God doesn’t throw the dice.
– EINSTEIN
IN THE FALL OF HIS JUNIOR year, Elliott tried to steal Silke away from Raj. He calculated his odds at fifty-fifty. He attempted to impose rationality on what was essentially an irrational urge, deciding to go for it and risk losing Silke, losing face, and losing Raj’s friendship.
He had recently undergone a sea change in his thinking. He would be reading a paper from the Moscow Math Institute online and would lose his concentration, remembering how beautiful Silke looked when she sat at the blackjack tables, tossing back watered-down booze and joshing around with naive tourists.
A girl he dated a few times when he was sixteen accused him of never thinking about anything except math. He didn’t correct her, because it would have been rude, but he also thought about sex. Sometimes both things churned around inside him simultaneously, good whiskey mixed with rich food.
And all good things converged in Silke.
Carleen had the flu, but the rest of them had just taken their first junket of the year to Atlantic City. During one enormous night at Harrah’s, Elliott won seventeen thousand dollars. They flew back, drinks all around, euphoric, Silke squashed between Elliott and Raj on the plane.
At Logan Airport all three shared a cab back to Everett Street. Elliott went inside with the others, ostensibly to see how Carleen was doing and to have a drink of the Chivas that Silke always kept in the kitchen, but actually to plot moves.
Raj, unknowingly cooperative, yawned and excused himself. Silke checked on Carleen but found her sound asleep, “Snoring, poor thing,” so she and Elliott hung around downstairs, laughing, carving equations into the pitted pine table. When she yawned for the second time, she looked in on Raj, and returned in her nightgown. “Raj crashed, but I could use one more tiny nightcap. How about you?”
“I should go.” He played true to type to avoid warning her, scaring her off too soon. He didn’t intend to go.
“Why don’t you just stay over?”
Her blue eyes appeared to hold nothing but a friendly welcome. He wished, as always, that he saw more in them. “Your couch is hard.” He had a new apartment across the river on Marlborough Street near the Esplanade, a new Jeep, and a new attitude, thanks to the change in his financial circumstances. It wasn’t just the money, though-being around the others, being part of their group, gave him a confidence he had never had. He saw cracks between Silke and Raj-his family’s dislike of her, her disdain of his extravagance, the arrogant way he had noticed that Raj treated her.
“On the other hand,” he said, “it’s not that late.”
Silke wore her dark hair tamed into a braid tonight except for some shorter strands that brushed against her ears, shining like loose satin threads. Unable to resist the impulse, Elliott reached toward her and undid the braid. “That’s better,” he said, stroking it free. “Your hair’s getting long.”
She ran fingers through her curling hair, stretched, and shook her head, sighing with pleasure. “I forget how good it feels, letting it go,” she said.
He admired how the line of her browbone extended in a curve at her temple beyond the delicate brows. She had no pretensions, no artifice. He loved these things about her. “What are you thinking, Silke?”
“About you, Wakefield.”
“Why? Do I want to know?”
“Of course you do. I would have nothing but the most pleasant thoughts regarding you. In Heddesheim, where I grew up, a farmer lived outside town. He had a little boy named Kristof. This kid was so shy, he had a hard time at our little school. I think he was the unhappiest boy in the world, but he was so smart. I heard he went away to a private high school in Darmstadt and then, in the summer we were sixteen, I ran into him at a street market. He wasn’t the same. He was really happy. Really happy, Wakefield.”
“How come?” On his third whiskey since they had returned to Cambridge, Elliott did not feel intoxicated, just hot. Just a little aggressive.
Silke leaned forward. Her nightgown, basically a long T-shirt of gray cotton, tightened over her breasts. Elliott noted the outline of her nipples, that she was unconscious of her effect, and didn’t mean to make him crazy. She wasn’t coming on to him. She never did. She was so damn proper, loyal to her man, monogamous. As if Raj, with his family’s millions, big houses in India, and condo on Riverside Drive, would ever marry her. One fine day Raj’s parents would introduce him to a nice girl from Madras with the dowry of a maharani’s daughter. Silke would be history. How could this smart woman not realize that?
“Let me guess,” he said. “Uh, your boy had found a girlfriend. She loved and respected him. He adored her. They stayed together, got married, took over the farm. Bought sturdy furniture. They have two kids, a boy and a girl, both excellent students. He’s happy. Ecstatic. Is that what you want for me?”
“What do you want for yourself?”
He set his glass down carefully and thought. What to say? The truth? She already knew how he felt; why not come out with it? No, too aggressive, wait for the right time. He said, cravenly, “Immortality. Nothing else counts.”
“Oh, Elliott.” Her voice scolded him.
“You think there’s something more important?”
“Love, of course.”
“Oops. Forgot about that. Of course you’re right.”
“You’re teasing me, Wakefield,” she laughed. “You need a relationship. You deserve happiness. You’re not unattractive, you know.”
“Oh, don’t push Carleen again,” Elliott said, tracing his finger along the carving they had made, then he lifted his hand to her hair, as if to straighten it over her shoulders, stroking it. “We won’t happen.”
Silke didn’t push his hand away. Two red spots appeared on her cheeks. “Too bad. She cares for you.”
“Listen. I’m not attracted to her. I’d rather sleep with a Gila monster. She’s fine as a friend, but stop pushing her on me.”
Silke looked behind him, her eyebrows up high, so he turned around, sloshing the whiskey in his hand. Of course Carleen had come downstairs just at that instant. Her tartan robe was hanging open and she was wearing just underpants. Elliott’s eyes went to her pale rib cage, her short, skinny legs; he couldn’t help himself.
Carleen made a strangled sound and turned and ran. Rolling her eyes at him, Silke went after her.
Elliott drank down the whiskey. He would sleep on the lumpy couch and leave early. Silke did not come back down. It seemed his chance had fled, and just for a minute there, when he said, “Immortality,” he could have said, “You,” and Silke might still be talking to him. Now Carleen was mad and complications would ensue.
All external thoughts fled, and he fell gratefully into the rutted byways of his theories, like a junkie who knows it’s dangerous but can’t fight it anymore.
Back, back to Cantor’s Continuum. The central difficulty lies at the intersection of linguistics and math analysis, he thought, the intersection of what is discrete, like the integers, and what is continuous, like infinity. What is that intersection? Where is that intersection?
The Greeks had such a horror of infinity, and it still afflicted number theory, this need to make the infinite finite, these tortured reciprocals, these sequences that lead to the infinitely small, this strange reversal of the kingly truth…
The primes are discrete, but extend into infinity like any set of integers. They are discrete in some qualitatively different way. The integers are at equal intervals from each other by definition. What if I make a number line putting the primes at equal intervals… how is that function constructed… no damn imaginary numbers, not even reciprocals to make the series converge, forget the zeta function, I’ll invent my own…
“ Wakefield!” Whiskey-tinged breath blew into his face. He lay on his back on the couch, his neck at an impossible angle. His eyes refused to open. It was very late, or maybe very early?
“You have to go home. Carleen can’t see you here in the morning.”
He reached up and around Silke’s body, finding her waist. He drew her down to him.
“ Wakefield, no…”
“It’s you. It’ll always be you.”
“Stop!”
“You, not immortality.” He squeezed tighter. He loved holding warm, soft Silke against him. He felt hot tears on his face. Hers or his? She stopped struggling and lay exhausted on top of him.
“Please,” he said. “Just this once. I need you so much.”
“Idiot,” she said. “No.”
“Then kiss me. That’s all I ask. Silke, I need you more than he does. Please.” His lips already lay against her cheek. She turned her head slightly and her mouth caught his. He drank her in.
His arms relaxed and she rolled off the couch onto the floor and went away. He turned onto his side and went back to sleep.
Sun came through the curtains. “Old man,” Raj was saying, and shaking him none too gently. “Up you go.”
“What time is it?” Elliott mumbled.
“Eight-thirty.”
“I have class at nine.”
“The bathroom is clear. The women are upstairs, but the atmosphere up there is what my mother would describe as overspiced. Get up.”
Elliott borrowed Raj’s toothbrush and splashed cold water on his face.
Raj awaited him in the kitchen. “Drink.”
Elliott drank the hot coffee, Raj watching him curiously. “What happened last night?” Raj asked.
“Nothing. I dreamed about a function to factor large numbers. Over two hundred digits.”
“Only God can do that.”
“The discrete has to be made continuous first. Cantor was close. Grothendieck…”
“Later. You have your car keys?”
Elliott felt them jingle in his pocket.
“Go.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever come back,” Elliott said. “I think I’m going to lose all this.”
After that Elliott worked on the Riemann Hypothesis, staying at his apartment.
He ate his cold cereal and drank a lot of coffee. He sat at his kitchen table twisting bits of paper into dough.
His father called claiming to be fine, always a bad sign. He only talked of his health when he’d had an episode, but Elliott’s probing yielded no further information about any deterioration in his condition. Every few days Raj came by. Once he brought lentils and rice in a big pot. Elliott lived on that for a week, spooning portions into a bowl each night, no longer caring that it was cold food.
The problem with Raj was that he didn’t love math enough, not like Elliott did. Raj didn’t need math. As a result-his loss-he’d never be an immortal. And Silke… Elliott was glad now that she had rejected him; what a huge distraction.
With a few thousand in the bank, his tuition and rent paid, he closed the blinds. He stopped answering his phone.
Raj brought Professor Braun to see Elliott. Braun had contributed several original papers on differentiable manifolds before the age of twenty-two, and at the age of twenty-nine had been made the youngest full professor in the history of MIT. He taught the advanced number-theory course.
“You’re wet,” Elliott said as Raj and Braun took off their jackets and hung them on chairs.
“It’s pouring outside,” Braun said. “Didn’t you notice?”
“Did you come to see my work? Because it’s not ready yet. You know Erdös’s proof that a prime can always be found between an integer and its double? It has to do with the number One. The Stick. One is an integer. I don’t care if you won’t call it a prime number, you have to admit it’s an integer. Why doesn’t the proof work with One? There is no prime between One and Two. How can it be said that Erdös proved anything? Have you thought about this problem?”
“We want to take you out to lunch,” Raj said. “And Professor Braun wants you to return to class.”
“Wait, I want you to think about it. The way there’s no integer between One and Two, but where the prime should be, there is one-half. What does that remind you of, Raj?”
“Real part one-half,” Raj said softly. “Riemann’s critical line.”
“Yes! Yes! The Riemann Hypothesis! There’s a link, but I haven’t been able to prove it. Shall we talk about that?”
“We’ll talk about anything you want if you’ll come have a meal with us,” Dr. Braun said.
“Okay. I’m out of food anyway.”
They walked out into the rain, to a grubby pizza place on Mass Avenue. Drinking beer fast, eating a large salad, Elliott talked about his new suspicion that the Riemann Hypothesis was undecidable, unprovable either way. He talked about Cantor, about the discrete integers and the continuum. He explained how he had tried the algebraic approach through finite fields; how he had used Cramer’s model, treating it as a perturbation problem, trying to get a set of wobble frequencies. He talked about Sarnak and Wiles and Bump.
But mostly he talked about Cantor, the master of infinity. “I need a math that will operate with divergent series,” he explained, “comfortable with infinity. That happens if you permit division by zero.”
Raj groaned.
“Yeah, that again,” Elliott said.
They pumped him, or did they? Maybe they were just curious. He couldn’t tell. They wanted to know about his work on factoring large numbers, and he told them he had been trying a variation on the Pollard-Strassen method on his computer. He told them that Dixon ’s method using the quadratic sieve was inferior. He talked, because he hadn’t talked for so long, he had no choice. He knew he had no perspective anymore, but drunk or not, he didn’t go into detail.
He didn’t talk about his new idea, for a function that seemed to predict the location of large primes. He had to work alone. The function had some flaw he couldn’t find yet, some error in the calcs. If his idea got around the campus, it might be stolen, published half-baked in some journal under someone else’s name.
He promised Dr. Braun that he would return to class the next morning. The professor gave him some class materials and said he’d pass Elliott if he turned in some work. Raj kept talking about eating better. The two of them and the other people in the restaurant seemed to be talking in some other universe, their minds occupied with all the wrong things.
“Carleen moved out of Everett Street,” Raj announced. “She claims she’s forgiven you, but she won’t hang with us anymore.”
“And Silke?”
“Did Silke have something to forgive you for?”
“Are you and Silke still taking trips?”
Raj cast a glance at Braun. “Sure,” he said. “You’re always welcome to join us again.”
“When I finish my work.”
“Do you sleep at night?” Professor Braun said, his blue eyes intent.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty,” Elliott said. “How old are you?”
“Forty-two.”
“What have you discovered lately?”
“Don’t,” Raj said.
“You have to watch your health. I don’t like the look in your eye,” the professor went on.
“I don’t give a shit about my health.”
“Remember what happened to Cantor?”
Elliott thought of Cantor, alone in wartime at the asylum in Halle, begging his daughter to bring him home. She wouldn’t. He had always wondered how she put it: “Sorry, Father, but you’re too much trouble,” she must have said. Cantor had died swiftly after that.
“Don’t squander it,” the professor repeated, pushing the last piece of pizza away from himself. “ Wakefield, you have to pace yourself. It’s a question of balance. You should see people. Your friends are worried.”
“No, no,” Elliott said, draining his mug. “Accomplishment requires sacrifice, even pain. You have to set priorities. Right now, my work comes first. Friends, family, romps in the park, children, lovers, these things have to wait.” He stood up, carefully placing his chair under the table. “Thanks for the vitamins. I need to go.” He felt pressure to flee from their slowness and their compromises before they infected him.
“See you tomorrow, then,” said Dr. Braun.
“See you.” He gave them a friendly wave. He could afford the ten seconds it took to make them happy.
He didn’t go back to class the next day, or the next.
A week later, at four in the morning, Elliott finally fell into sleep, or something like sleep. He had been taking No-Doz and drinking a lot of coffee and hadn’t slept for a couple of days. He should have slept too hard for dreams to reach him.
But one did. It was early in the morning, he would remember later.
An angel appeared, her wings outspread, calling him to her and clasping him tight. He wasn’t afraid; he felt that he was already dead, and nothing worse could happen to him. In a way, he felt that this was his reward for dying. Maybe the angel was his mother.
They flew to a place at the dim limits. Here he found waves, rhythms, measures he had never known existed. All answers were here.
The angel generated a zeta landscape, infinitely dense. Even so, the mountains they flew over were porous, one or two stretching up into infinity. Between the mountains he saw deep holes, the points spiraling inward. The beauty of it made him weep.
They moved down to sea level and flew along the cross-section. The angel pointed. Then he saw it breaking through below: a huge prime, lonely and beautiful, its gray back shiny with spray. It had lost its way and was moving away from the other primes, spuming and slapping their tails in the limitless distance.
They moved into higher densities, Elliott now carrying his black notebook to write it all down. This rolling sequence, which looked like a field in Wisconsin, converged on both zero and infinity at the same time.
He looked at the angel, and the angel nodded its blazing head.
He didn’t really want to do it, but he felt he had to. He did the unthinkable. He divided by zero.
The white sky split and the rules gave way to random crime. The universe compressed into its basic reality, the four numbers surrounded by their clouds of probabilities. But Zero, staggering, was vanishing into the mist. One was a hard black branch beating the other integers. Two, the cop in blue, struggled to keep order, but it was outgunned by Three, red and bursting, rampaging all through the set.
The Three destroyed adelic space and time. Elliott, horrified, had to watch the gruesome factoring of the prime.
His angel faded away, leaving him to drift all alone in this disintegrating universe. It would all collapse into pure theory soon.
He became very frightened. Flying low across the sea, he found a hidden crater a few fathoms beneath: the square root of minus one, a geyser of fresh water rushing out of it into the saltiness.
He dove into the deep cold system.
TOO MANY COLLEGES, TOO MANY BROWNS. Nina recalled a math instructor at Lake Tahoe Community College she had helped with a contract problem once, Mick McGregor. Mick had his math doctorate, but had lost his first job at UC Berkeley for reasons he had never told her. Luckily for her today, he had landed right around the corner.
High noon on Thursday at the LTCC campus, and the place wasn’t exactly hopping although school was in session. Nina parked among shady pines and walked to the Administration Building. An art exhibit was going on inside, student sculptures propped amid the seats in the high-ceilinged reception area, paintings on the wall, but few students circulated. The building was brand-new and even the carpeting still looked fresh and welcoming.
At the registrar’s window she was directed to McGregor’s office, but she found him outside the building talking to a student.
“Uh-oh,” he said when he recognized her. He might as well have said, Here comes trouble. She often called forth that reaction, a hazard of her trade.
“Everything’s fine,” she assured him. “I’ve come to consult you about something I’m working on.” The student wandered away and they entered McGregor’s office, which was as neat as a marine’s cot. Nina looked around approvingly at the orderly books and papers and photos of McGregor with his family and students.
“Long time,” McGregor said. “I still wake up at night remembering how worried I was in those days that I’d lose the case. No offense, but you’re always in the dreams.”
“For Pete’s sake, Mick. We won the case. Can’t you rehabilitate me? I hate to think I’m part of somebody’s nightmares.” Nina was only half-joking.
“Let’s start over,” Mick said. “Let me think of you as a very pretty lady who dropped in on me unannounced for a chat about nothing much.” He was still young, with reddish hair, wearing jeans and a purple shirt with a white undershirt showing at the neck, his hands freckled, his manner ironic.
“I’d like to ask you about some math students, at least I think they may be math students, who I need to locate. They may be in Boston.”
“I was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts. But you knew that.”
“I did know that.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to find them. I know three things: One or more has or had a professor named Brown; they flew from here to Boston; and one of them bought two books at Sierra Books here at Tahoe while they were visiting.”
“The plane was flying at the rate of four hundred miles an hour, and the student read one-fourth of the first book on the flight. Elementary. Want me to write out the proof for you?”
Nina handed him the names of the books. “I want to know what kind of math this is, and what level.”
McGregor read the names. “Ooh. Somebody’s into the Riemann Hypothesis. And Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis. I’ve seen these books at Sierra Books gathering dust. It’s a wonder they carried them.”
“What can you tell me about these-these hypotheses?”
“Analytic number theory. A fancy word for arithmetic, but do not be misled. This is graduate-level stuff, very sexy math, very deep. Hardly anybody is working on it. The universities want combinatorics people and physicists and topologists these days. Students who read books on these topics on vacation are going to be obsessed with the hypotheses. For them it’s the closest thing to fun.”
“It sure doesn’t sound like fun to me. So would you think this student was working on a graduate degree?”
“Could be an advanced undergraduate. These books concern the most famous problems in math. Some people think figuring out whether the Riemann Hypothesis is true or not is the biggest mystery in the universe, bar nothing. It has to do with the prime numbers. You know? Prime numbers?”
“I remember that they’re the numbers that you can’t divide anything into,” Nina said. “Am I saying it right?”
“Sure. They’re the basic building blocks all the other numbers consist of. But they have a devilish aspect. They appear randomly on the positive number line. There’s no satisfactory algorithm that identifies them in sequence, and with large numbers it’s almost impossible to find the factors and determine if the numbers are prime or not.”
“So what?” Nina said.
“So what, you ask. Well, if we can’t find a formula to predict such a basic and crucial number sequence, we look like clowns, and the whole orderly system of mathematics we’ve built up over twenty-five hundred years looks like a pile of shit,” McGregor said. “It’s the black hole at the center of this area of human knowledge. We don’t even know what the fuck prime numbers are. Maybe they’re aliens from outer space sent to drive us crazy.”
“Oh. Aliens. Sure.”
“Riemann gave us a big clue about the behavior of the primes a hundred fifty years ago, but nobody has managed to take full advantage of it. Until his hypothesis is proved, we’re all a bunch of buffoons. Same with Cantor’s work on infinity. Until we figure out what to do with series that diverge, we may as well admit our whole mathematics system is a joke.”
“I see.”
“We’re screwed at the source. If my students had any idea how shaky math really is, they’d run screaming over to the English department.”
“That would be pretty dire,” Nina said. “May I ask, how are things with you?”
“My wife left me. I was thinking of coming to see you, then when you came here, I thought you must be representing her. I almost took off running, like I said. Reminds me of the old hermit mathematician who cracked open his door to some colleagues and said, ‘Please come at another time and to another person.’ ”
“Well, I’m not here to harass you.”
“And they’re not renewing my contract here. I had an affair with a student.” He had the grace to look embarrassed.
Nina gave him her card. “Any time,” she said. “But right now, I need help on this case.”
“Okay. Brown, Boston, Riemann.” He turned to his computer and clicked a few times with his mouse.
“ Brown University,” he said. “ Amherst. Northeastern. Brandeis. BU. MIT. The Big H. To name a few. Have some coffee and don’t interrupt me.” The thermos he pointed to was almost empty, but Nina took the last drop. McGregor clicked away, grunting occasionally to himself.
The campus was quiet. Occasionally a bird twittered, a squirrel chittered, or a student littered-no, muttered with another student, passing by. Not bad, acres of wooded park near a world-famous mountain lake, a state-of-the-art campus, friendly registrars-not her memory of college, but then, that was so long ago.
“Bingo,” Mick said dourly. “Got him. Come around the desk.” She jumped up and came around to where the sun made it hard to see the screen.
“Gottlieb Braun,” he said. “I’ve even heard of him. He hangs with the giants at MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” He sang to the tune of The Mickey Mouse Club song, “M-I-T, P-H-D, M-O-N-E-Y.”
He added, “That’s a song the envious folks at Caltech sing, by the way, not the one they sing at MIT. Well, okay, they sing it at MIT but the difference is, at MIT they think it’s funny.”
“How do you know it’s the right Brown?”
