"Are you nuts? You can't do that. Crazy people are trying to kill you." He waved a hand. "Oh, who cares? We can't live that way. What's the use? Anyway, the risk is minimal here. It would take a major-league intelligence operation to track us down here in this dump. I'm much safer at some random restaurant than I'll be in Wash-ington or Boston. This is our only night together. Let's be brave. Let's find the nerve to be happy."

They dressed, left the beach house, got into the car. Greta started it with a metal key. The engine growled in ugly piston-popping fashion. Then Greta's phone rang.

"Don't answer it," Oscar said.

She ignored him. "Yes?" She paused, then handed it over. "It's for you." It was Fontenot. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Are you still awake? We're going out for dinner."

"Of course I'm awake! I was up as soon as you left the safe house. You can't leave Holly Beach, Oscar."

"Look, it's the middle of the night, nobody knows we're here, we're in a rented car with no history, and we're picking a town at random."

"You want to eat? We'll bring you in some food. What if you get pulled over by a parish sheriff? They'll punch you into the state police net. You think that'll be a fun experience for a Yankee who's crossed Green Huey?

Think otherwise, pal."

"Should that happen, I'll lodge a complaint with the American embassy."

"Very funny. Stop being stupid, okay? I finessed the Holly Beach thing for you, and that wasn't easy. If you depart from the itinerary, I can't be responsible."

"Keep driving," Oscar told Greta. "Jules, I appreciate your pro-fessionalism, I really do, but we need to do this, and there's no time to argue about it."

"All right," Fontenot groaned. "Take the highway east and I'll get back to you."

Oscar hung up and gave Greta her phone. "Did you ever have a bodyguard?" he said.

She nodded. "Once. After the Nobel announcement. It was me and Danny Yearwood. After the big news broke, Danny started getting all these threats from the animal rights people .... Nobody ever threatened me about it, and that was so typical. They just went after Danny. We shared the Nobel, but I was the one doing all the labwork. . . . We had some security during the press coverage, but the stalkers just waited them out. Later they jumped poor Danny out-side his hotel and broke both his arms."

"Really. "

"I always figured it was the fetal-tissue people who were the real anti-science crazies. The righters mostly just broke into labs and stole animals. "

She peered carefully into the moving pool of headlights, grasping the wheel with her narrow hands. "Danny was so good about the credit. He put my name first on the paper-it was my hypothesis, I did the labwork, so that was very ethical, but he was just such an angel about it. He just fought for me and fought for me, he never let them overlook me. He gave me every credit that he could, and then they stalked him and beat him up, and they completely ignored me. His wife really hated my guts."

"How is Dr. Yearwood, these days? How could I get in touch with him?"

"Oh, he's out. He left science, he's in banking now."

"You're kidding. Banking? He won the Nobel Prize for rnedicine."

"Oh, the Nobel doesn't count so much, since those Swedish bribery scandals. . . . A lot of people said that was why we got the Prize in the first place, a woman still in her twenties, they were trying some kind of clean-slate approach. I don't care, I just enjoy the labwork. I like framing the hypothesis. I like the procedures, I like proper form. I like the rigor, the integrity. I like publishing, seeing it all there in black and white, all very tight and straight. It's knowledge then. It's forever."

"You really love your work, Greta. I respect that."

"It's very hard. If you get famous, they just won't let you work anymore. They bump you up in the hierarchy, they promote you out of the lab, there's a million stupid distractions. Then it's not about science anymore. It's all about feeding your postdoc's children. The whole modern system of science is just a shadow of what it was in the Golden Age-the First Cold War. But . . ." She sighed. "I don't know. I did all right personally. Other people have had it so much worse."

"Such as?"

"There was this woman once. Rita Levi-Montalcini. You know about her?"

''I'll know if you tell me."

"She was another Nobelist. She was Jewish, in the 1930s, in Italy. A neuro-embryologist. The Fascists were trying to round her up, and she was hiding in this village in a shack. She made dissection tools out of wire and she got these hen's eggs .... She had no money, and she couldn't show her face, and the government was literally try-ing to kill her, but she got her lab results anyway, major results. . . . She survived the war and she got away. She ran to America, and they gave her a really great lab job, and she ended up as this ninety-year-old famous world-class neuro person. She's exactly what it's all about, Rita was."

