You need to know, though, what happened when Isla Holderness met Banacharski. That’s where this begins. It begins with a woman with short, dark blonde hair, and a handsome pointed nose, and windburned cheeks, walking up a cart track in the French Pyrenees. This is May 1998, and the hills are very beautiful. Buttercups nod in the cold wind.
Isla is carrying an old-fashioned backpack – it belonged to her father, and has a frame made of hollow aluminium poles. She has on thick hiking socks, made of grey wool, and jeans tucked into them. She is tired. She has been walking and – where possible – hitchhiking around this area for nearly two weeks now. In her pocket is a passport-sized photograph snipped from an academic journal. It has been creased and recreased.
It shows a thin man frowning with an expression of, she judges, concentration or toleration of having concentration broken. His hair is dark, and very close-cropped, nearly a skinhead – a reaction, perhaps, to a hairline already prematurely receded. It suits him. His cheekbones are sharp and he looks handsome. He’s looking not at the camera, but downwards and slightly to one side. Something like amusement plays around his mouth. The photograph is ten years old.
She is excited, because she thinks she may have found him. She started from Carcassonne, and she has been walking from town to town, going deeper into the countryside. She told her colleagues, most of them at least, that she was going on a walking holiday. Nobody mentioned Banacharski, except Mike – Mike, she thought, liked her – who when he heard she was going to the eastern Pyrenees said: ‘Off for a tryst with your boyfriend, I shouldn’t wonder.’
She is on a walking holiday. She’s thirty-two years old and she’s happy. She has been camping most nights, not more than one night in three treating herself to an inn. It’s warm in the days, but most mornings she wakes in her tent with dew on her feet. She hasn’t got much money. She eats chunks of saucisson sec with a penknife, and tears bits of bread to go with it. She has, in a compartment of her backpack, a jar of cassoulet and a tin of pineapple pieces for an emergency.
But when she passes through each village, she shows the photograph. She enjoys doing what a tourist would do – sitting in the village square, if there is one; eating her lunch quietly. She asks, with her halting French. At first it was hard. Now easy.
‘Cet homme – un ami… vous savez ou il est?’ She’d show the photograph. Cheeks would be rubbed, grunts emitted, more grizzled friends summoned over sometimes.
‘Il s’appelle Nicolas. Nicolas Banacharski. Il est un… il fait le mathematique…’ Here, she’d find herself feebly miming something halfway between a scribble on an imaginary table and a scribble on an imaginary blackboard. Her mime for mathematics was no more necessary, nor more plausible, than her mime for telephoning, or typing – the former consisting of an imaginary Bakelite earpiece and the latter of a peculiar ragtime piano solo played at the level of her clavicles with her eyebrows around her hairline.
Still, all this seems to endear her to the gruff old Frenchmen. Most of them seem to have heard some stories of a crazy mathematician. She has been following, generally, whichever wave of an arm her last informant offered. She’s tried to pick market towns when there were markets. But she isn’t hunting. Her idea is simply to have a holiday – to give it shape by hoping she’d stumble across the great man, but that isn’t the point of it, not at all.
Then, yesterday, she was buying her lunch in a boulangerie in Nalzen and waiting for the orange-haired old chimp to ring up her sandwich. She was wondering how long that display of Chupa Chups lollipops had been there, when she looked out of the window over a display of baroquely iced cakes and exquisitely lacquered strawberry tarts.
It was him. To the life. He was going past on a bicycle, lolling, with one hand on the handlebars and the bicycle describing lazy, open sweeps back and forth across the empty street.
The woman squawked as Isla barged out of the shop to give chase. She left her backpack in the shop, yanked open the door and hop-skipped after him in her ridiculous socks.
‘M’sieu! M’sieu!’
Half of her had imagined that if she ever met him he’d run or yell at her. She wasn’t quite prepared for him simply to stop. He braked, and turned round. He looked startled, but not yet annoyed.
