“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.”

“Йcrevisse,” 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.”