"You want me to drive a little now?"

''I'm sorry that I'm crying."

"That's all right. Just pull over."

They stepped out in the darkness and switched positions in the car. He drove off with a loud crunch of roadside oyster shells. It had been a long time since he'd done any of his own driving. He tried to pay a lot of attention, as he was anxious not to kill them. Things were becoming so interesting. The sex had been a debacle, but sex was only part of it anyway. He was getting through to her now. Getting through was what counted.

"You shouldn't let them destroy my lab, Oscar. I know the place never lived up to its hype, but it's a very special place, it shouldn't be destroyed. "

"That's an easy thing to say. It might even be doable. But how hard are you willing to fight for what you want? What will you give? What will you sacrifice?"

Her phone rang again. She answered it. "It's your friend again," she said, "he wants us to go to some place called Buzzy's. He's called ahead for us."

"My friend is really a very fine man."

They drove into the town of Cameron, and they found the restaurant. Buzzy's was a music spot of some pretension, it was open late and the tourist crowd was good. The band was playing classical string quartets. Typical Anglo ethnic music. It was amazing how many Anglos had gone into the booming classical music scene. Anglos seemed to have some innate talent for rigid, linear music that less troubled ethnic groups couldn't match.

Fontenot had phoned them in a reservation as Mr. and Mrs. Garcia. They got a decent table not far from the kitchen, and a healthy distance from the bar, where a group of Texan tourists in evening dress were loudly drinking themselves stupid amid the brass and the mir-rors. There were cloth napkins, decent silverware, attentive waiters, menus in English and French. It was cozy, and became cozier yet when Fontenot himself arrived and took a table near the door. It felt very warm and relaxing to have a bodyguard awake, sober, and check-ing all the arrivals.

"I need seafood," Oscar announced, studying his menu. "Lob-ster would be nice. Haven't had a decent lobster since I left Boston."

"ecrevisse," Greta said.

"What's that?"

"Top of page two. A famous local specialty, you should try it."

"Sounds great." He signaled a waiter and ordered. Greta asked for chicken salad.

Greta began to spin the narrow stem of her wineglass, which he had filled with mineral water in order to forestall more gin. "Oscar, how are we going to work this? I mean us."

"Oh, our liaison is technically unethical, but it doesn't quite count when you're unethical away from the action. You'll be going back to your work, and I'm going to the East Coast. But I'll be back later, and we can arrange something discreet."

"That's how this works, in your circles?"

"When it works . . . . It's accepted. Like, say, the President and his mistress."

Her eyebrows rose. "Leonard Two Feathers has a mistress?"

"No, no, not him! I mean the old guy, the man who's still officially President. He had this girlfriend-Pamela something, you don't need to know her last name . . . . She'll wait till he's safely out of office. Then she'll license the tell-all book, the fragrance, the lin-gerie, the various ancillary rights. . . . It's her cash-out money."

"What does the First Lady think of all that?"

"I imagine she thinks what First Ladies always think. She thought she'd be an instant co-President, and then she had to watch for four long years while the Emergency committees staked her guy out in public and pithed him like a frog. That's the real tragedy of it. You know, I had no use for that guy as a politician, but I still hated watching that process. The old guy looked okay when he took office. He was eighty-two years old, but hey, everybody in the Party of American Unity is old, the whole Right Progressive Bloc has a very aged demographic . . . . The job just broke him, that's all. It just snapped his poor old bones right there in public. I guess they could have outed him on the thousand-year-old girlfriend issue, but with all the truly serious troubles the President had, trashing his sex life was overkill."

"I never knew about any of that."