‘Pardon… pardon…’
‘Quoi?’
‘Nicolas?’
‘Quoi?’
‘Je suis Isla.’
His look was shifting from startled and sympathetic, to alarmed.
‘Isla Holderness – nous avons…’ She remembered he spoke English. They’d exchanged letters in English. ‘It’s me, Isla. We’ve – I mean, I’ve sent you letters. I’m Isla Holderness.’
‘Mam’selle…’
The man on the bicycle was kindly. He stayed put for her stammering explanation, and was gentle in telling her that the words ‘Isla Holderness’ meant nothing to him in any order at all, and that he was certain they had never exchanged letters. He was a handyman, not a scholar – he had used the word ‘scholar’, clumsily, when she’d said ‘mathematician’. He laughed when she showed him the photograph, though. He had to admit, it looked like him. No, no apology necessary. Au contraire. His name was Pascal. Enchanté.
But a mathematician? Lived alone? Pascal thought he might know him. Yes, bald. Not looking like this, though. He was an eccentric, sure enough – Pascal didn’t remember his name but it might have been Nicolas. He looked at the photograph, blotting out the lower half of the face with his thumb and looking at the eyes. Isla could see they were different, now, Pascal and Banacharski, about the eyes.
They were still standing in the street. It was a small town and no cars had come. Pascal rolled his bicycle back and forth with his hips, turned the handlebars lazily with his free hand. He seemed to be smirking.
‘Peutàtre.’ It was an old photograph. He couldn’t tell. But there was this type living in a shack up above Tragine. Pascal had gone to fix his septic tank. Had a lot of paper. He was – Pascal made a waving gesture with his hand… Big beard, Pascal said. Like a blaireau. People talked about him. Jewish, he thought. Maybe an inventor?
He left her after a few minutes, scribbling his phone number, as an act of gallantry, with a blunt stub of pencil on a bit of cardboard torn from a packet of cigarette papers. She folded this once and tucked it into the coin pocket of her jeans. They had made friends, though as she watched him cycle away she noticed that the bicycle was wagging less than previously and his head was wagging more.
She went back into the boulangerie and endured a foul look. The baguette, which she ate sitting on a low wall in the sunshine, was delicious. She spent the night in a field outside Freychenet, more excited than she was prepared to acknowledge to herself.
Now Isla is walking up, leaving the last outbuildings of the farm she passed behind her. The cart track is dry, and the sun has baked worm-curls of mud on it. Her new walking boots bash satisfyingly and painlessly off them. As a contour slopes round she glimpses the roof of a wooden cabin. The quarter-acre of land in front of it has been raked out flat and hoed, and there are lines of bamboo poles with brilliant green-yellow bean shoots curling around them. Chickens scratch in the dirt.
She doesn’t think that Banacharski knows she is coming to look for him. She underestimates how small these towns are, and how close together. Banacharski knows she’s coming.
He didn’t know, at first, whether he wanted to be found. But now he sees her starting up the path towards him, smiling, and he thinks that he has been too lonely for too long.
‘So, Jones,’ said Bree. ‘This thing. This thing you have.’
It had been bugging Bree all afternoon, and she had been bugging Jones with it. It wasn’t something Bree could quite make sense of. And – she being a naturally sceptical person – it wasn’t something she completely believed, either. It was far from impossible that this was something Red Queen was doing just to mess her about. That Jones was a spy, or an actor, or some other damn thing. Indeed, that this whole thing might be some sort of fieldwork assessment exercise.
Jones didn’t say anything.
They were in the car, and Jones was looking out of the windshield at the road. They were on the road west out of Atlanta heading for Birmingham. The sun was low in the sky ahead of them. They reckoned the kid was on the move, and that he was heading west.
