"She's gone to Holland now, right?"

"Yes, she's gone. That didn't work out, either."

"Why don't they work out for you, Oscar?"

"I don't know," he said. He jammed his hands in his pockets. "That's an excellent question, isn't it?"

"Well," she said, "maybe it's an excellent question, but maybe I shouldn't have asked it."

"No, Greta, I like it when you show up drunk and confronta-tional." He crossed his arms. "Let me get you fully up to speed here, all right?

You see, I'm the product of unusual circumstances. I grew up in a very special milieu. Logan Valparaiso's dream home. A classic Holly-wood mansion. Tennis courts. Palm trees. Monogrammed everything, zebra skins, and gold fixtures. A big playground for Logan's friends, all these maquiladora millionaires and South American dope czars. My dad had the worst taste in the world. I wanted this place to be differ-ent."

"What's different about it?"

"Nothing," he said bitterly. "I wanted my home to be genuine. But this place has never been real. Because I have no family. No one has ever lived in here who cared enough about me to stay. In fact, I'm rarely even here myself I'm always out on the road. So this place is a fraud. It's an empty shell. I've tried my very best, but it's all been an evil fantasy, it's completely failed me." He shrugged. "So, welcome home."

She looked stricken. "Look, I didn't say any of that."

"Well, that's what you were thinking."

She shook her head. "You don't know what I'm thinking."

"I agree that I can't outthink you. Not from a dead start. But I do know how you feel."

"You don't know that, either."

"Oh yes I do. Of course I do. I know it by the way you talk. By the way you move your hands. I can see it in the way you look." He smiled. "Because I'm a politician."

She put her hand over her own mouth.

Then, without warning, she embraced him and printed a damp kiss on his upper lip. He slid his arms around her lean torso. She felt magnetic, hypnotic, absolutely compelling.

She bent backward in his tightening grip and laughed.

He pulled her toward the inflated couch. They fell together on it with a bounce and squeak. He buried his face in the sweet juncture of her neck and shoulder.

She slid her narrow hand through the open collar of his shirt. He nuzzled her jawline. Those wondrous cavities beneath her earlobes. The authentic idiosyncrasy in the tendons of her neck.

Their lips parted stickily. She pulled back half an inch. "I like feeling jealous," she said. "That's new for me."

"I could explain all that, you know."

"Stop explaining. I'd bet anything Clare's dresses are still in your bedroom closet." She laughed. "Show me, I want to see." Once upstairs, she spun in place, swinging her purse, tottering just a little. "Now, this room is amazing. Your closets are bigger than my dorm room."

He set to work on his shoes. He stripped off his socks. One, two. He started on his cuff links. Why did it always take forever to strip? Why couldn't clothes simply vanish, so people could get on with it? Clothes always vanished in movies.

"Are these walls really white suede? You have leather wallpaper?" He glanced over. "You need some help undressing?"

"That's all right. You don't have to rip my clothes off more than once." Six endless minutes later he lay gasping in a nest of sheets. She sidled off to the bathroom, her hairdo smashed and her collarbones flushed. He heard her turning on the bidet, then every faucet in the room-the shower, the tub, the white sink, the black sink. Greta was experimenting, running all the local equipment. He lay there breath-ing deeply and felt weirdly gratified, like a small yet brilliant child who had snatched candy from under a door with a yardstick.

She came padding from the shower, black hair lank and dripping, her eyes as bright as a weasel's. She crept into bed and embraced him, clammy, and frozen-footed, and reeking of upscale shampoo. She held him and said nothing. He fell asleep as if tumbling into a pit.

He woke later, head buzzing and muddled. Greta was standing before an open closet door, examining herself in its inset full-length mirror. She was wearing panties, and a pair of his socks, which she had jammed, inside out, onto her narrow, chilly feet.

She held a dress before herself and studied the effect. Oscar sud-denly recognized the dress. He had bought Clare that sundress because she looked so lovely in yellow. Clare had hated the dress, he now realized groggily. She'd always hated the dress. Clare even hated yel-low.

"What was all that noise just now?" he croaked.

"Some idiot banging the door downstairs," Greta said. She dropped the dress on the floor, in a pile of half a dozen others. "The cops arrested him." She picked out a beaded evening gown. "Go back to sleep." Oscar turned in place, scrunched the pillow, grabbed for slum-ber, and missed. He gathered awareness and watched her through slit-ted eyes. It was half past four in the morning.

"Aren't you sleepy?" he said.

She caught his eye in the mirror, surprised to see him still awake. She turned out the closet light, crossed the room silently, in darkness, and slid into bed.

"What have you been doing all this time?" he murmured.

"I've been exploring your house."

"Any big discoveries?"

