in his big old Packard as they watched Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in High Society at the Valley 6 drive-in. Dennis tasted — not at all unpleasantly — of hot pastrami.

Minna had no real friends on the island. Before the move, friends had been as natural a part of her landscape as brambles and firs. She’d had friends from school, from the bank, from the neighborhood, from Augie’s college. Now it seemed that she’d shed every last one of them, and gained none to take their place. You’d hardly call Sunlight Beach Road a neighborhood, with its empty houses and migrant weekenders, all too young, too engrossed in their own familiness, to take much notice of oldsters like her and Augie. Or perhaps they were put off by Augie’s fame. In her rare encounters with other residents, Boy 381 always came near the top of the agenda, always spoken of as it were somehow strange and forbidding, something that made her and Augie not quite human. Last summer, one of the young weekenders had said, “Of course we’d love to have you over, but we’d hate to disturb his writing.” Minna had said, “Oh, no, he likes to be disturbed,” but no invitation followed.

The nearest person to a friend she had on the island was Svetlana, the henna-haired Russian who drove over from Langley twice a week to help keep the house tidy. But Svetlana’s English was often impossible to understand, she spoke far more than she listened, and she loved to offer Minna her opinions about “Americans.” Americans didn’t look after their old people; Americans spoiled their children; Americans cared only about money…Svetlana had been living in this country for two years, and talked angrily about going back to Russia, where, she said, “they treat me like queen.” Minna, of course, was locked out from the conversations she had with Augie in Russian, though she sounded so much gentler and nicer than she did in her hectic, threatening, arm-waving English. Augie made her laugh, and she’d never once laughed with Minna, so she really was his friend, not hers.

Minna stooped on the path to pick a dozen leaves from a clump of wild chard, just enough for supper that night. She looked forward to having company for the weekend. Students had healthy appetites. For dinner on Friday, she’d make a rocket salad with beet, orange, and walnuts, followed by a rack of Whidbey Island lamb. Blackberries she’d canned in September stood waiting in Mason jars on a high shelf in the utility room, and she could give them a nice cobbler for dessert.

FINN WAS UP to something — Alida was sure of it. She watched him in Humanities, paying no attention to the teacher but secretly scribbling. As he glanced down at his binder, a smirk would steal across his face, quick as a squirrel crossing a street in an undulating ripple of gray. Finn’s writing was notorious. Nobody wanted him on their team for projects because of his regular B minuses and Cs, and peer-critiquing with Finn was murder: he never got what you were trying to say, and his comments always boiled down to “I think it’s stupid.” The only thing Finn could write was code.

“Have you seen Finn?” Alida asked Gail when they headed for lunch.

“Like, the writing stuff? It’s really weird.”

“But what is it?”

“Well,” Gail said, “I think he’s writing mash notes. To me.”

They had to cling to each other for support as they giggled, and Alida had tears of laughter in her eyes when she said, “Oh my God, that’s so egregious!”

ON THURSDAY MORNING, Lucy was seated in the austere ceilingless writers’ room on the ninth floor of the Central Library, skimming through a toppling pile of World War II memoirs. August Vanags looked down at her from the wall that was hung with black-and-white photographs of local authors. His white mustache was trimmed to perfect shape like a piece of fresh-clipped topiary, but the bulgy glare in his eyes made it plain that he’d taken a dislike to the photographer. His military spruceness set him spectacularly apart from the other authors with their unkempt hair, their two-day stubble, their air of having tumbled fully clothed from their beds to face the camera.

To put Boy 381 in context, she’d pulled from the stacks first-person accounts by refugees, soldiers, civilians, Holocaust survivors. None were half as riveting as Augie’s: where he raced, they plodded; where he was light and nimble, they tended to a solemn, leaden weightiness. The more she read of its rivals in the genre, the more certain she became that Boy was a kind of masterpiece. Writing at a sixty-year distance from the war had given Augie an ironic perspective that no one else could match, and the extraordinary speed at which he’d written the book lent to it a dramatic urgency that was missing from these others. There wasn’t a page of Boy on which you couldn’t feel the author driving forward under a full head of steam, and that was part of its mesmeric quality; it infected the reader with what felt like the writer’s own compulsion to find out what was going to happen next.

Less than wholly compelled, she turned the page of Wolfgang Samuel’s German Boy:

We were alone. One wagon, two horses, and five people. The other soldiers had left on their motorcycles once the wagon had been pulled out of the sand. Below us, flames still flickered in some of the village houses. Refugee wagons and several army trucks attempted to enter the burning village. As our wagon crested the ridge, the horses broke into a trot. With no one in front of us to slow our progress, we moved rapidly, and soon saw the last wagon of our reconstituted column ahead of us. We were the last one now, but we were back with our people. What I had thought was a trap had opened and released us. God had answered my prayers and rewarded Mutti’s faith, I thought. The horses pulled steadily. For them, there was no good or bad day; they just did what they were told…

Samuel was pretty good on the whole, but he wasn’t up to Augie’s standard — though this wasn’t the best place in the world to give any book a fair shake. The writers’ room was overlooked from the tenth floor by a metal catwalk serving the glassed-in elevator shafts, and her reading was constantly interrupted by the annoying poing-poing, poing-poing of arriving and departing elevators. Fragments of Spanish conversation drifted down to her, and she found herself half unconsciously trying to translate them. People waiting for elevators on the catwalk leaned on the rail, candidly examining her at her workstation. When she looked up and caught their eyes, they stared straight back, as if they were watching an animal in a zoo: Look, Homo scriberens! “Throw me a banana,” Lucy wanted to call up to them.

So she was glad when her lone tenancy of the room was broken by the arrival of a disheveled-looking, spindle-shouldered older guy in a pink baseball cap that was too young for him. Like most of the authors on the wall, he looked like he needed a long, hot shower. When they traded nods, his face seemed faintly familiar, but she couldn’t put a name to it. He sat at a far diagonal away from her and opened a massive, grubby, ring-bound notebook.

Under Augie Vanags’ tetchy gaze, she got back to work, methodically scanning pages, but it was impossible not to be distracted by the behavior of the other writer. Though he had a ballpoint pen in his hand, it never touched the paper. Sometimes he leaned back in his chair, cupping his hands behind his head and staring at the black divider that ran between the workstations. Or else, elbows on the desk, he couched his unshaven chin in his palms and frowned intently into the divider as if it were an ebony mirror. An hour passed, then another. So far as Lucy could tell, he didn’t write a word. What was he seeing in that black? His furies?

Shortly after noon she got up to go to lunch. Across the street, Tulio’s had an okay bar that served hors d’oeuvres and sandwiches.

Seeing her disengaged from her books, the man said, “Isn’t this a weird place? It’s like living inside one of those trick architectural drawings by M. C. Escher.” He had an accent — Australian or British — and he was right about Escher. From the writers’ room, Rem Koolhaas’ many-angled lozenges of glass and steel looked like an insoluble puzzle of colliding perspectives.

“Yes, isn’t it?” she said, looking up, dizzied by the diaphanous zigging and zagging of the library roof.

“I like it here.”

She saw that his open notebook contained a few short lines, written in an untidy, spidery scrawl. Poetry? “So what are you w-w-working on?”

“Oh, I’m not exactly working. I just like to bring my block up here and look at it. It gets one out of the house.”

For a moment it crossed her mind to ask if he wanted to join her at Tulio’s, but his aura of gloomy pathos, combined with his unwashed look, made him too unpromising a companion for even a very short lunch. “Well, good luck,” she said.

Sitting alone at the bar, she picked at a sandwich and made notes on her morning’s reading. When she returned to the writers’ room, the guy was gone, having left his chair parked askew, along with a note on top of her book pile. “If you haven’t already, you should read Boy 381 by August Vanags — wonderful book, despite its crass bestsellerdom.” No signature, but she couldn’t complain. That was what writers were like — compulsive snoopers, shameless readers of other people’s letters.

It was getting close to three — and she had to pick up Alida at half-past — when she reached the last book in the pile and began to flip through. The Pianist, by Wladyslaw Szpilman. Polanski had made a movie of it, she remembered. “Even by the standards set by Holocaust memoirs, this book is a stunner.” So said the Seattle Weekly, quoted in the front, but Lucy was unstunned. She was wearying fast of World War II. The glass of pinot grigio she’d had at lunch didn’t help, and in the open cage of the writers’ room, the passing voices and regular inspections made her feel as if she were in the hospital.

