“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.
At 11:15, Oscar and Greta took a cab to Bambakias’s office in Cam-bridge. “You know something?” she told him. “This suit isn’t as stiff as it looks. It’s really very cozy.”
“Donna’s a true professional.”
“And it fits me perfectly. How could it fit so well?”
“Oh, any smart surveillance scanner can derive body measure-ments. That was a military-intelligence app at first — it just took a while to work its way up to haute couture.”