“Come over here.” She put her case on the ground and walked over to stand behind his chair. “Look,” he said.
Focusing on the MIT site, they reviewed the research interests of the math faculty. Dr. Braun was listed as being interested in “Areas Bridging Discrete and Continuous Math, Riemann Hypothesis, Continuum Hypothesis, Continued Fractions.”
“A number hound. A real throwback,” Mick said. “None of the other colleges I checked with had Browns with these kinds of research interests. Ready for a conjecture? Your student is one of his. Or was.”
“How sure are you?”
“What a question. I’m guessing, baby.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows at her, shot a look at her legs, then cleared his throat to distract her from his crassness.
She pressed on. “Gottlieb, huh?”
“A lot of the great mathematicians are from Central Europe. Lots of Germans. It all started with Gauss at Göttingen.”
“They’re fond of G’s, too, I guess.”
“Hmm, ‘Frequency of Letter G in Topics Related to the Math Profession.’ Don’t get me thinking thoughts like that. I need to sleep tonight.”
“Mick, I owe you.”
McGregor smiled at her and said, “Really?”
“You have my card. Thanks for this. And sorry to hear about your job. You’ll land somewhere better.”
“Give the Herr Professor my regards. A nondescript from the hinterland sends his respects.” He turned back to his computer, clicking furiously.
“See you, Mick.”
“High probability of that.”
Nina felt so excited she almost ran the red light at Al Tahoe and Lake Tahoe Boulevard. Back at the office, Sandy had laid her brown-bag lunch out on the desk. “Looks yummy,” Nina said. Tossing her jacket on the chair, she revved up her Mac and went straight to MIT, or the simulacrum thereof on the Web.
Sandy came in and deposited a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a can of cola on her desk. “Mangia,” she said.
“I’ve got the Brown,” Nina said. “Maybe.”
“If you don’t eat lunch you’ll starve, drop to the floor, and never find out anything else.”
Nina tore open the sandwich. Liverwurst and mayonnaise. Worse things had been turned into sandwiches, although she couldn’t think what they were offhand. She ate, clicking and navigating with her free hand. Sandy sat down with a legal pad. “Well?”
“Braun’s in Room 2-181 at MIT. Write down this phone number and E-mail. Here’s a photo of him. Pale blue suit jacket, red tie, black hair, specs. It’s his birthday. His sixteenth, to go by his looks. He’s very young for a professor, isn’t he? Mud-colored birthday cake, most pathetic-looking cake I have ever seen. Take a look at those sprinkles, the festive arrangement of yellows on brown.”
“You’re forgetting the one you made for Bob’s twelfth birthday. Remember?”
Nina remembered. “The great thing was, he thought I did it intentionally.”
“It took guts, serving that thing to friends.”
“Yeah, I’ve got guts all right. Guts enough to put up with you and him both. Okay, back to our picture. There are students in the photo. No boys from India, no girls. Dreadful lighting that washes the blood out of everybody.”
“Keep going.”
“Braun was a finalist for the Abel Prize. I think that’s like the Nobel, only it’s given for math. He’s a big shot, a full professor, even though he’s young. Okay, the math department: fifty-two faculty members, thirty instructors, one hundred twenty-five grad students, and they graduate about one hundred forty undergraduates a year.”
“Let’s check more photos.” Sandy edged around so that she could look with Nina. Additional pictures of student-faculty gatherings documented an unfortunate reliance on those rectangular brown cakes, which must have been a local caterer’s specialty. A couple of girls here and there joined the company, but didn’t seem to match the description of their witness.
The boys caught milling around in the photos looked conventional, except that a few were shaky on style, wearing short-sleeved oxford and plaid flannel shirts, the kind of thing that might have been sold at the Harvard Coop circa 1951. Hair ran the gamut from slickly modern to huge frizz to fifties executive. Chalked-up blackboards tended to dominate the backgrounds.
“They’re so pale, like slugs slithering out from under a rock,” Sandy said, disapproving. “I bet they never go outside.”
“They eat cake and trade fashion tips instead. But let’s not be unkind,” Nina said. “So what if they don’t sweat the small stuff?”
“Yes, but bad cake?”
“The real brain food. And to think my doc always told me to take fish oil for brainpower.”
“Supposedly, these kids will rule the world.”
Nina laughed. “Hardly, Sandy. They’re mathematicians. It’s not like they study law or anything useful.” She bit into a gusher of grease. “Let’s start with the Herr Professor.” Drinking the last of her cola, she repressed a burp, consulted her watch, picked up the phone, and punched a number. “The direct method. A times B equals MIT.” Nina pressed the speaker button so that Sandy could listen to the ringing.
A brusque voice answered. “Braun.”
“How do you do? My name is Nina Reilly. I’m a lawyer, calling from California on an important matter.” She was grinning, feeling cocky. It must be the liverwurst.
“Oh? What can I do for you, ma’am?” Herr Professor didn’t have a trace of an accent.
“I’m looking for some witnesses in a legal case here. One or more of the witnesses may be students of yours. May I give you some descriptions, and ask you if any of them sound familiar?”
“What kind of legal case?”
“A wrongful-death case. A woman was shot two years ago here at Lake Tahoe, and the students were witnesses.”
“Information about our students is confidential.”
“Of course. But perhaps you could confirm the existence of such students, as a matter of public duty. I’m not asking for anything else. The first one is an Indian. Of East Indian heritage, that is. He has thick black hair and a nice smile, and his eyebrows grow together in the middle.” She went on with the description of the most memorable of the three witnesses, sounding perfectly calm. Sandy sat next to her, her bracelets jangling slightly as she wrote on the pad.
“You think he’s one of my students?” Braun said when she had finished.
“That is my information. He’s interested in, er, the Riemann Hypothesis, I believe. Possibly.”
“And what would you do with him if you found him?”
“Ask him to come back to California for a deposition. All expenses paid.”
“And if he didn’t want to come?”
“That would be a problem,” Nina said. “The witness-subpoena power does not extend beyond the state boundary.”
“So he could refuse and you would not bother him anymore?”
“I would have no power to compel him to come here as a witness,” Nina said. Sandy frowned at this circumlocution, and Nina winked at her. “Rest assured, Professor Braun, that I would not bother him if this were not necessary to right an injustice.”
“Who did you say you were?”
“Nina Reilly. A California attorney.”
“Give me your state bar number.” She gave it to him. She wasn’t grinning anymore.
“I’ll look into it,” the professor said.
“A woman was killed,” Nina said. “This young man needs to step up and tell what he knows about it.”
“I have your number in the memory. Good-bye, ma’am.” He hung up.
“Is he gonna help us or not?” Sandy asked.
Nina tapped her temple. “Even great minds may err, Sandy. He’s cautious, and that may outweigh his sense of civic duty.”
“So are you gonna wait to hear back?”
“Book me on United to Boston for tonight out of Reno, would you?”
“Done.”
“What have we got this afternoon?”
“The DMV. The lady whose boat dropped off the trailer onto the freeway. Roberta. You ought to be finished by four.”
“Then I’ll run home and get Bob over to his uncle’s house and pack a bag. And please call Chelsi Freeman. I can’t make the massage appointment this afternoon.”
“What else should I do? When are you coming back?”
“After I have talked to those witnesses.”
“I’m not even going to ask who is going to pay for this trip.”
“What are credit cards for?” Nina said.
HER OPTIMISTIC MOOD LASTED THROUGHOUT THE flight from Reno. She loved red-eye flights anyway, sitting in the window seat, watching dawn suffuse the sky, her beam of light trained on the material she was reading while the other passengers dozed uneasily beneath their inadequate blankets and the flight attendants gossiped in the back.
She was coasting on a strong sense of determination, of being on the hunt. She’d never need to sleep again. She would find her witnesses. She was sure of it.
She had brought piles of printouts Sandy had pulled off the Web concerning the two hypotheses, the state of mathematics these days, and MIT information. Packed in her carry-on were also the police reports on Sarah Hanna’s death, a small tape recorder, and her laptop. There had been just enough remaining room for two pairs of underwear and her curling iron.
Nina read, making notes with her right hand, doodling, generating lists and plans.
By 9:00 A.M. on Friday morning Nina was washing her face in her room at the Charles River Inn. Outside, sloping uphill from the muddy river, spread the curiously European village of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The iviest of the ivy-covered brick campuses of the Northeast, which Mick called the Big H, was six blocks up the street, past Harvard Square and the Red Line subway station. MIT was a few miles’ drive along the river, or a stop or two on the Red Line.
She took a taxi up Memorial Drive. On this winter’s morn, sculls skidded through the icy water and boys and girls rushed along the banks as they had for about four hundred years. Bright sun blessed the bridges with golden light, sweetly disguising decades of gray grime. The venerable brown city of Boston loomed on the other side of the river, dry air sharpening the skyline, but even a clean hint of coming frost in the air couldn’t entirely subdue the reeking diesel and industrial smells.
Lake Tahoe Community College had a serene woodland setting, with low California buildings. At MIT, islands of grass, brown at this time of year, were pitifully dwarfed by many-storied concrete stacks engineered by maniacal purists. One did not major in phys ed or English literature at MIT, as one might choose to do at Tahoe. One majored in science, any science. The older Greco-Roman style buildings, nods to classical academia, had in the last century given way to functional beige buildings that housed sharp minds who found beauty in things less evanescent than mere aesthetics.
Lack of sleep and her ongoing self-assured mood had made Nina bold. “I need Professor Braun,” she told the male receptionist at the math department. “Room 2- 181.”
The boy, who appeared to be just a few years older than Bob, said, “Professor Braun’s already gone for the weekend. Sorry.”
“Oh, no! I really hoped to tell him some exciting results I have-this work I’ve been doing using Fourier inversions. I met him in Palo Alto at the American Institute of Mathematics a couple of years ago, and he was very interested in my work.”
“The Riemann seminar?”
“Right! I’m from Stanford. Had to come to the East Coast for a wedding and stopped off here. I really need to talk to him.” She clutched her briefcase to her chest and allowed herself to look slightly desperate, as though the nonexistent equations might be unraveling as they spoke.
“I’m sorry, but he’s home in Newton. I can’t give out his address.”
It was a blow, but Nina had fallbacks ready.
“How about his student? You know, the guy who was going out with that pretty German girl, or was she Norwegian? He was Indian… I forgot his name…”
“Raj attended that seminar?” His voice was mildly curious. “I didn’t know he had the interest.”
A little thrill went down her back. “Raj. Yes, that’s him. Any idea how I could get hold of him?”
“He’s probably drinking coffee at the student center right about now. With the lovely Silke sitting devotedly by his side, lucky man.”
Hot ziggety dog, Nina told herself. “Silke. That’s his girlfriend, right? He talked about her.”
He nodded. “You know, I applied to Stanford but couldn’t turn down MIT. Man, I regret it every single time I have to put on a coat, hat, boots, and gloves just to go outside to pick up the newspaper off the front step. So you’re a number theorist? An instructor there?”
Ouch. She couldn’t pass for a student anymore. On the other hand, she had worn a suit and shiny high heels to impress the professor, and an expensive black wool coat she had borrowed from Andrea. Probably it was the clothes that had him thinking that. “Post-doc,” she said. “I do assist in a couple of grad courses.”
“Do you want to leave a message for Dr. Braun?” He pushed a pad of paper her way.
“You can’t even give me a phone number?”
“It’s against the rules.”
“I’ll run and catch Raj and come back to leave a message later.”
“Suit yourself.” He pointed toward the direction she had just come from. “Can you find your way back to Building Eight?” He looked dubious. “We’re way over here, almost to Mem Drive. Can you get back there?”
She thought she could, so she nodded.
“Good. Then go back down-hey, you going to be around at sunset today?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“The sun sets down this hallway everybody calls ‘infinite’ even though it’s just long. It’s a beautiful sight. People hang around all along the edges to watch it. The hall turns red. Glows. It’s truly mysterious.”
“I won’t be here that late.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Okay, so go all the way out of that building, and down the steps in front. Then cross Mass Ave. The student center’s that big building on the right, up steps with a glass front. You can’t miss it.”
Incredibly, the first thing she saw as she walked into the large, noisy, glass-fronted room was a couple who fit the description from Tahoe. They sat at a table against the windows overlooking busy Massachusetts Avenue. The boy, dark-haired and much better-looking than his description, studied The Boston Globe. He wore fashionable glasses and, in a well-fitted golf shirt and slacks, seemed an exception to Professor Braun’s oxford-collar club.
The girl huddled in a big chair, trim legs crossed, a laptop computer propped on her knees. She raised and tipped a coffee mug, sucking thirstily, all the while fastening her eyes on her monitor. Attractive in an Italian-film-star way, full-lipped, healthy-cheeked, tousle-haired, she wore a long-sleeved white sweater over jeans, with thick socks and incongruous flip-flops on her feet. A chair next to her held their winter coats. At her feet, long leather boots lay akimbo, like a pair of abandoned legs.
They seemed to be here for the duration. Nina went to the counter to order a super-sized vanilla soy latte and a muffin. She needed them. Removing her coat, she looped it over the arm carrying her tray and walked back to her prey. She set the tray down on a low table in front of a cluster of chairs near them and tossed her coat over the chair back. “Hello. Are you Raj?”
The boy put down his newspaper. A wary expression spread over his face. He said nothing.
“My name is Nina Reilly. I’ve been looking for you. And you must be Silke!” She smiled and nodded at the girl. “Glad to meet you. Nina Reilly.” She sat down across from them, broke a piece of muffin off, and ate it, following up with a long wash of coffee. “No breakfast,” she said apologetically. “Just got off a plane.” Not true, but while they considered the information she had time to take another bite and another swallow. As the caffeine rushed to warm her chilled extremities, she began to feel very happy to be in Cambridge sitting with these two kid fugitives, making progress at last.
“A plane?”
“From California. My card.” She found one in her pocket and handed it to Raj, who scrutinized it and handed it to Silke.
“You’re a lawyer,” Silke said. Her clipped delivery suggested to Nina that English wasn’t her first language. “Professor Braun told us a lawyer called him.”
“That was me. I’m here to discuss that trip you guys and your friend took to Tahoe two years ago. No doubt you remember it.”
Their young faces showed they did and weren’t pleased at the memory, although they tried to hide it.
“When you got robbed. Not an easy moment to forget, I bet.”
Silke looked at Raj, who lowered his eyelids.
“The woman who died that night was named Sarah Hanna. She was pregnant. Her husband watched her die. I represent him.” Nina took guilty pleasure in watching the girl wince. She ought to feel lousy, running away.
“How did you find us?” Raj said.
“Why did you run away? Why didn’t you stay and talk to the police?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk to her,” Silke said to Raj.
“What’s the harm?” Nina asked. “You were just witnesses, right?”
“We can’t be involved,” Raj said.
“Oh, but you are. I have involved you,” Nina said. “That mode won’t work anymore.” She drank some more coffee, reflecting that her excitement was turning to anger at these cavalier kids who had left Dave Hanna to sink into his misery. Taking a deep breath, she tried for calm, and failing that, decided why shouldn’t they see how upset and mad she was? She flipped open her briefcase and touched a button on the hidden recorder.
“We don’t have anything to say to you,” Silke said, fright leaking into her voice, her accent more pronounced.
“Please, don’t give me a hard time about this. I don’t need much of your time, and considering the circumstances, talking to me is the absolute least you can do to make up for fleeing the scene.”
“Did we break any laws by leaving?” Raj asked. Unlike Silke, he seemed relatively composed. “I don’t believe we did.”
“Are the police here going to-what does this mean, you coming here after us?” Silke asked.
“I have a few questions, that’s all. The police here aren’t involved. Not yet.” Thus implying they would have first shot, if the two didn’t cooperate.
“I never felt right about leaving,” Silke said. She put her laptop on the low table, closing it gently. “But we were so scared.”
“What’s your last name, Silke?”
The boy and girl looked at each other.
Nina drank latte, settled in.
“Kilmer.”
“You’re from Germany?”
“Yes. Heddesheim.”
“A math student here at MIT?”
“I’m a Ph.D. student with about two and a half years left until I finish my thesis. If all goes well, that is.”
“How about you, Raj? What’s your full name?”
“Sumaraj Das.” He answered pleasantly enough, but she could tell now that he had been deeply shocked by her precipitous arrival. Nina wondered how long her air of authority and their astonishment at being found would keep them talking.
“And where are you from?”
“ Silver Spring, Maryland.” Raj had already had enough. “What do you want from us?”
“I need to know what happened.”
“Look, I followed the news reports online. We don’t know anything the papers don’t know. We have nothing to add. Why did you come all this way?”
“The woman’s husband needs to know who killed his wife. Wouldn’t you want to know?”
Silke put her hand over Raj’s. “We should talk to her,” she said. “It’s wrong to stay silent.”
Nina observed as Raj sat back in his chair and relaxed, allowing Silke to decide for them both. A complicated man, she could see that. Strong but flexible. Unpredictable, Nina thought.
Silke turned to Nina. “We were there. We were robbed, as you said.”
“With your friend. His name?”
“You must mean Elliott. Elliott Wakefield.”
“Where is he right now?”
“He doesn’t go to MIT anymore.” She’d obviously just had second thoughts about giving him up after the name had slipped out. “We don’t know where he is.”
But Nina had his name. The third witness was as good as bagged. “Why were you at Tahoe?”
“Vacationing,” Raj said. “De-stressing. You can only stuff your brain so full. Once in a while you need to get blank, do you know what I mean?”
“We gambled,” Silke said simply. “We won a lot of money that night. I had it in my purse. The robber must have followed us from the casino. We were happy, you know, in a celebratory mood. Not noticing him.”
“What’s your game?” Nina asked.
“Blackjack.”
Of course. The game of the smart, or wannabe smart. “Go on.”
“We got to the motel-the Ace High-late, after midnight. There’s a flight of stairs by the vending machines around a corner of the building, but it’s very dark there, and there are dark corners where you can’t see anything. Before we could climb the stairs to get to our rooms, a man jumped out in front of us.”
“Pointing a big, fat gun in our faces,” Raj added.
“Ja, a gun,” Silke said. “He wore a ski mask, dark clothes. He told us to empty our pockets. Well, what are you going to do? Get shot for money? I laid my purse on the ground.”
“But then our friend got too brave,” Raj said.
“Elliott rushed toward the man, trying to knock him over or something. The gun went off.” Silke’s white skin whitened further at the thought. “Oh my God. The sound of that shot.”
“Your friend hit him and the gun went off?”
“I think he came into contact with him,” Raj said. “The gunman fired one warning shot, and I think the second happened about when Elliott reached him. We always thought he wasn’t aiming, because if he had been, we’d be dead. We were so close, only about ten feet from him, and Elliott was even closer.”
“Elliott’s a genius, perhaps,” Silke said softly, “but one of those who is not well-adapted to normal life. You can’t depend on him to behave logically-at least, not according to your logic or mine.”
“When he heard the shot, Elliott let him go, but the gunman fired another shot. It went high, too,” Raj said.
“Do you think he was trying to kill us or just trying to scare us?” Silke asked Raj.
He shrugged. “It’s been two years. I’ve thought about that night so many times, and I can’t figure it out.”
“Did you see a couple on the balcony on the second floor behind you?” Nina asked.
“No. We never saw them. We read about it the next day, when we got back to Boston, and found out someone died. I guess when he fired those wild shots…” Silke said. “A random death, like a lightning strike or a car crash. So sudden. So awful.”
“Then what happened?” Nina asked.
Silke said, “Elliott jumped away. He yelled at us to run. Raj and I ran around the corner. Our room was right there on the ground floor. We were very scared. We grabbed our stuff and about a minute later Elliott was pounding on the door, saying the gunman had run away. We went into his room and got his stuff. We ran back to Harveys. From there caught a cab to the Reno airport. We took the next flight east.”
“Do you believe the robber followed you from Harveys?”
“Nobody would mistake us for rich people.” Silke pulled at the few frayed threads around the hem on her wrist. “We look like poor students. We were staying at that cheap motel. No, he knew we had money somehow. He followed us and got all of our winnings.”
“How much was that?”
“A lot,” the girl said.
“Hundreds?” Nina asked.
Silke shook her head.
“Thousands?”
She evaded that. “We didn’t count exactly.”
“Okay, describe this man who accosted you,” Nina said.
“He wore a mask,” Silke repeated. “It was dark. His voice was soft. He was American. And he stepped forward toward us, and there was something strange about his walk. Something wrong with his leg, I think. His foot turned out. Are you all right?”
A hot iron burned inside her temple, and a brand-new headache began to pulse. Nina put down her cardboard cup. “Jet lag,” she said. She had fallen back in her mind to the man in the floppy hat, with the funny walk, at Zephyr Cove. Dave Hanna hadn’t mentioned that the shooter had a bad leg, probably because he hadn’t seen the shooter moving in the dark.
The man in the parking lot who rigged their Bronco with an explosive had to have been the shooter, had to have been watching them in the rain. Why?
Because he was afraid she’d find these people, who could identify him? Silke still watched her speculatively. Nina struggled to regain her confidence.
“Now you describe him,” she said to Raj. “Maybe you noticed something different.”
“Fairly tall, medium weight, wearing sweatpants, just like every second person at Tahoe. I think he said it just exactly like this: ‘Empty out your pockets,’ the whole time, using the gun to gesture. I can’t tell you about the gun except to me it looked big. I’ve never been so close to one before.”
“If you saw him again, could you identify him?”
Again they looked at each other.
“I don’t know,” Silke said. “Probably not.”
“What about the third shot?” Nina said. “The final shot?”
“Yes, we heard one more shot while we were running away,” Silke said.
“As fast as we could. I’ve spent a lot of time on the treadmill since that night,” Raj said, “trotting, cantering, galloping. I plan to run faster if there’s ever a next time.”
