Surveillance

9

THE BROUHAHA over the Freak virus was over by lunchtime, when Lucy applied the patch and went onto the disinfected Internet. Googling Juris Abeltins, she found just one — a Latvian socialist politician, “dzimis 1947.” From the context, she guessed that “dzimis” must mean “born,” but just to make sure she Googled “dzimis + born,” and there, beside the name of some entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest, was “Dzimis Latvija (Born in Latvia).” A Latvian baby boomer clearly couldn’t be the same person as Marjorie Tillman’s wartime refugee. This was a setback, but by no means conclusive. There were still billions of people too obscure to show up on Google, and a dim and moony child might well have grown up to be one of them. Marjorie’s Juris could easily be working as somebody’s gardener, growing flowers now, not picking them, beyond the reach of any search engine.

When Lucy drove up to the school at 3:30, Alida ditched her friends with wholly uncharacteristic speed and came racing over to the Spider, her face pink and bulging with excitement.

“Oh my God! You won’t believe it!” she said, opening the car door. “You so won’t believe it!”

“What is it, Rabbit!”

“You won’t believe it.”

“Cool your jets! Won’t believe what?”

“Finn! It’s Finn!”

“Finn what?”

“Finn’s been arrested — by the FBI! We’re all getting counseling! It’s amazing!”

Lucy switched off the engine. “I’m lost. Can you just remember to breathe, please?”

“He wrote the virus! He was always signing himself ‘Freak’ in e-mails. Four FBI men came, in two cars. They caught his mom first and brought her to the school. They weren’t wearing uniforms or anything; they were in suits. Then the principal came and called Finn out of Humanities — this was this morning — and in the lunchroom there were these eighth-graders talking and they said Finn was going to get seven years. In jail! He wrote the virus! Finn wrote the virus!”

Holy shit! Lucy thought, but said, “Can I just say one thing?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“He won’t get seven years in jail.”

“He told me and Gail he was into horses. He meant Trojan horses! He wrote this Trojan horse thing and it did billions and billions of dollars of damage! The FBI came to our school!”

“How did they manage to find him so quickly?”

“The eighth-graders said he didn’t cover his tracks at all — because he wanted to get caught!”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“For the attention. Like, Finn’s famous. I mean, not famous like Tad’s famous — he’s famous famous! He’s so über-famous it’s unreal! Finn! I think his mom’s in jail, too.”

Lucy knew Finn’s mom slightly — a pallid blonde named Beth who worked for some online outfit but had once been a journalist. Despite that connection, they’d had an annoying conversation at the sixth-grade picnic in September and had barely spoken since.

“Rabbit, honestly, I wouldn’t worry too much about Finn. He won’t go to jail. They don’t jail eleven-year-olds for stuff like that. They’ll give him the fright of his life, confiscate his computer, and send him back to school. Either that or they’ll hire him as a consultant on cyber crime. But I don’t believe for one second that he’ll see the inside of a prison — him, or his mom.”

“Finn wrote the virus.” Alida’s face gave new meaning to the word boggle: there was no other term for it, her eyes were boggled.

“Holy moly.” Lucy switched on the ignition and pulled out of the parking space. “Jesus, what a day for you. I don’t suppose you managed to get any actual work done?”

“No, we had counseling. And there’s no homework.”

“So what did the counselor say?”

“Oh, you know. Stuff. I knew Finn was doing something. He’s always weird, but these last few days he’s been weirder than weird.”

“Funny — looking at him, I’d never have guessed he was smart enough to do something like this.”

“Finn’s a genius. He’s awesome.”

“Rabbit — you mustn’t think of him as some kind of hero…. He’s just a nerdy, fat, unhappy kid who wrote some code, and what he did was just plain wrong. It wasn’t cool.”

“You sound like the counselor.”

“‘Poor Finn’ is what I’m thinking. I wonder what drove him to it.”

“I think he misses his dad — I saw him writing an e-mail once. But now he’s famous.”