Skimming, she was suddenly arrested by a paragraph on chapter 3. How very weird: Szpilman, like Augie, had seen Nazis throw an old man out of a window in a chair. It was all different, of course — both the wording and the location, with Augie in Lodz and Szpilman in Warsaw — yet both men had noted the peculiar detail of the body and the chair hitting the street separately and making different sounds.

Surely this was an eerie coincidence, but whatever it was — if anything at all — she had no time to ponder it now. Not trusting the sluggish elevators, she hurried down the stairwells, The Pianist in hand, followed by the staccato echo of her own footfalls. Pausing on the third floor to self-check the book out, she flew breathlessly on down to the bowels of the building, where the Spider was parked in the underground garage. When she switched on the ignition, it was already 3:29.

EMPLOYEE THEFT. That was the big downside to the parking business — attendants slipping five bucks here, ten bucks there, into their scumbag pockets. Every day, Charles O watched the revenue line on each of his lots. Over the last six weeks he figured he was short around $2,500, and he knew who’d taken it.

He’d thought his Mexicans were too afraid of him to steal, and he was surprised to find that the thief was Miguel. For the past couple weeks he’d switched the attendants around daily, lot to lot, and whichever lot Miguel was on came up short.

Today the kid was on the Broadway lot on Capitol Hill. Driving up Pike, listening with half an ear to the CD of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, Charles O enjoyed the thought of how he was going to teach Miguel a lesson so good he’d run all the way down to Tijuana and never come back. Plus he’d pay back every sorry cent he’d stole, and then some.

At the lot, he saw the kid was in the booth — shambling, and goofy-looking, even for a Mexican. The others treated him like their pet and were always giving him stuff — candy, cigarettes, Pacifico beer.

He lowered his window. “Hey, Miguel!” He could already see the fright in his eyes. “Want to take a ride?”

Stupid kid came straight around to the passenger side and opened the door. He was that goofy.

“Lock up. Put out the sign.”

He could hardly work the combination, he was so scared.

“Okay. Now get in. Move your ass.”

“Si, Mr. Lee?”

Charles O said nothing, just drew away slowly, with the kid beside him and the CD still playing.

“Consider, for example, the buildup-breakthrough flywheel pattern in the evolution of Wal-Mart.”

“What you want, Mr. Lee?”

For answer, Charles O reached over and turned up the volume of the stereo.

“People think that Sam Walton just exploded onto the scene with his visionary idea for rural discount retailing, hitting breakthrough almost as a start-up company. But nothing could be further from the truth….”

He turned right, and left, and right again, then found a nice quiet place to park on the street, right beside the reservoir. He killed the ignition. Not looking at the kid, but staring straight ahead through the windshield into the drizzle, he said, “You been thieving.”

Big load of silence from the kid.

“Four thousand dollars. That’s some chunk of change, Miguel.”

“Noooo…” A moan like a hooting owl in distant trees.

“How much you take?” He let himself sound fierce now, but quiet, his voice holding out the threat of much worse to come.

“Dos mil cuatrocientos cincuenta,” Miguel whispered.

“English! Say English!”

He was crying, shivering on the seat, and Charles O was afraid he was going to shit up that good new leather.

“English!”

“Two t’ousand…four hundert feefty…”

“Four thousand!”

“No — I swear of God.” He was making the cross sign on his chest.

“Fuckwit.”

“I got the money, Mr. Lee.”

“Thief!”

“I give you…”

“Why you steal from me?”

“Mi padre.” The kid’s face was coming all apart. He looked like a quaking lump of spongy gray tofu.

“What your daddy got to do with my money?”

“Hospital.” The word was a whimper.

“What hospital?”

“LA.”

“He die?”

“No, he got problem. With heart.”

Charles O had to laugh: this kid’s dad, going to a hospital in LA? He’d be ruined by the expense. “How much it cost?” he said, interested now.

“T’irty t’ousand, five hundert, forty. T’ree days intensive care.”

“How much you gotta pay?”

“Five t’ousand. I got brothers.”

Charles O saw the kid’s feet down in the footwell — nearly black with ingrained dirt, in flappy plastic sandals. They were five-dollar feet. “The shit you in, Miguel, no way you ever going to get out.”

The kid was weeping a fucking river now.

“What do you think I’m gonna do to you? You better think, Miguel.” He wasn’t looking at the kid, who was cowering back in the seat against the window.

“You a piece of garbage, you know that?”

“Yes, Mr. Lee.”

“The others. How much they take?”

“Maybe little bit. Sometimes.”

“Like Lazaro. Last week, how much?”

“Saturday. Take twenty-five.”

“Enrique?”

“Saturday also. He take forty.”

“Party time, huh?”

“No — for family. In Mexico. By wire.”

“You and me, Miguel, we’re gonna do a deal.”

“Deal?”

“You be my eyes, my ears. Lazaro takes five bucks, you tell me. I want to know when Enrique took his last crap? You tell me. You tell me every fucking thing I want to know, right? You say one word to them, I tell you this: I make you hate to be alive. You bullshit me, I fuck you up so good you think I am the king of hell.” He spoke softly, slowly, making sure the kid got every word. “Everything. You tell me everything.”

“I do that.” He was making the cross sign again.

“You be good boy, I pay for your daddy in the hospital. Twenty-six hundred plus what you stole, asshole.”

The broken kid was sobbing out his guts in heaving gasps and grunts.

“Shut the fuck up,” Charles O said, starting the engine.

Back at the lot, the kid stumbled, still sniveling, back to the booth.

“Remember: everything!”

He was in high good humor as he drove away, having handled it just right. Surprise was the key: surprise yourself, surprise others. That was a mark of the elite player. He switched on Good to Great.

“Sam Walton began in 1945 with a single dime store. He didn’t open his second store until seven years later. Walton built incrementally, step by step, turn by turn of the flywheel….”

MAYBE IT WAS just that Germans were in the habit of tossing infirm, elderly Jews out of windows in their armchairs.

Nothing else in The Pianist chimed directly with Boy 381. Lucy had gutted it that evening, cover to cover, carefully reading every page. Both books were set in the same landscape of hunger, wreckage, and brute violence, but aside from that they were as different as could be. Vanags was the better writer: Szpilman, pianist and composer, writing back in 1945, was perhaps a little too close to his terrible material to achieve the sharp focus that was Augie’s hallmark. In Boy 381, suffering and laughter were constant bedfellows: there were no laughs in The Pianist.

Over the weekend, she’d raise the coincidence with Augie — lightly, casually, with tact. He had no reason to embellish his unique experience of the war by lifting a paragraph from someone else’s book. Somehow the explanation must lie in the character of the war itself. Yet that one incident — the irregular soft thud of the body, the splintering crash of the chair on cobbles — had thrown the book out of whack for her and become the dominant image in the foreground. Happening on The Pianist had made her a bad reader of Boy 381, unable to see the forest because of her perverse preoccupation with a single tree. But she was sure that talking with Augie would restore the book to its rightful shape in her mind — well, almost sure.

It had been a tough sell, trying to get Alida to buy into the weekend. She’d played the homework card, the date-with-Gail card, the stay-with-Tad card.

“The house is right on the beach. You used to love that beach when you were little. Don’t you remember Tom and Maggie Owen?”

“No.”

“We’ll pack your swimsuit.”

“How old are they?”

“Oh, sort of…sixtyish.”

“Great.”

“They have kayaks. Augie wants to take you kayaking.”

“Cool,” Alida said, making kayaks sound like a second helping of spinach.

The school had recently sent out a booklet, “Understanding Your Child.” Alida, at eleven, now exactly fit the profile of “Early Adolescence: Ages 12–14,” which advised parents to “resist seeing only the worst in your changing children. Focus on the positive, including their creativity, curiosity, and fresh ideas”—easier said, as Lucy was finding nowadays, than done.

“Anyway, Rabbit, we’re going.”

“Okay. I really like being a parcel.”

Then, when Lucy laughed, Alida abruptly relented. “You know, it’s been so long since we were at the beach? Not since we went to Hawaii.”

And when they were snuggling in Alida’s bed at around ten, she’d said, “Mom, I’m really looking forward to going to Useless Bay,” but Lucy caught in her voice the unmistakable tone of an adult indulging a child. Perhaps the school had issued a similar booklet to the students: “Understanding Your Parent.” What profile, Lucy wondered, did she fit?

