Freedom [179]
Although he’d played D.C. often enough over the years, its horizontality and vexing diagonal avenues never ceased to freak him out. He felt like a rat in a governmental maze here. For all he could tell from the back seat of his taxi, the driver was taking him not to Georgetown but to the Israeli embassy for enhanced interrogation. The pedestrians in every neighborhood all seemed to have taken the same dowdiness pills. As if individual style were a volatile substance that evaporated in the vacuity of D.C.’s sidewalks and infernally wide squares. The whole city was a monosyllabic imperative directed at Katz in his beat-up biker jacket. Saying: die.
The mansion in Georgetown had some character, however. As Katz understood it, Walter and Patty hadn’t personally chosen this house, but it nevertheless reflected the excellent urbangentry taste he’d come to expect of them. It had a slate roof and multiple dormers and high ground-floor windows looking out on something resembling an actual small lawn. Above the doorbell was a brass plate discreetly conceding the presence of THE CERULEAN MOUNTAIN TRUST.
Jessica Berglund opened the door. Katz hadn’t seen her since she was in high school, and he smiled with pleasure at the sight of her all grown up and womanly. She seemed cross and distracted, however, and barely greeted him. “Hi, um,” she said, “just come on back to the kitchen, OK?”
She glanced over her shoulder at a long parquet-floored hallway. The Indian girl was standing at the end of it. “Hi, Richard,” she called, waving to him nervously.
“Just give me one second,” Jessica said. She stalked down the hall, and Katz followed with his overnight bag, passing a large room full of desks and file cabinets and a smaller room with a conference table. The place smelled like warm semiconductors and fresh paper products. In the kitchen was a big French farmer’s table that he recognized from St. Paul. “Excuse me for one second,” Jessica said as she pursued Lalitha into a more executive-looking suite at the back of the house.
“I’m a young person,” he heard her say there. “OK? I’m the young person here. Do you get it?”
Lalitha: “Yes! Of course. That’s why it’s so wonderful you came down. All I’m saying is I’m not so old myself, you know.”
“You’re twenty-seven!”
“That’s not young?”
“How old were you when you got your first cell phone? When did you start going online?”
“I was in college. But, Jessica, listen—”
“There’s a big difference between college and high school. There’s an entirely different way that people communicate now. A way that people my age started learning much earlier than you did.”
“I know that. We don’t disagree about that. I really don’t see why you’re so angry at me.”
“Why I’m angry? Because you have my dad thinking you’re this great expert on young people, but you’re not the great expert, as you just totally demonstrated.”
“Jessica, I know the difference between a text and an e-mail. I misspoke because I’m tired. I hardly slept all week. It’s not fair of you to make so much of this.”
“Do you even send texts?”
“I don’t have to. We have BlackBerrys, which do the same thing, only better.”
“It is not the same thing! God. This is what I’m talking about! If you didn’t grow up with cell phones in high school, you don’t understand that your phone is very, very different from your e-mail. It’s a totally different way of being in touch with people. I have friends who hardly even check their e-mail anymore. And if you and Dad are going to be targeting kids in college, it’s really important that you understand that.”
“OK, then. Be mad at me. Go ahead and be mad. But I still have work to do tonight, and you need to leave me alone now.”
Jessica returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, her jaw set. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You probably want to take a shower and have some dinner. There’s a dining room upstairs that I think it’s nice to actually use now and then. I got a,