Surveillance

8

WALKING THE FIVE BLOCKS from the Acropolis to the King County Adminstrative Building on Fourth Avenue, Tad assured himself that he was simply doing what any sensible citizen would do, which was to check out the facts. Besides, he envisioned the Office of Vital Statistics — obviously named by someone with either a good sense of humor or none at all — as a Dickensian warren of musty files and papers, the dead stacked in their hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, organized, alphabetized, at rest. Tad felt he could do with their company for a while — an act of self-mortification that might be good for his soul.

The office was a disappointment, not Dickensian at all, just the usual motley of computer terminals, copiers, microfilm viewers. The dead — at least, the recently dead — had gone digital and couldn’t lend Tad the solace of their society.

He filled in the form, stating his Reason for Inquiry as “genealogical research.” He wrote in the name of Charles Ong Lee, his date and place of death (November 25, 1999, in Seattle), paid $17.50 in cash, and ten minutes later was in possession of a copy of the certificate. Here was the unlucky social worker. “Cause of Death: blunt trauma to head and torso incurred in single-vehicle automobile incident.” He hadn’t gone far in his life, this Mr. Lee. Born in Tacoma on February 13, 1974, he’d traveled about forty-five miles north to Shoreline, then met his death on the road between the two.

Tad folded the certificate and put it in his wallet. Heading back to the apartment, he resolved to take his time before making his next move, which would need more rehearsal and stagecraft than he could possibly manage on this gray, penitential morning. As he walked, he muttered to himself, “Eliminate the sins and hindrances that I have accumulated by disparaging the Dharma since the beginningless past. Eliminate the sins and hindrances. Eliminate the sins and hindrances….” It sort of seemed to work.

THE PILATES STUDIO on South Main looked to Lucy like a dominatrix’s well-appointed dungeon. Walled on three sides by floor-to-ceiling mirrors, it was furnished with gruesome implements — the Reformer, the Half-Trapeze Bed, the Ladder Barrel, the Tower, the Ped-a-Pul. Huffing and groaning, half a dozen other clients, male and female, were being punished by trainers in spa pants and black hoodies.

The first check from GQ, for preliminary research and expenses on the Vanags piece, had come through. Lucy was spending $280 on a month’s worth of weekly Pilates classes to try to get herself in shape. She nearly backed out of the deal when she saw the bodies in the studio, most of whom would’ve looked good on the frieze around a Grecian urn. Wearing her old sweats, she felt painfully self-conscious, a dandelion among the orchids, but took comfort from the sight of a sturdy red-faced woman in her fifties who was being tortured on the Reformer by a gay-looking Adonis. If she could go through with it, surely Lucy could.

“Find your abdominals,” said Lindsay, Lucy’s trainer. “Suck them in as if you’re pulling them out through your back.”

All very well for Lindsay to issue this impossible command: she was a dancer, sore at having just lost her job in the corps at Pacific Northwest Ballet. Lucy wasn’t sure she even had abdominals anymore, and though she sucked and sucked, all she achieved was a very modest diminution of the intractable mound that was her stomach.

“This is like cellular. Your body feels things even if your mind refuses.”

I don’t do woo-woo, Lucy thought, spouting air like a breaching whale.

“But it was turning into a really hostile work environment for me,” Lindsay said. “They brought in this new woman as ballet master — Martha Slater, a control freak and a total bitch. Okay, now we’ll do circles.”

Circles meant Lucy opening her legs and waving them round and round, exposing her crotch to the world.

“Wider!”

Wider still and wider, Lucy felt as if she was posing for beaver shots. She stared resolutely at the ceiling to avoid catching her reflection in the mirrors.

“But after like six years at PNB, to get canned like that was such a bummer I could’ve offed myself when I heard.”

“I know,” Lucy gasped. “It’s awful. It’s happening to everyone. The d-d-d-downturn in the economy…”

“Anchor — don’t arch—your sit bones!”

Wearily, Lucy rearranged herself.

“Knees in tabletop!”

At least she could now keep her legs together.

“Your sit bones make you focus on your core. Now you have to say to yourself, ‘My core is strong and solid.’”