From under the covers, she clicked on the remote to watch the late-night news. The torrential rain had triggered a massive rockslide near Snoqualmie Pass, closing Interstate 90 in both directions. A murder-suicide in Bellevue: “They seemed like such a normal, happy couple,” said a neighbor. More on the Safeco “terrorist,” who’d been released and sent back to Canada; but his brother had been found in a Eureka, California, motel, his giveaway Jetta parked outside his cabin, and was now in police custody, charged with immigration violations and tax fraud. Under the new laws, they never arrested anybody who wasn’t guilty of something.

As Augie had said, the weather for tomorrow looked good: isolated early morning showers, followed by sunshine in the afternoon. Temperature in the high seventies, rising to the mid to upper eighties on Saturday and Sunday. “For the first week in April that’s phenomenal,” said the weatherman. “You’re talking me into my bikini,” replied the fortyish newscaster in the coy voice that always made Lucy reach for the retch button and switch her off.

Readying herself for sleep, she evicted thoughts of Augie and his book from her mind and returned to the place she so often visited at this time of night — a long, straight, gumbo road riding the oceanic swells of prairie; her dad in the driver’s seat, on his rounds; scanty-legged pronghorn antelope leaping barbed-wire fences; the openness, the smell of dust and sage; prairie dog towns by the roadside; seasonal creeks overhung with cottonwoods; cattle on the rangeland; far-apart ranches hiding behind shelter belts of trees. The more remote this world grew from her, the greater the solace Lucy took from it in her most placid and satisfying dreams. So tonight she willed herself back to Custer and Prairie counties, her own patch of Eden before the world went bad. The penalty she paid for these sweet dreams was that occasionally she’d wake up screaming, but only when the dream went into uncontrollable fast forward — a risk that Lucy was prepared to take, for most nights the route in her dreams took her nowhere near where Lewis Olson stood, barring the entrance to his slovenly ranch.

ALL VERY WELL for Lucy — the model bourgeois liberal — to tease him about his “paranoia,” but Tad wasn’t paranoid, he was entirely reasonable.

In the late sixties, in Vietnam demonstrations, he’d seen men in nondescript brown suits — J. Edgar Hoover’s ubiquitous spies — taking pictures of the marchers, and with nearly forty years of protest and activism behind him, Tad was certain that somewhere along the way he must have picked up an FBI file. Even though he had drawn a 7 in the lottery, he escaped Vietnam by being “psychologically unfit,” their term for being a raving homo — a role he’d played with great conviction for the draft board. And in 1999, he’d gotten into trouble with Equity for marching with Michael, as they jointly held up a banner that proclaimed, SEATTLE ACTORS EQUITY AGAINST NIKE AND GLOBAL EXPLOITATION, during the WTO protests. A stern letter had come from New York threatening him with expulsion from the union after that.

In his time, Tad had demonstrated in favor of women’s rights, gay rights, and undocumented migrant workers’ rights, and against detention without trial, the sacking of Archibald Cox, the funding of the Contras, the invasion of Grenada, oil drilling in Alaska…too many causes to remember. He’d carried placards for Che, Fidel, Huey Newton, and Daniel Ortega, and had recently tried to stage a rally in support of Hugo Chavez, though he’d found too few takers to make it worthwhile. Lucy had said, “Hugo who?”

Of course they were keeping tabs on him. How could they not?

Data mining was Tad’s current obsession. Someone, somewhere, was watching as he tramped from site to site in cyberspace. The Patriot Act gave the federal government unlimited power to snoop on private citizens, and a daily visitor to Al-Jazeera must surely have aroused the interest of whoever was monitoring that site. Tapping out e-mail, Tad sensed that his messages were being scanned by an anonymous eavesdropper. Paranoia? Hardly. Internet service providers were required by law to render up complete records of their clients’ every digital move if they were sent a “national security letter” by the FBI.

Was he the subject of such a letter? The ISPs were sworn to secrecy on the matter, on penalty of a lengthy jail term, so you’d never know for certain that you’d been watched — until they knocked at your door.

First they’d used the system to catch pedophiles downloading kiddie porn from the web. Now they were trawling for political dissidents, terrorist “sympathizers,” which is to say any screwball foolish enough to get up the nose of the administration.

“Lucky your first name’s not Ahmad or Osama,” Lucy had said, with that annoying laugh of hers. “Don’t you think they’d have their hands rather full if they were chasing down every actor with lefty stickers on his car?”

But Lucy didn’t understand. They were using a net with a mesh so fine that almost anybody might be caught in it. “Either you are with us or against us.” So if you thought it important to read the Arab point of view on the situation in the Mideast, you were a likely traitor to the U.S. — especially if the FBI’d had you in its sights since 1969.

Such thoughts gave spice to Tad’s nighttime travels by mouse. Visiting Hizb-ut-Tahrir.org and Khilafah.com, he was making a lone citizen’s covert protest from deep in the grassroots against an intolerable and abusive government. Let them knock on his door. In his most expansive fantasies, he imagined Lucy, skeptical no longer, writing about it for The New Yorker, and his radical congressman, Jim McDermott, raising his case on the floor of the House. Were he ever to be offered the part of political martyr, he’d give good weight.

Tonight, though, he was doing a little data mining of his own, trawling through cyberspace for the new landlord. According to Google, there were Charles O. Lees living in Wisconsin, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, but none in the Seattle area. He moused over to the Post-Intelligencer site. Nothing for “Charles O. Lee,” so he tried “Charles Lee” and “Charles + Lee.”

Mr. Lee had been clever at keeping his name out of the papers, but you’d think a parking lot magnate would’ve left some kind of public trail. The only name that fit was that of a social worker, Charles Ong Lee of Shoreline, who’d died in a one-car crash on Aurora Avenue in November 1999. The report was very short: Mr. Lee, driving a white Honda Civic, had spun out on the wet and leafy pavement, hit a utility pole, and died instantly; alcohol was not thought to be involved.

The one detail that gave Tad pause was the man’s age — twenty-five, which, had he lived, would make him roughly as old as the landlord was now. Could Mr. Lee conceivably be guilty of identity theft? Probably not, but the possibility, however faint, was so tantalizing that Tad copied the story and e-mailed it to himself as the first item in the file he meant to build on Charles O. Lee. Sometime in the next few days, he’d try chatting up an attendant at one of the Excellent Parking lots. Tad had no doubt that Lee’s arrival on the scene meant either eviction or a rent hike so astronomical they’d all have to move. Certainly he was in no position to fork out three grand a month for what he thought of as an attic and Lee would grandly advertise as a “penthouse.” He’d been living in the Acropolis for more than twenty years, and it enshrined his and Michael’s happiness together. The prospect of being booted out by the insufferable Lee, railing against “scumbags” and “lowlifes” and “toerags,” was beyond enraging; it called for a manning of the barricades.

He glanced at the Trotsky quote, in Michael’s handwriting, on a strip of yellowing paper pasted above the top of his computer screen. “Americans think in terms of continents: it simplifies the study of geography, and, what is most important, provides ample room for robbery.”

A LUMINOUS thin haze hung over Elliott Bay as Lucy, at her window, watched what appeared to be a kind of maritime Noh play. Twice, a ferry had steamed into the bay from the direction of Bainbridge Island. Twice, a go-fast cigarette-type boat had approached it, settled alongside, and emitted a rather feeble puff of smoke. Twice, Coast Guard helicopters and patrol vessels had closed in on the supposedly stricken ferry, only to retreat to where they’d come from so the mock attack could begin again. There was something both comical and alarming in the unreality of this exercise, which had “fiction” written all over it. Though it was costing the taxpayers millions, nobody could possibly mistake it for the real thing.

Reality was hard to fake, as Lucy had noticed when she watched Alida, aged three, master the TV remote. It took her only a split second to recognize and dismiss a talk show, documentary, or news program in her searches for the soaps and sitcoms that held her uncomprehendingly enthralled. Still toddling, Alida knew that fiction was lit differently than fact, and in a single moving image could distinguish one from the other with deadshot accuracy.

The facile imitation of life now in progress on the bay wouldn’t fool a six-month-old. “First responders,” as they liked to call them, were being trained not for breaking news but for taking part in an episode of Law and Order or Desperate Housewives, and in the event of real horror they’d turn out to be about as much use as the cast of some crappy sitcom. Come to think of it, Tad and his friends from the Rep and ACT, accustomed as they were to stage emergencies and off-the-cuff improvisations, would almost certainly have done a better job than the Department of Homeland Security.