"People know. Somebody always knows. The man's krewe al-ways knows. The Secret Service knows. That doesn't mean you can get people to make a public issue of it. Nets are really peculiar. They're never smooth and uniform, they're always lumpy. There are probably creeps somewhere who have surveillance video of the Presi-dent with Pamela. Maybe they're swapping it around, trading it for paparazzi shots of Hollywood stars. It doesn't matter. My dad the movie star, he used to get outed all the time, but they were always such' silly things-he got outed once for punching some guy at a polo club, but he never got outed for playing footsie with mobsters. Crazy people with time on their hands can learn a lot of weird things on the net. But they're still crazy people, no matter how much they learn. They're not players, so they just don't count."

"And I'm not a player, so I just don't count."

"Don't take it badly. None of your people ever counted. Senator Dougal, he was your player. Your player is gone now, so you have nothing left on the game board. That's political reality."

"I see."

"You can vote, you know. You're a citizen. You have one vote. That's important."

"Right." They laughed.

They had consomme. Then the waiter brought the main dish. "Smells wonderful," Oscar said. "Got a lobster bib? Claw cracker? Hammer, maybe?" He had a closer look at the dish. "Wait a minute. What's wrong with my lobster?"

"That's your ecrevisse." "What is it, exactly?"

"Crayfish. Crawdad. A freshwater lobster."

"What's with these claws? The tail's all wrong."

"It's domestic. Natural crawdads are only three inches long. They stitched its genetics. That's a local specialty."

Oscar stared at the boiled crustacean in its bed of yellow rice. His dinner was a giant genetic mutant. Its proportions seemed profoundly wrong to him. He wasn't quite sure what to make of this. Certainly he'd eaten his share of genetically altered crops: corncobs half the size of his arm, UltraPlump zucchinis, tasty mottled brocco-cauliflowers, seedless apples, seedless everything, really. . . . But here was an en-tire gene-warped animal boiled alive and delivered in one piece. It looked fantastic, utterly unreal. It was like a lobster-shaped child's balloon.

"Smells delicious," he said. Greta's phone rang.

"Look, can't we eat in peace?" Oscar said.

She swallowed a forkful of vinegar-gleaming chicken salad. "I'll shut my phone off," she said.

Oscar prodded experimentally at one of the crawdad's many anciliary legs. The boiled limb snapped off as cleanly as a twig, revealing a white wedge of flesh.

"Don't be shy," she told him, "this is Louisiana, okay? Just stick the head right in your mouth and suck the juice out."

The music from the band stopped suddenly, in mid-quartet. Os-car looked up. The doorway was full of cops.

They were Louisiana state troopers, men in flat-brimmed hats with headphones and holstered capture guns. They were filtering into the restaurant. Oscar looked hastily for Fontenot and saw the security man discreetly punching at his phone, with a look of annoyance.

"Sorry," Oscar said, "may I borrow your phone a minute?" He turned Greta's phone back on and engaged in the surpris-ingly complex procedure of reinstalling its presence in the Louisiana net. The cops had permeated through the now-hushed crowd, and had blocked all the exits. There were cops in the bar, a cop with the maitre d', cops quietly vanishing into the kitchen, two pairs of cops going upstairs. Cops with laptops, cops with video. Three cops were having a private conference with the manager.

Then came the thudding racket of a helicopter, landing outside. When the rotors shut off, the entire crowd found themselves suddenly shouting. The sudden silence afterward was deeply impressive.

Two mountainous bodyguards in civilian dress entered the res-taurant, followed immediately by a short, red-faced man in house shoes and purple pajamas.

The red-faced man bustled headlong into the restaurant, his furry house slippers slithering across the tiles. "HEY, Y'ALL!" he shouted, his voice booming like a kettledrum. "It's ME!" He waved both arms, pajamas flying open to reveal a hairy belly. "Sorry for the mess! Offi-cial business! Y' all relax! Ever'thing under control."

"Hello, Governor!" someone shouted. "Hey, Huey!" yelled an-other diner, as if it were something he'd been longing to say all his life. The diners were all grinning suddenly, exchanging happy glances, skidding their chairs back, their faces alight. They were in luck. Life and color had entered their drab little lives.

"See what the boys in the back room'll have!" screeched the Governor.

"We're gonna look after you folks real good tonight! Din-ner's on me, everybody! All righty? Boozoo, you see to that! Right away."