And that, Lucy thought, was her abiding problem. It was her mother’s perennial accusation that she had no core, that she was an insipid sopper-up of other people’s feelings and opinions, by which she meant in the first instance that Lucy spent far too much time listening to her dad. Though she fought her mother fiercely, Lucy had always been depressingly conscious that she might have a point. On down days, she wondered if perhaps it was her lack of core that had led her into journalism — a trade where a good listener, a human sponge, could hide her secret corelessness behind a bold-type byline. Every opinion she held was provisional, and a smart remark by someone else could alter it in a heartbeat. She was instinctively reluctant to “commit”—to men, to salaried jobs, to causes, to ideas. To remain not entirely sure of where she stood had become a lifelong habit, almost a principle. As to this core business, if core meant some unique and irreducible essence of self, Lucy was as unsure of that as she was of most things. But she was absolutely certain that if she did have a core, she wouldn’t find it in a Pilates studio with her fucking “sit bones.”

So they talked about the ballet company, Lucy drawing Lindsay out. By the end of the hour, after the agonizing “hundreds,” Lucy could’ve written a feature on the tribulations of being a dancer in the corps — her pay, her many diets, her smoking to stay thin, her tendonitis, her shallow hip sockets, her hamstrings, her cheating boyfriends, her shrinking dream of making it to principal. At twenty-four, Lindsay was as grimly experience-hardened as a forty-year-old. Did she really say to herself, and mean it, “My core is strong and solid”? Maybe so — and, if so, lucky her. Not sure of what the form was here, Lucy tipped her twenty bucks at the end of the session, which Lindsay, looking grateful but furtive, tucked inside her sports bra for safekeeping.

ALIDA TAPPED on Tad’s door.

“Ali!” Sag-shouldered, puffy-eyed, Tad looked less like Tad than some character he was acting in a play, a man crushed by sudden bad news.

Frightened, Alida held out her arms for a hug, thinking that the hug would say more than the words she’d prepared. She clung to him for a moment: a + b, and a million miles from x.

“Ali.”

“You know what? The dogfish stuff? I got scared, but he didn’t mean to scare me, he was just telling me the truth, and I was being stupid and I scared myself, it wasn’t him, it was all me, he’s not like bad or anything, he’s…” Alida felt she wasn’t saying this right. It had sounded much better when she’d rehearsed it in her head.

“Oh, Ali. Right, and right, and right again. I got mad over nothing — nothing. I’m so sorry. It’s a lousy fact of life that sometimes people do get mad for no good reason at all. I had a sort of brain fart.”

“I had a brain fart today. I got really mad at Gail.”

“What about?”

“Nothing.”

“Weird, isn’t it, that nothing makes so many things happen? It’s so important it really ought to have a different name.”

Alida thought for a moment, then said, “Factor Zero?”

“I love you, Ali.”

“I love you, too.”

“Factor Zero. Now I have the word for it. I’ll always call it Factor Zero.”

“I have this idea,” Alida said, revealing her project to the world for the first time, “that everything is really algebra.”

“And you know what? I was always terrible at math in school.”

“Will you come to dinner tonight?”

“I’d love to come to dinner, but I promised Gilda — you remember Gilda?”

“Yeah, she’s the actress, right? She was with you in that play.”

“I have to take her out to a fancy meal in a restaurant. She’s going through a rough time. A lot of people are going through a rough time right now. It’s Factor Zero at work again.”

Leaving Tad’s apartment, Alida was reminded of kayaking — the giddy elation of being afloat and in control. She’d taken charge, she’d used her paddle right, her boat had skimmed safely over the yawning deeps below.

“I DON’T want to go.”

It was 9:30, and Lucy and Alida were snuggling in Alida’s narrow bed.

“Why, Rabbit?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t.”

“But yesterday you wanted to go so badly.”

“Yeah, but that was yesterday.”

Watching the troubled face beside her on the pillow, Lucy cast about for irresistible inducements. The whole weekend would be thrown out of balance if Alida stayed home. The invitation had been provoked by Alida’s eagerness to go kayaking again, not because Lucy had wanted more face time with her subject. It was essential that Alida come along. It didn’t help Lucy’s mental clarity that every muscle in her body ached from the Pilates class. She said, “You were getting so great at kayaking…”

“You can go. I can stay with Tad.”