Tiring of the show, she set about packing their bags for the weekend. Her only real work would be talking with Augie over dinner, which brought up the difficult question of the tape recorder. First she packed it, then she unpacked it. Taping your host in his own home, Lucy decided, would be a serious breach of basic good manners. For this piece, she’d rely on memory and her notebook.

At noon, bags ready for the car, she wandered down to the Bookstore Bar in the Alexis Hotel on First. Even now it felt a little weird going into the Alexis — scene of Alida’s strange conception — but she liked the bar, the books, the quiet raised table at the back, where she always ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc, a small Caesar, and the chicken potpie. As ever, she checked out the line of drinkers up at the bar — as silly a superstition as knocking on wood, since she’d be unlikely even to recognize him now, were he to show up, which of course he never did.

For company, she’d brought the bonus double Arts and Leisure sections of the Friday edition of The New York Times. She liked reading reviews of plays she’d never see, recitals she’d never hear, exhibits she’d never visit. Lucy was no vicarious culture vulture; it was the language of the reviews themselves that she treasured. After the front-page headlines, body counts, senatorial brawls, and denunciatory op-eds, it was good to loiter in a world where “subtlety” and “restraint” were terms of praise. So, sipping wine, she read about “the innate good taste and nuanced phrasing that informs Mr. Thomas’s spectacular, crystal-clear performance” in a dance concert at NYU. A pity, Lucy thought, that Mr. Thomas was unlikely ever to run for president.

At two, she climbed the hill back to the Acropolis, and by ten to three was outside the school, the top of the Spider down as for a vacation. Alida detached herself, with lingering hugs, from a knot of friends and ambled over, wearing a miniskirt over her jeans — a fashion Lucy thought was ugly, though she’d never dare to say so.

“How was your day, Rabbit?”

“Good.”

“What’s the homework load?”

“A lot.” She groaned.

“They’ve got a big house, so you’ll have a quiet room where you can hole up. I packed your laptop.”

“Cool.” She’d put on sunglasses and was wiring herself up to her iPod.

Of course it had been sweet of Tad to buy her one, but Lucy couldn’t help loathing the little white and silver gadget, which had drawn yet another curtain between her and her disappearing child. By the time they reached the top of the street, Alida was nodding, blank-faced, to the beat in her earphones.

Lucy headed for the interstate. Not long ago they’d sat down together in the living room and listened to the Green Day album on the sumptuous stereo system she’d bought after the Kurt Cobain piece, when Tina Brown had put her on a monthly retainer. She was surprised by how much she liked them, their unexpectedly complex melodies reminding her sharply of the Beatles. But the words! She had to work hard to figure out the lyrics and was shocked by their bleakness once she decoded them.

“What’s your favorite track?” she’d asked.

“‘Give Me Novocaine,’” Alida said, as Lucy herself at the same age might’ve voted for “All You Need Is Love.”

Give me novocaine—at eleven? Green Day had about as much optimism as Noam Chomsky, and about as much humor, in Lucy’s view. But they were the band for Alida and her friends, for whom tuneful despair was apparently the going thing. At least Alida liked — or pretended to like — the Beatles, too.

There were long lines at the I-5 checkpoint, where Lucy was again lectured about not having a National ID card, and a two-ferry wait at Mukilteo. Shortly after six, she drove onto Whidbey Island.

In the buttery evening light, the rinsed green of pasture and woodland looked like another, blessedly peaceful world. Not wanting to pass the scene of Monday’s accident, Lucy took a maze of little back roads, with Alida map-reading.

“In about half a mile, the road will turn to the left. You want to take a right immediately after the bend….” Her map skills were of motor-rally standard now. Last summer, she’d navigated them down to LA on the coastal roads and back to Seattle via the Mojave Desert and the Sierras without a single wrong direction. Along the route they’d talked and talked, about everything. But that was before the fucking iPod, which she continued to wear as she read aloud from the map, nodding away to some suicidal song that Lucy couldn’t hear.

“Look at how green it all is after the rain,” Lucy called out, as if to someone far off in the fields.

After a long pause, Alida said, “Cool.”

“Oh, Rabbit.”

Nod. Nod. Nod. Who gives a rat’s ass about greenery when history’s coming to an end and all you want is to be numbed with novocaine?

“Sunlight Beach Road is the next left, coming up in a bit less than a mile. You said they had kayaks, right?”

“Yes, Augie said he’d teach you if you wanted.”

“That’d be cool.”

“Like cool-cool, not like okay-and-what-else-cool?”

“Yeah, cool.”

As she swung the car onto the raked and virgin gravel of 2041, Augie Vanags came out the door to greet them.

He bowed to Alida and held out his hand. “Alida, hi! I’ve been so much looking forward to meeting you.”

“Me too.” Alida was reliably polite with strangers.

“Lot of questions I want to ask you.”

They were exactly the same height — Augie nattily tricked out in black turtleneck, white duck pants, and blue suede loafers, Alida in her weird skirt-over-jeans outfit. To Lucy they looked alarmingly like some May-November couple. God, those sunglasses: they turned her into a nymphet. Still, the just-visible sprays of zits on her forehead and around her chin helped to detract from the effect, which was something.

“Lucy.”

So she was Lucille no more: he must have looked her up on the Internet.

Squiring Alida by the elbow, Augie led them into the house, and Lucy remembered Tad saying that he used to hit on his students.

TAD, shopping at Trader Joe’s, mostly for wine, was waiting in the checkout line. The guy ahead of him, fortyish, with specs and an Abe Lincoln beard, looked familiar, though Tad couldn’t place him. The guy’s basket was bare: ground beef under cellophane wrap, a single can of tomatoes, three netted onions, a small box of mushrooms, a pack of cheap American-made spaghetti. Tad watched him pay with a mixture of food stamps and ones and quarters. Then he remembered.

“Mr. Quigley!”

The guy turned, blinked for a moment, and said, “Mr. Autoglass?”

“Alida — Alida Bengstrom — was in your class last year.”

“Yes, Alida. Smart kid, and kind, too, which counts for a straight A in my book. It was fun teaching her.” He looked forlorn at the memory.

“I’m sort of like her godfather.”

“Cash back?” the clerk said.

“No thanks.” Tad clicked Enter on the $143.04 he was charging to his debit card.

“How’s she liking sixth grade?”

“She’s doing great, but she still misses your class. You were the best teacher she’s ever had, you know that? You turned her on to so many things. Like that world population and income distribution project — with the kids on the desks and the M & M’s? She’s never going to forget that. I was pretty turned on by it, too.”

“Not too many M & M’s for Africa,” Mr. Quigley said. Not too many M & M’s for Mr. Quigley, either, by the looks of it. He appeared wrung out of everything except for that stubborn trace of schoolteacherly wryness, the ingrained habit of his trade.

“How’ve you been holding up?” Tad asked.

“Well, I’ve learned a lot about the bus routes, going to interviews. And biking.” Tad had noticed that the cuffs of his pants were tucked into his socks.

Tad was involved in a complicated bit of stage business: trying to scratch off the $18 price tag from the most expensive bottle he’d bought, shielding this from Mr. Quigley while keeping him engaged in conversation. The wine — a 2001 Château Gigault — wasn’t anything to write home about, but it would have to do.

“Nice meeting you,” Mr. Quigley said wanly, turning to head out into the street and get on his bike.

“No, wait — Mr. Quigley? Alida wants to be remembered to you. It’s a thank-you note from her. It ought to go okay with spaghetti Bolognese.”

“Thanks — thank Alida for me.” He took the bottle, but looked utterly humiliated by the transaction, and clearly couldn’t wait to escape Tad’s de haut en bas solicitude.

As he scuttled from the store with his string bag, pant-legs flapping free of his socks, Tad thought, Fuck! How the fuck could I have been so stupid?

It was just the sort of actorish gesture he despised, landing poor Quigley on the receiving end of such paltry, self-aggrandizing largesse. He should have found out his address and sent him a crate of the stuff with a covering note from Alida, who would have instinctively known how to handle it gracefully. Tad carried his two paper sacks, bottles clanking, out to the VW, cursing himself under his breath.