"Yes, I discovered what it means to be a rich guy's girlfriend." She sighed. "No wonder people want the job."

He laughed. "What about my situation? I'm the boy-toy of a Nobel Prize winner."

"I was watching you sleep," she said wistfully. "You look so sweet. "

"Why do you say that?"

"You don't have an agenda while you're sleeping."

"Well, I have an agenda now." He slid his hand over her bony hip and obtained a firm, intimate grip. ''I'm a hundred percent agenda. I'm going to change your life. I'm going to transform you. I'm going to empower you." She stirred against the sheets. "How is that weird little miracle supposed to happen?"

"Tomorrow I'm taking you to meet my dear friend, Senator Bambakias."

Yosh Pelicanos, Oscar's majordomo, had a grocery delivery shipped to the house at eight AM. Yosh was not a man to be deterred by the mere fact that he was hundreds of miles from the scene. He had a keyboard and a list of Oscar's requirements, so the electric hand of the net economy had dropped four boxes of expensive shrink-wraps at Oscar's doorstep.

Oscar set up the new air filter in the breakfast nook. This fi-nessed Greta's allergy problem. Allergies were very common among Collaboratory workers; the laundered air was so pure that it failed to properly challenge people's immune systems, which hence became hyperreactive.

Then Oscar tied an apron over his lounge pajamas and put the kitchen to work. Results were gratifying. Oscar and Greta tore through lox, and bagels, and waffles, with lashings of juice and coffee. When the ravenous edge was blunted, they toyed with triangled rye toast and lump fish caviar. Oscar gazed affectionately across the table's massive flowered centerpiece. Things were going so well. He believed in breakfasts. Morning-after breakfasts were far more intimate and emotionally en-gaging than any number of romantic dinners. He'd been through a horrid gamut of breakfasts: breakfasts that were hungover, shame-ridden, full of unspoken dread or politeness stretched tighter than a banjo string; but breakfast with Greta was a signal success. Steamed clean in a white terry bathrobe and socketed in her Saarinen chair, she was a mutant swan in freshwater. She smoothed a black mass of caviar across her toast and licked a stray dab from her fingertip. ''I'm gonna miss that cytoplasm panel."

"Don't worry. I've bought you the full set of conference tapes. They'll ship in the morning set at lunch. You can speed through all the boring parts in the media room."

"No one goes to conferences to watch the tapes. All the action's in the halls and the poster sessions. I need to go back there. I need to confer with my colleagues."

"No, Greta, that's not what you need today. You have a higher priority. You need to go to Cambridge with me, and confer with a United States Senator. Donna is arriving any minute; she's been shop-ping, and she's going to do you over."

"Who is Donna?"

"Donna Nunez is one of my krewe. She's an image consultant."

"I thought you left your krewe in Texas at the lab."

"No, I brought Donna with me. Besides, I'm in constant touch with my krewe. They haven't been abandoned, they're very busy back there-laying some groundwork. As for Donna, she's been devoting a lot of thought to this project. You'll be in very good hands."

Greta 'put down her toast with a resolute look. "Well, I don't do that sort of thing. I don't have time for an image."

"Rita Levi-Montalcini did."

Her eyes narrowed. "What do you know about her?"

"You once told me that this woman was very important to you. So, I put my oppo-research people on her. Now I'm an expert on your role model, Dr. Rita. Rita was a Nobelist, and a neuroscientist, and she was a major player in her country's research effort. But Dr. Rita understood how to handle her role. She dressed every day like a Milanese jewel."

"You don't do science by dressing up."

"No, you run science by dressing up."

"But I don't want to! I don't want to run a damned thing! I just want to work in my lab! Why can't you get that through your head? Why won't anyone let me do my work anymore? If you'd just let me do the things I'm really good at, I wouldn't have to go through any of this!" Oscar smiled. "I bet that felt marvelous. Can we talk like adults now?" She snorted.

"Don't think that I'm being frivolous. You are being frivolous. You are a national celebrity. You're not some ragged grad student who can hide out in your nice giant test tube. Rita Levi-Montalcini wore tailored lab coats, and did her hair, and had real shoes. And so will you. Relax and eat your caviar."

The door emitted a ring. Oscar patted his lips with a napkin, belted his dressing gown, stepped into his slippers.

Donna had arrived, with heaps of luggage and a set of suit bags. She had brought two winter-clad Boston high-maintenance girls in a second taxi. The three women were having an animated chat with a young Anglo man. Oscar recognized the man-he didn't know his name, but he knew the face, the cane, and the support shoes. This stranger was a local guy, a neighborhood regular.

Oscar unsealed his door. "How good of you to come. Welcome. You can take your equipment up to the prep room. We'll be sending your client in presently."