“So you said. Now, I thought for dinner I’d make some really special macaroni and cheese.”

“Cool.”

At five o’clock sharp, Alida, never normally a newshound, asked to watch the news. Finn was indeed famous, though not by name. He was “an eleven-year-old Seattle boy,” and the school, thankfully, wasn’t mentioned. Experts talked about the mechanics of the “vulnerability.” Then came the child psychologists.

Do you know what your child is doing on the Internet? Etc., etc. A solemn fellow in a bow tie advised parents to ensure that their kid’s computer was permanently located in a “family room,” where they could constantly “monitor” the screen.

“Parents today often fail to understand the growing computer literacy of the upcoming generation. Children as young as seven and eight are now performing complex operations far beyond the comprehension of moms and dads. Parents have a great deal of catching up to do. You have to ask yourself, ‘Do I understand what Junior’s doing here?’ And if you don’t, get Junior to explain it to you. If you’re not immediately satisfied with the explanation, you need to seek outside help. Do you have a tech-savvy friend? Who’s the IT teacher at your child’s school? This Freak virus is a wake-up call to parents everywhere.”

Pernicious nonsense, in Lucy’s view. Whenever she went into Alida’s room, Alida automatically closed the laptop on which she was instant-messaging with her friends, and Lucy respected that: just because she was a kid didn’t mean she had no right to privacy. What a lousy example to set, to snoop on your own child’s every move. Finn Janeway’s astonishing escapade was being used as an excuse for universal parental paranoia. And as for Mr. Bow Tie’s talk of “Junior,” that showed how hopelessly out of touch he was.

“Right,” she said. “Rabbit — laptop into the family room, screen facing me. And when you’re I.M.-ing, I need you to read me every word.”

Alida sniggered.

“Can you and Gail write HTML?”

“Nah, we leave all that stuff to Finn. Even the twelfth-graders go to Finn. You have to pay him with muffins.”

“I have a feeling Finn’s seen his last muffin, which won’t do him any harm at all. Better by a long shot than seven years in the pokey.”

“You really think he won’t go to jail?”

“I’m positive, Rabbit. He won’t be allowed near a computer, he’ll have to go muffinless, but he won’t go to jail. It was just a kid’s prank that went too far — way, way too far. And if I ever catch you writing a virus I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

“I’m cool with that,” Alida said, idly watching the weatherman gesture at his map.

“Now I need some help with dinner.”

The recipe, cut from a newspaper, had grown yellow but untried on the fridge door, where it shared a magnet with a sheaf of cards from take-out delivery joints. It began with the intimidating injunction to “Make a roux” and called for chopped ham, chopped green peppers, grated nutmeg, jalapeños, skinned and deseeded tomatoes, ricotta, and cheddar. It promised “tender elbows of pasta nestling in a complex and colorful cheese sauce.” Minna Vanags would no doubt have found it as easy as boiling an egg, but to Lucy it looked like the Everest of haute cuisine.

She set Alida to grating cheese. After the hysteria of the Finn affair, she needed to be returned to Earth. Alida babbled as she grated, while Lucy feigned a wise and airy cool about the whole business, though the pretense grew increasingly hard to maintain as her own hysteria about the recipe mounted. With every move she made, she foresaw the threat of Chinese takeout in the offing. Congealed lumps appeared in the roux; she fiercely mashed them out with a wooden spoon. Deseeding tomatoes was beyond her, so she substituted canned. Jalapeños, she thought, might be more than Alida’s palate could take, so she sprinkled the now-bubbling mixture with a dusting of cayenne instead. The water for the pasta — she had straight macaroni, not “elbows”—refused to come to a boil on time. The kitchen counter turned into a slovenly chaos of spilled tomato juice, nutmeg, pepper cores, seeds, and cheese that Alida had managed to grate almost everywhere except on the designated plate. Lucy scalded a knuckle when she tried to take a taste, said “Fuck!” then “Excuse me!” then “Fuck!” again when the wooden spoon slid unaided from the counter to the floor.