Hating himself, he felt a resurgence of hatred for the conniving band of mothers who’d brought Quigley down, and for the supine weakness of the school’s principal, who’d let him go. It had been politics, of course. Quigley had polluted his fifth-grade classroom with “left-wing opinions.” That was the festering complaint of the suburban moms, especially those from the East Side. But when Quigley made fun of “intelligent design,” the mothers saw their chance and sprang. They were technically outnumbered by the secular, liberal group of parents from the city, led by Lucy, but they had the big guns, including control of the PTA and a vociferous moral indignation that the liberals couldn’t match. Their precious beliefs were being contemptuously mocked by a dangerous atheist, a man grossly unfit to take charge of their too-easily-impressionable darlings, and when they confronted the principal, she put up about as much resistance as a sponge. When Lucy’s army tried to counterattack, the principal went into tearful meltdown: oh, of course she was on their side, really, but what could one do when the Jesus freaks were on the warpath? So she sacked him.

The worst thing was that the arch-freak, Elizabeth Tuttle, chair of the school board and a “homemaker” married to a venture capitalist, was the mother of Ali’s best friend. At the time it had felt to Tad, staying up till all hours talking with Lucy, advising her on strategy, like the War between the States.

They’d debated as to whether to remove Ali from the school in protest. But Ali was happy and settled there and hardly deserved to be a pawn in this grown-up feud.

Lucy had heard that Mr. Quigley’s wife had taken wing soon after his dismissal, and that he was now an every-other-weekend parent to their two kids. Perhaps the miserable-looking spaghetti Bolognese was meant for them. That Tad had so empty-headedly added to the luckless Mr. Quigley’s indignities made him take it out on the Beetle. Wrestling the car angrily into reverse, he came within an inch of slamming into a harmless elderly couple jointly maneuvering their shopping cart across the lot.

“WELL,” AUGIE WAS SAYING over dinner, “I suppose you’d be for the Equal Rights Amendment? Gay marriage? A woman’s right to choose?”

“Guilty on all counts,” Lucy said, digging into her pink and tender rack of lamb.

“Which is exactly why we have to fight the war on terror, don’t you see?”

“Animal rights?” Alida looked up from her untouched chop, though she was cleaning the plate of the vegetables around it.

“Sure, animal rights. We’re talking all rights here. Rights I happen to believe in, along with a whole bunch of rights I don’t. It’s what living in a democracy is all about. You have certain rights, you want others, you argue people around to your way of thinking, you vote — well, you’ll be able to vote quite soon. You make the laws — you and all the millions of other Americans who exercise their democratic freedoms. And that’s why we’re fighting now, against people who want to take away our freedoms, like our freedom to lobby for animal rights. Here, let me get you a fresh Pepsi.”

Alida, fork in the air, was looking grave. Still at the age when adults tended to talk to her in voices they used exclusively on children and dogs, she’d warmed to Augie’s grown-up-to-grown-up earnestness.

“I’m so sorry about the lamb, Alida,” Minna said. “I used to be a vegetarian once, so I totally understand. If there’s anything else…like eggs?”

“It’s okay. I really liked the potatoes and beans and carrots, thank you.”

Lucy said, “It may be short-sighted of me, but…Like if I could see grand ayatollahs in the governor’s mansion and the White House, if I could imagine the spread of sharia law across the state of Washington, and Pike Place Market filled with American women in burkas, I’d sign up for the National Guard tomorrow morning. Me and my AK-47. But I guess I’m misunderestimating the power of the enemy.”

Augie treated Lucy to a momentary, sardonic flash of cracked-china blue, and turned to Alida. “What do you think?”

“Well…” Alida said. “(A)…”

This (A) and (B) business was a new ploy she’d been practicing a lot lately on Lucy and Tad, and meant to stake out in advance a broad acreage of conversational space.

“(A) I think we’re too freaked out by the terrorists. I mean, like just about every country in the world has got terrorists blowing up stuff. You know, like it happens. Like airplanes crash, and tsunamis, and earthquakes — stuff like that. Like what if I was a kid in Africa or India? But in America all we act scared of is the terrorists — and it’s not true! And(B) I think the president spends all his time thinking about terrorists when he ought to be thinking about so much other stuff, like emissions. I’m really, really scared about emissions. We did this project once — but America won’t even sign the Kyoto proto-thing. It’s like we don’t care about the world at all, we just want to fight a bunch of stupid terrorists. It just doesn’t compute to me. It’s like two plus two equals five.”

Lucy had never heard Alida talk like this before. Did it come from Tad? From Bill Quigley’s class? Surely it didn’t come from her, though she found herself rooting for her daughter’s argument, holding her own against Augie Vanags, even as she felt an unsettling pang, half loss, half pride, at seeing Alida as this articulate stranger on the far side of the dinner table — someone whom Lucy ruefully thought she’d be glad to get to know.

“I take your point,” Augie said. “Or points, rather. But—”

To Lucy, Minna said, “It’s not too rare for you?”

“No, it’s perfect. I’m going to grab Alida’s, too, if that’s okay.”

Minna laughed, the first laugh Lucy had ever seen from her. “I’ll tell you my secret recipe for rack of lamb. If Julia Child ever caught me doing it, I’d probably get sent to cookery jail. But what I like to do is turn the oven to Self-clean, then I put the rack of lamb in, and when smoke comes out the oven door I know it’s done.”

“That’s the kind of recipe I can follow.”

“I like to cook,” Minna said. “I don’t know why. My mom used to hate it — she always thought everything tasted best if it came out of a can. I was in high school when they invented frozen TV dinners. Mother loved those. Sliced turkey, cornbread dressing, peas, sweet potatoes, and gravy. We’d have that four, five nights in a row.”

“What did your dad do?”

“He was an engineer. At Boeing.”

They were still talking politics at the other end of the table. Lucy heard Alida say, “This like scenario…” Scenario?

“That totally makes sense to me,” Lucy said. “You’re a gourmet cook because your mom cooked out of cans. I’m a lousy cook because my mom was so into haute cuisine — she had whole shelves of French cookbooks — but never had the time to do anything properly. She’d come in with this casserole and say in her two-packs-a-day-of-Tareytons contralto, ‘It’s just a simple daube de boeuf provençale—and it was horrible, like chunks of saddle leather floating in a lake of grease and vegetables. But it was from France, not Montana, so we had to sit down and say how brilliant she was to have found the recipe. God, we had so much cassoulet, and carbonnade, and noisettes of this and noisettes of that, that I’d’ve died for one of your frozen turkey TV dinners.”

It was fun to make Minna smile. Her face lost its usual mistiness and came into sudden focus, again putting Lucy in mind of Marilyn Monroe. In her teens, she must’ve been like flypaper to the boys, and even now it was hard to credit that she must be only a couple of years younger than Lucy’s mother. Thinking of her mom, turtle-faced, peering short-sightedly from behind the chained door of the Coral Gables condo, Lucy said, “I only have to get near the stove to start feeling I’ll mutate into her and produce something utterly inedible with a fancy French name.”

Augie was saying, “That’s just not a biggie for me. The way I see it, the gut issue—”

“Politics!” Minna said. “You know we lived once in Washington, D.C.? Augie loved it, of course, but I just couldn’t wait to get back to the Pacific Northwest. That awful climate. Summer in D.C. — it’s like a sauna! And the people there, they’re so different from Seattle people, they didn’t hardly seem real to me.”

Lucy tried to imagine Minna hanging out with National Security Council types and their wives in the age of Nixon and Kissinger.

“Martians!” Minna said with a conspiratorial giggle.

She’d’ve been — what, in her early thirties? — in those chauvinist days, and a prime piece of cocktail-party prey. “You had to fight them off — the men, I mean?”

“Oh, yeah, I got to be a champion wrestler in D.C. And in Seattle, too, back then. You know how it is. I bet you’ve slapped a few faces in your time.”

Lucy heard Alida say, “Like when I was at preschool, I used to think Hitler lived on Bainbridge Island….” What was this about?

Minna leaned toward Lucy. “Had to slap Augie’s once. Right around the back of the bank. He was getting fresh before we even got inside the car.”

Augie was saying, “Nah, that dog won’t hunt, Alida.”

Minna said, “That old Ford of his, it was a wreck. His students used to laugh at him for driving it. But he had such a way with words.”

“Hey, what are you two yakking about down there?”

“Mind your own beeswax,” Minna said; then she and Lucy cleared the plates from the table.

There was blackberry cobbler for dessert, wolfed down by Alida. “Yummy!” she said to Minna, suddenly a child again.

“At CollierParnell,” Lucy said, “did you work closely with an editor?”

“Oh, yeah — Charlie Shaw. Good man. He made me empty my box of commas. Come to think of it, he just about eviscerated my entire system of punctuation. He was big on what he called ‘sentence speed,’ and thought my grammar was too fussy and academic.”

