Stella jumped off her lap. Here he had evaded her attempts to control him, and very cleverly, too, by boning up on all those movies and manufacturing himself as a movie fan, while all the time doing surveillance of the city and the bay. She was angrily impressed by his enterprise in getting around—a man who could not drive! He must have used trains and streetcars, and of course walked considerable distances. She called Stella back to her and patted her. Through her coat she could feel that the dog was muscular and physically fit. And he had conjured the Kimuras and Pete into a “nest of spies.” Poor Mr. Kimura, to have his artistic aspirations so cavalierly dismissed as a cover-up for espionage! And poor Mrs. Kimura, a woman who had witnessed as much daily horror as anyone! Andrew imagined that she was noting down harvest dates, and estimating crop sizes (peaches? cherries? roses?) as she was driving from delivery to delivery. Naoko had visited their house on the island, and come to several knitting circles. Did Andrew think that when the ladies weren’t looking the girl was going into his office and rifling through papers for information on the Aether? Or, alternatively, sneaking about the ship factories, writing things down? Evidently, he did.
Yes, Pete was a shady character. All of Pete’s attractions grew out of the fact that he was a shady character whose credentials were not in order, and whose stories could never be proved or disproved. The only things she knew about Pete were that he had in his possession some Japanese works of art, that he had shown her some horses at the racetrack that he said were his, and that, for now, she liked him. Very much. He was kind, observant, and enjoyable to talk to. Aah, Pete, she thought. Andrew was right to be suspicious of Pete, because Pete made a career of acting suspiciously, but the thought of his suspicions made her tingle with rage.
She got up from the chair, turned out the light, and went into Andrew’s office. She laid the papers in the center of the desk, where he would be sure to see them, then she put a shawl over her shoulders and took Stella out into the yard. The dog did some investigating, and then they went back into the house. She left Stella in the kitchen, where he would find her, and went upstairs to her room, where she closed the door, changed into her nightgown, and got into bed. Sometime later, she heard Andrew come in, then come up the stairs. He did not knock on her door. He went into his room, then the bathroom, then his room again. After that, there was silence. She fell asleep.
In her dream, she didn’t know whether she was frightened for Andrew or of him. Sometimes he was a figure stumbling through the sand, and sometimes he was a figure coming toward her, large and threatening, but overall what frightened her was the space around him, a vastness that seemed to indicate that anything could happen. She woke up from this dream and fell asleep again, into a different dream, in which the word “spy” itself was what frightened her. At first Andrew was the spy (as indeed he was), seeming to look at one thing but really looking at another. Then he was supplanted by other figures, none of whom she could recognize, who were also spying, though not, in particular, on her. Though they seemed innocent enough—rather like the figures of children running about—her dream self was filled with waves of horror that she could not escape or reduce, waves that might be tossing her about in the surf, just below the Golden Gate Bridge. At the end of this dream, just before she woke up, she thought the words “Agent Keene,” and those words stayed with her and repeated themselves over and over through the next uneasy dream, which was about men coming to the house. In this dream, she kept going to the door and opening it, and seeing a figure on the doorstep. The roses like those she had cut and carried to Mr. Kimura also figured into this dream—she was afraid that the person on the doorstep would see her cut the roses and know whom they were for, and take them away from her. But she didn’t actually dream about the Kimuras or Pete.
Toward morning, she woke thoroughly. The room was dark,