Nina didn’t like him making light of the situation. “‘We’ meaning…”
“Raj and me. Elliott was a few seconds behind us,” Silke answered.
“Why didn’t you stay, talk to the police, and make a report?”
“Personal reasons,” Raj said.
“Which means that we were utterly freaked,” Silke said in her precise speech.
Nina sat back in her chair, fighting the headache.
“You don’t look well,” Silke said.
“I need you to come back with me,” Nina said, “for a deposition and to talk to the police. We have to locate this guy. I think he may still be in the Tahoe area, keeping an eye on the case.”
Raj smiled. “I knew you would suggest that. A few minutes of our time multiplied many times over.”
“Will you come?”
“Please, no,” Silke said. “Can’t we do something here?”
“We need you in California. Your expenses will be paid-” She squinted up through eyes that rebelled at focusing and saw two men standing at the table.
“Professor Braun!” Silke said, her voice shaking. “Hello.”
“Don’t bother to get up, Ms. Reilly, because I don’t want to shake hands with you. Let me introduce Mr. John Branson, my attorney.” He rubbed Silke’s shoulder avuncularly. “Did you know she is a lawyer? Has she been bothering you?”
“She’s no problem,” Silke said. “She had a few questions, that’s all.”
“She’s trying to enmesh you in a major court case on the other side of the country under false pretenses,” Branson said. “The professor is very concerned for you and asked me to assist if I can.”
“Great,” Raj said. “Here’s a legal question for you. Do we have to go to California for a deposition just because she wants us to?”
Nina stood up. “Mr. Branson? You don’t understand the situation. These people are witnesses-”
“Professor Braun filled me in,” the short, small, angry lawyer with him said.
“You don’t represent these people,” Nina said. “You don’t need to jump all over this. So back off.”
“You want my help?” Branson said to Raj and Silke. Although Silke hesitated at first, she took her cue from Raj this time. They nodded. “Okay, I’m advising you to leave right now. This lady can’t stop you and she can’t force you to go to California, either.”
“Keep my card, Silke,” Nina said, rubbing her temple.
“Go,” Branson told the students. “We can touch base later.”
Rising immediately, Raj said, “Come on.” Silke picked up their coats and took his hand.
“I’ve told you how meaningful your evidence could be to the family of Sarah Hanna. I can only hope that, now you know your importance, you’ll do the right thing. You can call me at the Charles River Inn until two-thirty,” Nina said.
“Good-bye,” Silke said. Raj and Silke gathered their things and left.
Silke had good manners. Her new lawyer, John Branson, did not. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Interviewing crucial witnesses. As you apparently know,” Nina said.
“What did they tell you?”
“Ask them.”
“I will.” Branson’s distinguished head was held up by a bandy-legged body, like a pumpkin propped on sticks, but the suit was Italian and did a good job disguising it. “I’ll also tell them they don’t have to talk to anyone in a California civil case, or go there, whatever lies you may have told them.”
“They can talk to the police, then.”
“The police here have bigger worries than a two-year-old case from California, which by the way, doesn’t even involve a criminal accusation.”
“Well, it’s been delightful, gentlemen, but I have to run along. A pleasure meeting you, Professor.” Braun didn’t reply. His hard eyes went well with his black hair, the winter outside, and his general demeanor of one who has had one put over on him, and resents it.
“Run along and don’t come back,” Branson said.
Due to the high-octane dose of caffeine she had just imbibed, Nina didn’t sleep when she got back to the hotel, but the headache put her in bed for an hour until the full impact of the ibuprofen kicked in. Then she had a hot bath, went downstairs, and had lunch.
Then she felt better.
She made calls. She asked Wish to start searching for Elliott Wakefield electronically. He wasn’t listed in the Boston or Cambridge directories. Sandy was checking out the lawyer named Branson, as Nina thought she might hear from him again.
At two-thirty Nina checked out of the hotel and went to the main police station in Boston to discuss her situation with someone in charge. She didn’t expect the cops to rush out and arrest the two students as material witnesses in a murder, but she expected respectful attention and for them to fill out a report that might come in handy. The detective she spoke with listened to her tape and asked her what she was supposed to do about it.
“It’s not our case,” she told Nina. “Have your local police contact us. We have to work through them. That tape you made can’t come in as evidence in a court case, you know. No consent. I’m a second-year law student at BU.”
“Evidence, shmevidence,” Nina said. “They’re witnesses, and the right people will hear this tape and agree they’re witnesses. The people I taped will come in person to make their statements if I have to dog them all day.”
The detective said, “Well, I admire your persistence. By the way, a shame, Branson’s involvement.”
“Why?”
“He’s a tight-ass who never gives an inch.”
“I gathered that.”
“And Braun is not just some nobody math professor. He married into a Boston Brahmin family, has more money than Wells Fargo Bank. They live with their two kids, a boy and a girl, straight-A students, no doubt, in a mansion in Newton bigger than Faneuil Hall, and are active fund-raisers for the local pols. He also consults for one of the big research outfits on Route 128. If you could persuade him to help you, he could do you a lot of good.”
“We got off on the wrong foot,” Nina said. “The detective in charge of the Hanna case at Tahoe is Sergeant Fred Cheney. I’ll talk to him tomorrow and see what we can do about getting these witnesses to make formal statements. I have more questions myself.”
“Can you subpoena them for the civil case?”
“Not if they’re outside California. Not as witnesses. I have to rely on the police.”
“Okay. We’ll wait to hear from Cheney.”
She taxied back to MIT, pulling her carry-on along the street, briefcase slung over her shoulder. She intended to try to collar Silke and Raj again, but they had left for the day and the new kid now manning the math department desk gave her the stink-eye. She was persona non grata at a great university, but such is the life of a lawyer.
Still, she wanted to try what she could to find Silke’s and Raj’s home addresses, or address, as the case might be. Phone information had no listing. The MIT directory wasn’t available to nonstudents, but she wooed a bored office worker in administration and took a look anyway, without finding them. She tried talking to a few fellows in faded sweatshirts who were lounging around in the lobby of Building 8, but they turned out to be electrical engineers, busy bees, willing but unhelpful.
Her work in Boston was done. She took a short walk over the Harvard Bridge, enjoying the windy afternoon, then snagged a cab to Logan.
The flight was delayed an hour and she felt exhausted. She finally fell into her window seat, opened her Vanity Fair, sniffed as a new celebrity scent unfolded from the magazine, and began reading every word of the bilious interviews, self-aggrandizing columnists, and tales of aged billionaires. The case melted away. The magazine lasted all the way back to California.
AS DUSK FELL OVER THE SIERRA, the Great Tahoe Weekend got going. Winding her way up Spooner Pass from the Reno airport, Nina approached the California state line. The big casino-hotels hove into view, attended by their happy throngs, whose happiness would evaporate bit by bit over the next two days in direct proportion to their stashes of cash.
She turned onto Pioneer Trail with relief, leaving the fortune-seekers behind, and turned left onto the uphill cul-de-sac of Pony Express, where her brother Matt lived, and where she had left Bob twenty-odd hours before.
The house at the end of the block abutted some nice trails and good rock climbing. Although it wasn’t quite dark yet, a full moon peeped over the hill behind Matt and Andrea’s rooftop. She parked and walked up the path to the front door. Light spilled from the windows and she heard within the anxious cry of Matt and Andrea’s baby, June.
“Come on in,” Matt said. “How was your trip?”
“Breathless. How’d it go with Bob?”
“Follow me,” he said. “Stuff to report on that front.” He went to the fridge and pulled out a couple of diet root beers, offering her one, which she took.
“Hungry? Want some leftover spaghetti?”
“No thanks. Where’s Andrea?” Nina asked.
“At a Women’s Center meeting. I’ve got the kids. Bob and Troy are in Troy ’s room playing video games.”
“Should we get June? I heard her crying when I came in.”
“She’s asleep now.” They both listened with the exquisite attention of people who have experienced parenthood. No sound came from June’s crib.
“Bob and Troy have gotten out of hand.”
Matt had had a long day towing vehicles with flat tires around the shoreline. He was thinner these days, and so was his hair. He was only thirty-four, but age and three kids to support already marked him. He ran a parasailing business during the summer months, which made up for the slim pickings in the winter, when he rescued tourists with his tow truck. These days, he and Nina talked a lot about his businesses, his tax problems, employee problems, contract problems. The old carefree Matt still came out now and then, but the adult emerging lately was harassed, unable to be expansive and light.
“What did they do?” Nina said, setting her can down on the table, not wanting to hear the lecture apparently pending. Why couldn’t she collect Bob and head home? Why did every single day have to be so fraught?
“They hung bolos on telephone lines all over town.”
“Bolos?”
“They collect rocks and attach them to a couple of feet of electrical tape, then they skateboard around town until they find an accessible telephone line. They toss the bolo until it falls over the line, with the rocks dangling over either side. Yesterday they spent most of the evening throwing these things.”
“Where in the world did they get an idea like that?” Nina said.
“Ask your son. Troy ’s his minion. He follows the plan.”
“Oh, Matt. Like Troy has no say in the matter. As if he doesn’t love every minute of it.”
“I’m not excusing him, but Bob’s older. He should act his age.”
She thought about that, his age, fourteen, and what that meant.
“You look amused. It’s not amusing,” Matt said.
“Remember yourself at fourteen? The time you crawled through your bedroom window absolutely bubbling from beer, and Mom heard you, but thought you were a burglar and called the police?”
He grimaced. “Don’t remind me. You know we expect better from our kids. And by the way, you could have told her but you didn’t. You let the cops come and hassle me. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you for that. And all the other stuff.” Matt was upset. He didn’t like it when Bob egged Troy on into trouble. Sometimes Nina thought that he was especially sensitive because when she and Matt were kids, she had done the same thing to Matt, persuaded him into all kinds of harebrained schemes.
Of course, Matt in his early adulthood had found much more trouble all on his own, but no need to get into that any further. He had turned into a strict parent who grounded his kids. He might be right, she sure couldn’t judge, but it still struck her as a harmless prank.
She laughed. “I was sixteen and so superior. I thought you deserved a kick in the rear end.”
“Mean older sister.”
“Matt, it’s not like they beat up a senior citizen,” Nina said.
“ Troy ’s grounded,” Matt told her. “They had one of these things slung over the line right outside. I made them get it down. It took a long time, because it isn’t easy. Nina, quit laughing. Add some heavy snow during the winter and that line could come down. And it interferes with utility lines. They could get a ticket or something. Plus, they climb fences and go into people’s yards without permission. Of course, most people don’t care, but some of them are pretty protective of their space. They came here for some peace and privacy. They don’t need a couple of wild kids rioting through their yards.”
“Okay, you’re right,” Nina said.
“Make Bob understand he can’t do things like that,” Matt said, “not when he’s staying with us, anyway.”
“I will.”
“He’s out of control.”
“I said I will!” But Matt didn’t seem to believe her. Now she was upset, too. Bob wasn’t a troublemaker. He was a high-spirited kid, and…
“Sometimes I think…” Matt started, then stopped.
“You think what?”
“Never mind.”
“No, Matt. Spill it. What’s on your mind?”
He scratched the back of his neck. He needed a haircut. His blond hair almost touched his shoulders. He looked fitter than a man in his early thirties, tall and muscular, but his face was as careworn as that of a man in his fifties. “I think he misses Paul. He’s staying busy because he’s dealing with a loss, too. Did that ever occur to you?”
“They never got along that well.”
“I suspect they were closer than you imagined. And Paul-well, he’s tougher than you.”
“You mean because Paul’s a guy? You think I can’t manage my son on my own?”
“Nina, no,” Matt said, shocked. “I never said that! It’s just easier with two people playing off each other, bad cop, good cop. Gives them perspective.”
“Hey, Mom.” Unfortunately, Bob chose this moment to appear at the kitchen door, accompanied by Hitchcock, who rushed toward Nina.
“Hey, kiddo.” She held Hitchcock off. “Good boy. How’s my big boy? Down! Down!”
“I’ll get my stuff. Meet you at the truck,” Bob said.
“Thank your uncle for letting you stay over last night.”
“Thanks, Uncle Matt,” Bob said. “I love coming here.”
Matt’s expression softened. He said, “So long, buddy.”
The three Reillys, human and canine, drove home. Nina felt disgraced. “I heard about the bolos.”
“Aw, we were just havin’ fun.”
“You’re out of control.” This echo of Matt forced itself unbidden out of her mouth.
“I couldn’t do my hazardous-waste work with Taylor ’cause I wasn’t at home. There’s nothing to do around here! Troy and I were just goofing around.”
“Well, you upset Uncle Matt. You showed bad judgment. Tomorrow we’ll drive around and you’ll knock down all those bolos.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
On Saturday morning after breakfast, they cruised around the area of Bob and Troy ’s bolo-tossing. The boys had restrained their mischief-making to streets near Pioneer Trail. Bolos swung from telephone wires all up and down the neighborhood. Nina parked at each one and Bob got out, found a rock, and started throwing. Some of the bolos wound themselves tighter. Only one cooperated by falling to the ground.
“Can we give it up, Mom?”
“What the-what’s going on?” They had come to an unusual-looking bolo, strung conspicuously on a line on Jicarilla, only blocks from their house. “Those aren’t rocks. Hey! My shoes!”
“Remember how you complained they were old and you needed a new pair of running shoes that would inspire you to run once in a while?”
“I never said throw them up for the neighbors to hate!”
“They made a perfect bolo. Sorry, Mom.”
“My dirty old shoes! You get out there and knock them down.”
But all Bob’s throwing efforts only resulted in an extra loop of electrical tape wrapping around the line. It appeared that Nina’s wretched sneakers would dangle forever above the street, symbols of anarchy and of the essential weirdness of the world.
Nina could not stand it. “Bob, you are grounded until you get those sneakers down. And you are not allowed to climb on the telephone poles or do anything dangerous to get them down.”
“But Taylor and me have to go collect waste this afternoon!”
“How much money have you made with your work?”
“Why do you ask?”
“How much?”
“Sixty-two dollars.”
“That should cover the cost of a good tall ladder. I’ll help you finish this project. We’ll get your money and go to the hardware store.”
“I worked hard for that money! I have plans for it!”
“That’s life in the city,” Nina said heartlessly.
“Wait. Give us a chance first.” Bob held his hands up. “ Taylor ’s coming over. He’ll help me.”
“You can’t leave the house except to buy a ladder and get my shoes down.”
“I’ll take care of it, Mom.”
“Yes, you will.” They drove back home in silence. Bob went to his room and got on the phone.
A short time later Taylor Nordholm, Bob’s homie, showed up. Taylor hadn’t had his growth spurt yet and was physically awkward, except in his weight-lifting arms, but he had an insouciant maturity in his manners. He went to find her and greet her.
“It’s good to have you and Bob back in town,” he said. “How are you, Mrs. Reilly?” He carried a brown paper bag.
“Fine,” Nina said, plumping the pillows on the bed she had just made.
“Well, see you later.”
“Don’t do anything unsafe.” The boys left and she completed a disaster-prevention pickup of the cabin. When she had folded the laundry, she collapsed on the couch, letting Hitchcock crawl beside her, letting the worry flow back in.
The man who had tried to hurt them was probably the shooter. She had talked to Cheney the minute she got back from Massachusetts, but the police hadn’t found him yet.
She had to assume Sarah’s killer knew her home address. She had apparently done what she never wanted to do: drawn attention to herself, and by extension, to her family.
She got up and walked to the entry closet, opened the door, and checked the lights on the keypad inside to see that all the doors and windows were properly secured, and the alarm was ready to be armed for the night. In the bedroom, she lifted the mattress. Yes, there it was, the knife in a leather sheath-crazy, but it made her feel better. Then she took down from its hook on the wall the shillelagh her dad had given her once upon a time. A heavy cudgel made of some extremely hard wood, it had a big knob on one end and a hole drilled through the other end for a leather cord. A leprechaun smoking a pipe had been carved into the base.
She swung it, first a little, then as if bringing it down on someone’s head. Her blood rose, not in fear, but in anger. Uncivilized, these feelings. After tucking it into the cabinet by the front door, she checked the lock on the door itself. Secure. Midday sun poured down on the porch. She stepped outside to sit on the steps.
Bob and Taylor strolled around the corner into view, carrying her sneakers, Hitchcock rambling behind.
Smiling, Nina said, “How’d you do it?” She accepted the sneakers, which bore traces of electrical tape.
Bob said, “ Taylor brought over his dad’s shaver. It operates on batteries. We attached it with tape to a long stick we found in the meadow. Then I turned it on and held it up and shaved right through the tape, and the shoes fell down.”
“Good move, kids,” Nina said. “What an idea. I doubt I would have thought of using a shaver on a stick.”
“You have to think outside the lines,” Bob said, repeating an old line they often used with each other. “Am I still grounded?”
“Until you wash the truck,” she said.
The boys were extremely pleased with themselves. Bob got the hose from the yard and they gave the truck a rinse, if not a wash, then Bob turned the hose on Taylor, who grabbed it away. They kept it up until they were screaming and almost blue from the cold. Then they went inside, dried off, and helped themselves to microwaved popcorn, leaving a good portion on the kitchen floor for Hitchcock to clean. Soon Taylor ’s dad drove up and collected them for their waste-disposal rounds.
You had to hand it to Bob. He had a way about him.
The afternoon passed in a blur of errands. Finally Nina was back on her couch, a freshly bathed dog at her feet, a crystal glass full to the brim with Clos du Bois-the sauvignon blanc, not the chardonnay-in her hand, and the news on TV.
The phone rang. The call was from the land of men.
“Hi. It’s Mick.” Mick the math teacher.
“Hello,” Nina said.
“I hope you don’t mind me calling you at home. You gave me your personal card. I hope it wasn’t by accident. Hey, guess what day it is.”
“Saturday.”
“That’s right. And Saturday night is date night. I heard around town that you might actually be free for a change.”
“For a date?”
“That’s right. A harmless sort of thing. Dinner, wherever you want. I know it’s late notice. But we’re grown-ups and we can break the rules.”
“What about your wife?”
“I told you, she left me.”
“What about the student?”
“She came to her senses and left me, too. It was a disastrous peccadillo. She was twenty-one, by the way. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“Mick, I can’t go out with you. I’m very flattered. But I’m your lawyer. It would be unethical.”
“You put up some major obstacles, Nina, but I am a mathematician and I anticipated that one. I am resigning as your client. I’ll find some other lawyer. We have nothing pending anyway. I hadn’t consulted you yet. Nina?”
“I don’t think so, Mick.”
“What are your plans for tonight?”
She planned to take a walk in the neighborhood with Hitchcock. On the other hand, it would be nice to sit across a table from a well-spoken man. Neither of them had a thing to do on this particular night. Why not?
Who cares? she thought. Mick, or Bova, or the next guy.
Quickies. Then the thought came: When did I give up all hope?
“Nothing too special,” she said.
“No expectations,” Mick said. “No strings. You have to eat dinner anyway.”
“True.”
“I enjoyed our conversation at my office.”
“You have to be kidding. About Braun?”
“Don’t you have some other math questions for me?”
Now, that was some invitation. “Well, all right. Sounds like a plan.” She gave him her address.
“Bob!”
“Yeah?” He was in his room, up to no good, no doubt.
“I’m going out tonight. There’s a Hungry Man in the freezer. Is that okay?”
“Yum.”
“I’ll set the alarm when I go. Don’t forget it’s on.”
“Uh-huh.”
Upstairs, she pulled out her low-cut red sweater and brushed her long hair. Let Mick’s eyes bug out. She hoped he would have enough wits left to answer a couple more questions. Hitchcock followed her around, his tail wagging hopefully.
“Sorry, boy,” she told him.
That ol’ mountain moon shone down through the twilight as Mick’s car pulled into the driveway. Nina watched from upstairs as he disembarked from the driver’s side, carrying a bouquet of cranberry and gold.
Flowers! How long had it been since anyone had given her flowers?
“Greetings,” he said at the door. “You look superb.”
“Thank you.” Demurely she took the flowers and invited him to come in to see the cabin, the orange Swedish stove in the corner, the big windows onto the backyard, the thick rug.
“Cozy,” he said. She arranged the flowers in a jar and set them on the table. Bob came out in his sweats and was duly introduced. Mick, in jeans and a pin-striped shirt, but no pen in the shirt pocket, looked pretty harmless, like the boys at high school who always hold up their hands to answer the teacher’s questions, the ones who seldom get drunk and always shower in the morning. Away from his office, he seemed more subdued, even nervous.
She suggested Passaretti’s, only a few miles away on Highway 50 heading out of town toward Echo Summit.
She hugged Bob good-bye, gave Hitchcock a pat, and set the alarm on her way out, slamming the door tightly behind her, pulling on the handle once to make sure it had latched.
“Feels good to get out,” Mick said, opening the car door for her. He drove a VW Jetta. All in all, there was a comforting normality and modesty about him. “My apartment is the repository of too many memories right now. Wait, I didn’t mean to start out like that.”
“It’s okay.”
“Right now is what matters,” he said. “Tonight.” Mick drove with one hand, fast. The trees on both sides of the road seemed to lean in on them.
At Passaretti’s they found a private booth. The roadhouse twinkled with tiny lights and smelled like a garlic field. Nina ordered a glass of Chianti and Mick had a beer.
She guessed that he was about thirty, maybe six years younger than she was. Once they loosened up, they started talking like old friends, and the conversation quickly rose to an intimate level of honesty. Nina enjoyed herself. She wished Paul away. He had another woman. She had the right to other men.
After a while Mick leaned back against the wall of the booth and said, “You’re intimidating.”
“So are you. You’re smart.”