“But the text itself? Did he ask for revisions or like suggest incidents that were needed here and there?”

“No, he hardly changed a word. He just pulled out all the punctuation.”

At least the issue had been broached, and Augie seemed to take it in stride. When Alida left the table to go to the bathroom, Augie looked at Lucy and shook his head from side to side. “She’s a delight.”

WAKING EARLY Saturday morning to the first slivers of gray light between the blinds, Lucy heard the irregular chatter of typewriter keys coming from Jefferson’s library across the hall. What was he writing now? A sequel to his blockbuster, a Horatio Alger story of a poor European boy making good in rich and generous America, or one of his dry-as-dust polemics for Foreign Policy magazine? Whatever…Listening to the pleasant, distant clackety-clack-clack of Augie at work in the gloaming, she fell asleep again, only to wake up, almost immediately it seemed, but actually two hours later, to the sound of a piano down below: over and over again, the same sequence of notes, though never twice in exactly the same rhythm. Then came a deep, resonant chord struck first hesitantly, experimentally, then again with confident force.

She took a shower, giving a wide berth to the hostile scale on the bathroom floor. Her weight had begun to frighten her lately, a problem she dealt with by hiding it under muumuus and shunning those escalating red digital numbers. She dressed to the accompaniment of Augie exercising his democratic freedoms at his Steinway grand, then poked her head into Alida’s room next door. The bed was empty, and it looked as if she’d upended her bag and shaken out every piece of clothing in a tumbled heap.

Downstairs, Augie was alone, sitting at the piano.

“Poor old Schubert. What did he ever do to deserve the way I murder him? Alida went off to the beach, Minna likes to sleep in on weekends, there’s coffee over there.”

From the squared-off kitchen area, Lucy called, “Do you want some?”

“No, I’ve been tanking up on caffeine since five-thirty.”

“Do go on playing. I like it — even if the piano’s better than the pianist. How long have you been learning?”

“Three months. From scratch. I couldn’t read a note of music when I started.” He tinkled out a few bars.

“Sounds like you’re doing great.”

“If I could learn to play just this one sonata semi-fluently before I die…” He went back to practicing a wobbly arpeggio, not at all embarrassed by Lucy’s presence.

She found it pleasant to sit on their cruddy old sofa, sipping at her coffee and listening to Augie hacking away, banana-fingered, at the keys. During a pause, she said, “Is that in A major?”

“B flat. Number Twenty-one. His last.”

Behind Augie’s halting notes, she was beginning to hear the ghost of a performance on disk that she was sure she had at home. There was something more than mildly megalomaniacal, she thought, about an absolute beginner tackling a work so obviously difficult and emotionally lavish. But that was Augie, and being Augie he’d most likely crack the sonata before his deadline. Still, it was strange that a man so ambitious and doggedly competent should have failed to make full professor at UW — or was it that only in retirement, in his new life on Whidbey, that he’d uncovered in himself this ferocious willingness to beat the odds?

His practice was interrupted by a string of thin electronic beeps. Augie shut off the alarm on his watch and closed the piano lid. “Two hours,” he said. “My daily stint.”

“You’ve read The Pianist?” Lucy said offhandedly, looking at the piano rather than at him.

“Oh, didn’t they turn that into a movie? No, I haven’t read it. Ironically, as a historian I’m not that big a fan of memoirs. Of course they have their uses, but their narrators are chronically unreliable.”

“You might like this one, just for the bits about music.”

“I’ll have to check it out,” Augie said, his tone of voice suggesting that this wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

“The odd thing is that Sp — Spuzz — Szpilman saw almost the exact same thing as you did. Like when you were in Lodz…is that how you say it?”

Augie laughed. “You mean Wootsh?”

“Wootsh?”

“L, O, D, Z. Wootsh.”

“Wow.”

“Poles are tricky that way. Lot of others, too. Yeah, Wootsh?”

“Well, when you were in…Wootsh…with those two other kids, and you saw the Nazis throwing an old Jewish guy with arthritis out of a window in his armchair? The guy who wrote The Pianist—however you say his name — he described pretty much the same thing: Nazis throwing an old man in an armchair out of a high window in the ghetto in…is it Warsaw?”

“Funnily enough, Warszawa’s pronounced pretty much like Warsaw. Polish inconsistency, you see.”

“I was struck by the coincidence.”

“Why?”

“Well, these two old guys in armchairs, both hurled out of windows…it all seemed so shockingly particular that I was kind of amazed to read of it happening in two different places. Warsaw, and Wootsh, you know?”

“No surprise to me. Face it, Lucy, in war brutality gets to be fun, and like every other kind of fun, like football or checkers, brutality develops its own rules. It gets conventionalized. Remember the pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib? They were of jocks having fun, playing games by the rules. All those human pyramids of naked prisoners? Naked guys on all fours being led around on a leash by a grinning woman? Hooded guys with electrodes attached to their testicles, strung up like carcasses in a butcher’s? It was ritualized play, like a frat-house hazing. The players weren’t making up that stuff as they went along, they were going by the rulebook, playing the torture and humiliation game.

“The Nazis were like that. It was a game for them to empty out the tenement buildings of the cities they invaded, especially in the ghettos. Architecture had a lot to do with it: think tall sash windows, with sills just a foot or two above the floor. You raise the sash, you create a space just right for a person in a chair. If some old guy can’t get up when you break into his apartment, it’s out the window with him. Do that once, you electrify the entire goddamn ghetto, and you’ve got a new move. Word gets around: here’s a trick pour encourager les autres!”

He laughed, an arid little chuckle. “When we saw what we saw in Lodz, it looked like they were doing it for the hundredth time. It had that practiced air. Makes me think of the Ik. You know the Ik?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Tribe in Africa — Uganda, Sudan, somewhere up there. The Ik lost their hunting grounds; then they had a go at being farmers, which they were no damn good at at all. When they hit starvation point, they figured the only way to save the economy was to get rid of their old people. It’s a tough assignment in any language to kill off your own close kinfolks, so the Ik had to ritualize it, turn it into a kind of elaborate game. They pushed their grannies off the top of cliffs like it was some Olympic event, you know, Tossing the Granny.

“Two years plus into the war — by the end of ’41, beginning of ’42—the Nazis were behaving pretty much like the Ik, like a barbarized people. They could do the unconscionable because they’d worked it up into a whole series of rituals. Oh, hey there! How ya doin’?”

Alida had stepped into the room. Barefoot, hair a blond tangle, in shorts and baggy T, she was carrying a plastic bag and looked more eight than eleven.

“Oh my God,” she said, “I’ve got so many sand dollars it’s obscene.”

To Lucy, Augie said, “I need sand dollars for my research, so I commissioned Alida. We had a deal: a dollar per dollar, if that’s okay with you.”

“Sure.”

“So what’s the score, Alida?”

“Forty-seven.”

“Lay ’em out on the floor there. Let’s count them.”

Alida unpacked her trove of sandy skeletons. Augie, down on his knees, was talking nature study as if the Nazis had never existed, explaining cilia and pores and tube feet. “That one’s got a nick in it. Doesn’t qualify. Let’s break it open. See those little hard white pieces inside? Sand-dollar teeth.”

“Cool.”

“What do you think it eats?”

“I don’t know. Plankton?”

“Right. Juicy little plankters. Uses its tube feet to shovel its food into its mouth here, then sifts it through its teeth.”

Three sand dollars were rejected as unfit for research purposes, so Augie got out his wallet and paid off his assistant with $44.00. Alida stowed away the loot in the buttoned back pocket of her shorts. Grinning at her mother like the cat that got the cream, she said, “I think the tide’s coming in quite fast now.”

Augie looked at his watch. “Mid-tide should be about eleven-fifty, then we can think about getting the kayaks out.”

“Have you had breakfast yet, Rabbit?”

“Yes, Augie cooked me scrambled eggs.”

“With some expert assistance. She’s a better cook than I am, I’m afraid.”

“You’d better put that money away before you go kayaking,” Lucy said, hearing in her voice the annoying note of the parent trying to repossess her child.

At nine Minna showed up, looking particularly busty and skinny-legged this morning, dressed as if for a picnic in a knee-length skirt and a tight white angora sweater — hardly the same person as the faded woman in a housecoat who’d met Lucy at the door earlier in the week.