Alida was still going on about Finn and his famous Trojan horse, but Lucy had ceased to listen. She thought wistfully of all the varieties of macaroni and cheese that came frozen in containers, to which all you needed to do was prick the cellophane top and shove them in the microwave. With such drama around the stovetop, who needed news? Most of all, Lucy feared duplicating one of her mother’s culinary atrocities, and swore she’d stick to Stouffer’s in the future.

Eventually, the whole pinkish, greenish slumgullion made it into a casserole dish, was sprinkled with more cheese, and was placed under the broiler, with the timer set for fifteen minutes. Lucy rewarded herself with an extra-large glass of Oregon pinot noir.

The knock on the door came just when the timer started beeping.

“Oh, Jesus — Alida! Get the door, will you?”

It was the landlord. Bowing, smiling, he had a tape measure in one hand and a book in the other. Lucy, hair in her eyes, holding the heavy casserole in burned and greasy oven gloves, grimaced at him.

“Home cooking!” Mr. Lee said.

“S-S-S-Sorry, we’re just about to eat.”

“Came to measure up.” He pointed back at the door. “Video monitor.”

“What?”

“Like I told you — video monitor for security.”

“Oh, that.” She put the casserole on a mat on the table.

“Bring you the book.” He placed it beside the casserole. It was a small book, grown fat and soggy with rereading: Who Moved My Cheese?

“That’s funny. I was just making m-m-macaroni and cheese.”

“Lots of good tips — you’ll see.”

“Well…thank you.” She wished he’d get on with his measuring, though the last thing she wanted was a video monitor. The landlord appeared to be using her as a guinea pig for his projects: the lock on Tad’s door had remained unchanged. Why was her apartment being singled out for these experiments? And why did he always have to show up at such inconvenient hours? “Mr. Lee, do you mind if we just g-g-get on and eat?”

“No, no — smells good!” He didn’t budge from the table, just stood there, smiling expectantly.

Lucy gave up. “Alida? You’d better set another place for Mr. Lee.”

Alida was happy to welcome the landlord to the table, treating him as a fresh pair of ears to which she could tell her astounding news. She’d been deeply disappointed to find that Tad wasn’t home when they’d returned to the Acropolis, and now she had the captive audience she craved.

“You heard about the Freak virus?”

“Oh, yeah. My bank got hit — call me this morning.”

“You know who started it? It was a boy in my class! Finn—”

“Alida, I don’t think—”

“Finn Janeway! The FBI came to our school! He got arrested! They took him away, in two cars.”

“Janeway? Finn?” Mr. Lee’s overslung eyelids seemed for a moment to be working overtime. “He do all this with his home computer?”

“I think so — or maybe from the computer lab at school.”

“Big mistake,” the landlord said. “He shoulda gone to library or someplace. Kid smart enough to do that stuff, he should know better. Do it from his house…that’s crazy. Why he do that?”

“I think he like wanted to get caught.”

The landlord frowned and shook his head disbelievingly. “Like I say, this kid crazy.”

Lucy, annoyed by the landlord’s too-ready adoption of the criminal point of view — surely not the way to talk to Alida — said, “Do help yourself, Mr. Lee.”

He did so, generously. The golden crust on top made the dish look almost professionally respectable: Lucy thought it a pity that the landlord’s uninvited presence so detracted from what should have been her pride and pleasure in having successfully carried off the recipe.

Still, he praised the food lavishly. “Good cook, Lucy!”

“Thank you, Mr. Lee. Alida?”

“Yummy.”

Looking around the room, the landlord said, “You keep things nice. Real homey.”

“We like to think so.”

He quizzed Alida about her school, then said, “You think about college?”

“Sometimes I do. I want to be a math major.”

“Math, huh?”