“Book-smart, you must mean? Surely you don’t refer to how I conduct my life.”
“What’s going to happen with the student and the wife?”
“They’ll leave my sphere quietly, I think. None of us wants trouble.”
Nina said, hesitating, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’d rather have dinner with you, and talk about life and the world to come, and not talk about my everyday problems.”
What a relief. She didn’t want to talk about her everyday problems, either. “So, how long have you been at Tahoe?”
“Three years. I’m thinking of taking a teaching job in L.A. Living at the beach.”
“Do you like teaching mathematics?”
“I love it. I love showing kids the beauty and elegance of math, how certain and satisfying the equations can be. I like undressing Nature. Seeing beauty bare. Do you like practicing law?”
“Yes,” Nina said. “Although I fuss about the hours and the stress all the time.”
Mick waited, but Nina didn’t go on. She had said what she usually said, and seldom did anyone want her to go farther. But Mick seemed genuinely curious, in a pedagogical sort of way.
“That’s all you have to say about it? Why work so hard? Why put yourself on the line for strangers?”
Nina said, laughing, “No boundaries, I guess.”
“Be serious.”
“Okay. This case I’m working on: I want to catch a man and make him see what he’s done to a family. All the law can do is take his money and liberty. I want to make sure he understands what he did.”
“You want more than what’s required. Or even humanly possible. You’re setting yourself up.”
“I can handle it.”
“But if this bad guy came to you and asked you to defend him, you would?”
“I might. To make sure the punishment is proportionate to the crime. To make sure he gets due process. What if he’s mentally ill? What if there are mitigating circumstances?”
“You take on conflicting roles, avenging angel, bleeding heart.”
“Sounds like the name of a great Chinese movie. Zhang Ziyi would be in it.”
Mick said softly, “What’s wrong, Nina?”
He had asked, in that disinterested tone of his, as if she were an equation with an unknown variable he wanted to investigate. She decided, just like that, to tell him.
She said slowly, looking down at her glass, “The problem is that sometimes my work attracts violent people.”
“You can’t mean Gottlieb Braun.”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“You know, I don’t want to talk about it, Mick. I want you to stay outside all that.”
“I understand.”
A long, comfortable silence ensued. Nina heaved a sigh.
“So here you are.”
“Trying to be useful.”
“You don’t look like a lawyer tonight.”
“Glad I can still surprise people now and then.”
“Lots of people?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you go out a lot?”
“Given my son and a twenty-four-hour job, I barely make it to the grocery store.”
“Who’s Bob’s father?”
“Bob’s father? Oh, a musician who lives in Germany.”
“Still married?”
Nina said, “We never married. But I have been married twice. And I just left a two-year relationship.”
Mick said, smiling, “I was intimidated before, but now I’m terrified. What happened with the marriages?”
“My first husband took up with a divorce lawyer. My second husband died.” Talking about Kurt, and Jack, and Collier, and Paul in this way made her uncomfortable. It didn’t seem dignified. Or maybe it was her complicated love life that sounded undignified. Since Mick’s love life was even more undignified, it didn’t matter as much.
They ate and talked on. Mick told her about his downfall at UC Berkeley, another student-teacher affair. He might be a hound for women, but he was funny and charming and understanding. She reflected that these qualities of Mick’s might have been exactly what had gotten him into his trouble.
During the tiramisu, Nina said, “I found two of the witnesses. You helped a lot.”
“Gottlieb Braun came through? You saw him?”
“I went to Boston.”
“Wow. I’m impressed. What’s he like?”
“Judging from the short time I spent with him, like something that makes a loud cracking noise and chips off the Antarctic Shelf.”
“That’s what I figured. Nothing personal, I’m sure, but a lot of mathematicians don’t understand why other people need to take up space on their plane. Erdös called nonmathematicians ‘trivials.’ And he was considered sociable for a mathematician. So you nailed your witnesses?”
“I managed two taps of the hammer. But I still have one more for the hammer, and I think he may be the most important one.”
“Another math student?”
“He dropped out of MIT in his first year of the Ph.D. program,” Nina said. “He was listed as a candidate two years ago. I can’t pick him up on the Web for the last two years.”
“He’s not publishing, then. Most of the papers are at least indexed on the Web.”
Nina said, “Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly are all those papers about? There seemed to be hundreds of thousands in all sorts of journals.”
“They’re proofs,” Mick said. “Proofs of hypotheses, extensions of specialty fields, refinements. There are about two hundred fifty thousand published each year.”
“What exactly is going on in math?” Nina said. “Are all kinds of developments occurring that I won’t hear about for five years?”
“You’ll never hear about them,” Mick said. “The profession wanders in the wilderness. Nobody’s had a new idea in number theory since Selberg years ago. The heyday of math was the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Look at Riemann. He came up with his hypothesis about the primes in 1854. We desperately need a new Euler or Riemann to burst on the scene.”
“Are you being honest, or bitter?”
“Both. I haven’t got the skill or dedication to write a paper. But that’s okay. I’d rather see a student’s mouth drop open when she finally gets Pascal’s Triangle. I have to say, I’d be as happy as Gottlieb if somebody came up with a new idea.”
“What about computers?”
“Yeah. Computers. Well, the kiddies are on top of base two now, but the real impact is a new emphasis on experimentation in math rather than developing algorithms. Like the prime numbers. Computers meaninglessly spin them out, one by one. I think we have a couple billion listed now. What good is a random list? Machines waste time. They don’t prove anything. They create shopping lists. Am I boring you?”
“Not at all,” Nina said. “This ex-student…”
“Care to give me a name?”
“I can’t do that.”
“I might know the little slacker.”
“Maybe you can help me indirectly. Why would a young man who has been accepted into a Ph.D. program at MIT drop out?”
“Probably not money problems. MIT takes care of you at that point. Problems at home? Psych problems?” Mick stroked his chin reflectively. “By definition, he’s a whiz kid. Have you looked at the list of high-school national prize winners? Maybe he won something before college. Like the National Merit, or Westinghouse Science Talent Search Award. The runners-up will be listed on the Web. You think he’s the one who bought the books?”
“One chance out of three.”
“The American Institute of Mathematics had a Riemann seminar a couple of years ago. And there are summer institutes just for young scholars. The Ross Program at Ohio State. MIT has something, the, uh, Research Science Institute I think it’s called. Look up the teams in the USA Mathematical Olympiad. It’s like Jeopardy! for high schoolers, only harder. Here’s a napkin to write on.”
As he rattled off names, Nina wrote them down. “You mentioned psych issues,” she said. “What do you mean? Stress-induced problems?”
“Sure. It’s a rough time, the late teens. That’s when schizophrenia breaks out, especially in boys. I don’t know where to go with that. Medical records will be confidential, won’t they?”
“I wonder about this boy,” Nina said. “Maybe I can locate him through the other two, but they have an obstructive, odious lawyer all of a sudden.”
“Can I help? I’d like to know more about this,” Mick said.
“I wish I could talk more about it,” Nina said. “But…” The waiter brought the bill. Mick paid. They walked out under the stars, the forest looming.
“Late movie?” Mick said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Drink?”
“I’m sleepy already.”
“Drive up Echo Summit and neck on the lookout? Or Mount Rose, if you’re feeling particularly brave?”
Nina laughed. “Not tonight.”
“We sadly settle for an after-dinner mint, then.” He produced one.
“I think I should be getting back.” She was thinking about Bob, home alone, feeling panicky.
“Is it me?”
“Of course not. You know you’re attractive,” Nina said.
“Okay.” At her cabin, he jumped out, opened the door, and helped her out. They stood in the driveway.
Nina wondered if Bob was peeking out the window. “Thanks, Mick.”
“Any time. Let’s have a hug, okay?”
They embraced. Mick’s strong arms wrapped her tightly. His mouth sought hers and they kissed. His lips were soft, not demanding. Unfamiliar.
Fine. Unfamiliar was just fine.
ELLIOTT’S PSYCHIATRIST TOLD HIM THE DREAM precipitated his psychosis. He wasn’t supposed to think about it: It would hinder his recovery. He spent more than a month in the psych hospital in Seattle, missing so much of spring semester of his junior year that he had to make it all up in the summer.
In a way, he enjoyed his stay. They let him wear earplugs so he wouldn’t have to hear the TV. They made sure he slept and ate a lot. He wasn’t allowed to do math, but the meds made that cool, too.
He gave up on six years of work. He decided that Riemann’s work had been stupendous, but not supernatural. His talks with Silke about physics returned to him again and again.
A rest cure, his father called it. Elliott had allowed the breakdown to happen, gone exploring in the zeta landscape with full knowledge of the danger, and had taken a tumble, breaking something.
He had also brought something away with him, which no meds could make him forget. Scrawled in his black notebook, his function filled several pages, in handwriting that didn’t even look like his. He had his idea, but no proof yet.
That summer, he returned to MIT. Raj was in Madras, Silke in Germany. He rowed on the Charles during the hot hazy afternoons.
In the evenings, he worked on the prime numbers, taking care to knock off by eleven and sleep at least seven hours.
He now took life slowly, but there was never any question of turning his back on the primes. A very few people are granted knowledge of their destinies at an early age-gymnasts, musicians, great beauties, scientists, and many mathematicians. He had been blessed with a certain future. He knew his fate, but he also knew now that he wasn’t God; he couldn’t run rampant toward his goal; he would have to approach it stealthily, the painstaking calculations on the infinite sequence he had discovered, the endless checking and rechecking of the algebraic expressions.
He tried to explain it to his father over the phone, but Pop couldn’t follow anymore. “The only actual numbers are primes,” Elliott said. “The composite numbers are just junk in the road, piling up, slowing down the primes.”
“Are you sleeping?” his father said.
“Each prime is a cloud of probabilities, like quanta.”
“Come home as soon as classes are over.”
“I’m back to the li line. I have finished the first phase of my work. If you give me any number up to three hundred digits, I can tell you egg-zackly how many primes there are to that point. Do you know what that means, Pop?”
“No, I don’t, son.”
“It’s big.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine. I’m sleeping. I’m eating. It’s linked with physics. This correction we’re looking for-there is information loss from the more fundamental structure behind what we see as primes. I’m moving into phase two.”
He had traveled beyond Riemann. Keeping his excitement in check, he stayed on the safe side of the precipice. He corralled his imagination and worked on debugging his proof, which would be a long and arduous process.
The angel did not come to him again.
When the first year of their graduate programs began a year and half later, Elliott and Raj and Silke resumed their gambling jaunts. Elliott and Silke did it for the money. Raj did it for the kick. Even Carleen came along a time or two. She had decided against grad school and taken a job with a company on Route 128 that made security software.
Not wanting to see pity in them, Elliott avoided Silke’s eyes. She and Raj were never apart. Fiercely entwined and forbidding to outsiders, they were as tight as barbed wire.
After a Fourth of July trip, the team was barred from the casinos in Atlantic City. Their photos were circulated. They dressed differently, changed their signals, and concentrated on Nevada, where they were still uncaught.
November came. They picked a weekend.
They chose Tahoe.
Something was wrong between Raj and Silke on the flight west. Even Elliott, who didn’t pay much attention to silence and surly expressions, could feel it. Silke stared out the window, arms crossed, face shuttered. She ignored Raj. He didn’t seem to care. He teased the attendant and drank some of the wine they served, which was very unusual for him.
Elliott sat behind them. He slept most of the way.
They took a cab to some motel by the state line, paying cash as always from the stash in Silke’s purse. It was a Saturday morning, cool, dry, bright, airless from the altitude.
Later, inside Harveys, Elliott played desultorily, waiting for Carleen or Silke to signal him to move to a hot table. Silke suddenly came to him, tears in her eyes.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “Can we go outside?”
“Let me tell Raj…”
“Don’t tell him.” They wound through the banks of slots and went through the revolving doors. At 6:00 P.M. or so the evening shift of tourists had just begun.
“Shall we go back to the motel?”
“No. Let’s go toward the mountains.” They crossed the busy highway and walked through Caesars’ acre-wide parking lot. Then they were really in the mountains, walking uphill on a dirt path, alone.
“Did you hear? Raj is getting married.” Silke walked ahead of him, wearing those high-heeled boots that seemed so silly away from a city.
“Oh.”
“Is that all you can say? His parents found him a wife. A Wellesley girl whose family is from Madras. Tower Court, that’s her dorm address. Sounds grand, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“He loves me, but he’ll marry her. Wait, though. He won’t marry her right away. He’s checked his calendar and squeezed us both into his future! First, he and I continue to live together while we get our doctorates, he, a man with two foolish females to keep happy; I, the doormat; she the ignorant, innocent dupe. She’ll finish grad school, marry him, and become a banker, he says, at least until the four children come. I, at that point, well, he forgot to say what I will be doing right then. But doesn’t his life sound wonderful?”
She was really messed up, Elliott could tell by the perfection of her grammar, but she had always known this day would come. To tell the truth, he was glad Raj was finally leaving her. The old passion rose in him again, with the thought that she would be alone and lonely and perhaps turn to him.
Then he chastised himself for his unquenchable egotism, which converted her pain into a potential advantage for himself.
“He thinks he’s another Ramanujan,” Silke said as they walked. “But he has never had an original thought. Except in bed. He’s very original. When we make love, he-can I say this?”
“Say whatever you want.”
“He says, ‘I-am-Ram!’ over and over. You know. In rhythm.”
“Who is Ram?”
“A Hindu god.”
“Does it make things more interesting?”
“It’s funny! I’m making fun of him! What would it be like with you, Wakefield? ‘I have the proof!’ Climaxes all around.”
“Silke, you are savage.”
“Only because-I do feel savage.”
Elliott puffed now as the trail became steeper and rockier, petering out. He could hear the sound of a stream to his left. “Let’s go this way.” Silke followed him as he picked his way across the rocks. “Let’s sit down,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.” Bushes clustered along the bank of the streamlet he had found. He reached down, letting the cold pure water run over his hand.
“He gave her an engagement ring.” Tears choked her voice.
“His family is wealthy,” Elliott said practically. “Conservative. So is he. You always knew that.”
“He loves me!”
“He does.”
“He can’t leave me.”
“How do you mean? What are you thinking?”
“I’m not thinking,” Silke said. She let out a bitter laugh, then said, “Do you still love me?”
“I’ll always love you.”
“I’ll always love Raj.”
“Stay with him, then, for as long as you can.”
“But-” She brushed away her hair and looked at him dubiously. “I’m too good to be second best. I deserve-”
Elliott said, “What use is pride? What does it do besides keep you away from the one you love? I never let it stop me.”
“I’d start to hate him.”
“I haven’t started to hate you.”
“You’re an idiot, that’s why. You should hate me.”
“Why are you so harsh to me, Silke? Why do you say things like that?”
Her face contorted. She reached over and put her arms around him. “Maybe you’re right… maybe if he stays with me… he won’t be able to go through with it,” she said into his shoulder. He held her tight and pretended she was crying over him.
Finally, when she let go and wiped her face with her sleeve, he said, “I’ll never get married.” Then he added shyly, “I managed to find a function that seems to predict the primes. It implies an easy way to factor large numbers, too.”
Silke became all business. “Are you sleeping?”
“Brother John, Brother John,” Elliott sang. “Not another breakdown, not another breakdown-”
“Ding dang dong. Stop singing. Tell me.”
“There are some flaws. But-”
She gave him a long look. She had sat down on the rock opposite, one knee pulled up in what Elliott remembered was called the Royal Pose in Asia. She looked like a small and perfect statue, her face immobile, a wet streak still evident on one cheek, like a stone goddess who has been left out in the rain. The windless air and shadows where they sat seemed to calm her.
“You found it through your work on the Riemann Hypothesis?” she said.
“No. I’m following up on some work by Connes and Berry in physics. I went back to the li line and started over, where Riemann started. Before he went down his blind alley. It’s a correction to the Prime Number Theorem.”
“You can prove it?”
“Not yet.”
“You confuse me,” Silke said. “Do you have a proof or not?”
“Not yet. But give me any number up to three hundred digits and I think I can tell you if it’s a prime in about fifteen minutes. If it’s a composite number up to about five hundred digits, I can factor it with my Mac G5 in about twenty minutes. The point is, it seems to work case by case. Now I need to figure out why.”
“That’s-those are huge numbers. Colossal.”
“I may be able to go bigger. It’s just that my computer doesn’t have the capability.”
“Let’s say I believe you. Show me.”
“I can’t. I’m not ready. Even for you.”
“I might find an error and save you some work.”
“I gave Professor Braun some of my results. He’ll review them.”
“Who else knows?”
“I told Carleen. She called on my cell phone to see how we were doing.”
“Idiot,” Silke said. The way she said it, it sounded like “idyote.” “Then the whole world knows. You know where Carleen works?”
“No.”
“For an encryption company in Web security.”
“I knew it was some kind of security software. So what?”
“They’ll want to buy it.”
“Why?”
“To suppress it. Public-key encryption is built around not being able to factor large numbers, Wakefield. The Web depends on this encryption. Banks, government, big corporations, they depend on it. Where have you been living?”
“In a zeta landscape,” Elliott said. “I wouldn’t let it be suppressed. It needs to be written up and published.”
Silke put her hand to her mouth and smiled, her eyes widening. “You’ll win the Clay prize! A million dollars! And they will call it the Wakefield Theorem! You will be immortal!”
“But first I have to finish the proof, and I have a long way to go. I probably need a couple more years.”
“You know, Wakefield, my darling, I think I believe you.” She looked at him with a sort of awe, which stirred him deeply. He had dreamed of receiving a look from her for so long, but this look wasn’t mixed with the desire for possession she felt for Raj.
It’s hopeless, he thought. But he knew that.
“Anyway. What are you going to do?” he asked her, and let her talk. Let her cry some more. Let her threaten Raj, then let her hold him and say what a good friend he was.
He had just offered her all he had, emptied out his life, his work, for her, but he could not awaken in her a desire for him. He would continue approaching her forever, never reaching her. It was another aspect of his destiny. He would be solitary. How odd to know such a thing at his age.
WISH CALLED ON SUNDAY MORNING. “ELLIOTT Wakefield,” he said. “I found him, Nina. He lives on an island about fifteen minutes by ferry from Seattle. He owns a home there.”
“Wonderful!” Nina said, yawning.
“His father just transferred title to him.”
“Are we sure it’s Elliott Wakefield the math guy?”
“The Vashon Island newspaper has a small article about his graduation with a B.S. in mathematics from MIT. I also finally located a paper he wrote while he was still enrolled there. I think it’s his senior thesis.”
“What’s the topic?”
“‘Conformal Mapping on Riemann Surfaces.’ ” The Riemann word again. “He’s ours,” Wish went on. “What do you want me to do?”
“Give me the home address.” She wrote it down. “Wish, can you drop off a copy of that thesis at the community college tomorrow? Professor Mick McGregor in the math department. I’ll call and tell him it’s coming.”
“Ten-four. I have Silke Kilmer’s resume, too. I’ll drop it off at the office.”
“How’d you get that?”
“She posted it on the Web. She’s looking for a position for next summer. She’s an expert on something called Hermitian matrices.”
“Ugh. I hope I don’t have to learn about this stuff,” Nina said. “But I really want to try to get to know these witnesses.”
“They sound like they’re from another planet.”
“I’ve heard that theory.”
“Do you like math, Nina?”
“No,” Nina said. “I have to say, one reason I went to law school was because I’d never have to see an equation again. That’s why this is so unfair. I have a book right here on prime numbers. Somehow this Riemann guy is mixed up with them.”
“Have fun. See you tomorrow.”
It was still morning out on the deck. Bob had bicycled over to Taylor ’s house. Nina had already devoured the Tahoe paper.
The prime-numbers book turned out to have medicinal properties. She was asleep in the pale sun within five minutes of opening it.
Even on a Sunday afternoon, the police are all business, including the naturally mellow ones, like Sergeant Cheney of the South Lake Tahoe Police Department. He came to the counter and escorted Nina down the claustrophobic hall to his office without much greeting.
Paul and Cheney had gotten along well. Perhaps that explained Cheney’s slightly unfriendly attitude. If so, he would have to get used to the new regime, Nina thought.
Or perhaps she was the one thinking about Paul, and that disturbed her, making her attribute emotions to Cheney that didn’t exist. She could try to psych out the large middle-aged African American police officer sitting across from her with his hands folded across his belly forever, or she could get down to it.
“I have something on the Sarah Hanna case,” she said without preamble.
“I’m listening.”
“You’re the officer assigned to the case?”
“I am.”
“You remember the three witnesses?”
“I sure do.”
“I found two of them.” She ran it down concisely for him. The sergeant’s eyes never left hers.
“Let’s have the tape you made,” he said when she had finished. She pulled it out of her briefcase and he took it, handling it gingerly, as though it were a bird’s nest, or a forged check.
“Now we’ll tape you on a separate tape, and this time I’ll ask questions,” he said. She nodded and they started again. When she had repeated what she knew about Raj Das and Silke Kilmer, he switched it off.
“You want me to bring them back here,” he said. “You can’t bring them back yourself.”
“That’s right.”
“I will be talking to them, but I can’t promise how that’s going to happen. I might have to go to Boston.”
“That wouldn’t work for me. I need to get them to California or the civil case goes bye-bye.”
Cheney spread his hands. Nina said, “Do what you can.”
“I’ll do that.”
“You’ll let me know how it goes?”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
He opened the door to the reception area for her. “Thanks for the break,” he said. “I appreciate it. How’s my friend Paul?”
“Fine. He has plenty of business down in Carmel.”
“Give him my best.”
