Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and scuffed on by, gouging divots in the sand out of disgust or some vandalistic impulse.

      The person closest to the water was having a problem with the dog. He was a bearded Caucasian whose glasses were held on with a black elastic band. Jackie was snapping at his raised elbows. “Go! Go! Get away!” he commanded as she barked and tried to corner him between a pair of broken waves scissoring up onto the sand from two directions. He gave the air a vicious warning kick, and she retreated. Meanwhile the third person, a female with short black hair, had run on far ahead, her windbreaker and jeans fading into the whiteness. This was the person who, when the group returned in tighter formation a few minutes later, said, “I’m going to go ask this guy,” in a voice not low enough to escape Louis’s hearing. She came up the sand towards him. She had a small, pleasant face, with a short nose and pretty brown eyes. Her expres sion was fixed in an intense, frosty smileyness. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. “We were wondering if you’d been here for a while.”

      The bearded Caucasian drew up behind her shoulder, and the thought went through Louis’s head that these people were plainclothes cops; they seemed so purposeful.

      “Yeah,” he said. “Are you looking for something?”

      Before she could answer, Jackie jumped on the bearded Caucasian, hooking her front claws on his belt and getting dragged along on tiptoe as he tried to pull away. Hands high, he turned reproachfully to Louis.

      “Not my dog,” Louis said.

      “We’re looking for disturbances in the sand,” the smiley woman said. She held her arm out to one side and snapped her fingers and snapped them again, just casually getting the dog’s attention, her eyes not leaving Louis. She was a few inches shorter than he and at least a few years older; there was some gray in her dark hair. “We thought that if you were here during the earthquake you might have seen something.”

      He looked at her blankly.

      “We’re from Harvard Geophysics,” the bearded Caucasian explained in a grating, impatient voice. “We felt the earthquake and got a rough location. It was big enough, we thought there might be some surface effects on the sand.”

      Louis frowned. “Which earthquake is this?”

      The woman glanced at the Caucasian. The dog was licking her fingers. “The earthquake an hour and a half ago,” she said.

      “There was an earthquake an hour and a half ago?”

      “Yes.”

      “Around here?”

      “Yes.”

      “That you felt, wherever, down in Cambridge?”

      “Yes!” Her smile had become one of genuine amusement at his confusion.

      “Shit.” Louis scrambled stiffly to his feet. “I missed it! Or but, wait a minute, maybe it was not that big?”

      With a loud sigh the bearded Caucasian rolled his eyes and headed back up the beach.

      “It wasn’t small,” the woman said. “The magnitude will prob ably be about 5.3. The city’s not in ruins or anything, but a 5.3, that registers around the world. Our colleague Howard”—she aimed some smileyness at the Oriental, who was skipping stones between waves—”is quite happy about that, as you can see. It means a lot of information.”

      Louis thought of the car with its theft alarm ringing.

      “And you didn’t feel anything at all?” the woman said.

      “Nothing.”

      “Too bad.” She smiled strangely, looking him right in the eye. “It was a nice earthquake.”

      He looked around, still disoriented. “You expected the beach to be all torn up?”

      “We were just curious. Sometimes the sand subsides and cracks. It can also liquefy and boil up to the surface. There was an event here about two hundred fifty years ago that did some serious damage. We were hoping we’d see something like that. But—” She clicked her tongue. “We didn’t.”

      By the water’s edge her colleague Howard was playing with the dog, tapping her behind the ears with alternating hands while her head thrashed back and forth. Louis still didn’t believe there had really been an earthquake. “Would a house around here be wrecked?”

      “Depends on what you mean by wrecked,” the woman said. “You have a house?”

      “It’s my mother’s house. My ex-grandmother’s house, which you couldn’t possibly care less about, but she was the person who died in the earthquake last week.”

      “No! Really?” Concern became the woman better than amusement did. “I’m very sorry.”

      “Yeah? I’m not. I hardly knew her.”

      “I’m really sorry.”

      “What you sorry about?” Howard asked her, coming up from the water.

      The woman indicated Louis. “This … person’s grandmother was the one who died in the April 6 event.”

      “Bad luck,” Howard said. “Usually, small earthquake like that, nobody dies.”

      “Howard is an expert in shallow seismicity,” the woman said.

      Howard squinted into the white sky as though wishing this description of him weren’t accurate. He had a hairstyle like half a coconut.

      “What about you?” Louis asked the woman.

      She looked away and didn’t answer. Howard slapped the dog on the muzzle and fled, taking crazy evasive action as the dog pursued him. The woman backed away from Louis, her smileyness assuming a leave-taking chill. When she saw that he was following her, a flicker of alarm crossed her face and she began to walk very briskly. He buried his hands in his pockets and matched her footsteps with his own. He had a faint predatory interest in this small-boned female, but mainly he wanted information. “There really was an earthquake?”

      “Yes, uh-huh. There really was.”

      “How’d you know it was up here?”

      “Oh … instruments plus an educated guess.”

      “So, and what’s causing these earthquakes?”

      “Rupture of stressed rock along a fault a few miles underneath us.”

      “Can you be a little more specific?”

      She became smiley and shook her head. “No.”

      “Are there going to be any more?”

      She shrugged. “Definitely yes if you’re willing to wait a hundred years. Probably yes if you wait ten years. Probably not if you leave here in a week.”

      “It doesn’t mean anything to get two earthquakes in a row like this?”

      “Nope. Not particularly. In California it might mean something, but not here. СКАЧАТЬ