Tad! Damn him! Alida had gone to his apartment after school and come back with an ambiguous Gioconda smile, saying nothing of what had transpired between them. Evidently they’d made a pact — Tad and Alida versus the Vanagses, like the Allies against the Axis powers.

But Lucy had to hide her anger. “Rabbit, it’s really important to me that we go together.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Try and tell me why.”

In a small voice, Alida said, “It’s because like…I think it might hurt Tad’s feelings.”

“Is that what he said?”

“No. It doesn’t have anything to do with what Tad said. It’s just how I feel.”

“Oh, Rabbit.” There was candid misery in Alida’s face now. “I promise you it won’t hurt Tad. Would it help if I talked to him?”

“No.”

“This is a you-and-me thing. We just can’t back out now.” Cradling her daughter, she remembered how, at her age, she’d felt physically torn apart in the intermittent Cold War between her parents. Her great ambition had always been to protect Alida from anything like that, and now Alida was suffering exactly as she had done.

“Is it really super-important?”

“Yes, but…” That but was the crucial word. Lucy realized that Alida had somehow, just recently, gained the power, the right, of refusal; it wasn’t that Lucy wouldn’t force her on this, it was that she couldn’t.

Alida suddenly smiled — exactly as she had when she returned from Tad’s apartment. “Okay, then. I’ll come.”

“Thank you, my darling.”

“I really do want to go kayaking again.”

Five minutes later, she was asleep. By ten, Lucy was back at the computer, continuing the research she’d begun earlier in the evening and plowing through the reader reviews of Boy 381 on Amazon.com. There were more than seven hundred of them, and it was dull, repetitive work. The book had an unblemished five stars, and the readers all said the same thing: they’d cried, they’d laughed, they’d stayed up all night to finish it, they’d missed their subway stops in their engrossment, Augie had changed their entire view of the world, they’d felt his pain, and so on, and on, and on. It seemed to be part of the house rules at Amazon that to praise a book you had to manifest an exaggerated physiological response — laughing till you cried, cracking up, weeping buckets, or, as a woman from Akron, Ohio, claimed, wetting yourself, choking for breath, depriving yourself of sleep, as if readers were competing for some emotional dysfunction award. Growing impatient with these displays of I-felt-it-more-deeply-than-anyone-else-did, Lucy clicked Next, and Next, and Next on each batch of ten reviews until boredom sent her over to Amazon.co.uk. Maybe the Brits had a different take on it.

Four stars over there, and there were only ninety-something reviews. She scrolled through them, not knowing what she was searching for until she found it: a review headed FRAUD by “A Reader from Thetford (See more about me),” written very shortly after the book came out back in 2005.

“I knew ‘August Vanags’ during the war years,” it began. “He was an orphan and a refugee, but spent most of the war living on my parents’ farm in Norfolk. I possess a copy of the very same photograph that is shown on the cover of his so-called ‘memoir.’ He is not in a refugee camp — he is standing in front of the part of the farm that my father fenced off in 1940 in order to raise chickens, as many people had to do after Lord Woolton was made minister of food. He was a very thin child because he suffered from coeliac, a wasting disease. He was always in and out of the Jenny Lind children’s hospital in Norwich, where he was treated for this condition. He was nowhere near Poland or Germany or any of the other countries described in his ‘book.’”

Lucy reached for the quote-unquote book and checked the inside back flap for the provenance of the picture. It said, “Jacket photograph of August Vanags (1945): Philip Cahan”—the name of the U.S. Army sergeant who’d rescued Augie in Germany at the war’s end.

The Reader from Thetford was inexorable: the review ran for at least a thousand indignant words, detailing the family farm, how the boy had been taken in, and his ingratitude after the war, when a Latvian aid society had found him a permanent foster home in Braintree, Essex, and he’d never responded to the many affectionate postcards sent to him by the reviewer’s family.

If true, this was the Wilkomirski story all over again. Lucy forced her mind into a state of numb agnostic cool as she clicked back through the later reviews to see if anyone had picked up on these revelations, if they were revelations. Nobody had. The preponderance of comments echoed the American ones, though many had that sniffy old-boy air of self-important judiciousness. She then went back to Reader from Thetford and clicked on See more about me.