It was three-thirty when Nina left the police station on Johnson Boulevard. She would remember that later, that and everything else, with the same crisp clarity the day displayed as she drove down the boulevard. The deep blue of high altitude reflecting off the enormous hidden body of water close by shaded the mountains. Few people were about. They were watching football, hiking, gambling, picnicking by the water, anything except driving through town.
The trees that stood everywhere, even right here in the heart of town, seemed to float in this blue air, scented with resin.
She would remember the trees, too.
Chelsi’s tiny studio, sandwiched between a closed watch-repair store and a beauty parlor called Hair ’n Now in the strip mall just before Al Tahoe Boulevard, had an open door with a sign that read Therapeutic Massage Only above it. Nina knocked at the entry and entered the front room with its enthusiastic ferns and posters of acupuncture points and scoliotic backs.
“Hey, Nina.” Chelsi wore red running shorts and running shoes. She was in amazing shape. She had a rolltop desk tucked in the corner, where she was writing out bills. Her fine blond hair had been pulled into one of those negligent buns that manage to look both efficient and chic on the right person.
“Hi.”
“I’m not going to talk about Aunt Sarah today, I just wanted you to know that, because this is your time, you know? Except, I just wanted to say, sorry about Uncle Dave and my dad. They get into it sometimes. I hope you got the information you needed.”
“No worries,” Nina said. “We are making progress. I’ll be updating your uncle in a day or two.” She went into the massage room and took off her clothes and lay down on the table with her towel.
“Ready?” Chelsi called from the other room. She came in and the soft music began drifting through the room as she rubbed oil onto her hands. “I’m generating energy,” she said. “Have you had more headaches?”
“A couple.” The hands began making long movements up and down her back.
“What were you doing just before it started?” She had asked that question before.
“I’ve been thinking about that. One of the headaches was definitely caused by fatigue and stress. The other one-you know, they often come right when I’m ready to go to sleep. You know what I do before I sleep?”
“Make love?” Chelsi giggled.
“I read.”
“We’re zeroing in on it now,” Chelsi said. “You mentioned reading a few times. I’m ready to make my diagnosis now. This move here, you might hear or feel some cracking. Just ride with it.”
Deep within the skeleton, some ancient sorrow protested, then disentangled itself reluctantly from Nina’s spine and dissolved forever. “You haven’t been swimming this week,” Chelsi said.
“Is that the reason for my headaches?”
“No. But if you don’t swim, your back will start going out from all the sitting.”
“I’ll swim. But what’s the diagnosis?”
“Maybe you need glasses.”
“Hmm. But my vision is perfect.”
“Maybe just reading glasses.”
“I have those.”
“But you said your vision is perfect.”
“You know. Reading glasses don’t count.”
“Maybe you need stronger ones. Don’t buy them from the drugstore.”
“Those are for old people, not me!” Nina wailed.
“That’s what they all say.” Chelsi giggled once more.
“Okay. I’ll get my eyes checked out. There’s someone I’d like to introduce you to, Chelsi. That feels really good, right there.”
Chelsi didn’t have any difficulty following this massage-table train of thought. “Like who?”
“A young man. My investigator. His name is Wish.”
“You mean, like a blind date? Because I don’t do things like that. This muscle between your shoulder and neck is called the trapezius.”
“He’s such a nice guy,” Nina said. “I know you’d have fun. I just-I see the two of you meeting.”
“Yeah, you’re an old lady of thirty-six, better start matchmaking for other people,” Chelsi said. “What about you?”
“I’m open,” Nina said. “Even in my advanced state of decrepitude.”
“Interesting that you should talk about this Wish boy. I’ve been thinking about guys I know, wondering who I could fix you up with.”
“No need. I’m doing fine through the Internet,” Nina said, and they both laughed. Chelsi massaged her legs thoroughly, using the light oil that she had warmed as she rubbed her hands. Nina turned over and Chelsi began on her jaw, which did not want to unclench. Eventually the jaw fell open obediently, though, and hung down toward her chest, doofus-style. The eye muscles said thank you and surrendered. Nina reached the Zen zone.
“That darn buzzer,” Chelsi said. She gave Nina a final set of kneading strokes on her shoulders and polished them off with a pat on the hand. “See you outside,” she said.
Nina didn’t get up right away. She let herself float in this state of well-being, not thinking, not planning, not even feeling guilty about doing nothing.
Finally she opened her eyes to that peculiar luminousness coming through the open window, got off the table, and went to the hook where her jeans and polo shirt hung. Her underwear was on the chair and she stepped into her underpants, noting how supple she felt, how easily her back bent, swearing to herself to exercise more and maybe take up yoga.
She remembered later that she saw a movement from the corner of her eye. Her senses were very acute at that moment, and she noted that the movement came from the screened open window. With an intuition born of this unusual acuity she dove under the massage table, hearing the two knocks at the door that announced Chelsi was coming in at the same time.
A movement. Under the table. Knock knock. It went like that.
Chelsi opened the inner door and came in in her red shorts. Nina was facing her, wearing nothing but lace panties from Victoria ’s Secret, crouched on the linoleum floor under the table like some half-naked precursor of a human, and their eyes locked. Chelsi’s eyebrows began to draw together in puzzlement and her lips parted.
There was a bang, sharp, enormous. A large red hole appeared in Chelsi’s right cheek and her expression began to turn from bewilderment to agony. Another bang. Chelsi fell backward against the door, a red stain on her blue shirt, her eyes still open and still puzzled. She looked down at her shirt, tried to raise her hand to her face, but the hand lifted only briefly.
She slid to the ground.
Nina let out a shriek of horror and pain. It echoed around her brain and she thought, Now he’ll come in and finish me off too. She saw Chelsi on the floor a few feet away, watching her, her eyes so surprised, so disbelieving, shaking her head slightly even as the blood ran down her face, down her shirt.
Nothing happened during the ensuing longest minute of Nina’s life. Just maybe, she heard some slight noise in the parking lot that she translated as the shooter leaving.
Nina crawled the few feet across the floor and grabbed Chelsi by the arm. She dragged her under the table. One eye open now, not two. Chelsi wasn’t conscious anymore. She was gasping, leaking blood too fast to survive.
Nina weighed her chances. It seemed to her that if the shooter wanted her enough, he’d come and get her and there was little she could do.
Or he was already gone. Meantime, Chelsi fluttered one eyelid and lay on the floor, legs akimbo.
Nina scooted through the door, duckwalking. Slammed it, leaving poor Chelsi in there. Ran to the front door, slammed it shut, locked it. Ran to the phone. 9-1-1. She had hoped never to dial this number again. She was crying, blubbering, looking around frantically as the dispatcher asked the questions.
She would always remember the tears sending scalding trails down her cheeks, her jaw clenched tight again, where she would always keep it from now on.
CHELSI’S FUNERAL WAS HELD AT THE Bible Baptist Church just outside Placerville on Mother Lode Drive three days later, in the morning.
The death of a young person defeats some important plan. Babies are thrown into the world with every possibility ahead of them, and gradually their world narrows as they grow and experience and begin to express and produce. Someone very old may die, and it is sad, but the thought comes, They had their time. They had their chance. We saw, they saw, what they became.
But for a young girl to die shockingly, without her chance, without anyone knowing what she might have become, is an injustice as well as a tragedy.
Nina was still fresh and hurting from the assault at Chelsi’s office. Throughout the long police questioning that had followed, the reporters’ questions, the phone constantly ringing at the house, and the awful talk with Chelsi’s father, she kept a grim calm. She accepted Wish’s offer to move in for a few days and sleep on the couch at the cabin. He and Bob talked in undertones while she made sandwiches, lay down on her bed, sat on the deck in the backyard, and watched the trees.
Half the town came to Chelsi’s funeral. She had been popular in high school, a basketball player, a star in her drama classes. Many of her friends spoke about her life. Her mother came from Arizona and stood with her father, looking so much like her that Nina could hardly talk to her. Dave Hanna came, sober, shaved, head hanging.
Sergeant Cheney said, “There’s some thinking around here that you might have been the intended victim. Placerville PD isn’t turning up a scintilla of a motive to kill the young lady. She was very well-liked. Not even a boyfriend for us to take apart.”
Nina had just returned to the office. Somehow, Sandy had kept order during her absence, though the pileup of court appearances the following week would be a problem. She had never felt so angry, so grim. These feelings left little room for personal fear.
“I’m protected,” she said. “My son is protected.”
“It’s odd, though. He probably-”
“He or she.”
“He or she probably saw you through the window before you dove under the table. If he knew what you looked like, he would have seen that the girl was younger with a different hair color. So maybe he didn’t know what you looked like.”
“Or maybe he was an amateur, and let off a shot when I took a dive out of panic. If he knew Chelsi wasn’t me, why didn’t he come in and shoot me?”
Cheney shrugged. “You tell me.”
“He must have followed me to the massage place,” Nina said. “He must have known what I looked like.”
“You say she and her father were the prime movers on the Hanna wrongful-death action. They pushed the hardest, provided the funding. That’s my thinking right now.”
“Mine, too,” Nina said. “The shooter is keeping track of this case. He waited for it to be dismissed, but then I came in at Chelsi’s urging and the case started to open up. He’s watching. Here’s a list of all the ways he might be watching.” She handed Cheney the list he had stopped by to pick up. “Maybe he checked on the file at the clerk’s office. Maybe he was in court the day of the dismissal. Maybe James Bova is sharing everything with some murderous significant other. Maybe it’s one of the witnesses.”
“Why would you think that?” Cheney said. He had one of those heavy-lidded gazes, mostly caused by the way he slumped in her chair and kept his hands folded on his stomach, that gives the false impression of somnolence. Behind him, Sandy leaned against the door.
“They didn’t want to be involved.”
“But they were victims, too. You think one of those Boston kids would care that much about having to come back here and do some talking?” Then he nodded slowly. “Okay. The robbery wasn’t simple, that’s what you’re thinking.”
“You know how often the robber knows the victim in some way, or there’s a hassle between them. I’m thinking it’s at least possible that one or more of those kids has some idea why they were being ripped off, and you have to talk to them. I already gave you the third witness’s address. The one named Wakefield, who lives in Washington State.”
“It’s getting complicated,” Cheney said.
“What do you mean, complicated?”
“The Boston kids’ lawyer went to the Boston PD and offered to make a statement there. They’re not willing to come to California. Sorry.”
“Are you going there?”
“Someone is,” Cheney said. “This has to be coordinated with Placerville PD.” The door to the outer office opened and Sandy disappeared, checking on whoever had come in.
“They’re material witnesses! Why can’t you have them arrested and-”
“We don’t have enough to do that,” Cheney said softly. “We don’t have any real idea if they know anything at all. According to your tape, they don’t. And you taped them without their knowledge anyway.”
“They do,” Nina said, her jaw set. “They have a lot more to say. This is how I see it, Sergeant. Either Chelsi was killed so that the case would go away, or the attempt was made on my life for the same reason. It’s about the Hanna case, it has to be.”
“What does your client want to do? He’s the girl’s uncle, right?”
“I don’t know what my client wants to do.”
“You haven’t-”
“He was arrested for his third DUI on the road last night, after the funeral. He had gone to a bar and got drunk. He’s in the Placerville jail. He’s an alcoholic. He’s going to have a public defender on that charge, and in the meantime he doesn’t call me and I’m not going to call him. Because he hasn’t got the guts to fight.”
“Better hurry up with your case, then.”
“What about your case?” Nina said. “What forensic evidence has turned up in Chelsi’s death? Even on a drive-by, somebody must have seen something.”
“We’re working on it.”
“No sign of the gun?”
“All we have are the two bullets,” Cheney said. “Because the killer couldn’t go in and dig them out of that poor little girl’s body. And they’re valuable bullets. Preliminary tests on them show they are not from the same gun that killed Sarah Hanna.”
“It has to be the same person!”
“We’ll ask him why he needed two guns, when we find him,” Cheney said. “Maybe he threw away the gun he used to kill Sarah Hanna two years ago, and bought another one recently. We’ll look into that.”
Sandy said, “Sorry to interrupt. Your eight o’clock is here. And your eight-thirty is, too.”
“I’ll be right out.”
“Good luck,” Cheney said, nodding a couple of times and then hauling himself up. “Keep in touch.”
Lunch hour. Nina closeted herself in the conference room with the computer and the law books. How could she force the witnesses to come to California to testify at a trial?
She started with Out-of-State Witnesses, Civil Subpoenas.
The Code of Civil Procedure was clear. Witnesses in a civil case can’t be subpoenaed to appear at a trial from outside the jurisdiction.
Material Witnesses. Nothing in the books that would help anyone but the police, and the police weren’t ready to use that power yet.
Flight from Jurisdiction. Those precedents only applied to defendants. Apparently witnesses can flee as far as they want. No problem, she thought angrily, just split and leave all that chaos behind.
She could go take their depositions in their states, but it would require a court commission. And that wouldn’t bring them to California for trial.
If only the witnesses were defendants. She leaned back, put her arms behind her head, thought of the Ace High Lodge, a defendant because of the long reach of the legal concept of negligence.
Negligence means you owe somebody a duty of care, even if it only amounts to a duty to act like a reasonable person around them. Negligence means that your act or omission results in unintended harm to that somebody. In the case of Ace High, the creative interpretation of negligence said you had a duty to keep your premises secure, and if you omitted to do that, and somebody got hurt, you were negligent.
What if the witnesses had been negligent in some sense? No, they had been victims. But what if-
Now she was thinking furiously, flipping through Witkin and looking for-
Yes. A robbery. The victim, defending himself. The assailant, shooting an innocent bystander during the struggle. What if the victim used unnecessary force on the assailant, or did something so rash in the course of self-defense that the victim could legally be said to have acted negligently when a bystander got hurt?
There were California cases, rare. A case in which the victim wrested the gun from the assailant and accidentally shot a bystander. That hadn’t happened here.
Though how did she know it hadn’t happened here? She went into her office, came back with her copy of the tape of Silke and Raj, and played it.
Wakefield had rushed the guy. Silke said so. There were shots, and Silke and Raj ran. The gun was missing, so who would know who actually shot Sarah Hanna?
“Could have been Wakefield,” she thought aloud. She listened to the tape again. Even if Wakefield hadn’t shot Sarah Hanna himself, had he been negligent in rushing an assailant with a gun?
You could allege that he was negligent. You could allege a lot of things, and at this stage of Dave Hanna’s decrepit case, at this time when a beautiful young woman had been killed for some obscure gratification, you might as well get creative.
What about Silke and Raj? How could she allege that they were negligent, too? That was tougher-they hadn’t done anything but get robbed, and run.
On the other hand, you can allege anything. Let the other side come in and defend, in a California court.
I’m going to force the issue, she thought, bring them back. Excitement lodged next to the sorrow and rage in her heart. Force the law to behave the way she needed it to behave. Stretch the negligence idea like the biggest piece of chewing gum ever, all the way to Boston and Washington State. Bring the kids back kicking and screaming, and find the shooter through them.
Sandy knocked.
“Coming.”
“Find anything?” she asked as Nina passed her.
“Could you find an order shortening time request, and model points and authorities? I’ll give you some facts and cases and you plug it in. I need to get it to Flaherty today for signing. And call Betty Jo Puckett. Say I’ll meet her at the courthouse at four-thirty. Tell her it’s an emergency motion relating to the witnesses in the Hanna case.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“What else do I have today?”
“Interrogatories to answer. Demurrer to a complaint. Four big phone messages.”
“How many of those can wait until morning?”
Sandy tugged at her lower lip and said, “If you don’t make two of those phone calls, you’re going to lose two cases.”
“It’s a deal. I’ll make those calls.” She went to her desk, sat down, made the calls and made them stick, and felt a hot rush of an emotion so foreign to her that at first she couldn’t give it a name.
Ah. Vengefulness!
So this was what it felt like to be vengeful. Hard, fevered, superhumanly focused, like the skull is grinning inside the head, anticipating what it’s about to do… how interesting that personal fear had no place.
It’s a matter of honor, and behind that is the fact of humiliation. You don’t kill a human being in front of me and not deal with me, you son of a bitch, she told the shooter in her mind.
Sandy buzzed. “Okay, I have the Petition for Order Shortening Time, and I have a draft order here, and I have model points and authorities. But what’s the motion going to be? I need a title.”
“It’s a Motion to Amend the Complaint,” Nina said. “I’m going to add three new defendants after Shooter Doe I.”
There was a pause while Sandy digested this.
“And pull out three subpoenas for deposing defendants. I’m going to ask Flaherty to personally sign them.”
Nina opened the file and looked at the complaint in the case of Hanna v. Ace High Lodge and Does I-X. Doe I would be changed to the shooter’s name, when they found the shooter. She considered once more what she was about to do, suing three people who were going to be rather perturbed about it. And they had Braun and Branson to object.
So what? They had dodged involvement too long. They had no right to complain that she was getting dodgy, too.
She wrote on her legal pad, “Plaintiff David Hanna hereby substitutes for John Does II, III, and IV in the complaint, the following-named defendants.”
“Silke Kilmer.” A Jane Doe, actually.
“Sumaraj Das.”
“Elliott Wakefield.”
She looked out her window, at the black and lowering sky. November now ruled in the mountains, harsh and cold.
They were in for it.
THE LEGAL SYSTEM HAD ALWAYS VEERED toward the person with the strongest conviction. If a lawyer believed in a case very strongly, the usual obstacles fell away. That made it a good system, so long as the lawyer’s purpose was honorable, and that quality of honor would shine through, or it wouldn’t. Nina’s conviction overrode both Betty Jo and Judge Flaherty.
“All we want is out,” Betty Jo told the judge. “We are willing to pay the price. We are bystanders as much as the lady who was shot. Your Honor, please, just approve our settlement agreement and let Ms. Reilly pursue the real malfeasors.”
Great word, malfeasors. Nina wouldn’t have thought Betty Jo was up to a word like that.
Flaherty was about fifty. Nina knew that he worried about his heart, and how long he could continue dealing with all the stressful bullshit he was exposed to all day, every day. He didn’t like dodgy legal moves. He flipped through the file, finding no solutions there, then looked out the window, where rain fell. The enclosed paneled courtroom felt cozy after the drive through the dark afternoon.
“This ought to be a criminal matter,” he told Nina. “This court, and you and Ms. Puckett, shouldn’t be the ones trying to pursue this.”
“But here we are, Your Honor.”
“Two murders,” Flaherty said, shaking his head. “A civil case. Wrongful-death cases aren’t meant for this sort of thing. A senior citizen develops septicemia in her nursing home from bad care, and dies. That’s a wrongful-death case.”
“But here we are.”
“I don’t understand why the police aren’t taking a more active role.”
“Me neither,” Nina said. “But they aren’t.”
“Maybe I should at least let the motel out.”
“Maybe the motel’s involved.”
“You haven’t presented any facts in that regard,” Betty Jo protested.
“But two people are dead. The plaintiff needs, and the plaintiff deserves, every latitude the law permits. Let this case proceed, Your Honor. Let the motel remain as defendant. Allow me to bring the witnesses back to California to be deposed.”
“They have a lawyer. You didn’t serve him. You could have faxed him. I’m not sure about this ex parte stuff.” Flaherty appeared uncertain, but ready to blow the way the strongest wind blew.
“Technically, he’s not retained to represent them as defendants, to my knowledge,” Nina said. “Naturally I will cooperate fully with him when I’m notified that he will be involved in that capacity.” She turned back to her main point, adding urgently, “We have to find out who did this. The murder of Chelsi Freeman is an affront to the court. It’s an attempt to intimidate us into not pursuing the complaint. It’s the one thing, the one thing, Judge, we can never permit. Our justice system can’t flee from intimidation.”
Betty Jo said, “Your Honor, we see the steamroller and we would like to step to the side in time. Please. Let us out. We’re just a building, a series of room numbers. We don’t want to go two-dimensional during whatever attack Ms. Reilly has in mind.”
“Two-dimensional?” Flaherty said. “Oh, flattened.”
“That’s tough,” Nina said. “You could almost feel sorry for the Ace High clerk, E-mailing her boyfriend while a mother-to-be lost her life. She should have been at her desk. She should have called 911 sooner. Or how about that cul-de-sac, that tight vending-machine space, isolated and unsafe, set up by the Ace High. Or the three robberies in the past year on the premises.”
“Whatever our culpability,” Betty Jo said, “it’s not worth more than the settlement we have already offered. A failure to accept the settlement at this late date will amount to bad faith.”
“Then bad faith it is,” Nina said. “The case has changed. It’s about two deaths now, and nobody skates.”
“We’re good for fifty thousand, Your Honor. I thought Mr. Hanna took our offer. Where is Mr. Hanna, by the way? Hmm?” She turned toward Nina, her eyes narrow. Betty Jo was as aggravated as hell, and Nina didn’t blame her.
“Tell me again. What’s the problem with letting this party out of the case?” Flaherty asked Nina.
“We don’t know enough yet. We don’t know if someone from the Lodge might be involved somehow,” Nina said. “Mr. Hanna told me on the phone this morning that he understands we cannot go forward with a settlement right now.”
Betty Jo folded her arms and looked over the top of her specs at the judge. In a hard tone that Nina hadn’t heard before, she said, “Well, then, the settlement offer’s withdrawn, Your Honor. It’s off. It’s as off as three-day-old chicken left in a hot car trunk. We’ll stay in and request our attorney’s fees at the right time.” She didn’t look at Nina.
“Then there’s nothing before the court with regard to the settlement,” Nina said.
“I can still dismiss the case next week based on the court’s discretion, since two years will have passed,” Flaherty said.
“And let the whole world know this court bows to a killer?” Nina asked. Her words seemed to resound through the courtroom. The clerk looked scandalized and the lawyers lounging in their chairs, waiting for their own arguments to be heard, shifted and whispered.