"Yessir," said Boozoo, who was one of the bodyguards.

"Gimme a COFFEE!" boomed Huey. He was short, but he had shoulders like a linebacker. "Gimme a double coffee! It's late, so put a shot of something in it. Gimme a demitasse. Hell, gimme a whole goddamn tasse. Somebody gonna get me two tasses? Do I have to wait all night? Goddamn, it smells good in here! You folks having a good time yet?" There was a ragged yell of public approval.

"Y'all don't mind me now," screamed Huey, casually hitching his pajama bottoms. "Couldn't get myself a decent meal in Baton Rouge, had to fly down here to take the edge off. Gotta take a big meeting tonight." He strode unerringly into the depths of the restau-rant, approaching Oscar's table like a battleship. He stopped short, looming suddenly before them, hands twitching, forehead dotted with sweat. "Clifton, gimme a chair."

"Yessir," said the remaining bodyguard. Clifton yanked a chair from a nearby table like a man picking up a breadstick, and deftly slid it beneath his boss's rump.

Suddenly the three of them were sitting face-to-face. At close range the Governor's head was like a full moon, swollen, glowing, and lightly cratered. "Hello, Etienne," Greta said.

"Hallo, petite!" To Oscar's intense annoyance, the two of them began speaking in rapid, idiomatic French.

Oscar glanced over to catch Fontenot's eye. There was a two-volume lesson in good sense in Fontenot's level gaze. Oscar looked away. A waiter arrived on the trot with coffee, a tall glass, whipped cream, a shot of bourbon. ''I'm starvin' ," Huey announced, in a new and much less public voice. "Nice mudbug you got there, son."

Oscar nodded.

"I dote on mudbugs," Huey said. "Gimme some butter dip." He pulled his pajama sleeves up, reached out with nutcracker hands, and wrenched the tail from the carapace with a loud bursting of gristle and meat. He flexed the tail, everting a chunk of white steaming flesh. " C' est bon, son!" He stuffed it into his mouth, set his teeth, and tore. "That GOOD or what! Gonna BODY-SLAM them Boston lobsters! Bring me a menu. My Yankee friend the Soap Salesman here, he's gotta order hisself somethin'. Tell the chef to put some hair on his chest."

Their table was now densely crowded with waiters. They were materializing through the ranks of state cops, bringing water, cream, napkins, butter, hot bread, panniers of curdled sauce. They were thrilled to serve, jostling each other for the honor. One offered Oscar a fresh menu.

"Get this boy a jambalaya," Huey commanded, waving the menu away with a flick of his dense red fingers. "Get him two shrimp jam-balayas. Big ol' shrimp. We need some jumbo shrimp here, the Child Star looks mighty peaked. Girl, you gotta eat something more than them salads. Woman can't live on chicken salad. Tell me somethiri'. You. Oscar. Man's gotta eat, don't he?"

"Yes, Governor," Oscar said.

"This boy of yours ain't eatin'!" Huey crushed the crawdad's boiled red claw between his pinching thumbs. "Mr. Bombast. Mr. Architecture Boy. I cain't have a thing like that on my conscience! Thinkin' of him, and his pretty wife, just wasting away up north there on goddamn apple juice. It's got me so I cain't sleep nights!"

''I'm sorry to hear that you're troubled, Your Excellency."

"You tell your boy to stop frettin' so much. You don't see me neglectin'

life and limb because the common man can't get a decent break up in Boston. We get Yankees like y'all down here all the time. They get a taste of the sweet life, and they forget all about your god-damn muddy water. Hungry Boy needs to lighten up."

"He'll eat when those soldiers eat, sir."

Huey stared at him, chewing deliberately. "Well, you can tell him from me-you tell him tonight-that I'm gonna solve his little problem. I get his point. Point taken. He can put down his goddamn cameras and the apple juice, because I'm gonna do him a favor. I am taking proactive executive measures to resolve the gentleman's infra-tructural contretemps."

''I'll see to it that the Senator gets your message, sir."

"You think I'm kidding, Mr. Valparaiso? You think I'm funning with you tonight?"