Donna ushered her charges upstairs, chatting briskly in Spanglish. Oscar found himself confronting the man with the cane. "May I help you, sir?"

"Yeah. My name's Kevin Hamilton. I manage the apartment block up the street."

"Yes, Mr. Hamilton?"

"I wonder if we could have a word together, about all these guys who've been showing up trying to kill you."

"I see. Do come in." Oscar shut the door carefully behind his new guest.

"Let's talk this over in my office." He paused, noting Hamilton's cane and the clumsy orthopedic shoes. "Never mind, we can talk downstairs." He led the limping Hamilton into the dayroom. Greta appeared suddenly, barefoot and in her bathrobe.

"All right, where do you want me?" she said resignedly. Oscar pointed. "Upstairs, first door on your left." Hamilton offered a gallant little salute with his cane. "Hello," Greta told him, and trudged up the stairs.

Oscar led Hamilton into the media room and unstacked an aluminum chair for him. Hamilton sat down with obvious relief "Good-looking babe," he remarked.

Oscar ignored him and sat in a second chair.

"I wouldn't have disturbed you this morning," Hamilton said, "but we don't see a lot of assassinations in this neighborhood, generally."

"No. "

"Yesterday, I myself got some mail urging me to kill you."

"Really! You don't say."

Hamilton scratched at his sandy hair, which had a jutting cowlick and a part like a lightning bolt. "You know, you and I have never met before, but I used to see you around here pretty often, in and out at all hours, with various girlfriends. So when this junkbot email told me you were a child pornographer, I had to figure that was totally de-tached from reality."

"I think I can follow your reasoning," Oscar said. "Please go on."

"Well, I ran some backroute tracing, found the relay server in Finland, cracked that, traced it back to Turkey. . . . I was download-ing the Turkish activity logs when I heard some gunfire in the street. Naturally, I checked out the local street monitors, analyzed all the movement tags on the neighborhood CCTV. . . . That was pretty late last night. But by then, I was really ticked off. So I pulled an all-nighter at the keyboard." Hamilton sighed. "And, well, I took care of it for you."

Oscar stared in astonishment. "You 'took care of it'?"

"Well, I couldn't locate the program itself, but I found its pushfeeds. It gets all its news off a service in Louisiana. So, I spoofed it. I informed the thing that I'd killed you. Then I forged a separate news release announcing your death, and I faked the headers and fed it in. It sent me a nice thank-you note. That should take care of your problem. That thing is as dumb as a brick."

Oscar mulled this over, thoughtfully. "Could I get you a little something, Kevin? Juice? An espresso, maybe?"

"Actually, I'm kind of bushed. I'm thinking I'll turn in now. I just thought I'd walk down the street and give you the news first."

"Well, that's very good news you've glven me. It's excellent news. You've done me quite a favor here."

"Aw, think nothing of it," Kevin demurred. "Any good neigh-bor would have done the same thing. If he had any serious program-ming skills, that is. Which nobody much does, nowadays."

"Forgive me for asking, but how did you come by these pro-gramming skills?"

Hamilton nudged his chin with the handle of his cane. "Learned them from my dad, to tell the truth. Dad was a big-time coder on Route 128 before the Chinese smashed the info economy."

"Are you a professional programmer, Kevin?"

"Are you kidding? There aren't any professional programmers. These losers who call themselves sysadmins nowadays, they're not pro-grammers at all! They just download point-and-click canned stuff off some pirate site, and shove it into the box."

Oscar nodded encouragement.

Hamilton waved his cane. "The art of computing hasn't ad-vanced in ten years! It can't move anymore, 'cause there's no commer-cial potential left to push it. The Euros have settled all the net protocols nice and neat, and the Chinese always pirate anything you publish. . . . So the only guys who write serious code nowadays are ditzy computer scientists. And nomads-they've always got time on their hands. And, you know, various white-guy hacker crooks." Hamilton yawned. "But I have a lot of trouble with my feet, see. So coding helps me pass the time. Once you understand how to code, it's really kind of interesting work."

"Are you sure there's nothing I can do for you? I feel very much in your debt."

"Well, yeah, there is one thing. I'm chairman of the local neigh-borhood watch, so they're probably gonna bother me a lot about this shooting incident. It would be good if you could come over later and help me reassure my tenants."

''I'd be delighted to help you."

"Good deal, then." Hamilton stood up with a stoical wince.

"Let me see you out, sir." .

After Hamilton's shuffling departure, Oscar swiftly transferred the contents of his laptop into the house system and set to immediate work. He sent notes to Audrey Avizienis and Bob Argow in Texas, urging them to run immediate oppo scans on his neighbor. It was not that he distrusted Kevin Hamilton-Oscar prided himself on his open-minded attitude toward Anglos-but news so wonderful seemed very hard put to be true.