“No need to grandstand, Counsel,” Flaherty said. “You still have another week. The court will consider any additional documents filed during that time that tend to show progress in bringing the matter to trial.”
“Very well,” Nina said. “Then I assume the court will execute the subpoenas requiring the newly named defendants to be deposed pursuant to our papers?”
“Any objection?” Flaherty asked Betty Jo.
“We’re just the sacrificial lamb on the side altar, Your Honor,” Betty Jo said. “Let’s get on with the immolation.”
“Immolation?” Flaherty said. “Do you object or not?”
“No objection. Bring ’em on.”
“Then it is so ordered. The signed papers will be available from the clerk’s office in an hour or so, Ms. Reilly.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
“Ms. Reilly-”
“Yes, Your Honor?”
“Be careful.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
Nina went out to the hall, Betty Jo at her heels. She tapped Nina on the shoulder. “Wait,” she said. “I have a question for you.”
“You should have raised it in front of the judge.”
“I thought about it. Thought about asking if your own client approved you throwing away fifty grand. Then I realized, no way did he approve this. You’re here blowin’ off the settlement, and your client’s in jail, ’cause he’s a sick alcoholic. Who’s backin’ you? That’s the question. Well, it’s none of my business. Bottom line, you’re never going to get a dime out of the Ace High now. I warned you.”
“It’s worth it, to have everybody still sitting together in the pot.”
“And you’re the little cannibal, stirrin’ it all up with a big wood spoon.”
“Sorry, Betty Jo.”
Betty Jo shrugged. “I’ll just tell Jimmy you’ve gone crazy. He’ll understand.”
Nina felt a rush of anger. She said, “A friend was shot to death three feet away from me. I am going to find and take down the shooter. I want you and your client with me on this. We can find the shooter and deal with him together. He’s caused you as much harm as he has me.”
“You want to ride piggyback on the Lodge,” Betty Jo said, unmoved. “That’s not an option. I won’t let Jimmy crouch down so you can take a ride on his money and his business. You’re on your own.”
“I would think you’d like to find the guy who shot up the Lodge.”
“You’d think wrong. The best strategy for the Lodge is to end all this. Every time you make a move, the Tribune reports it and Jimmy gets cancellations.”
“I thought you were-” Nina turned away.
“What? Your mama?” This stung.
“No. An honorable… an honorable lawyer.”
“You’re a funny one,” Betty Jo said. “Look, nothing personal. You’re causin’ me a lot of trouble, but I forgive you because you can still use the word honor in a court of law. I’m startin’ to figure you out. You’re an idealist, and you’re a romantic, and you have some ideas about lawyers being gentlemen champions on white horses.”
“I do not,” Nina said.
“White horses with gold stirrups, and a world just beggin’ to be saved.”
“I’m starting to figure you out, too,” Nina said, “and it’s too bad. A bright mind, a lot of life experience, and a strong desire not to rock the Good Ship Lollipop you find yourself sailing on. I was thinking you and I might become friends. It’s too bad, it really is.”
Betty Jo gave her a measured look. “No, I don’t think we’d ever be friends. You take things too personally.” She gave her umbrella a firm shake and opened it as they reached the portico.
“Yeah. And you don’t take them personally enough. I’ll let you know when I depose the three kids, so you can attend.”
“Do that.” They had reached the parking area. Rain fell straight down, mercifully free from wind. Betty Jo drove a Porsche Cayenne SUV, burgundy, water beading on its expensive hood. It let out a discreet burp as she used the remote to unlock it, and she swung into it. “Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” she said with a trace of her former joviality. She closed the umbrella and tossed it into the back seat, then slammed the door.
Nina went to her beat-up white Bronco a few stalls away and got in. Betty Jo purred past her onto Johnson Boulevard, her profile vague behind the water-smeared driver’s-side window. But it seemed to Nina that on her way past, she gave Nina the finger.
Thus ended a beautiful friendship, which had barely begun, immolated, as Betty Jo might have said, on an altar to a blind Greek goddess who holds a set of scales. At least Flaherty had given her what she needed. Nina drove off, depressed because she liked Betty Jo, thinking about her unexpectedly rich vocabulary.
She had said Nina was trying to “ride piggyback.”
That word again. Nina remembered the dream of a couple of weeks before, when the case was just starting up. How had it gone? A scary old lady trying to climb on Nina’s back. All she wanted was a piggyback ride.
Some of her most important cases began with dreams, dreams that somehow meshed later with the case. They didn’t exactly provide clues-she didn’t believe in premonitions or any of that other New Age magic-but they sometimes did seem to pull something from her subconscious about the dynamics of the case.
She passed the small shopping center near her office, her wipers whapping across the windshield as the rain fell faster. The Starlake Building looked solid and warmly lit as she pulled into the lot. The Titanic had also looked solid and warmly lit. A killer was hiding somewhere, maybe still at Tahoe. It wouldn’t be wise to relax her guard…
What did it mean, to ride piggyback? To use another’s strength. To oppress someone, sit on them. To be an opportunist.
She shrugged mentally. If the dream meant something, it was something still in the future.
The Bronco door swung open and she struggled with her umbrella. What, really, was going on? Good thing the shooter couldn’t read her mind right now, rife with speculation, unreined and vulnerable.
Several long days went by. Two things happened in the Hanna case: The new defendants were served with the Amended Complaint and Notices of Deposition, in Boston and Seattle; and Dave Hanna was released from jail, not without having pled guilty and having his driver’s license taken away, among other punishments.
Chelsi’s father called as she worked through a stack of phone messages late in the morning. Rain still fell at lake level, with a blizzard above seven thousand feet on the cloud-concealed peaks ringing the lake. The radio in Sandy ’s office was predicting the ski resorts would open in a couple of weeks. Winter was lowering itself like a hearty lover upon the town.
“Dave won’t answer his phone,” Roger Freeman said. “I went over there, but he’d gone somewhere. A bar, probably.”
“How are you?” Nina asked.
“Not too good. Chelsi’s mom called me last night from Arizona. She was thinking about her and started feeling like it’s all my fault. She wanted to take Chelsi to live with her when she left with her boyfriend years ago, but I fought her and got custody. If I hadn’t, Chelsi would be sunbathing in Tucson right now. My beautiful little girl. Excuse me.” He set the phone down and she heard snuffling and nose-blowing. Nina steeled herself not to fall into her own grief about Chelsi. She could grieve later, after she went to bed.
“She’s very sad right now, Roger, and not thinking clearly,” Nina said in a matter-of-fact tone when he picked up again. “You mustn’t take it personally. It’s not your fault.”
“I have to ask-are you going to stay with the case? I couldn’t blame you-you almost got killed yourself.”
“I’ll stay with it as long as Dave can stand me,” Nina said.
“I’m glad to hear it. It would seem like this monster got his way, if we stopped now. But I’m worried that Dave doesn’t understand that. He had already spent that settlement money in his mind. He’s not too happy with you.”
“I have to keep the motel in, until the case solidifies a little more. That’s the way it is. That’s my professional opinion.”
“Fine, just fine, but I don’t think Dave agrees.”
“I’ll come down there and talk to him.”
“Don’t come. If he sees you, he’ll fire you. He needs money to pay his DUI fine and a bunch of back bills, Nina. He gets his disability, but he spends it on booze in the first week. I keep thinking he’s not responsible anymore, can’t take care of himself. I keep thinking-about what I told you, that he needs, you know…”
“A conservator?” Nina said. “I think that’s what you mean. Someone to take care of his money for him.”
“I would be willing to do that.”
“Just thinking aloud, and this shouldn’t be construed to be a piece of legal advice, but a conservator would take care of his legal affairs, too.”
“Like deciding whether or not to stay with this case,” Rog said.
“But I can’t advise you about that.”
“Why not? Aren’t you supposed to be looking out for his best interests?”
“I suggest you consult another lawyer down there.”
“I will. Right away. Nina?”
“Yes?”
“Could we let Dave out and bring me in as the plaintiff? I’d be a much better plaintiff.”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about it, Roger,” Nina said. “You have a cause of action for the loss of your sister, but it’s not very strong, not like Dave’s legal position. And it’s too late in the game.”
“Could I sue for Chelsi’s death?”
“Sue who?”
“I don’t know. The John Does.”
“It’s all wrapped up in Dave’s case,” Nina said. “He has to hang on.”
“Okay. I’ll do what I can to help you. You need another check?”
“I’m afraid the bill’s in the mail.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll pay it. This is my daughter and my sister we’re talking about.” He hung up. Nina walked out to Sandy ’s office. Fresh coffee was brewing in the espresso maker through the half-open door of the conference room. Sandy and Wish sat at the table in there.
“I was just about to call you,” Sandy said.
“I never smelled anything so good.” Nina went to the coffee and started steaming some milk. “You know, it’s odd how allies turn into enemies and how new allies appear just when you need them.”
“If you say so,” Wish said. He was so soaked that rivulets of water were coursing onto the rug from his pants. His hair was plastered to his head, and his eyes were wild.
“Why, what is it, Wish?”
“I just heard from Ed Vasquez in Boston. He served the couple yesterday, then watched to see what they would do. They made a trip to the law offices of John Branson a couple of hours ago, about two P.M. Boston time-that’s eleven A.M. here-”
“Too bad,” Nina said. “I was hoping they would retain some charming, reasonable Harvard lady lawyer. I’ve already met that guy.”
“Listen,” Wish said. “They came out of the law offices, which are located on Boylston Street near Boston Common, at 2:35 Boston time. They walked to the side street where they had parked the car, a blue 2001 Corvette. The guy-Raj-got in the driver’s seat and the girl got in the other side. Ed was watching from across the street in his car. After about ten seconds they jumped out and ran into a bank right there on the street.”
Nina was still standing, her cup in her hand. “I’m getting a headache,” she said. “I just know I am. Go on.”
“The ’Vette blew up. That’s what Ed said.”
“It blew up?” Sandy said. “Ed said it blew up?”
“Exploded. Some people passing by got hit by glass. The bank windows were blown in. The car jumped about ten feet in the air and landed on its roof in the middle of the street.”
“The couple?” Nina said.
“Unharmed.”
Sandy and Nina looked at each other. Nina said, “Thank God.”
“They came out a minute later, looked around, then left. They flagged down a taxi and-”
“Their car blew up, you say?” Sandy said. “Is this a joke?”
“I am not kidding, Mom.”
“Someone went all the way to Boston to kill them,” Nina said. “Right after they got served.” She burned her tongue on the coffee, needed it too much to care, and drank some down, destroying a few taste buds in the process. “Because they got served. Someone knows exactly what’s going on in this case, minute by minute.”
“You make it sound like we have a mole here at the firm,” Sandy said. “Which consists of you and me and Willis, so I don’t think so.”
Wish was nodding fast. “It was the next morning after they were served, Nina! It has to be about our case! Anyway, so then they got in a taxi and Ed followed them. They went directly to the airport in Boston -Logan-and they went to the Lufthansa counter and bought tickets for a flight to Frankfurt, Germany, leaving in four hours. Ed called as soon as he could. They’re still in the waiting room, but they’re about to board-he couldn’t call right away-”
“They’re going a long, long way away,” Nina said. “Maybe they should.”
“Shall we call the police in Boston? Try to stop them?”
Nina said, “My thought exactly.”
“Have Ed tell them everything?”
“Sure. Have him call right away and report that the owners of that Corvette are fleeing the country.”
While they waited for Ed Vasquez to call back, Sandy made Wish take off his sweater and shirt and gave him a sweatshirt she had tucked in the drawer. They all drank espresso. Cars sloshed through the traffic light on the boulevard outside. Although it was barely past noon, night seemed to be falling, the day so dark the streetlights began to sputter on.
Nina went to the ladies’ bathroom at the end of the hall and took two ibuprofen, washed her face, forced a yawn or two.
When she came back, Wish’s long face told her all she needed to know.
“The police didn’t make it, Nina. Red tape. Ed doesn’t really know why. He couldn’t do anything to stop them himself. They’re at thirty thousand feet by now. I’m sorry.”
Sandy said, “How bad is it?”
Nina said, “I’m going into my office now. And I’m going to think about things. I’ll be back out in fifteen minutes with assignments.” She closed her door, gravitating as always to the window. Mist overspread the marsh leading toward the lake and she could hear rain pouring down the drainpipes, like Raj Das and Silke Kilmer, down the pipes and out.
A MAN RANG THE DOORBELL AT ELLIOTT’S house on Vashon Island. Elliott rushed downstairs. His father was coming from the kitchen, walking slowly, having a good day. He held a finger to his lips and his father said, “What’s gotten into you?” but in a whisper.
Peering through the peephole, he saw a stranger in a black windbreaker and jeans on the porch, carrying a clipboard, looking at his father’s roses.
“Yes?” he had opened the door a crack.
“Oh, hi. Mr. Elliott Wakefield?” The man smiled and held out his hand to shake hands, and Elliott said “Uh-huh,” and opened the door wider, automatically polite. Instead of a hand, a manila envelope full of papers came through the door.
“You’vebeenservedwithlegalpapersandyoushouldconsultanattorneyrightaway.” The smile never left his face. He turned and jogged back down the path.
Elliott closed the door.
“Why, El, you’re as white as a sheet,” his father said.
“It’s all right, Pop.”
“Who was that?”
“Just someone bringing me some papers on a consulting job. Pop, listen to me. You have to let me open the door. Don’t answer when I’m not home.”
His father looked stricken. “What is happening?”
“Just-someone is trying to find me. It’s a business thing. We have to be careful.”
“Who was it that called you last night and got you so upset?”
“An associate.” Silke, calling from Germany.
“Are you in trouble with the law? The IRS or something?”
“No.”
“Well? What is it, then? Don’t try to protect me.”
“I have to go to a meeting today,” Elliott said. “In the city. Please. Don’t answer the door when I’m away.”
“Take the ferry to Seattle?” He was tiring. A smell of burning bacon came from the kitchen.
“We’ll have breakfast first.” Pop nodded and went back to his cooking. Elliott showered and shaved, and when he came back down, dressed in a heavy sweater and jeans, he managed to deflect his father’s questions pretty well. He made sure his father was tucked into his favorite chair by the fireplace and that Gloria was on her way before leaving.
He hadn’t even opened the envelope. On the ferry he pulled it out of his backpack. It came from the Law Offices of Nina F. Reilly, Esq. When he read the contents, he groaned.
Now what? Wasn’t it enough that the shooter had tried to kill Silke and Raj, was probably looking for him, and he had to go talk to these corporate honchos today when he wasn’t feeling well?
At the ferry landing he pulled out his Seattle map. The building he needed was right downtown, only a few blocks away, and the day looked clear and cool. He could see the snowcap of Mount Rainier floating in the eastern sky. He walked past the Market and up the hill, turning right at the light. He felt frightened, but he really wanted to hear what these people had to say to him, so he trudged inside and went up to the fourteenth floor, to a law firm.
Oriental rugs. Mahogany reception desk, and a smart-looking receptionist who took his name. Uneasily, knowing he was out of his depth, he sat on the edge of one of the upholstered chairs and stared at the law books crawling up the walls all around. The place could have been empty for all the sound he heard. The receptionist murmured something into her phone, and a few minutes later two men and a woman strolled down the hall toward him.
“Elliott! It’s great to see you again,” Professor Braun said. He had lost weight, and it felt wrong to see him in this setting, but his handshake was firm. “Let me introduce the gentleman who let us borrow his office today, Mr. Phelps.”
“Nice to meet you.” Mr. Phelps had a shiny watch and white cuffs. He was middle-aged and corpulent, his handshake friendly, his eyes guarded.
“And this is Patty Hightower, executive vice president of the firm I consult with, as I mentioned on the phone, Elliott.” Patty Hightower shook his hand. She was awfully young to be a VP, very blond and very slim, wearing pointed high heels. In fact, she was extremely good-looking, and the way she was looking at him made Elliott plunge his hands into his pockets and look away.
“Nice of you to come over today, Elliott,” she said with a smile that showed she understood his thoughts.
“Let’s go in, eh?” They all followed Phelps into a private office with a wall-sized view of the San Juan Islands, boats and ferries dotting dark blue Puget Sound.
“How have you been?” the professor asked when they were seated in the leather chairs surrounding the polished table. “Miss the campus?”
“Uh, I’m fine. Thank you. How are you?”
“Getting along.” The professor had never been a big talker and without a blackboard didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Elliott thought with a start, He’s nervous! Which made Elliott more nervous, which made him wonder why he had ever let the professor talk him into coming over here when so much else was going on. “I’ve told Patty here what a fine student you were, your areas of interest, and XYC is looking for someone like you.”
“So this is-this is a job interview?”
“Not for a job where you’d ever have to leave home, Elliott,” Patty Hightower said. “Not that you wouldn’t be welcome on Route 128 anytime.” She sat down next to him, crossing her legs, which were encased in sheer black stockings. “We’re looking for consultants. Part-time, and you never have to go anywhere.”
“I’m not really looking-”
“People as accomplished as you rarely are. We have to talk to knowledgeable people, like the professor, and find you rather than the other way around.”
“What kind of business is this?”
“Internet security,” Patty Hightower said.
“Like RSA?” RSA was a well-known Internet-security firm.
“Right. We handle financial encryption for some customers you have definitely heard of.”
“What does the name ‘XYC’ come from?”
Patty smiled. “From the x,y axis. Plus ‘Corporation.’ We thought the abbreviation XYC would look good when the stock went public.”
“I mentioned your work regarding factoring large numbers to Patty,” Professor Braun said. “Not in any detail, Elliott. Just the general direction you’re heading in.”
Patty Hightower said, “We’d like to hire you to help us keep the Web safe for credit transactions, Elliott. And for many other purposes.”
“I don’t know a thing about that stuff,” Elliott said. “I do pure math. Combinatorics. Analysis. Number theory. I don’t even have a doctorate.”
“But you have some very promising results, don’t you? An algorithm that efficiently factors large numbers? That predicts the primes? I can hardly believe I’m saying this. It’s been a Holy Grail for mathematics for so long-my field is information technology. But my B.S. is in math. Princeton. I have to congratulate you, Elliott.”
“I haven’t even published any of my work. How do you know so much about it? Professor, what have you said about my work?”
“Just that I think it’s going to be ground-breaking, and that XYC would be smart to help you find the means to continue.”
“And we have a friend of yours consulting for us. She mentioned you independently of the professor. Carleen Flint.”
Carleen knew a lot about Elliott’s work, unlike the professor. She knew all about the blackjack, about Silke, about the function. She also knew about Elliott’s notebook. Elliott’s fright was increasing.
“I feel like you’ve been watching me,” he said. “Strange things have been happening lately.”
Patty looked at the lawyer, at the professor. “I’m not sure what you mean. You’ve come to our attention and we’d like to have you on board along with the many other very talented mathematicians who work for us. I’m not trying to overwhelm you, Elliott. As a matter of fact, I wish we hadn’t met in a big office, in such a formal way. Would you like to go down to the Market and have a little lunch? Just you and me? My treat.”
The professor was nodding, but Elliott said, “I’m sorry, but I have to get back across the bay soon. My father’s not well. Why don’t you finish saying whatever you came to say right here.” Patty looked disappointed for a moment, but she leaned forward so she was very close to Elliott and he felt suddenly hot.
“A million dollars for signing with us, Elliott,” she breathed. “And a million dollars per year salary for the next three years. Work under our umbrella, that’s all we ask.”
Elliott, stunned, said, “That’s a lot of money. I don’t understand.” Then he said, “You mean you would own my work?” He remembered Silke talking to him the afternoon of the shooting two years before. What had she said? That companies like XYC would want to suppress his work.
He recoiled, and Patty saw it; a pearly tooth bit into her glossy lower lip.
“Would I still be able to publish?” he asked.
“After our legal department has had a look. Perhaps not everything.”
“Would you want all my work to date?”
“That would be part of the signing bonus, yes. Payment for your work to date on prime number theory.”
“Your company would own my work? Have control over my work?”
“In a manner of speaking. And you would be free, in just a few years, financially secure, able to spend your life working without worries, your father taken care of…”
“Professor, you know I’m not worth that kind of money.”
“But you are, Elliott. You are working in precisely the most crucial field of applied mathematics right now. You are ahead of everyone else. I believe in you. I want you to succeed. Your work will be of enormous importance in keeping the Internet safe. The use of large primes for encryption is the basis of the whole emerging global economic system. There is no mathematician in the world today who has come as close to you to being able to decrypt our system by factoring the products of enormous primes. Frankly, I’m in awe. The Internet has come to depend on-”
“On keeping my work a secret,” Elliott blurted.
“Not at all. The focus of your work would change for a few years, to preventing attacks on public-key code systems. It’s a very laudable way of using your expertise. I’d enjoy working with you, and Carleen is looking forward to a collegial relationship. You’d have every resource imaginable. You’ll love being a part of XYC. Many MIT graduates have decided to join us. You’re a very lucky young man. And a very gifted one. We’d be proud to have you.”
It was a heck of a speech. Elliott looked at the professor, at the ascetic face with the high cheekbones and the long fingers that he had watched, mesmerized, through several seminars, performing magic with chalk. Braun was the only professor at MIT who had shown any interest in his work. He had tried to help Elliott when he was sick.
He imagined it, working through some of the problems he was having with the help of Professor Braun, having his full attention. He believed in Elliott, and had arranged for him to join him.
“I am grateful,” he said. “Professor, your interest means a lot to me.”
The professor breathed out and said, “You had me worried there for a minute.”
“I’m grateful, but I can’t join you, Professor.”
Braun said, frowning, “I don’t quite know how to respond to that, Elliott. Are you sure you appreciate what Patty has come all this way to offer you?”