“It’s hard to think seven years ahead when you’re eleven,” Lucy said. “People change. By the time you get to twelfth grade, who knows what you’ll want to major in? It might be math, it might be astrophysics, it might be anthropology.”

“Lot of good colleges in the U.S.,” Mr. Lee said. “What college you want to go to?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t like thought about it.”

“Harvard College. That’s good one. You heard of Harvard College?”

“Yeah,” Alida said, carefully forking the green bits out of her macaroni and cheese.

“You want an A-one education, you go to Harvard College.”

Alida shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You need big bucks to pay for Harvard College. Tuition!” He was speaking to Lucy now. “Costs a fortune.”

“So, you have children, Mr. Lee?”

“Me? No. No wife, no kids. Single man!” He reached for the casserole to give himself a second helping. He munched rather noisily for a while, then said, “Been reading what you wrote. Good writing, Lucy! Bill Gates, he knows what it takes to go from good to great. Can learn a lot from a guy like him.” To Alida, he said, “Bill Gates went to Harvard College.”

“He dropped out,” Lucy told him.

“What do you mean?” Alida said.

“He didn’t finish. He never got to graduate. He quit in his junior year there.”

“Like me.” The landlord eyed the casserole for the third time. “Never got to graduate from college!”

“So where were you, Mr. Lee?”

“Seattle Central Community College. Took class there once, Business Studies. Shoulda gone to Harvard.” He laughed. “But I was poor man then. Couldn’t pony up no tuition.”

The notion of him as a Harvard student was so absurd that Lucy giggled out loud.

“Is true!” Mr. Lee said, grinning. “Hey, I live like dirt once. Work my way up, right from the bottom. Not like Bill Gates. More like Sam Walton.” He turned to Alida. “Wal-Mart guy. When Sam a kid back in Depression time, his family didn’t have but just one cow. Every morning, five o’clock, this kid be out there milkin’ the cow. Then he bottle that milk and sell it all over Oklahoma on his bike. That how he got started. Know Wal-Mart’s turnover right now? Two hundred, eighty-five billion dollars!”

After a longish pause, Alida was gracious enough to mumble, “Cool.”

It took the landlord an age to leave. Then Lucy realized he’d never gotten around to taking measurements for the damn video monitor.

FINN’S EMPTY CHAIR was the focal point in Social Studies. They were meant to be doing this new project about George Vancouver and the Northwest Indians, but no one was paying attention. His absence from the room only made the cyberterrorist more present in everybody’s mind. In the minutes before the eight o’clock bell, all the talk was of Finn’s scarifying future. Most thought he’d spend years — behind bars! — in a juvenile detention center. Alida tried to say roughly what her mom had told her, but that wasn’t nearly exciting enough for the other kids.

“If he doesn’t talk, they’ll probably torture him,” Alex said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“He’ll go to trial.”

“He’ll be incarcerated.”

“He’ll have to spend the entire rest of his life paying for what he did. They’ll take it off his salary every month. He’ll never even have a car!”

“He’ll have to work on road gangs, wearing a yellow jacket with Prisoner on it. He’ll be picking up litter.”

“Can you imagine Finn like really, really thin?”

In class, Mrs. Milliband was saying, “Then Lieutenant Peter Puget and his men rowed ashore, and that was their very first meeting with the people we now call the Coast Salish Indians.”

Who cared?

MIRACULOUSLY, the FedEx package arrived mid-morning. Given the time difference, Marjorie Tillman must have moved like greased lightning to copy the photo and deliver it to the Norwich FedEx office. Lucy tore the flap of the package twice in her haste to get it open.

Two sheets of stiff cardboard enclosed a dust jacket of Augie’s book, a print of Mrs. Tillman’s original photograph, and four pages of small, old-fashioned, scrolly, blue-ink handwriting. Lucy grabbed the photo and immediately saw that it wasn’t — quite — identical to the one on the book, but could easily have been the next picture on the roll: boy, barbed wire, grass in the foreground, dirt in the background. The light had changed between the two shots, though. In Marjorie’s version, the boy — who sure looked like Augie — was squinting into the sun, and his shock of pale hair had changed shape a little, probably because of the wind.