Marjorie Tillman of Thetford, Norfolk: she liked books on history and travel, and her Favourites list included A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Mountbatten: A Biography. Lucy dialed Qwest for international directory assistance and got the number for an M. Tillman, 3, The Broadwalk, Thetford. It was midnight, eight in the morning in England, and too early to roust Ms. Tillman from her bed with a call out of the blue. Lucy made coffee to keep herself awake for another hour.

If true. She had to see that photograph. As a piece of writing, the Amazon.co.uk review was itself suspect — its rankling, aggrieved tone sometimes verged on the crazy. People’s obsessions with the famous led them into all sorts of delusions, and this woman might turn out to be on a par with the cranks who sighted Elvis in their local supermarket. Interesting, too, that no one had followed up her accusations; maybe habitués of the British site knew her to be a nutcase. Lucy checked out a dozen of her other reviews, which were all peevish but not noticeably insane. On travel books, she sounded like a New Yorker fact-checker, forever putting people to rights on trifling mistakes, so presumably she had money to spend on globe-trotting.

By the light of the architect’s halogen lamp on her desk, Lucy pored over the book jacket. Until this moment the picture had said “refugee camp” in stark, unambiguous terms: the skeletal boy with his feet in grass, the closely spaced lines of barbed wire, the bare dirt beyond. Now that she was reading it as “chicken farm,” it made equal but unsatisfactory sense, for there were no other clues — no human figures, and no chickens, either. It could as easily be a refugee farm or a chicken camp.

At 1:03 A.M. Lucy dialed the fourteen-digit number in after-breakfast England.

“Hello?”

For a millisecond, Lucy thought she’d accidentally got her mother on the line, for the voice was hers — or rather, it was the voice her mother liked to affect when she was feeling grand, one often heard on PBS but never, in Lucy’s experience, in real life. She asked if she was talking to Marjorie Tillman, and the voice said, half bray, half bark, “Yarse?”

Stating her business, Lucy talked up the reputation of GQ, though she doubted if it would mean much in Thetford, Norfolk. But the woman, far from treating her as a rude intruder on her morning, sounded as if she’d been waiting for years for Lucy to call her, though she was practically shouting, as if conveying her voice across an ocean and a continent via satellite required an extraordinary effort of the lungs.

“But of course I remember. I was ten when the war ended, four when it started, so the whole period’s very vivid to me! He was rather a dim, moony sort of child, always wandering round the garden picking flarze. We had to take him in. Either one took in refugee children or one got billeted with evacuees!”

These, Lucy gathered, were an even lower form of life than refugees.

“I mean, it was the shock, you see — seeing that picture on the cover. I have to say I’m glad my mother’s not alive. It would’ve killed her, the sheer ingratitude! And he never wrote back, not once. Then this…atrocity! We had to drive him to the hospital in Norwich.” Norritch. “Week after week, with petrol desperately short in those days. For his ruddy coeliac. And this is what we get for thanks, these barefaced lies about having survived the war in concentration camps and God knows what. Poland, my foot! Thetford was where he was, two miles outside Thetford. We used to have a hundred and fifty acres there.”

It didn’t sound like much to Lucy. Even the wretched Lewis Olson had twelve sections at 640 acres to a section, but of course English farmland was exceptionally wet and rich, so perhaps such a negligible acreage might go with Marjorie Tillman’s very upstairs accent.

“He had to be fed on bananas, you know? Bananas were incredibly scarce during the war, but they were one of the few things that child could keep down. They were specially flown in, in RAF transports, for the likes of him.”

“But you have the same photograph as the one on the b-b-b-book jacket?”

“I’m looking at it right now! It’s in a frame, on the Welsh dresser, on the knickknack shelf, where my mother used to keep her mementos. Even though he never wrote, she kept his picture to remind herself of the war years. ‘Our little refugee’ was what Mummy used to call him. I can’t tell you how this ridiculous book would have hurt her. It would’ve cut her to the core.”

“And you’re sure it’s the same one?”

“I’m not blind!” That shout again. “Of course the printers have done things to the one on the book, touched it up and so forth. But it’s him, all right, by the old chicken run.”

Frantic to see Augie publicly exposed as an ingrate and a liar, Marjorie Tillman was Lucy’s eager collaborator. She checked her local phone book for the nearest Federal Express office, which turned out to be in “Norritch,” agreed to have the picture copied later that morning, and wrote down Lucy’s FedEx account number and her address at the Acropolis.