Alone with Lucy in the kitchen, she said, “I have to go into Langley to pick up some things.” Clearly an invitation.

“Can I drive you there?”

“Oh, in your sports car? That’d be such a treat. Driving our Corolla’s a drag.”

So that was what lay hidden behind the doors of the three-car garage. Lucy had expected something grander.

“We can have some girl talk,” Minna said over the gruff snarl of the coffee grinder.

“I THINK I’m going to throw up into the fucking aspidistra.”

“Asphodel, Tad, asphodel.”

“Whatever. ‘It’s my allergies, you know, honey.’”

“Just swallow it, and we’ll break after this take, okay? Silence on set!”

“Rolling.”

“MagiGro 9, take 7.”

“Now is the season…” Tad sometimes bought free-range eggs from an old man with a little truck farm on the Snoqualmie River, and it was his voice — an old-West tobacco-chawing burr — that Tad borrowed for the MagiGro commercials. “Now is the season when all our thoughts turn to planting out our prettiest summer annuals…”

He hated these MagiGro things.

SETTLING HERSELF into the crimson leather of the top-down Spider, Minna said, “This is nice. It reminds me.”

“Of what, Minna?”

“Oh, you know…just memories.”

Driving coast to coast across the narrow island took only a few minutes. As she crossed the central highway, Lucy looked right, up the hill to where the accident had happened, half expecting to see again the play of red, white, and blue lights among the firs. Safely past that hurdle, she relaxed, enjoying the twisty road that snaked through fields and clumps of woodland. Accelerating hard out of a bend, she said, “Sorry, is this too fast for you?”

“I like fast,” Minna said.

But in the store at Langley, she was one of the slowest shoppers Lucy had ever seen. Expertly, fastidiously, she sniffed and fingered her way through the produce department. Spinach was rejected as tired, apples as old, celery as spent. She paused for a while over a box of early, expensive Mexican peaches and held one up to Lucy’s nose. “They don’t smell peachy yet to me.”

“Me neither.”

A mango narrowly passed muster; a papaya failed the test. Getting into Minna’s shopping basket was like Harvard entrance for fruits and vegetables: many were called but few were chosen. When Minna, trailed by Lucy, at last reached the checkout with her scanty haul, they were patronized by the boy behind the till.

“Find everything you want, ladies?” Lucy saw that she and Minna were perfectly invisible to him — two old bats on whom to give his charms the lightest of workouts. “Are we enjoying the nice weather?”

Disappointingly, Minna swallowed the bait, explaining that Lucy and her daughter were visiting and that her husband was taking Alida kayaking, that…

“Oh, cool!” the boy said, in Alida’s not-listening tone. To his “Have a nice day, ladies!” Lucy wanted to steal Joan Didion’s riposte and say “I have other plans.”

Crossing the parking lot, Minna said, “I do like the people at the Star Store — they’re all so friendly.”

Poor Minna: was it for the boy at the checkout that she’d dressed to kill?

Knowing the answer to the question, Lucy asked, “Do you know many people on the island?”

“Oh, no, hardly a soul. There’s another retired professor and his wife, but they live in Coupeville and neither of us like to drive at night, so we don’t see too much of them. Augie calls him the Liberal Revisionist: they’re not really friends.”

They left Langley on a different road, with Minna giving directions. As they passed the county fairgrounds, Lucy said, “When you first knew Augie, did he talk much about his past?”

“Oh, yes. He talked a lot about Ann Arbor, where he’d been in grad school, and Binghamton, where he was in college. And Schenectady — he was in high school in Schenectady. We were always talking then.”

“But Europe and everything that happened to him there — did he talk about that?”

“Not really. Of course, I knew his mom and dad had passed. I got the idea they must have been killed in the camps over there, but it wasn’t something he ever spoke about directly. After all he’d been through, I think he just wanted to forget, and talking about it would’ve brought it back. I remember him telling me about the day he arrived in New York City — he was nine then — and being amazed by the skyscrapers, and the lady from Latvia who took him to Macy’s, and this fountain they had in the store. It was like his whole memory began that day, and everything that happened before was kind of dead to him. I’d see stuff on the news about Berlin and say ‘You’ve been there, Augie,’ and he’d nod and say yeah — and that was all he ever said. Yeah. He was bottling it up inside himself and wasn’t saying nothing to nobody.”

“I wonder how it was when you took him home to meet your parents? He must have struck them as quite an odd bird.”

“Oh, they got on really well. My dad called him ‘the prof,’ of course, but then he saw how good Augie was with his hands. They’d spend hours out in the yard together, working on Dad’s Hudson. Augie tuned it right up, even though my dad was the engineer. Augie could fix anything back then, which was how he kept that old Ford of his going, and my dad looked up to him for that. He called himself a ‘shade-tree mechanic’—an expression he’d picked up someplace, and he used it a lot.

“I think we were the first real ordinary family he’d ever known, and he kind of glommed on to us: not just me, but Mom and Dad, too. We’d go on weekend outings together in the Hudson — it was a Hornet — me and Augie in the backseat, Dad and Mom in front. It was a funny way to go dating, I guess, but we’d drive up in the mountains, and Augie was always in charge of the campfire. He had a knack for that, could make just anything burn.”

When Lucy glanced over, Minna’s whole face was a smile. But the island was too narrow to contain her memories; they were almost back at Useless Bay when she said, “Dad and Augie used to go steelhead fishing in the spring…” and her voice trailed off as the house came into view. Lucy resolved to entice her into the Spider again later in the weekend.

The moment they walked through the front door, Lucy knew that Alida and Augie were gone: the house was no better than a Holiday Inn at holding the imprint of the human, and she could smell its vacancy. Minna, out of habit, called “Augie?” but the name came back on echo.

The sands were glazing over under the incoming tide. The two kayaks looked like one — a jerky water boatman, scuffing along the surface with its feet. Squinting at the glare, Lucy made out Augie ahead, Alida just behind him: identical in size, they looked married in their oblivious preoccupation with their own small world. She picked up the birdwatching binoculars from the patio table and had a hard time bringing the swimming image into sharp focus. The kayakers went from fuzzy to more fuzzy, then turned crisp. Both were wearing puffy orange life vests, she was glad to see. Augie’s paddles sliced the water as cleanly as knives; Alida’s splashed. She was saying something, and Augie turned his head. In close-up, they were a couple no longer, but grandfather and granddaughter — and no sooner had Lucy voiced that thought in her head than she wished it gone.

“She’ll be quite safe with him.”

She hadn’t realized that Minna was standing at her elbow. “Oh, I wasn’t—”

“Augie loves children,” Minna said, with exactly the same stress that he’d put on the same words.

ON THE SEVENTH FLOOR there was no sign of the fag actor or Lucy Bengstrom. Charles O let himself into 701, dumped his tools on the floor and his bunch of tulips on the table, then stepped into the bathroom and turned the lock.

The close, female stink of the place made him catch his breath. Both the windowsill along the edge of the bath and the glass shelf below the medicine cabinet were so crammed with lotions, scents, shampoos, gels, paints, creams, and ointments that a dozen women might be living in the apartment. He unscrewed the top of a perfume vial and held it gingerly to his nose. Wah! You could kill a horse with that one.

Two toothbrushes: good. Then he spotted a pink razor on the windowsill. He had to reach for it carefully with forefinger and thumb to avoid knocking over a whole bunch of little bottles with colored stuff in them. The razor looked as if it hadn’t been used for a long time; a cracked rime of old soap whitened its twin blades, and speckles of rust showed through the rime. Looking more closely, he found some short hairs embedded in the muck on the blades, too fine for beard stubble. He set the razor back exactly where he’d found it.

American women had hairy legs, like American men had hair on their backs. Passing construction sites in summer, Charles O was offended by their monkeylike hairiness. So American women shaved, and you’d find a razor in any woman’s bathroom. Get a wife with citizenship, you’d get the hairy legs thrown in. He was okay with that. He’d want her to shave.

He checked the inside of the medicine cabinet — nothing there but cold cures and Kotex, and some prescription pills that had expired back in 1999.

From the bathroom door, he listened for a moment before going into her bedroom, where he rummaged expertly through the closet. Women’s shirts, women’s dresses, women’s pants, as he expected, but he’d needed to make sure. He pulled back the blue comforter on the bed to expose white pillows still dented by the weight of her head. He bent down and sniffed their thick, musky American Woman odor, like old cheese. Lucy Bengstrom.