Bree had asked how they knew that and Red Queen had said something about triangulation. They had tried the idea of using fluctuations in the ambient spread of probabilities to track the device. They conjectured that its effect on the world might leak out from it – little subtle ripples of unlikelihood, little freaks, unexpected variations from the mean could be discerned if you looked at large enough bodies of data. Their conjecture – unless what they were seeing was no more than the effects of chance itself – seemed to have been borne out.
They were monitoring regular big spreads: sports events, the patterns of roulette wheels and hands dealt in the major gambling centres of the North American mainland. Of course – and Bree would never have doubted it – they had access to those data in real time. Over the last several hours there had been spikes, outliers, runs of aces, improbable snake eyes, statistically significant fluctuations.
Red Queen didn’t go into detail – just hints. Bree imagined low-level employees sitting in safe houses in all fifty states flipping quarters every ten seconds and noting down the results: ‘Heads, tails, heads, heads, tails, heads, heads, heads, heads, coin landed on edge, heads, heads, heads…’ Whatever was measurable was measured.
Wispy though it was, all these variations, plotted together, seemed to signal some sort of gradient, something geographical, arranged around a moving focus. And the data was consistent with that focus heading westwards at approximately the speed of an automobile travelling down a highway. Crudely, as Red Queen explained it, the closer to this thing you got, the less likely it was that you’d roll a four one time in six. Dice were behaving themselves on the eastern seaboard, Red Queen said. Dice were becoming more unruly to the west.
That, then, was the weather report: that was the state of chance. Things were getting more unlikely in the south-western United States of America, with a front of downright implausible moving in from the east. Conditions in Atlanta and points east were calming, with nobody expected to beat the house for the foreseeable future.
‘This thing,’ Bree repeated. ‘Does it make life fun?’
‘I don’t understand.’ Jones said that to a lot of enquiries. Bree had learned to persevere. She stopped talking, and looked at the side of his face like he was a Sudoku.
‘Knock knock,’ said Bree.
Jones didn’t say anything.
‘I said: knock knock. You know about that, Jones. Don’t pretend you don’t. You grew up in some laboratory somewhere you never got told knock knock jokes?’
‘I know knock knock jokes. I just don’t know why they make you laugh.’
‘So you know what you say?’
‘I know.’
‘So say it.’
‘Who’s there,’ said Jones, but he said it without a question mark.
‘Boo,’ said Bree.
‘I’ve heard that one,’ said Jones.
‘Say it for me, Jones,’ said Bree with a wheedling intonation. If you’d been watching carefully you could have identified her coaxing manner as flirtatious, almost.
‘Boo who.’
‘Don’t cry,’ said Bree. ‘It’s only a joke.’
Jones continued to stare out of the windshield. Bree reached into the glove compartment and took out a Slim Jim and unwrapped it and began to chew. That hadn’t been a success.
‘Slim Jim, Jones?’ she said.
‘No thanks,’ said Jones.
‘OK,’ said Bree, a mile or so later on. ‘Not big on sense of humour. No GSOH, like they don’t say in the lonely hearts listing. Jokes don’t make you laugh.’
Jones didn’t say anything.
‘Jeezus, Jones. I’m trying to needle you here. Throw me a bone.’
Jones continued to look out of the windshield with bland attention to the road.
‘OK. Needle means like… Bone means like… Means say something.’
‘What would you like me to say?’ said Jones.
‘Make conversation.’
Jones left it a while. He seemed to be involved in some sort of mental effort. Bree could have sworn the hand with which he ordinarily smoked – the main hand with which he ordinarily smoked, given he seemed to be ambidextrous in this regard – twitched towards his pants pocket.
‘Knock knock,’ said Jones eventually.
‘Who’s there?’ said Bree.
Jones didn’t say anything for a bit.
‘Who’s there?’ said Bree. ‘Jones, you have to -’
‘Mister,’ said Jones.
‘Mister who?’ said Bree.
‘Mister Jones,’ said Jones. Bree laughed. Jones didn’t.