“And you’re going to show him up in your magazine? In America?”

“If it really is the same p-p-picture.”

“There’s no if about it. You’ll see — and I hope your magazine has an extremely large circulation. It’s about time someone put a stop to that man’s dreadful nonsense.”

As Lucy was thanking her for her help and about to say good-bye, Marjorie Tillman said, “Of course he didn’t call himself August Vanags then; he called himself Juris Abeltins.”

“Could you spell that?” Lucy said.

UP LATE after dinner with Gilda Hahn — at which she’d spent the dessert course, followed by two Courvoisiers, in tears — Tad was web surfing the world’s news. He read a long glum article in the Guardian, by an English jurist who was cataloging the erosion of civil liberties in the UK since the London bombings in July 2005. The Brits were playing Simon Says, slavishly following every move dictated by the U.S. administration — imprisoning people without trial, battening down on free speech, giving the police and secret services unprecedented powers to mine private data and tap phones of legislators, to harass and arrest citizens, to deport aliens…the usual story. Apparently in Britain there were even more spy cameras than here, with motorists followed around the country by the hidden eyes of government. According to this guy, the Brits — with no written constitution — were pretty much screwed. Canada was beginning to look like the last place in the English-speaking world where civil liberties were still relatively unscathed. It was always at the back of Tad’s mind that one day the time would come when he, Lucy, and Alida might have to cross the 49th parallel as political refugees — if the Canadians would let them in, which was a big if, for half of Canada’s neighbors to the south must be harboring similar thoughts. And of course Lucy would have to be dragged up there by her hair. Until the undercover agents were actually at her door, she’d go on living in her bubble of delusion that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

The worm of anger was beginning to work in him again. He fought it back and went over to the BBC site.

Police in Wolverhampton raid terror suspects’ home…

Strangely, for there was usually no advertising on the BBC, a pop-up appeared, a very amateur-looking pop-up saying he’d “won £100!!!” Tad clicked on the close-window X button on its top right-hand corner, realizing he’d done the wrong thing when an unfamiliar web page appeared, succeeded by his Outlook Express address book. Then blood-colored letters from some paint program began to slowly write themselves across the screen. F…R…E…FREAKED!!!

He took the cursor to the Start button to close down Windows, but it was immobilized. The hourglass symbol appeared next to the traveling arrow. The computer was frozen solid. He had to turn off the power strip.

His first major virus. He’d never opened a suspicious attachment and was protected by a Norton firewall. The experience of watching the familiar screen turn suddenly, mockingly hostile on him was more unsettling than he could’ve imagined. It was like a spookily successful exercise in black magic — like seeing a domestic cat transformed into a toad. Five minutes later, hoping this was some momentary cyber aberration, he switched the power on again. The computer started up normally, then told him he was truly

FREAKED!!!

ON TUESDAY MORNING, Lucy dropped Alida off at school with just seconds to spare before the eight o’clock bell. When she switched on the NPR news, the lead story was about a Trojan horse named Freak, which had spread overnight through America, Europe, and Asia, burgling people’s address books and forwarding itself to unsuspecting millions. Sites like Amazon and eBay were temporarily down. A spokesman from Microsoft, who promised a patch within two hours, described Freak as “a malicious act of cyber terrorism,” which Lucy thought wildly overblown. Vandalism, certainly. Terrorism? Surely not. The cant word of the last few years was graying from repetition, decaying in a process of inevitable entropy — which, come to think of it, was another cant word from an earlier decade. Entropy itself had fallen victim to entropy.

The Microsoft man explained the virus in breezy technobabble. It was, he said, a “WMF exploit” by a hacker who’d uncovered a “Day Zero vulnerability” in the Internet Explorer system, blah, blah, blah. The important thing was that his geeks had been on the case since midnight, and a solution was imminent.

Senate committee hearings had begun on the appointment of another judge to the Supreme Court — a born-again guy whose views on Roe v. Wade were characterized by liberal Democrats as “beyond Neanderthal.” A threatened subway strike in New York, more bloody news from the Middle East…She switched off the radio to concentrate on her own, more pressing news from Thetford, Norfolk.