She went to Alida’s room to dig out the magnifying glass that had been Alida’s constant companion when she was eight and deeply into Harriet the Spy. She found it in the third drawer down in the homework desk: Alida, the neat freak, always kept her drawers in perfect order.

It was hard to be sure, but under the glass she thought she saw discrepancies. Marjorie’s copy was nearly as good as an original, but both had clearly been taken with a Box Brownie’s crappy little lens. Even fresh from the processors more than sixty years ago, their resolution would have been smudgy. The dust jacket version wasn’t helped by its multitude of creases — creases that both served to authenticate its age, and now made it infuriatingly more difficult to read. But, look, wasn’t that barbed wire more widely spaced, and somehow spikier, in the photo on the book than it was in the copy?

And the boy himself: on the book his features were relatively sharp, but in the other they were almost whited-out from overexposure. The rule in those days — reverently observed by Lucy’s dad long afterward — was that the photographer had to keep the sun over his left shoulder to get the best picture, so a smidge too much sunlight could reduce a human face to a cipher. The boy — if it was the same boy — had obviously moved. In the first, his feet were hidden in the grass; in the second, Lucy could see the tops of a pair of sandals.

Suppose, now, that she were looking at two Latvian boys, both the same age, both Oxfam starvation cases. Substitute Chinese or African-American for Latvian, and would she expect to be able to securely tell them apart? How do you tell one munchkin from another?

It was the setting that was so damning. But then again, weren’t dirt and barbed wire part of the basic vocabulary of wartime, like Augie’s and Wilkomirski’s rats? A single fencepost would’ve helped confirm that the fence was the same fence, but in both shots there was only wire.

Maddening, since Lucy had expected the new photo to either convict or acquit at a glance. Her feeling was that both pictures were of Augie, taken a few minutes apart, but there were just enough differences to allow — no, to enforce — a wedge-shaped sliver of doubt.

She thought of showing them to Tad, who was interested in photography and might know more than she did about boys, but of course he’d confidently place Augie on the chicken farm and delight in seeing his book trashed by the world.

She turned to the letter. Marjorie’s notepaper was embossed with a letterhead printed in red—Mrs. Peregrine Tillman, 3, The Broadwalk, followed by her phone number and e-mail address, where, rather surprisingly, she was informally marjiet@ somewhere or other. Peregrine, how quaint! Peregrine must have died, though, since everything about Mrs. Tillman suggested a widow with too much time on her hands.

“Dear Miss Bengstrom,” it began, the women’s movement having apparently bypassed Thetford, Norfolk. The neat lines of immaculately legible writing ran on and on, peppered with words like “liar,” “ungrateful,” “deceitful,” and “cad.” Mrs. Tillman’s sea-blue fountain-penmanship uncannily conveyed her speaking voice — precise, imperial, and loud. She appeared to have the memory of an elephant: sentences would start “In early April 1944…” and “Sometime around the 15th of February 1945…” Perhaps she’d worked from her schoolgirl diaries. Lucy didn’t doubt her facts, but whether they were facts about Juris Abeltins or August Vanags she simply couldn’t tell. She learned more than she’d ever wanted to know about the symptoms of coeliac, and was in a position to draw a detailed map of Major Vickers’—Mrs. Tillman’s father’s — farm in all its hundred and fifty superior acres. The tone of the letter was of one conspirator to another: Marjie T. and Lucy B. had the author of Boy 381 pinned squarely to the ground. All that remained was to disembowel him in public.

The letter ended:

I am most grateful for your assistance in this matter, and will be happy to supply you with further information as required. Please do not hesitate to phone or write. When your magazine article appears, I would much appreciate it if you could send me a dozen copies at the above address, preferably by your “Federal Express” service. This nonsense has gone on for far too long.

