By the afternoon, Finn mania had begun to subside, and even Social Studies was interesting. Peter Puget had mapped exactly where he was on the Earth’s surface by using a sextant — Mrs. Milliband had brought one into the classroom — to measure the angle of the sun from where he stood on the Olympic Peninsula. He’d used a tray of reflective mercury as an “artificial horizon.” Alida couldn’t wait to get her hands on the sextant, which looked way cool with its swinging arm, its hinged mirrors, its protractor and micrometer. Listening to Mrs. Milliband talk, she thought navigation might turn out to be right up there with algebra.
“My husband’s a big sailor. One of the first things he taught me when we went sailing — this was back in the 1960s — was how to use a sextant.”
Which meant that Mrs. Milliband must be over sixty years old. Maybe seventy, even. Cripes! As old as Augie, or almost.
AT USELESS BAY, the weather — light showers and heavy overcast — was almost suspiciously normal for mid-April, coming as it did after the succession of heat waves and floods. It was how Lucy remembered springtime in the 1990s. She even liked keeping the top up on the Spider. Adose of normality was what she craved, and badly needed in order to handle this trickiest of weekends with Augie.
At dinner — a rich and winey boeuf à la bourguignonne that nicely fit the fifty-degree temperature outside — it was Augie who brought up the Freak virus.
“This kid—”
“He’s in my class, and his name’s Finn.”
“Really? Wow. So you’re on first-name terms with the infamous terrorist?”
Lucy said, “I think ‘terrorist’—”
“It goes back to what we were saying about infrastructure a couple of weeks ago.”
“Imagine, eleven!” Minna said to Lucy.
“Your friend Finn, it’s just a hop and a skip from doing what he did to crippling the country’s entire financial infrastructure. A sixth-grader! No offense, Alida, but if a sixth-grader can manage that, imagine what a bunch of determined Islamists could do. They’ve got college degrees from our own universities — Ph.D.s, a lot of them. They’re biochemists, physicists, computer engineers, you name it. They’re not peasants from the desert, but well-off professionals in their fields. They’ve got all Finn’s considerable skills and a whole lot more.”
“What are Islamists?”
“It’s a long story that I’ll tell you when we’re kayaking, if you like. For now, just think of them as men made mad by weird beliefs in a warrior god. Fanatics who hate America.”
“Okay.”
Lucy thought this rather less than okay, and had no desire to see Alida return from her kayaking trip converted to Augie’s peculiar brand of neoconservatism.
“Fact is, Finn deserves a medal for exposing how open to attack we are. I just pray we’re capable of learning our lesson from this, though I wouldn’t put a five-spot on that one. You think Internet Explorer’s vulnerable? You better think about the water supply, the electrical grid, the railroad system. And all I see is a lot of people who ought to know better blowing smoke up our collective hiney.”
“Augie!” Minna made a face at him across the table.
“My educated guess is that Alida’s perfectly familiar with the word ‘hiney.’”
Alida laughed. “I never heard that one, though, about blowing smoke up it.”
“It’s not a bad expression to learn. Most of politics consists of blowing smoke up people’s hineys.”
Over dessert — a chocolate and orange mousse, for which Augie brought out a bottle of Muscat de Beaumes de Venise — Lucy steered the talk around to Boy 381, the movie.
“They say it’s still in preproduction, whatever that means. I take no interest in it: my attitude to that deal was to grab the moolah and run straight to the bank. They bought it, so it’s their story now. They can turn it into fiction, which is all the movie’ll ever be. I’ll read a junk thriller on a plane once in a while, but I’ve never really cared for fiction.”
“You mean they’re turning your book into like a Hollywood movie?”
“You have to read it, Rabbit. It’s a bit like Anne Frank’s diary, about Augie as a boy, growing up in World War II. As soon as I’m done with my piece, I’ll lend it to you.”
“Steven Spielberg called him up on the phone,” Minna said.
“Once. A single, solitary phone call. They wanted me to be a consultant on the film, but I wasn’t having any of it. They can make up their own details. Besides, I have an irrational prejudice against southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular.”
Minna giggled. “He applied for a job at UCLA a long time ago and didn’t get it,” she told Lucy in a whisper meant to be heard by her husband.
“Like I said, the prejudice is irrational. How’s that piece coming, anyway?”
“Oh, I haven’t started writing yet,” Lucy said. “It’s odd — I find writing profiles harder and harder as I get older. It’s that conclusive tone they tend to have, as if the journalist has gotten to the bottom of the subject’s soul in a one-hour interview, and the piece is like the last word.”
“Woe to those who conclude!” Augie said.
“Montaigne?”
“Close, but no cigar. You got the language right, at least. Flaubert.”
“I thought you had no time for fiction.”
“It’s his letters that I like. They’re great. I’ve done little more than flip through Madame Bovary.”
“I prefer nonfiction too.” Alida was practically licking the last of the mousse from her plate.
“Like your mom said, you might try my book. It’s about a kid a good bit younger than you are now.”
“Okay, cool. And it’s your true story?”
“Sure, it’s everything I remember from being three to around nine.”
“Did you meet Adolf Hitler?” Evidently Alida believed that a person who got phone calls from Steven Spielberg must habitually have moved in high circles.
“Not personally, no. But I was in Germany when he was in charge.”
“Cool!”
“No, it was just about as uncool as you could imagine. Read the book, you’ll see.”
As Lucy and Minna were loading the dishwasher, Minna said, “You know, I haven’t seen Augie as happy as this in years. You’re such fun to have around, you and Alida. For me, too.”
Lucy felt like Judas.
ALIDA USUALLY slept in on Saturdays, but this morning she’d set the alarm for six-fifteen to catch the tide. Muffled in two heavy sweaters and her yellow anorak, she had to breathe in deeply to fasten the clips on her life vest. Augie, too, looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
They set off in a dank, gray, windless chill, the sound of each paddle stroke uncannily amplified by the dawn silence. In the days following her last outing, Alida seemed to have unconsciously absorbed the new skill; she paddled, as Augie said admiringly, “like a pro.”
They went farther out this time, letting the houses that rimmed the bay shrink behind them. Alida told Augie about Peter Puget and navigation by sextant.
“Yeah,” he said. “George Vancouver was a stiff, uptight guy. You wouldn’t want to get on his bad side, which was about the only side he ever showed. But Puget was quite different — a real people person. He got fascinated by the Indians, bartered with them, tried to learn their language and understand their customs, all that. He’d be a good guy to share a yarn with. I sometimes wonder what he’d say if he could see Puget Sound today. Okay, so obviously his eyes’d be bugging out on strings, but would he feel proud, or sad, or what, do you think?”