The deep, confident, moneyed voice filled the cab. Breakthrough momentum—that was where he was at, and Lucy Bengstrom was part of it. Half listening, half dreaming, he was struck by an idea so new to him that it took several blocks to recognize it for what it was, or what he presumed it must be. Love, never an item on his agenda, and a term so far outside his usual vocabulary that he classed it along with such other dim abstractions as “amortization” and “fee simple,” had at last caught up with him in the shape of the tenant of #701 in that big flowery dress of hers. Crossing the Aurora Bridge, Charles O felt suddenly, mysteriously gifted.
LUCY WAS GLAD that Alida had been upstairs in her room when the live crabs had been slid, claws flailing, into the massive pan of raging water, each letting out a desolate whistling sigh as it met its death. At lunch, Alida was engrossed in managing the novel implements — the hinged crackers in the shape of claws, the slender two-pronged forks for teasing the flesh out of the shells.
“So how goes the homework?” Augie said.
Alida looked up from her splitting and crunching. “Oh, I finished it. It was pretty easy. I found the part where Anne says she wants to be Dutch, and put that in.”
Lucy didn’t know what she was talking about. “Who’s this, Rabbit?”
“Anne Frank.”
“We were talking about her earlier,” Augie said.
Alida never discussed her homework with Lucy.
“It’s an interesting question,” Augie said. “Was Anne Frank an emblem of the human spirit in general, or was she the archetypal Jewish victim? Her father, Otto, always claimed her as the first. This guy Meyer Levin tried to turn her into the second. There’s been a big battle over the possession of her memory, so by now there are two different Anne Franks — maybe more.”
This was Alida’s homework — multiple Anne Franks? “I thought you didn’t like memoirs,” Lucy said.
“And here’s why. Otto Frank’s Anne is one person, Meyer Levin’s is another. You read her diary through Otto’s eyes, then through Levin’s, and they’re two different books entirely. One’s about the trials of humanity, the other’s about the suffering of the Jews. Memoirs are always tricky that way.”
“Augie, I was thinking…”
“What were you thinking, Alida?”
“Well, like if we could go kayaking after lunch?”
“Oh, Rabbit, there’s no time. There’ll be long lines at the ferry, particularly in this weather. You’ve got school tomorrow. We have to get away in less than an hour. I’m sorry.”
Alida’s face went pinkly limp with disappointment.
“Hey, talk your mother into coming next weekend, we can go then.”
“Oh, Mom, can we? Please?”
Lucy was aware of a whole battery of alarms going off inside her head. August Vanags was her subject, her paycheck; he was food and rent. She needed distance to get him in perspective, to hold him coolly at arm’s length and not get drowned in this warm tide of hospitality — a tide, she feared, that issued from his and Minna’s loneliness. In the case of Bill Gates, she’d won two one-hour sessions, three weeks apart, and that was about right. In the case of August Vanags, it felt as if she and Alida were moving in. Her piece was in danger; she must get her priorities straight.
“Rabbit—”
“Oh, yes, we’d love to have you over,” Minna said.
“Of course we’d love to come, but…can we talk about it later, on the phone?”
“Take your time,” Augie said. “No urgency about it. We’re on island time here.”
It was the second time he’d said that, and Lucy always found the phrase faintly annoying. Even people who lived on Bainbridge used it, smugly, to insinuate that the most technical of insularities was some kind of moral virtue to be paraded over mere mainlanders.
They left the house at 2:30. At 2:31, Alida began campaigning for a return to Useless Bay on Friday.
“Oh, maybe, Rabbit, maybe…But it’s difficult.”
“Why is it difficult?”
“It just is.”
In response, Alida wired herself to her iPod and turned the volume up so loud that Lucy could hear the thin, tinny dribble of teenage nihilism coming from the earphones.
“Sorry! I know that’s a lousy answer!”
Tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-novocaine.
“Alida?”
But there was no reaching her. She might as well have been in Idaho, lips twitching to the lyrics, eyes half focused on the middle distance, left foot tapping in the footwell. She was gone.
There was a three-ferry wait at the terminal, where Alida tried to make overtures to a sniffer dog and was repulsed by its handler. Lucy made notes. “Memoirs are always tricky that way.” Talking of Anne Frank, had he really been speaking of himself and of multiple August Vanagses? She saw no obvious connection, but it was too hot to properly think. Ferry came and ferry went. The low-tide reek of drying bladder wrack grew steadily stronger as the water sank around the harbor pilings. The waiting cars kept their engines running for the air conditioning, filling the dead air with their fumes. At last the line began to move, and aboard the ferry there was blessed cool.
They sat by a window in the passenger lounge, next to a bulkhead. Alida — still wired — pointed approvingly to a framed notice that boasted, THIS FERRY IS POWERED BY SOYBEANS — BIODIESEL FUEL IN USE. Lucy responded with a thumbs-up sign and went on making notes. Maybe she’d have to learn sign language if she was to keep in meaningful communication with her daughter.
Halfway across Discovery Passage, she noticed for the second time the man in the Hawaiian shirt, jeans, and tightly buttoned poplin summer jacket. His tourist getup was at odds with his purposeful stride down the rows, eyes swiveling from passenger to passenger. On the instant that he registered Lucy and Alida, he appeared to cancel them from his attention. Then she saw the bulge in the jacket under his left armpit: a holstered sidearm.
An undercover marshal. Until now, she’d believed these guys were figments of Tad’s paranoid imagination. He claimed he’d seen them everywhere — on buses, ferries, and “all over” Pike Place Market. Sometimes he called them Stasi, sometimes just the secret police. Yeah, Tad. Go, Tad, go. She’d paid no attention. Now that she’d seen one for herself, she felt rebuked, like a doubting Thomas. Over her shoulder, she watched the man on his unrewarding beat. Whom was he hoping to catch? Bin Laden, returning from his weekend hideaway on Whidbey Island? Or perhaps his whole point, in his loud vacation gear, was not to observe but be observed, the watcher watched, as she was watching now.
“It happens slowly,” Tad had said, “so slowly you don’t see it happening. You think you’re living in a democracy, then one morning you wake up and realize it’s a fascist police state, and it’s been that way for years.”
But that was Tad, speaking from inside his world of dark “intel” and crazy theories garnered from the Internet. On the day Ronald Reagan died, he’d said matter-of-factly that of course Reagan had been dead for months, if not years, and that they’d been keeping his corpse on ice in readiness for a political emergency. They’d chosen to announce his death on that particular day in order to divert attention from some pickle that the president had gotten himself into over in Europe. All this Tad said as flatly as if he were reporting the weather forecast, which had made Lucy wonder for a moment if he might be clinically insane.
Whenever Tad got going on the federal government, Lucy bristled with unease. It was too damn close to Lewis Olson, his knee-jerk conviction that everyone in Washington, D.C., was conspiring to subvert the Constitution and enslave the American people. It was cheap and dangerous thinking, and she couldn’t count the hours she’d spent railing back at Tad, telling him he was no better than the Montana Militia with their kooky crap about black helicopters and the New World Order. “You and John Trochmann,” she said, “you’re like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”