Rufus, of course, knew her only as Saskia, and had introduced her as such to all of the Boskeys. It was a code name; but at the same time she felt in some ways that it was her true name, and she very much enjoyed being called it.
Saskia awoke hot and sweaty to the sound and aroma of yet more food being prepared. Weather was fine （if sultry） here, but the hurricane had struck the Gulf Coast overnight, passing just far enough south of Houston that it wouldn’t go down in the records as a direct hit. But rainfall and storm surge had still been huge.
Caught in the periphery of the hurricane had been the part of Louisiana where the Boskeys lived. According to news coming in from their network, there’d been some flooding. But the Boskeys had shown her pictures of their homes. These were constructed on stilts as much as six meters high. As long as those stilts didn’t get knocked out from under them by floating cars, trees, or houses that hadn’t been put up on stilts, they’d be fine.
On the outskirts of Houston there were apparently places where the big radial freeways leading into and out of the metropolis were equipped with crossover lanes that could, with the flip of a switch, be shunted into a special evacuation mode. A freeway that normally had, say, five lanes going into the city and five going out would suddenly become a one-way, ten-lane behemoth, a fire hose of traffic aimed outward into the higher and dryer hinterlands. Or, given that it was Houston, maybe the correct figure was fourteen or eighteen lanes. Anyway, that switch had been thrown yesterday. So, as Saskia and her team tried to consume food as rapidly as Mary Boskey and
her son-in-law Reggie were producing it, they were treated to imagery on the screen of Rufus’s laptop showing a webcam feed of a vast unidirectional traffic jam in open territory some forty miles west of downtown Houston. The camera was rocking slightly in what they assumed were powerful bursts of wind. The image was frequently blurred, or blotted out, by waves of what looked like static. It was actually rain coming down with such intensity as to stop all light. When it abated they could see a galaxy of red taillights.
Where they were, of course, it was hot and sunny with barely a breeze, and just a few clouds building up in the south that looked like rain later.
“This all look real strange to you, coming from Holland?” Mary asked, taking advantage of a lull in the eating. She and the other Cajuns had worked out that Saskia’s team were Dutch, but apparently Rufus hadn’t divulged more than that.
Saskia mastered the urge to correct Mary on her use of the not-exactly-correct term “Holland.” “Oh, you might be surprised. There are parts of the Netherlands where people drive around in pickup trucks, and go to . . .” She was about to say “church” but wasn’t sure how these people would respond once she brought up religion, so she finished, “。 . . a very traditional kind of church, very conservative.”
“Got your own Bible Belt, do you?” Mary answered, with a nod.
“Very much so.”
“Y’all with Shell?” Reggie asked.
“Shale?” Saskia was having trouble with his accent and assumed he was talking about the oil-bearing rock.
“I think he means Royal Dutch Shell,” Alastair put in, slightly amused. “Maybe you have heard of it.”
Saskia’s family had co-founded Royal Dutch Shell—which was why it was called Royal—and she personally owned a significant percentage of the company.
“You meet a Dutchman in Houston, that’s who he generally works for,” Reggie said with a wink.
“In a manner of speaking,” Saskia answered, “I suppose you could say that, yes, I am connected with that company.”
But, as she came to see, the Boskeys were, in a very polite and roundabout way, trying to bring the conversation around to business. Not in the sense of seeking to extract money from the Dutch castaways—that seemed to be the furthest thing from their minds—but in the sense of trying to figure out where this was all going, and what to do next. How, in other words, to properly discharge the responsibilities they had cheerfully shouldered when they had taken in the foreign castaways. Camped here on this sandbar they were not getting any closer to Houston. Nor were they getting closer to Lake Charles, which was where the rest of the clan presumably awaited their return. A general plan seemed to be coalescing that a number of Boskeys and their friends and associates might converge on Houston in a pincer maneuver, a couple of days hence, after the storm had abated, but while they could still make themselves useful assisting flood victims.