‘Hah, Jones,’ said Bree. ‘I like it. You were joking… Nice work…’
She cracked open another Slim Jim – they were minis – by way of celebration. Jones continued to stare benignly at the road, but she saw something around his eyes, in his frown, that looked a little haunted.
She waited a bit.
‘You weren’t joking,’ she said. ‘Were you?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I was trying.’
‘You were funny. Sort of… inadvertently.’ After the highway had gone by for a bit more, uneventfully, Bree continued. ‘Knock knock jokes aren’t really funny, anyway,’ she said. ‘They’re more like corny. So it’s funny when they’re not funny?’
‘I know that,’ said Jones. ‘I know other people find things funny. It’s one of the concepts I find difficult to understand. Funny is what?’
‘Do you not laugh, Jones?’
Jones thought quite hard about this; as did Bree, who was trying to remember if she’d heard him laugh since they’d met.
‘No,’ he said eventually, in a tone of voice that suggested that the question was an odd one.
‘Not even if I tickle you?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I think that reflex is attached to anticipation. I don’t have that. But I don’t laugh. I know a lot of jokes. I remember every joke anyone tells me. I remember everything anyone tells me. I have an eidetic memory. It’s one of the things that allows me to function. Someone tells someone else a lie and they laugh. I know that’s how it works. But it doesn’t work for me. If I know the joke, I know what’s going to happen. If I don’t know the joke, I often don’t know it’s a joke. It’s just – nonsense. It confuses me.’
Bree remembered, suddenly, the way her own daughter had been when she was five or six. That was when they’d been living in Washington, again, in the long narrow apartment with the air-con unit in the window at the end of the hallway that made all that noise.
Bree remembered Cass saying two things, the two things connecting up. First was when she had overheard Bree talking to Al, when they were still talking, and Al had said something that had made Bree laugh. A joke, not one of his dirty ones. Bree had been a couple beers in, probably laughing harder than whatever Al had said deserved.
‘What, Mommy? What?’ Bree had repeated the joke, but Cass had just looked confused. Did that really happen? Why not? Why did you say it did?
That phase lasted months – a curiosity about jokes, matched with a total failure to understand them. They seemed to be everywhere. Suddenly her schoolmates were all telling these jokes and Cass would bring them home, wondering, almost to the point of tears.
Cass – prim with indignation, hands behind her back in the blue dress, toe of the red shoe pivoting on the linoleum. ‘No, Mommy. That’s not true. No. That’s a lie.’
The problem was that Cass didn’t understand the difference between a joke and a lie – and Bree, though she knew there was one, had not been able to explain it to her daughter. She had not, come to that, even been able to explain it to her own satisfaction.
Later, when Cass started to lie in earnest, the thing recurred from the other end. ‘Did you do your homework?’ ‘Did you study for the test?’ ‘How was school?’ These routine questions would be answered yes, and yes, and lovely thank you, Mommy. It was only when the teachers called to ask why Cass had failed the test, why she’d come to school without her homework, why she’d bitten another child so hard she’d drawn blood, and Bree confronted her, that she’d protest, ‘I was joking! It was a joke!’
‘Cassie, did you take Mommy’s keys, honey?’
‘No, Mommy, I promise. Daddy took them.’
And Cass would have a blazing row with Al. And then the keys would show up, in Hampton Bear’s bear house in the corner of Cass’s room.
‘I was joking, Mommy! I was joking!’ she would shriek as Bree, especially if it was late in the evening, smacked the backs of her legs red. Long time gone.
‘What’s the matter?’ Jones said.
‘Nothing,’ said Bree. ‘Bit of my Slim Jim went the wrong way.’ She coughed and thumped her chest and wiped her eyes on her sleeve and went into the glove compartment and came out again.
‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Irish knock knock joke. You say knock knock.’
‘Knock knock.’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Mister.’
‘No, it’s -’ she started. Jeepers he was hopeless. Then she realised he was, earnestly, trying. That made her feel…
‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother. Just drive.’ Trying, she thought.