She neither believed nor disbelieved Marjorie Tillman, whose story was full of oddities that fit together badly. Lucy found it hard to imagine that Augie Vanags had ever been a “dim” or “moony” child. The boy in his book was instantly recognizable in Augie the man, while the boy of Marjorie’s memory was a total stranger. There was the business of the printers “touching up” the supposedly identical photo, which surely meant the two were not identical. The FedEx package should arrive tomorrow or the day after, by Friday at the latest, and until then any speculation about the pictures would be pointless.

What about the two names? If August Vanags had once been Juris Abeltins, why, reinventing himself in America, had he chosen another Latvian name? Had Lucy been called Juris Abeltins, then emigrated to the States, she would’ve gone for a more American-sounding moniker. Juris could have turned himself into Lowell Cabot, so why choose August Vanags? When the Freak virus was safely patched, she’d try Googling this Mr. Abeltins to see if he was leading a separate existence somewhere; there couldn’t be that many Juris Abeltinses in the world, and if she could locate one in England, the whole fabric of Marjorie’s tale would unravel.

Plus there was Marjorie’s voice. During their conversation, Lucy hadn’t warmed at all to her vengeful tone and absurdly snobby accent — though perhaps that was because Marjorie was so irresistibly reminiscent of Lucy’s mother at her worst, and “picking flarze” was exactly how her mom would say it.

For all these reasons, Marjorie Tillman was someone Lucy was inclined to take with a large pinch of salt, at least until the photograph arrived. If it really showed Augie on an English chicken farm, the GQ piece would raise a storm, not just in America but around the world. For a journalist, that would be an incredible windfall, yet even as Lucy allowed herself to savor this thought for a moment, she felt a wrench of alarm and pity for Minna. If Marjorie turned out to be right, she’d be destroyed. Augie, much as Lucy had learned to like him now, could be said to deserve whatever might be coming to him, but Minna was innocent, defenseless, and trusting, and no more deserved the hurricane in which she’d be engulfed than she deserved hanging, regardless of what Montaigne might have to say on the subject.

Lucy was impatient for Microsoft to sound the all-clear. Despite herself, she badly wanted to find an English Juris Abeltins.

TAD’S SECOND-TO-LAST rent check, returned to him with his most recent statement, was stamped on the back:

PAY TO THE ORDER OF UNITED SAVINGS & LOAN BANK SEATTLE, WA 98104 FOR DEPOSIT ONLY EXCELLENT HOLDINGS, INC. 125004587

The bank, on South Jackson, had a line of customers waiting for the four available tellers, which was fine by Tad as he scoped the place out. Most of the bank’s staff were Asian-looking, with Chinese names, but he spotted two Caucasians, one with the name tag Amy on her chest, the other — fortunately — a man. He’d do “Jeff,” though because the guy was in his twenties, the voice would be tricky: easy to play old, much harder to play young.

When Tad’s turn came, he cashed $100 on his Visa card to make himself a legit customer, then went to the courtesy phone. If that number, or the bank’s name, showed up on Lee’s cell phone, he’d have no cause for suspicion.

He was nervous as he always was when waiting in the wings for his cue. He checked the other Charles O. Lee’s Social Security number on the slip of paper in his hand, then dialed the landlord’s cell. One ring, and it was picked up.

“Yeah?”

“Hi, this is Jeff from United Savings and Loan, South Jackson branch.” Tad lifted his pitch to a height just short of falsetto, and tempered it with a butch Seahawks-fan accent. “I’m looking for Charles Lee.”

“Yeah, is me.” There was no hesitation in the voice at the other end.

“We got a minor problem here, nothing serious — this Freak virus hit us, I sure hope it didn’t hit you, Charles. Dang thing seems to have messed up some of our records. Just wanted to check your SSN. The number we have for you is 015-48-…”

“7816,” Lee said.

“Right — that’s what we’ve got. Thanks for your time. Have a great day!”

Bingo! Walking away from the bank, Tad trod on air. It was the law of averages, of course. He’d been wrong, and wrong, and wrong again — he had to turn out to be right sometime.

What he’d found would be his secret. He meant to tell no one, not even Lucy, at least not yet. That he could now prove the odious Lee was an illegal with a stolen ID was, Tad thought with giddy self-satisfaction, his nuclear option.