Lucy. He tried saying the name aloud, softly, to a pillow. “Lu Si.” Sounded good. “Lu Si.”

Happy with the results of his research, Charles O went back to the living room and began to pull books from the pile of old boxes she used as shelves.

FULL OF HER TRIP, Alida babbled on. They’d seen an osprey diving for fish, and she spoke of it with hardly less wonder than if they’d spotted a flock of African parrots out there on the bay.

“Like we watched it—watched it, right? — and then these two seals came up right beside us. They were so cute. Augie called them Lewis and Clark. They kept on swimming ahead of us and looking back to see if we were following. Lewis had this sort of sad, whiskery face, but Clark always had a big grin. They stayed with us for ages. Augie said I was getting to be a real hotshot at paddling, that I was like a natural.”

Augie said was her refrain. Lucy had never seen Alida so instantly smitten by an adult, and found herself having to stifle the resentment that rose in her as she listened to her daughter’s copious rave review of August Vanags.

“All humanity is united in its hatred of a headwind.”

“What?”

“Augie said that all humanity is united in its hatred of a headwind.”

“You need some lunch inside you,” Lucy said, thinking that somewhere she’d read or heard that epigram before. “Did Augie make that up, or was he quoting somebody else?”

“I think he made it up.”

Twenty minutes later, sitting down to lunch, Lucy said to Augie, “Alida tells me that all humanity is united in its hatred of a headwind.”

“Isn’t that good? Know who said it? John McPhee, in The Survival of the Bark Canoe—great little book, especially if you like paddling as much as I do.”

“Oh, that’s where it’s from — I think I read it when it was excerpted in The New Yorker.”

“Punch with the paddle, don’t sweep it,” Alida said. “I’d really, really like to go kayaking again this afternoon.”

“Rabbit, Augie’s a busy man. You have to think about his schedule.”

“Schedule? What schedule? We’re on island time here.” Augie looked at his watch. “I think we could fit in another hour after lunch before we lose the tide.”

So Lucy was left behind on the patio, watching the two figures, plumped out like puffins in matching PFDs, as they dragged their kayaks to the water’s edge. True, she thought, kayaking wasn’t for her; she’d be too afraid of capsizing, but it would have been nice to be asked. For a few moments she allowed her feeling of exclusion to rankle, rather pleasantly, before she was joined by Minna, carrying an enormous shaggy creation of mud-brown yarn that looked as if she was trying to knit herself a grizzly bear.

“It’s nice for Augie to have someone to go kayaking with,” Minna said, over the fast, regular ticking of her needles. After a long pause, she added, “I’m not much of a sea person.” Then, after an even longer pause, “I lost my uncle to the sea.”

“Really?”

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. “Which reminds me. Does Alida eat crab?”

“Yes, she does. She doesn’t have too many fads — lamb’s the exception, not the rule. Her favorite soft toy was a lamb. She just hates the thought of eating Larry.”

“There’s a place up near Ebey’s Landing that sells live Dungeness crabs out of a pen. I thought tomorrow morning, we might go get some for lunch — if you felt like driving.”

“I’d love that.”

Minna smiled her shy, winsome, Monroe smile and returned to her knitting. Companionable silence was what she seemed to want, so Lucy turned her gaze to the bay, where Alida, paddling ahead of Augie this time, was confidently setting her own course out to sea.

The windless water was as still and as viscous-looking as a pool of mercury, and the two kayakers shimmered and dwindled like mirages in the haze. Lucy thought of how moments like this had lately become the pattern of life with her daughter: Alida lost to her soccer game, Alida lost to a writing project Lucy was no longer permitted to read, Alida lost to her iPod, and now Alida lost to this aquatic adventure. The sight of the two of them out there roused the familiar pang, half pride, half pain; loss, love, and wonder all balled up together.

She reached for the birdwatching binoculars, then let them be. Better to learn, like Minna, how to keep her place ashore. Yet she couldn’t help wishing that she trusted August Vanags a bit more. Of all the marine life on view at Useless Bay, Augie was the slipperiest fish by far.

BEFORE WALKING the hundred yards to the studio, Tad had left the car at the Excellent Parking lot just off Broadway on Capitol Hill. Now, starting back to the Beetle, he sorted through his meager stock of bare-bones Spanish. Three months of living with Jesus and his Saturday-night special had set him up with the elementary basics of the language, and regular winter breaks with Michael in easygoing, gay-friendly Puerto Vallarta, where Tad appointed himself translator, had brought him to the brink of fluency. His grammar was atrocious, his vocabulary sparse, but his knack for accents sometimes got him mistaken for a native speaker — a half-witted, illiterate native, probably, but better that than a dumb Yanqui tourist.

“Muchas gracias y muy buenas tardes,” Tad said aloud on the street. “Por favor, más despacio.” A passing woman gave him a wide berth.

The kid manning the booth was dark-skinned, an indígeno. Chatting the boy up as he paid and collected his keys, Tad learned that he came from Oaxaca, had lived in L.A., had been in Seattle for one year. But the conversation was like pulling teeth; the boy’s vagrant eyes looked everywhere except at Tad’s face, as if scanning the lot for a route of escape. Still, Tad persevered.

“Charles Lee es la dueño de Excellent Parking, ¿sí?”

“Sí, el Sr. Lee es el dueño.” The boy’s voice was sullen.

“Escucho que es difícil para trabajar por él. El gentes dicen eso.”

With sudden, unexpected force, the boy said, “¡No! ¡No es verdad! El Sr. Lee es un buen jefe: es amable, considerado, muy honesto y siempre nos paga a tiempo. El Sr. Lee nos cae bien. ¿Qué quiere saber del Sr. Lee?”

He looked freaked.

“Okay, muchas gracias. Buenas tardes.”

Back in the car, Tad reached to adjust the rearview mirror and was appalled to see the face of the MagiGro gardener leering back at him. He’d forgotten to wash off his makeup: his forehead was thickly powdered, the bags under his eyes caked in pale blush foundation, his cheeks as red and cheery as those of a department store Santa. Poor kid — he must have thought he was being propositioned by some hideous old queen.

PUNCH, don’t sweep. While Augie put names to the birds overhead, Alida had eyes only for the limpid submarine world below. Augie called the water shallow, but to Alida it appeared miles deep. Each paddle stroke sent refracted sunbeams racing across the sandy sea floor and through the waving meadows of spinach-green eelgrass. The beams lit on bright purple sea stars and the gross sea cucumbers that littered the bottom. A hurrying crab skedaddled along the sand and a fish flashed like the wink of a silver spoon.

Augie had shown her these things in the morning; now she was making them her own. She’d never felt more grown-up, more satisfyingly in charge, than now, scooting the kayak through the water with her paddle. She couldn’t stop smiling. The one thing missing from her happiness was Tad’s presence in the picture. She wished he were standing on shore now, watching her captain her own boat at sea.

“Hey! See the little shark there! He’s coming your way!”

Alida thought Augie was joking, then saw the mottled brown elongated shape glide right beneath her kayak like a winged cigar, so close that she could’ve touched it with her paddle. Little? It was huge — easily as long as she was tall. “Shark?” She heard the hiccup of panic in her voice.

“Dogfish. Spiny dogfish. It’s a member of the shark family, like the great white’s baby cousin.”

“Shark! Oh my God, you mean it could attack you?”

“Oh, no. A dogfish is pretty harmless — unless you threaten him, in which case he might give you a nasty bite.”

For Alida, the whole character of the sea had changed on the instant. She was afraid of looking down now, for fear of seeing another gliding monster.

And Augie made it worse. “It’s kind of odd to see one out on his own. That’s why they’re called dogfish — they hunt in packs. See one, you usually see a hundred.”

Packs!

“They can live for fifty years, maybe even a hundred, which is a helluva great age for a fish. Hey, there’s another! I thought so.”

She didn’t dare look.

“Scavengers of the sea, they’re called, and they do a fine job of cleaning up.”

Shakily, she said, “Can we go back now?”

“Sure, but we still have a good half hour left. We could follow the sharks.”

Terrified of losing her balance, Alida turned her kayak toward the beach and began to paddle fast and splashily, sweeping not punching, through water squirming with hungry hundred-year-old sharks, their bald, underslung jaws opening and shutting to bare repulsive yellowed fangs.

“Alida!”

She was far ahead of Augie now.

“Alida, it’s okay! Really, it’s okay! They’re just dogfish. There’s nothing—”

But she was deaf to anything he might say: she was paddling for her life.