The light was going down ahead of them, spreading out over the sky. It was cloudy in that direction. They drove on through Birmingham without stopping, at Bree’s suggestion, and got takeout from a Wendy’s on the outskirts, also at Bree’s suggestion. Jones ordered what Bree ordered, which was one fewer burger than she would have liked. Bree liked Wendy’s. The hot foil wrappings felt classier than Mickey D’s, and she liked the way the burgers were square even though the buns were mostly round. She liked that you could nibble the corners off, salty and greasy and chewy and hot.
They ate leaning back against the doors of the car where it was parked in the lot. The restaurant was light and the light spilled into a kids’ play area with a slide in the shape of an elephant and a see-saw anchored to the PlayCrete by a spring. It had a smiling plastic Wendy face, with ginger bangs and braids, atop the central boss. Wendy’s eyes were dark.
Bree felt tearful. She slurped her big orange soda. Jones, on the other side of the car, smoked gratefully, and the drift of the smoke smelled good.
As they drove, afterwards, Bree stopped trying to establish what went on in Jones’s head. That was Jones’s business, she reckoned. She liked him.
They drove on from the Wendy’s and kept going to Tupelo, where when Bree saw the illuminated vertical beacon of a Motel 6 glowing she asked Jones to pull in and they decided to stop for the night. They would contact Red Queen in the morning. Bree wondered what had happened about the disappearing case – the one he’d had at the airport and then hadn’t had.
They booked two adjacent rooms, both for cash. Jones helped Bree with her small travelling bag, put it in her room for her then came out to the walkway. It was round ten thirty, maybe eleven.
‘Jones,’ she said. ‘Sleep well.’
‘Yes. Thank you. You sleep well also.’
There was a moment of neither moving. Jones seemed to be looking for a cue.
She stood opposite him a minute, and thought of hugging him and then laughed aloud, a little nervously, and turned round and went into her room before she had time to register his quizzical expression.
Bree lay on her back on her bed in her clothes and looked at the ceiling. She thought of Cass. It was some time before she went to sleep. She wasn’t aware of falling asleep at all. But she woke still in her clothes and with the lights on, where she had been lying earlier, with a disoriented feeling. That meant she had been asleep. The clock on the wall said it was 2 a.m. She could hear a noise.
Cheap thin motel walls, she thought, as her startlement abated and she got a sense of where she was. Barely more than partitions. It would be some couple going at it. But the noise wasn’t the grunt and huff of sex, not even the stagy wailing some women seemed to put on when they found themselves in motel rooms with thin walls next to Bree when she was trying to sleep.
It was the high, animal, keening sound of someone in distress. Bree rolled her feet onto the ground and reached into her bag for the small, light handgun she carried and had never had to fire. She knew that this was a serious job. If this thing was as powerful as she understood it to be, she knew the DEI would not be the only people looking for it; they probably weren’t even the only government agency looking for it. There were interests at work in it that would use violence. Red Queen had as much as told her so.
She sat with the gun in her two hands, getting her breathing steady, listening. The sound rose and fell, came and went. It wasn’t the sound of someone being hurt. It was the sound of crying: the jagged hee-hawing of someone winded by grief. It was coming through the wall separating her room from Jones’s. It sounded too high to be a grown man’s voice.
Bree got up, rolled on the outsides of her feet to her door, and slowly turned the handle. Outside the air was still muggy. There was a dirty yellow halogen light illuminating the porch, and mosquitoes blatting against it. She eased the door behind her closed – a soft click, and a moment of panic before she remembered her key card was safe in her pocket – and she could no longer hear the bellow of the air conditioner.
She took a couple of steps down to Jones’s door. It was closed. The sound was coming through the thin plywood. She kept the gun in her right hand, but let it fall down behind her thigh. She knocked, softly, with the knuckles of her left hand on the door.