“All she’s offering is money,” Elliott said. “I want to expand human knowledge. So this would include buying up all my mathematical work to date?”
“Only work related to prime numbers. The work summarized in the notebook you keep. Carleen mentioned it.”
Now he was fighting full panic. His notebook! Years of his blood!
“N-no way,” Elliott said.
“I beg your pardon?” Patty Hightower said.
“I’m going home. Please don’t contact me again.”
Patty Hightower held up a hand, and the professor sat back in his chair. She said, “Nobody else will make you a better offer, if that’s what you’re thinking. We could actually go higher. A two-million-dollar signing bonus. How’s that sound?” The atmosphere of the room had changed. Now Elliott saw the three of them very differently, as though they were shape-shifters who had suddenly become predatory, malign. He jumped up and grabbed his backpack.
“So I’m Hippasus,” he said.
“Hippasus?” Professor Braun looked startled. Then he let out an incredulous laugh.
“Your days as a card counter are numbered. How are you going to take care of your father?” Phelps said from the door, which he was blocking.
Red fog clouded Elliott’s eyes. He said, “Did you arrange the robbery? The one at Tahoe? Was it to get my notebook? Did you hire the man with the gun? He’s looking for me.” A new flood of images made him shout, “Did you kill that girl at Tahoe last week? Try to kill my friends?”
“Take it easy!” Professor Braun said. “What are all these accusations? This isn’t the Mafia! We’re a business!”
“You didn’t answer my questions. Did you? Did you?”
“Of course not,” Patty Hightower said. “Wait! Don’t go yet. We have to… Stop him!”
But when he pushed Phelps, the lawyer shrugged and stepped aside, and no one ran after him, no burly security guard chased him down the fourteen flights of stairs, no one stopped him as he rushed breathless from the building into the rational coffee-scented Seattle morning.
Leaning one hand against the granite wall of a building to support himself, he reached inside his jacket and felt the reassuring bulk of his notebook over his heart. He felt shaky. The people walking by on the street paid no attention to him.
Was he thinking straight, though? Confusion overwhelmed him.
Hippasus. The Pythagoreans had murdered Hippasus for telling a secret that undermined their system.
He covered his eyes with his hands and rocked a little. The professor must know how many nights Elliott had lain awake in bed, imagining the joy, the acclaim, when his proof was finished. His work didn’t just belong to him, it was a permanent advance in human understanding. Knowing all this had allowed Elliott to work endlessly, to give it everything. How many times had he fantasized about Professor Braun reading his proof in the Journal of Mathematics, appreciating it, thrilled that his student had come so far!
His work was all he had. What trick was the universe playing on him now, that such a hard-won discovery had become such a threat to the powerful?
Silke would never love him, and his work would be stolen and destroyed. His father was dying. Wherever he looked, he saw failure and disappointment.
He was rocking a little as he stood against the building, getting some glances now.
Have to get out of here, he thought. Can’t go home. But-Pop! He started walking blindly up the busy street.
As he turned a corner, he pulled out his cell phone to call Silke and tell her everything, get her advice.
No answer. She was in some tiny town on the Rhine more than six thousand miles away. She couldn’t help.
I’ll hide it, he thought. The notebook came first. Silke had told him the night before that he should stay home and keep his guard up. Was it all he could do, stay home knowing they would have to come for him, like Hippasus?
“Hallo?”
“Hello? Is this Silke Kilmer?”
“Who’s calling?” the voice responded in English.
“Ms. Kilmer, this is Nina Reilly, calling from California.”
A pause. “Sorry, I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Are you represented by counsel?”
“A lawyer? Not anymore, since we came here.”
“Then please, give me a moment of your time.”
“How did you get my number?”
“You told me you came from Heddesheim. You’re staying with your parents, I take it.” It was eleven at night, and Nina lay on her bed in her kimono, practicing law. Germany was nine hours ahead.
Silke Kilmer said in a voice so low Nina almost couldn’t catch it over the transatlantic static, “Do you know what happened to us? Why we left the U.S.?”
“Yes. An explosion. You weren’t hurt?”
“A miracle. The car smelled wrong. Like a bad aftershave. I don’t know. I said, ‘Raj, someone’s been in here.’ He panicked, thank God, and dragged me out and we went running. It must have been set off with a remote trigger. The man was waiting not far away. I suppose he watched us get in and he was looking down or something, and didn’t see us run from the passenger side, and set it off. We shouldn’t be alive.”
“I’m very glad you’re all right.”
“So. You can understand, this lawsuit of yours-so long as the man is at large, we cannot help.”
“He’ll stay at large unless you do help. Another person has died. One of the people who helped bring this lawsuit.”
“Why are you pushing this?” Silke said. “I don’t understand people like you. This thing is ruining my life. I had to leave school.”
Nina said, “You don’t have to understand. There is a court order requiring your presence at a deposition in ten days here at Lake Tahoe. I am calling to offer you and Mr. Das traveling funds.”
“You make me laugh. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll be killed. Your police are letting this man run amok.”
“Then help us get him.”
“You have the head of a mule, Miss Reilly. I admire you for staying there yourself. But I’m not brave like that.”
“Elliott’s been served too,” Nina said. “Are you going to let him travel here all alone?”
“He won’t come.”
“Then I’ll get a judgment against him and you and Raj that will compromise your futures for years to come,” Nina said. She wasn’t too sure she could do that, but it wasn’t completely impossible.
Another pause. The faint crackling continued. Nina imagined phone cables laid across the still, freezing floor of the Atlantic, her words flung like pellets toward the woman in Germany.
It was probably all done by satellite anyway. Who could keep up with technology?
“Elliott isn’t well,” Silke said finally. “He has had some psychiatric problems. He doesn’t deal with stress very well. Please don’t harass him.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I’d rather not go into it.”
“If you don’t come, what can I do?”
“We aren’t coming! Our lives are in danger!” Yet she was still talking. Nina thought, She’s torn, she’s looking for a way to help.
She thought, What if I do drag them here and something happens? For a moment, the whole effort of overcoming the obstacles in the case seemed insuperable.
“I’m getting off the line now,” Silke said.
“What if I come to you?” Nina said. “I might be able to persuade the court to allow me to take your depositions in Germany, where you feel safer. Don’t say no without thinking, Ms. Kilmer. This may be the only way out for both of us.”
“You would come to Heddesheim?”
“If I can work out the legal details.” It would be expensive. Nina tried not to think about that. It was, in fact, highly irregular. But it had been done, in cases where people were too sick to travel, for instance.
“What about Elliott?”
“I have to depose him, too. He may have seen something you and Raj didn’t see.”
“What if Elliott comes to Germany, too? Could you take all of our statements the same day?”
“It’s a possibility,” Nina said.
“He’s in danger in the States.”
“What do you all know that is causing you to live in fear? The sooner it’s known to everyone, the sooner you’ll be safe.”
“I don’t know what we know! We had money, he wanted it. What else is there to say? He killed a bystander, now he has to kill us so we can’t testify about him.”
Nina said, “You were very close to him. You saw some identifying feature.”
“Then come here and help us figure it out. I’m going to call Elliott and tell him not to say anything until he is with us.”
“You seem to care a lot about him.”
“He’s my friend, okay? I watch out for him. You don’t understand. Elliott is brilliant. Brilliant, but very fragile.”
“You won’t be safe in Germany, either, until you have been deposed. From that point forward, I can’t see what use it would be to hurt you and your friends. The deposition transcript could still be used in court, if you were… unavailable.”
“You make me feel so much better.” Sarcasm, in one so young.
“Anyone can get on a plane to Europe. I’ll call you tomorrow, Silke.”
A sigh. “If you have to.”
When Nina came downstairs, she found Bob sitting at the kitchen desk, text on his computer screen.
“I hope that’s your homework,” Nina said.
“Me and Dad are instant-messaging.” Some new words popped up on the screen and Bob started typing back.
“Dad says hi,” he reported shortly.
“You know, Bob, sometimes I think someone up there is rooting for us,” Nina said. “Could I, uh, type to your dad for a couple of minutes?”
“Sure. It’s easy.” Bob showed her, then left for the kitchen.
Hi, Kurt. It’s Nina.
Hey there! You!
Sorry to interrupt.
No problem. How are you?
Frazzled. You?
Hands still bad. Otherwise can’t complain.
Sorry. How’s the weather in central Germany?
Rainy. It’ll be better when the snow comes in December.
Same here. Rainy.
So. Is this about Bob?
Actually no. It’s about a case.
Okay.
I need to come to Germany.
No kidding! When?
Quickly. Some paperwork first. I have to do some depositions with witnesses in a place called Heddesheim.
That’s not far from Heidelberg. It’s only about an hour, hour and a half from here.
Problem is, I don’t speak German and I’m worried about getting around.
Don’t worry. They all speak English. Anyway-
It’s just tha-
– you’ll be with me.
Don’t get that.
I’ll help you, Nina.
I could use help.
Please bring Bob. Can you?
It’s business.
I’d love to see him. Thanksgiving holiday for him soon?
Coming up.
It’s a deal then? You’ll love my car.
What is it?
A surprise.
He had added a smiley face. Nina stared at it, shook her head, smiled back at it.
Now all she had to do was wade through red tape even Kafka had never imagined.
SERGEANT CHENEY NOW JOINED THE SMALL group of Nina’s allies in the Hanna case: a select and counterintuitive group that did not, for instance, include her client. Cheney submitted a declaration to Judge Flaherty alleging that the new defendants had relevant information and that the interests of justice would be advanced. This impressed Flaherty more than all of Nina’s other arguments.
Flaherty came through with the necessary orders for deposing witnesses in a foreign jurisdiction. He was interested in the case, and made no more reference to a discretionary dismissal. He, too, was becoming an ally.
Betty Jo, erstwhile ally, did not even attend the hearing. A hundred pages of pleading paper and many a phone call later, Nina had her orders, her appointments, and her tickets.
Roger, ally, attended to Dave, non-ally, who remained mostly incommunicado. Roger did not move forward on the conservatorship idea.
“I found another way to handle Dave,” he told Nina. “We had a talk. To be honest, I let him have it. I told him I was disgusted with him. He told me he was disgusted with himself. He said he’s barely hanging on right now, and he can’t help, but he’s not going to interfere with your work.”
“Thanks. Great.”
“It’s the least I can do. That, and pay for your airline ticket.”
“Much appreciated.”
“How much more will you need?”
“I’ll front the rest,” Nina said. “The German official who sits in and the transcriber. We’re staying with a friend who has a car, so it won’t be too expensive.”
“Good luck.”
The case had become an intelligence war; the shooter in Nina’s mind was like Bin Laden, hiding in a cave, making dark forays from time to time. His freedom hurt her. She thought about Chelsi every day, the flutter of her eyes as she lay on the floor so close to Nina, the little business she had built up all by herself, her beauty, her heart.
It felt almost like being shot again herself. She couldn’t rest until the shooter was found; she imagined what it would be like to stand face-to-face with him.
It would happen soon. He was close, watching, unquiet himself. The Heddesheim depositions would break the case, she was sure of it.
Silke became an ally. Over the next few days, she persuaded Elliott Wakefield to fly to Germany from Seattle. She persuaded Raj not to allow Branson, the attorney from Boston, to represent them.
Bob was jubilant that he would be seeing Kurt over his holiday, but he kept giving Nina worried looks as she sat night after night in her bed, reading over the autopsy reports, working on her motions, making endless notes.
“Mom, you’re getting obsessed,” he told her one night. “You’re not going to get him by staring into that math book.”
“It’s interesting.”
“What has math got to do with it?”
“The new defendants are mathematicians.”
“So?”
“So. I’m going to be questioning them. Their work might come up, be important in some way.”
“I have the same brain as you, and I know obsessed. And you’re getting obsessed.”
Nina said, “Okay, it’s true. I don’t know why the mystery of the primes interests me so much. I don’t know if this math stuff has anything at all to do with my case. It’s one way to go, that’s all.” She kept her place with her finger and added, “I’m going to find this sucker, Bob.”
“That’s what I’m worried about. Or else he’ll find you.” Now she knew what was at the root of his worry.
“Come sit on the bed for a minute,” she said. Bob came in and sat down on the edge. His baby picture on the dresser still matched up with this tall fellow, though a curious solidification and elongation had occurred over the years. He still had the mole on his earlobe, dark hair that fell forward, blunt fingers, narrow feet.
“I’m sorry,” Nina said.
“You oughtta be.” Bob said this with feeling.
“I can’t help it.”
“You need a life.”
“I have a very full life.”
“Books aren’t a life.”
“Don’t you think my work is important?”
“I don’t know. I guess it is. But you get into it too much, Mom.”
Nina said lightly, “Do you think I’m going to lose my marbles? Start mumbling to myself on the street? Bob, I’m sane as a post.”
“Well, watch it. Anyways, what if this guy comes after you?”
She wanted to be flippant, say something like “Well, then you’ll protect me.” But he was so earnest, his brow knitted in the lineaments of worry.
“We’re leaving in two days, Bob. Wish and the police are watching out for us. We have a really good security system here.” She was still watching Bob, and she realized how much he wanted to help protect them. In a moment of maternal insight, she asked, “Is that why you’ve been practicing throwing rocks? The bolos?”
“I didn’t think you’d let me buy a Luger.”
Nina sighed. “That doesn’t explain my sneakers on the line,” she said. So he was practicing throwing rocks because he had no other way to protect them. She pulled him closer and put her arm around him. He let her do it. His shoulders were heartbreakingly bony. “Listen, bud, I promise you, we’re going to be fine. Okay? Now go start the laundry or you won’t be able to pack.”
“Okay.”
“Love you,” she said lightly. She kissed him warmly on the cheek. It had been too long since she had done that.
On the day before the flight, at the office, Mick McGregor stopped by. He waited patiently while Nina saw her client out.
“Hi, Mick! What brings you here?”
“You,” Mick said. Sandy let out a muffled “Hmph” from her desk ten feet away.
Mick had a burning look in his eye and a fistful of gladioli. He wore a corduroy sport coat with leather patches on the elbows hilariously reminiscent of the sixties.
“Look at the color of those flowers,” Nina said. “Uh, Sandy…”
“I’ll get the vase.” Sandy went into the conference room and shut the door, mostly.
“Can I buy you dinner?” Mick said. “I need to buy you dinner.”
“I really can’t. I’m leaving tomorrow on a trip.”
“You have to eat dinner.”
“That line only works once,” Nina said, and smiled. She appreciated his obvious interest in her, but he was hard to take seriously, what with the wife and the students.
“How about a quick drink after work? You have to drink after work.”
“True.”
“Don’t you have any more questions for me? Please? Ever been to the top floor of Harrah’s, to the bar there?”
“No.”
“What time shall I pick you up?”
“Six. But I only have an hour.”
Six came and went, but Mick waited for her. When she saw the bar, Nina wished she’d had time to change out of her work suit. The sixteenth floor at Harrah’s consisted of a restaurant and a “view” bar: The view stretched west across the Tahoe valley to the mountains, and across the grassy slopes of Heavenly only a mile or so south of the casino-hotel. Taking a slow leave, the sun still left a gleaming trail across Lake Tahoe to the north, and several of the guests stood at the tall window looking out.
“Lucky time of day,” Mick said. He held her arm and steered her toward a small vacant table in the back.
“I’ll have a glass of white wine,” she said.
“Live a little,” Mick said. “Ever tried B & B?”
“Why not?” It was delicious, sweet. Mick had one, too. He drank it down in a gulp and that marvelously exciting look came back into his eyes. He put his palms together and held them to his face as though he was considering something important, still looking at her. His eyes were dark blue, she noticed.
“It is hard to extricate you for an hour,” he said. “I get the feeling you have to be cajoled from point to point.”
“Are you cajoling me somewhere?” She had to smile.
“To my lair, I hope. Someday,” he added hastily. “I don’t know how to act with you. Masterful, I think, but I’m not really the masterful type. I’m more of the puppy type, to be honest.”
But you know the language of love, Nina thought to herself. “I would have said that you’re the wolf type,” she said.
“Predatory?”
“I do get this feeling of something with paws creeping up on me.”
“Puppies do that too. Then they roll over and beg for it.”
“Wolves call themselves puppies,” Nina said. “Let’s have another one of those.”
“Okay, the puppy thing isn’t going anywhere, I’m going to take another tack,” Mick said. He ordered another set of drinks and said, “Wow, look at that sunset.” They truly did have an angel’s view of the spectacle from their tower in the sky. The lake was flaming now, a sheet of red shading to indigo above.
Nina let her spine loosen. She was enjoying sitting opposite a charming younger man in a comfortable place, listening to his stories. She even wanted to tell Mick that, but…
He wanted to be in love. Did he care who he was in love with tonight? Did it matter if the splash of his erotic fancy had only accidentally encountered her one day, as she sat on the bank of the river of life staring drily at a book?
Maybe Mick could help keep this grim angry feeling about Chelsi from overwhelming her. It would be such a relief to lie in the freckled arms of this, uh, math professor… what kind of sheets would he have? A grid pattern?
Mick put his hand on hers.
“What are you thinking?”
“About something I read. I’m still reading about prime numbers.”
“The subject does tend to suck you in.”
“Mick, let’s talk about l-i-e-s.” She spelled the word out because she was not sure how to pronounce it in this context.
He took his hand back. “Isn’t it a little soon for that discussion? If I can momentarily adopt a masterful tack, well then I insist that topic will come up much later in our relationship. If ever.”
She laughed at his expression. “I mean in the mathematical sense.”
“Oh, good, ’cause it’s such an alarming word in its plain English sense.” He noted her glass was empty. Again. “Can I get you another one? No more for me. I’m driving.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“These things are small and weak. Like me.”
“Oh, well. Why not.” Dinner would have to come from a cardboard box in the freezer, preformulated, but then, as Bob had mentioned, it usually did lately.
“You want to know about lies, eh? Well, all sorts of lies relate to math. There’s a Chinese professor by the name of Li.”
“Not him.”
“There’s also a Norwegian mathematician from the turn of the century, named Lie. He gave his name to some concepts called Lie Groups and Lie Transformations.”
“Are they used in prime number theory?”
“Maybe. But if so, it’s way over my head,” Mick said. “So much genius has been wasted trying to figure out what the hell the primes are, and why they sit where they sit on the number line, that I’d have to look it up, and I might not know enough about that field to help.
“Here’s the thing about number theory: Any fool can ask a simple question that no genius can solve. Is one a number? What’s the square root of minus one? Why can’t you divide by zero? And the question that has you hooked: How come the primes, the building blocks of all numbers, can’t be located using some formula?”
“It’s true,” Nina said. “It seems so simple. There must be a pattern. I look at the list of numbers, and I think I see a pattern like a mist just behind the list. That there’s some simple little adjustment to be made, and they would fall into a regular sequence-2, 3, 5, 7, 11…”
“There’s a very great mathematician named Grothendieck who said you have to come at things this difficult with the mind of an infant,” Mick said. “Maybe the mystery will be solved someday by some retired postal worker who likes math puzzles. Meantime, let’s talk about one more ‘li.’ ”
“The li that comes close to predicting a pattern of prime distribution,” Nina said.
“Right. Let’s start with maybe the greatest mathematician who ever lived, the incomparable Gauss. Active in math in the late seventeen hundreds. A child prodigy. He kept notebooks, and he only published a small number of his discoveries. It’s said that his failure to let the world into his brain set mathematics back a century.
“When he was fifteen, he wrote a stunning little function in his notebook. He wrote, ‘N over the log of N.’ This predicted approximately how many primes would be found as one went higher and higher on the number line. That teenage observation, with some refinement, became the Prime Number Theorem after about half a century of work by other mathematicians proving it. It’s still the most important thing we know about the primes.”
“You said ‘log.’ A logarithm is some kind of root, is that right?”
Mick scratched his head and said, “I don’t think of it like that, but, yeah, it is a root. The natural log is the power a base number has to be raised to in order to equal the particular prime. Most people have had to study base 10 logs, but the scientific log is called the natural log, and…” He saw Nina’s eyes glazing over and said, “Yeah, it’s sort of a root,” and laughed.
“But not exact?”
“No. Close, but no cigar. Still, close was an amazing leap of creativity. Tantalizing, how close he came.”
“Are we getting closer to li yet?”
“Li. Hold on to your glass. Bring all brain cells into play. Grit your teeth. Ready?”
“Go for it.”
“Li means ‘logarithmic integral.’ It’s a refinement of the theorem that comes even closer to predicting the number of primes up to a certain number, and it gets more and more accurate as the numbers get larger. It still can’t predict individual primes, it just comes closer. Gauss came up with it later. It’s a root of a root, you might say. You make an x,y graph. Make a line representing the actual prime numbers, which of course we know up to a hundred digits or so. Make another adjusted line representing the lies of those numbers. The lines run extremely close to each other.”
He drew a simple diagram on his napkin. A right triangle-“The vertical axis is y. The horizontal axis is x, the number line. Where they intersect is zero”-then added another line starting from the zero point and extending out with an arrow at about a forty-five-degree angle.
“That’s the li line, which predicts how many primes there should be up to any point. But it only works approximately. Each prime is located at some random distance below the li line.” He drew a jagged stepped line which ran under the li line like a narrow staircase. “See where the actual number of primes are located? It’s as though the primes got pulled away from their line and have sunk at different rates.” He spread his hands. “To find out how and why this force acts to distort the prime distribution, I would sell my soul. Now I’m getting romantic. It’s because of those brown eyes of yours.”
Lights were winking on all across the forest now, leaving the mountains and the lake in their mysterious darkness.