Yours very sincerely,

Marjie Tillman

“SEIZE THE DAY!” was a phrase he’d glommed onto from his audio books. Seize the day!

All morning, Charles O had ridden around town in his pickup, practicing his lines. Driving from parking lot to parking lot, he felt a mounting certainty and masterfulness. Today was the day to seize; if he left it till tomorrow, his confidence in his own power might falter.

Banking $3,461 in cash at United Savings and Loan on Jackson, he said to the teller, “You beat the virus, huh?”

The teller, looking puzzled, said, “Yes, I had the flu a couple of weeks ago.”

“Never mind,” he said, stuffing the receipt in his wallet.

He climbed into the truck and drove on to the Acropolis. Each time he saw the building, he liked it more: spend $50,000 on minor refurbishments and it would be a palace. Repoint the bricks, freshen up the stucco. A gang of Mexicans could work wonders in a week. Possession of the big, old, stately building had mysteriously enlarged Charles O’s own character; its air of permanence in the world was now his. Just looking at it made him feel bigger, older, grander. After parking across the street, he spent five minutes sitting in the truck, window down, drinking in the sight. Swollen with feelings he found impossible to name, he walked over and took the creaky elevator to the seventh floor.

Lucy was in. Dressed in tight jeans and a black silk blouse, she looked flustered.

“Look, Mr. Lee — about the video thing, I’ve been thinking, and—”

He held up his hand commandingly and said, “No video! Must ask you something!”

She crossed the room, sat down at her desk — a litter of papers, books, and pictures. “Yes?”

He remained standing. He needed the advantage of height.

“Maybe this come as big surprise but—”

“If it’s our l-l-l-lease—”

“No!” She mustn’t interrupt, or he’d lose his thread. “First time I see you in this apartment, I know you’re smart. You a writer — good writer. I read what you write about Bill, you got him all figured out. You a born American — know stuff I don’t. So I gotta ask you.”

“Yes?”

“Washington is community property state. You know community property?”

“Precious little, I’m afraid.”

“I got book about it. Means all assets and property acquired after marriage belong to man and wife, fifty-fifty. Book say that. Like I get married, make a million dollars, spouse get five hundred K. I buy parking lot, apartment building, spouse own half. Big money!”

He had her attention now. She was interested, smiling.

“Spouse get rich — assets and property commingled! Word in book, I looked it up. ‘Commingled.’”

“I can see how that might be a problem.”

“No problem! See, guy like me, guy with property, need spouse. Time to marry! Need good homemaker. Like entertaining, I got business associates, dinner party, reception, all kinda stuff. See? I need wife. Look at Bill — him and Melinda. Sam and Helen. Time is come. Lucky this is community property state, huh?”

“Well, depending on how you look at it, I suppose.”

“I think lucky.”

“That’s very generous of you.”

She was really smiling now. She’d got his drift. No more fluster, she was listening keenly.

“Not generous. Make good sense. Spouse be nice to big guy from like New York, D.C., whatever — more money in bank! Fifty-fifty, like I said.”

“So who are you planning to marry, Mr. Lee?”

“Lucy, moment I see you, voice inside me say ‘She the one.’”

“Mr. Lee! Please! D-D-D-D-Don’t—”

“Stop! I finish!” He shouted her down. She sat tensely on her chair, smile frozen on her face, staring. “You old — no problem. You little big — no problem. You got Alida — great. Smart kid like that, I pay for Harvard College. Fifty-fifty, Lucy. Commingled.”

“Mr. Lee!” Her voice was a shriek.

“Come like shock, huh? Big decisions I always sleep on like overnight. Time to think, right? I give you time to think. Lucy?”

Her hand was at her mouth, her shoulders shaking. She was overcome with emotion — of course she would be, hearing it for the first time like that. Charles O knew from movies what to do. He stepped across to her, was about to put his hands on her shoulders and draw her close, when he saw she wasn’t crying. She was laughing.