The sound stopped, abruptly. She stood breathing there for a minute, then knocked again.
‘Who is it?’ It was Jones’s voice. She had, momentarily, a flash of remembering the knock knock jokes.
‘Jones?’ she said.
‘Bree?’
‘Yes.’
The door opened. Jones was there, and from behind him there came a gust of old cigarette smoke. He had his trousers on, and no top. He was well muscled. In one hand he had a toothbrush and in the other a lit cigarette, and his eyes were red and sore. He looked at her a moment, winced, and resumed brushing his teeth. Foam appeared around his mouth.
‘Jones?’
‘What?’ he said, removing the toothbrush. He put the cigarette up to his mouth and took a pull. The end was dabbed with shiny foam when he took it out. Then he turned round and went back into the room. His room was exactly like Bree’s, except that beside the laminated no-smoking sign on the bedside table was the polystyrene cup from the bathroom, filled with butts.
Jones tapped his ash into this cup, went into the bathroom and spat noisily.
‘I was just going to bed,’ he said.
‘What the hell’s up? Was that you crying?’
Jones looked at her as if slightly affronted.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Easy, Jones,’ Bree said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘My mother is dead,’ Jones said.
‘Oh, Jones. I’m sorry. Shit. You should have said. What happened?’ Bree moved in, awkward because of her bulk and because of Jones’s semi-nakedness and his being a colleague and being covered in toothpaste and waving a cigarette. She thought she ought to hug him but contented herself with reaching up and squeezing his shoulder. Jones’s face crumpled, then recovered. He sat down on the bed.
‘Jones, look, we’ll – where’s home? Do you want to drive there? Did you just hear?’
Jones sat down on the bed, and Bree sat down with him.
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’
Bree didn’t say anything for a bit, then she said: ‘Twenty-four years?’
‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’
‘I heard you, Jones. I mean: what? What’s making you cry? Twenty-four years is a long time.’
‘She’s still dead,’ said Jones.
‘Jesus, Jones. Of course. I know, but it’s like you just found out -’
‘It is like I just found out. I always cry before I go to sleep,’ said Jones. ‘I have emotions. I don’t have an imagination: I can’t see things that aren’t there. But I have emotions. I had something and it made me happy and I lost it and now I don’t have it.’
‘Tell me about her,’ said Bree. Bree thought of Cass again, and then stopped the thought. ‘What do you remember about her?’
‘Everything,’ said Jones.
‘You’re -’
‘I remember everything she ever said to me. Everything she ever wore. Every time she touched me. Every smell and taste of her.’ Jones sighed. ‘I have an eidetic memory. That is my condition. Everything that ever happens to me I remember it exactly. If I didn’t have that I couldn’t function.’
‘But.’
‘Why would I not be sad when I am alone?’
‘Jones, people get over things. They have to. You can’t just -’
In the light from the wall lamp, Jones’s face was a sick yellow. He looked miserable. He got up and went to the sink, rinsed his toothbrush and stood it in the other polystyrene cup.
‘I can’t. I know that this is not like other people. It’s not important. It is what happens to me. But I have no way of “getting over things”. I have no expectations, no desires that live in what you call the future. That is what apsychosis means. Everything I want is in the past. Everything I want to happen has already happened. Everyone I love is already gone, and I can remember everything about them.’
Bree didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. Jones lit another cigarette from the butt of the last. Bree felt sad and annoyed and a bit awkward.
‘Would you like me to leave you alone?’ she said.
‘I don’t…’
‘OK, I get it. You don’t know what it would be like. But you must know – from your experience – if you’re happier when you have someone with you or if you’re happier when you’re alone.’
‘I’m happier when you are with me,’ said Jones.
‘OK then,’ said Bree. And she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed. When he finished smoking he turned off the light and lay down, apparently without self-consciousness, on the bed next to her. The keening noises he made rose a little, then settled, as Bree put one of her arms over him and held him as he fell to sleep.