“Then Riemann found another pattern, somehow related to the li line, by working with a function called the Zeta Function. And his work still seems like the best approach to finding this force or differential or whatever you might call it. So prime theoreticians went looking in that direction. But so far, the Riemann Hypothesis hasn’t been proved.”
“I’ve been reading about that.”
“I have a really good book about it at home I could lend you. So this is connected to your case?”
“I told you, one of the witnesses is very interested in prime number theory.”
“Maybe he works for an Internet-security company,” Mick said.
“What?”
“Well, really big numbers can’t be factored-nobody can find the primes they’re made of-even with today’s computers. So a company called XYC invented a method of encoding financial and other information using that fact, so information couldn’t be hacked as it traveled from one Web site to another. The code lets you type in your credit-card number for certain eyes only. Ever buy anything on eBay?”
“No.”
“You will soon. Everybody will. Local markets can’t really compete. Where was I? Oh, yes. Internet codes. I have a good book about that at home as well. Want to borrow it? We could stop by there.”
Nina had been lulled into such a scholarly daze by Mick’s disquisition that she almost didn’t notice that he had made his move. Maybe she didn’t want to notice, erect defenses, analyze, think it through. “I would,” she said. “I could take it to read on the plane.”
“Let’s go, then. Maybe you should call your son and say you’ll be a little late.”
“Good idea.” Nina called Bob and said she’d be a little late. She wasn’t hungry. The B & B warmed in her stomach. She was on the trail of something intellectually challenging. Mick was a fount, a real fount. He was holding her hand as they emerged into the parking lot.
Okay, be honest, she was on a trail all right, but the trail had just forked, and his hand was confident.
He went on talking during the short trip to his place in the Tahoe Keys, and Nina leaned back in the passenger seat, allowing herself to be fed information as if he were spooning ice cream into her mouth. Up the stairs they went into his dark cabin. He didn’t turn on the lights. He opened the door to his stove-fireplace and a blast of heat came out and flames flickered into action.
“Let me show you something,” he said. He drew her to the window. Outside sparkled one of the canals that led to the lake. The stars shone down.
It didn’t surprise her when he began to undress her. “Ssh, ssh,” he said. “Let’s get comfortable and I’ll show you the books. It’s getting hot in here.”
She had heard that line in a bad rap song, but somehow she was in her slip, and his hands caressed her. “Right in here,” he said, drawing her over the threshold into his bedroom, where a large bookcase took up half the wall. The bed took up the rest of the room, though, and hardly had they entered when Mick engineered her to the bed and said, “Relax, I’ll get it in a second.”
She sat on the bed, tired all of a sudden and acutely aware of Mick kneeling in front of her, sliding his hand up her thigh. In the dark she only sensed his head below her. She took a handful of his hair, ready for the ride.
“This’ll only take a minute,” he said. “You’re really going to like this book, sweetheart. It’s full of details about logs that make you want to be close to somebody who understands. Like I’m close to you right now, touching you. Mmm, you are absolutely luscious. You’re hot, baby. And now I’m going to show you a log, a natural log, you’re gonna get this right away…”
He went on like that, and he did have some books, though she didn’t get back home with them for another hour and a half.
As for the sheets being in a grid pattern, she didn’t have time to look.
HER SILVER-TONGUED MATHEMATICIAN DUMPED HER the next day, via a cell-phone call Nina missed on her way to the Reno airport. While she and Bob waited for the hop to San Francisco to be called, she found it after a last-minute message from Sandy.
Hi. Maybe it’s better this way. You know that job offer in L.A.? They need me right away, so I won’t be here when you get back. I loved every minute and I think you’re sweet. And please don’t be mad-remember, I never lied to you. Bye, and good luck cracking the primes.
She didn’t return the call-what would she say? Another watershed of single life spread before her-the hookup followed by the cheerful phone message. Apparently he hadn’t “caught feelings,” as the alternateens say. She glanced over at Bob, who read Rolling Stone magazine in the seat beside her, and realized he was the wrong person to confide in.
She examined herself. Emotional trauma?
She felt ruffled, yes.
Damage to her vanity, then?
Some. Mick should have found her so irresistible that he changed his plans, changed his circumstances, changed his very personality now that she had lit up his life. Then she would have decided at her leisure what to do with him.
Regret? Some. Mick had been fun, but then again, the fun wouldn’t have lasted. The main regret was that she had lost her math expert.
She hadn’t caught feelings either, then. It seemed that she would survive handily. Mick would go on his way, a very lonely way, finding women at every stop, staying with none of them. He hadn’t harmed her, and she was a big girl.
Well, then, could she just enjoy the memory, and not analyze it into smithereens?
No way; analysis was always necessary, at least after the fact.
What lesson had she learned?
Math is sexy, she thought. Who knew? Then she thought, like giving herself a slap, You’re starting to sleep around. She would have to think about that.
The loudspeaker blared and she shrugged, slung her bag onto her shoulder, and said, “That’s us, bud.”
They flew to Frankfurt on a crowded Lufthansa flight from San Francisco.
On long flights, a devolution occurs in the passengers. They begin polite, tidy, and optimistic. Toward the end of the flight, it’s like an aerial Animal House. Debris slops all over the cabin, the kids jump around, the bathrooms are not to be trusted, and the adults sprawl in their seats trying to achieve blottohood with liquor or sleep.
Bob slept all night, his head on her shoulder or parked at a strange angle against the seat, drooling a little, shifting, muttering incoherently. He woke up cranky but pulled the bags down from the overhead compartment with the energy of the well-rested.
Kurt waited just past the customs booth. He put a hand on Bob’s shoulder and as Bob spun around, he smiled broadly, reaching out so that Bob was enveloped in a long tight hug.
“Hey,” Bob said, and Nina thought with a start, Does he call him Dad, or what? He had spent much more time with Kurt than she had, and they had never all spent time together.
“How was your trip?” He turned to her and she found herself hugging him. He stepped back then, as though he was afraid he had come too near her too soon, but she really didn’t care, she was tired and glad to see him.
“Long.”
“All your baggage arrived?”
“Just what we’re carrying.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here. It’s raining, sorry. November in Germany isn’t our prettiest season. Put on your jackets.” He kept a hand on Bob’s shoulder as he marshaled them to the next line. The doors to the street opened with a whoosh, leaving all the stale air inside.
Diesel fumes and shouts mingled in the narrow street they crossed on their way to the parking structure, which looked just like the one in San Francisco. The wind whipped under the stout black umbrella Kurt deployed to protect them, and they were all dripping and gasping as they walked into the dimness.
“Here we are.” It was the smallest car Nina had ever sat in, a yellow Citroën from the seventies, a minicar that belonged in a cartoon.
“My baby,” Kurt said. Getting older suited him; his smooth face had some rugged lines now that she liked, and she even saw a smattering of gray at his temples. He wore a black sweater and jeans, just as he always had. He looked happy to see them, but unsure how to treat them.
“It’s cute,” Nina said.
“It’s the future. Tiny cars and pedestrian malls. Like it, Bob?”
“Is there room for all our stuff?” Bob asked dubiously. He snaked into the back area and drew in his duffel. Nina sat up front, her bags tucked at her feet and on her lap. The car enclosed them like a neat yellow envelope. They drove out into a sky of blue overlaid by a dense gray cover above, rain still spattering now and then across the autobahn. Kurt stayed right as the Mercedes and BMWs zoomed past in the faster lanes. A silence fell upon them, the silence of adjustment to a new situation.
Nina hadn’t known she’d be casting about for some conventional rule to guide her in talking to Kurt. He was really a stranger. Fifteen years before, she had known him for three weeks, and the intense feelings from that time were no longer relevant.
Though they had resulted in the boy sitting quietly behind them. Fifteen years, and then nothing, while she raised Bob alone, not wanting Kurt even to know about his son. Then a few more weeks at Tahoe in which she defended Kurt in a murder case. He was innocent, but in the process of proving that, Kurt and Bob had found each other. Now they exhibited the same shyness toward each other she was feeling, as though they hadn’t formed their own warm relationship over the past two years.
Vineyards flowed by under the lowering clouds. Kurt drove with both hands firmly on the wheel, very differently from Paul, who merely kept a couple of fingers handy near the wheel in case something might come up on the road. Nina hadn’t had time to think about what it would feel like to stay with Kurt. They were friendly, linked; Bob would of course be staying with him; he’d offered to drive them to Heddesheim. Now she wondered if she should have stayed at a hotel. She thought of the tiny living environments she’d seen at the Ikea store one day, and wondered if he lived like that.
In a half hour or so they turned off the highway and drove into Wiesbaden, where the rain had given way to unequivocal sun as if in honor of their arrival. They cruised past an expensive row of stores and cafes, the waiters just now coming out with chairs to set up in this moment of warmth, and soon passed a graceful, long building with Roman columns all along the front.
“The Colonnade,” Kurt said. “Couple thousand years old. The town was founded by Celts in around the third century B.C. Everybody came for the hot springs.” Then they were in the main market square, dominated by a shining Gothic church. Kurt told them about it, and about the State Theater, where he often played. In front they saw an enormous statue of a nineteenth-century personage. “Schiller,” Kurt said. And that was the tour.
Even so, Nina caught the spirit of the city on the Rhine: luxurious, wine-loving, musical, healthy, nestled in its forest away from the gray granite of Frankfurt. The shoppers and dog-walkers looked pleased with themselves, even with the puddles.
They came to a townhouse on one of the side streets and Kurt pulled his yellow cube into a minuscule garage. He shouldered some of the bags and they entered a hall with no windows facing a staircase, which they began to climb. On the third floor, as Nina admitted to herself that she wished she’d stayed at the Hyatt, Kurt brandished his key and entered one of the flats, Bob right behind him, Nina following with some trepidation.
But the ceilings were high, with ornate molding, and there were bay windows looking out at the market square. Kurt moved to the fireplace, causing an attack of déjà vu as Nina thought of Mick doing the same thing, and said, “Sit down. I have good coffee. C’mere, Franz. Come on, say hi to Bob and Nina.” He picked up the big orange cat and brought it to Bob.
Somehow, the room reflected that an American lived here, in spite of the antique furnishings, the white grand piano in the corner, the piles of books. Bright with blues and yellows, the Danish rug in front of the fireplace gave the room warmth. She could see Kurt through an open doorway under a strong light, moving around.
“Mind if I look around?” she said. She found the bathroom, another high-ceilinged cavernous room with a claw-foot tub and a tall fern in the window, then went down the hall to see the bedrooms. Kurt had already made a bed for Bob in his room. His own bed was a mahogany four-poster much like Nina’s at Tahoe. Portraits in oil of musicians and dancers hung on the walls, painted as if by Rembrandt so that vivid faces and figures appeared to emerge from darkness. A stack of music lay on a stool by the bed.
Why, he’s been living here all these years, carrying on a life, and I never really thought about him at all, she thought. While she struggled through law school, married, moved to San Francisco, made Bob’s lunches, learned how to practice criminal law, divorced, moved to Tahoe, married briefly again-he, too, had been living a life, dealing with his own struggles and pains, celebrating his own successes. Their paths had crossed so briefly that it seemed a miracle that she should be here, meeting him now for the third time.
The Miracle himself sat down at the piano and opened it, running his hands over the keys. Bob hesitantly began to play the first movement of Satie’s Gymnopédie, which he had practiced over and over on the electronic keyboard at home, and which had never sounded like this. Because of the hardwood floor and the height of the ceiling, the rich sound of the grand piano filled the room.
Nina came to her doorway from the hall to watch and saw Kurt do the same across the room, leaning at the doorsill to his kitchen, a white towel over his shoulder, nodding at each hesitation as if urging Bob on. Light came through the window onto the carpet and a fire burned in the grate. The music was calm, spare, and steady.
Bob, in profile, bulked up by his parka, looked all grown up. He frowned as he played, leaning into the keyboard, head low, engrossed. A lump came into Nina’s throat. She looked at Kurt. He was grimacing as though he was in pain, and she was just about to go to him and ask what was wrong when he turned abruptly and went into the kitchen. It was emotion, she realized. Bob was playing for him, and he was proud of Bob.
She didn’t feel part of this warm loop between them. In truth, she felt very odd standing there watching her son with another parent. She felt both happy for Bob, who seemed somehow more complete, as though he were the apex of a triangle that now had both legs under him, and angry at having to share him. She stayed and listened and clapped when he had finished. Then she went into the white-tiled kitchen and helped lay out the lunch on the coffee table, there being no dining table.
While they ate, talking became easier. “So when is this thing?” Kurt said.
“What time is it now?” Nina said.
“Twelve-thirty.”
“We cut it close. Four this afternoon, and tomorrow morning.”
“No problem. It’ll take about ninety minutes. How about a nap before you go? Did you see your room?”
“It’s fine.” Her room seemed to be a music workroom, the table covered with sheet music, the walls full of books and music, a guitar leaning against the bed. The window opened and cool damp air entered with the light. “I like it.”
“I’ll clear a space on the table so you can work,” Kurt said. “I’ve been doing some composing, now that my performing days seem to be over.”
“Your hands seem-you don’t wear a splint or anything?”
“They’re fine for daily life. But as for the Rach Three concerto-they’re shot.”
“What are you composing?” Bob asked. He had maintained the same adult mood.
“Some things you could play, if you practice.” Kurt smiled. “Anyway, let’s go for a walk and let your mother rest a little.”
The house fell still. Franz the cat didn’t come in. The street noise, the scents, the light, were strange but not disturbing. Nina lay down on the creaky bed, but sleep-no, she would just lie here and think about Chelsi, and worry and wonder.
She needed a shower. Stripping off the clothes from the plane felt really good, and so did the hot shower, handheld in Kurt’s enormous tub. She blew her hair dry, went back to her room, put on her black suit with her blue silk blouse, figured out the phone, confirmed that Herr Kraft would be present at the offices of the judicial commissioner at four, and was reviewing her notes when Bob and Kurt came bursting in, bringing a puff of moist air and smoky smells with them.
“Time?”
“We have about ten minutes.”
“Bob, you better comb your hair. And change your clothes. We’re going to a restaurant tonight.” Kurt said this, and Bob went. No back talk.
Kurt sat down on the couch in front of the fire. “Can you sit down for a minute? I’d like to know a little more about your case. Do you have time?”
“Since I’m dragging you into this, I had better explain.” She sat down at the other end of the couch. He smiled at her, right at home. He had always been one of those people who do the right thing, who discipline themselves, who are sure who they are. Personal strength comes from that inborn sureness. The glad feeling came back, and Nina realized that she needed his support.
“All right. It’s a wrongful-death case. A civil case. An innocent bystander, a woman, was killed during a robbery, and I represent her husband.”
He nodded. The cocked eyebrows and narrow jaw were the same, the long dark hair brushed straight back, the knitted brows and hollows under the cheekbone. He was as tall as Paul, but lighter. She saw the faint scar on his cheekbone. She had forgotten that he, too, had once been hit by a bullet. She remembered that they were the same age.
She said, “Long story short, I reactivated the case when it was about to be thrown out. I’ve been looking for the shooter, and to do that I needed to find the people who were robbed. They’re here in Germany, and they’ve agreed to make statements.”
“What do they know?”
“They saw him. He was wearing a ski mask, but they saw him. They know more than that. They know why he decided to rob them, and they have been reluctant to talk about it. But I’m going to get the full story now, and on the record.”
“Good.”
“So why am I jumpy? Why is this so sudden? Because the shooter seems to have reactivated, too. What he’s trying to stop is the Hanna case.”
“What has he done?”
“He killed a friend in front of me. At Tahoe. He shot her. I think he thought it was me.”
Kurt leaned back, closed his eyes, and expelled a long breath. “What else?”
“He’s been watching me. And Bob. I’m sorry, Kurt.”
“Bob, huh?”
“That’s why I have to end this fast. He’s been prowling around Tahoe. He’s mobile, though. He threatened two of the witnesses in Boston.”
“He threatened them?”
“Tried to kill them. They went to Heddesheim because the girl’s family lives there and they thought they’d be safer.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s all that matters.”
“He could try to get at you through Bob.”
Nina caught her breath. “You always had a way of cutting through facts. You could have been a…”
“Am I right?”
“Yes, you’re right. That’s one reason I wanted to get out of town and take Bob with me. I’m hoping the police will track him down while Bob is here.”
“Could he have followed you here?”
“I just don’t think… it’s so far. The decision to take the trip was made so fast. But I have to say that the guy seems to know what I’m doing. I don’t know how. Kurt, I have not given your address to anyone.”
“My phone number?”
“Only Sandy has it.”
He must have understood by the look on her face that Sandy would reveal nothing that might endanger them, not ever. “So we’re safe here. But what about this office we’re going to?”
“It’s in the police department. I set it up that way.” She waited for his verdict.
Bob came back in, presumably cleaned up, though it was impossible to tell from the parka and baseball cap. He looked at them and said in an accusatory tone, “What’m I missing?”
“I was just telling your dad about the case.”
“I brought my camera. And my GameBoy.”
“We’ll find plenty to do while your mother is busy,” Kurt said. “And then we’ll eat.”
“So it’s okay?” Nina said.
“It is what it is,” Kurt said. “Let’s go.” He locked up carefully.
Heddesheim had a lot of cars for a quaint village. In fact, Nina was figuring out something else about Germany: The facade was traditional, with half-timbered homes, geraniums, cobblestones; but the mostly-invisible technology was twenty-first century. Accompanying the respect for history was a very modern energy.
They wended their way through the town square and somehow Kurt found them a parking spot a couple of blocks from the police station. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, and seemed to be getting dark already. The yellow streetlights had begun to sputter and the shop lights were on. Christmas lights and wreaths hung in the pastry shop and the butcher’s, and the street was full of shoppers and office workers with cell phones at their ears.
As they rounded the corner, they saw the imposing building where the depositions would take place across the boulevard, the red, black, and yellow German flag hanging limply from its tall pole in this early dusk in the light of a single lamp. On the steps Nina saw three young people, one a girl, standing uncertainly in a huddle, talking, all dressed similarly in dark jackets and pants.
“Those are my witnesses,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Want us to go in with you?” Kurt asked her. His eyes scanned the street traffic. It was noisy and hard to hear.
“No, no, you guys go get something warm to drink. Take some pictures.” She wished the weather were more welcoming, that they had more to do, but Bob was looking around with interest. “I’ll break it off for the night at about six-thirty and call you.”
“Be careful.”
She stepped off the curb and crossed, looking back once to see Bob and Kurt still standing there, watching her. A moist breeze, the remnant of the rain, blew down the avenue.
“Hello.”
The three turned to her. Three young, scared faces.
“We have come.” The young Indian man, Sumaraj Das, shook her hand. He wore a red cashmere muffler and an overcoat.
“Hello, Silke.”
Silke was pale but her expression was determined. “Yes, we are ready,” she said. “And this is Elliott. Raj? What are you doing? Are you all right?”
Raj had closed his eyes and brought his hand up to his chest.
“Raj?” Silke Kilmer said again, panic in her eyes. Then she made another sound, a grunt, a sound that this young lady would never have made in company, except that she had just been shot. Nina knew this instantly.
“Uh.” Silke fell with Raj.
Nina and Elliott tumbled against the short wall at the top of the stairs and fell behind it, entangled.
Nina’s leg was still exposed. She pulled it quickly behind the shelter of the wall. Elliott was shouting something beside her, but she was feeling very quiet, paralyzed almost, praying, Please don’t let him shoot me, too.
She heard screams. Nina opened her eyes. Elliott Wakefield crouched beside her, his glasses askew, peering around the wall toward the steps. He was about to jump out there. She pulled him back.
“But-my friends!”
“Someone else has to help them! He could be waiting for you to show your face!” Elliott comprehended this. He fell back against the wall and reached in his jacket and felt for something.
“Do you have a gun?”
“No! How could I get a gun through customs?”
“Just sit tight,” Nina said. “We’re just going to sit here and not move.”
“Did he kill them?” His eyes were wild.
“Just sit tight!” The tall double doors burst open and several uniformed police officers came running out.
After the ambulances left, after the police took them inside and questioned them at length; after Elliott had some sort of panic attack and had to be subdued and kept from running away; after the officer came in to tell them that Silke Kilmer and Raj Das hadn’t made it; long after full darkness came upon the town and the traffic noises subsided outside; after the German police woke up Sergeant Cheney at his home at Tahoe and confirmed the details of Nina’s story; after she gave them a false address for Kurt and said they’d be available for more questions the next day; after Elliott said to her in the cold waiting room, “What should I do?”; after all that, Nina and Elliott were released.
It was past ten. Kurt and Bob waited for them at the back door. The Citroën was running at the curb, its headlights bright. A police officer walked them down to the car. Nina kept her arm around Bob.
Kurt was waiting in the driver’s seat. Nina sat beside him. Bob and Elliott Wakefield sat in back.
Nina realized he hadn’t made a plan during the long hours he had been waiting. Elliott lapsed into a daze in back, gazing dully out the window at nothing.
“The first thing is, let’s get out of here,” Kurt said after a moment. He put the little car in gear and drove swiftly through the town.
“My stuff,” Elliott said from the back seat. So he was still with them mentally. “At the hotel.”
“We’ll have it picked up tomorrow, okay?”
“But where am I going? To the airport?”
“We can’t, not yet,” Nina said. “We have to stay at least through tomorrow. The police-”
“Screw the police! It happened at the police station!”
“You can stay with us,” Kurt said quietly, cutting through it again. “It’ll be safe. No one knows my address.”
“Maybe he’s following us,” Bob said.
“I’d know it.” Kurt was right. The Citroën’s humbleness provided a novel way to avoid a tail. They were on the autobahn, in the slow lane, moving so slowly the cars seemed to whiz past. Anybody following the Citroën would be obvious.
“Silke,” Elliott said, and began sobbing.