All Cry Chaos (3 page)

    "Forensics is angry as hell," said a woman. "The fire crews saved the block but drowned the evidence."

    Gisele De Vries shook Poincaré's hand, insisting on formalities. As the local agent that Dutch security services had assigned as liaison to Interpol, De Vries was the one member of his team Poincaré had not personally selected. Interpol agents, by charter, held no powers of arrest and were bound in every case to work alongside local or national police of their host country. The flinty De Vries had immediately impressed Poincaré. Give her a data-gathering task and she would finish ahead of deadline, not only collecting information but presenting analyses in multiple views. Her desk was neat; her clothes, carefully pressed; her shoes, square-toed and sensible. Only her long, auburn hair, clasped loosely at her neck and hanging to mid-back, hinted at a rich inner life.

    "If you didn't know better," she said, "you'd think someone carved out the room with a laser cannon from over there." She pointed across the canal, where a crowd had gathered.

    She handed him a photograph. "Taken ten minutes ago from a police helicopter. The blast patterns are the same on both sides of the building, consistent with a bomb placed
here
, beneath the sink." On a second sheet she showed Poincaré a schematic of the hotel room. "Fenster must have been leaning over it at detonation. Aside from being burned beyond recognition, what's left of the torso is splintered with porcelain. And then there's this." She reached for a piece of wet, charred wood, sniffed, and held out her hand. Poincaré winced.

    "Ammonium perchlorate," she said. "Rocket fuel, believe it or not. Burns like a flare and, under specific conditions, will explode. If the bomber had used as much C-4, the entire block would be gone. In fact, it was an elegant job."

    Poincaré had seen the effects of all manner of explosives in his career, but this was a first: rocket fuel used for a purpose other than breaking heavy objects loose of Earth's gravity. "Not typical, is it."

    "Hardly," said De Vries.

    "Well, let's collect some residues." He sniffed the charred wood again. "Send samples to the lab here in Amsterdam for a quick analysis, but I also want the European Space Agency looking into this. And NASA. This could narrow our search."

    "To die bent over a sink," said Ludovici. "I suppose there's a moral in that."

    Poincaré glanced at the tarpaulin and, again, turned away—an aversion that had nothing to do with squeamishness. He had worked with his share of corpses; but he also lacked the capacity to regard them as pieces of meat once the heart stopped beating. There was this thing called Life—the way Claire would sometimes look up from her work and smile at him—and not Life. Death. Wonder at one entailed wonder at the other, and Poincaré simply could not feel nothing at the sight of a burnt-out corpse. Soon enough, he would shut down certain sensors and approach the remains.

    "A moral?" came a booming, sepulchral voice from the hotel entrance, three steps below street grade. Serge Laurent clapped a hand on Ludovici's shoulder. "Young man, the moral here is that cleanliness is next to godliness."

    Poincaré's closest friend and confidant in or out of the service checked his watch. "Almost three hours post-explosion and the desk clerk is still shaking. The man needs a new diaper and likely an injection of some sort, but he won't leave his station. Professional pride."

    Poincaré watched Laurent note the coffee stain on his trousers and then restrain himself from making a crack about water management and men of a certain age. Both agents had given their careers to Interpol and were so unlike in temperament, so different in their approaches to a case, that no one could have predicted a friendship. If Poincaré faced oncoming force with a kind of mental jujitsu, sidestepping trouble and studying opponents as they tripped from their own momentum, Laurent preferred collisions. If he were a physicist, he would have smashed atoms for a living—precisely the quality that doomed his marriages.

    "Forensics just about came to blows with the fire crew for making a mess of the crime scene," said Laurent. "Extracting evidence will be challenging in the extreme, but they've established one salient fact: clean prints off the doorknob to the room and the window cranks match prints on the room key, which match the left thumb and right index fingerprints of the victim—which, since you asked, are the only digits not reduced to jelly or blown into the canal. The torso was lodged in that tree"—he pointed—"and a leg knocked a guy off his bicycle." Laurent closed his notebook. "When I die, for pity's sake let it be in one piece."

    Across the Herengracht, a crowd had gathered; some watched from open windows. "Alright, then," said Poincaré. "We've got internally consistent prints, which is not the same as a positive ID. What are we doing to confirm the ID?"

    "Data from Boston is due tomorrow morning," said Laurent. "Oh—I nearly forgot." He opened a folder and produced a clear plastic evidence bag with a photograph, which he set, still in its bag, on the hood of a Mercedes half-crushed by a roof beam. "Fenster's— the victim's—prints are all over it." They gathered around the image.

    Several moments passed. "Come on, people. It's not a game if no one plays. There's a caption on the back. Two euros to the winner."

    Ludovici went first. "The spine of a mountain range. I flew over the Alps last week when I went home. Just like this—central spine fanning out to ridges."

    "Gisele?"

    "An angiogram. When my mother had a stroke, the doctors showed me a scan that looked something like this. It's a blood vessel, I think. But then again it could be a river with tributaries. Or the roots of a plant."

    "Wrong again. Henri?"

    "Spare us, Serge."

    Laurent flipped the photo and read the caption. "Lightning. Negative image." And then: " 'Series 3, Image A, WTO talk.' Apparently, there are other images we haven't found. Destroyed, I suppose." He surveyed the wreckage. "How did no one else manage to die? Did you hear, there was another explosion today—in Milan. Old-fashioned dynamite."

    "Milano?" said Ludovici. "Where?"

    "Galleria Vittorio Emanuele."

    "No. . . ." It was his birthplace. He dug into his jacket for a cell phone and left them to place a call.

    "Six people died in that one," said Laurent. "A man wearing robes called on Jesus to heal the world, then blew himself up. There's nothing remotely religious about our bombing, I suppose."

    De Vries thumbed through a sheaf of papers. "Nothing here about anyone wearing robes. I'll check into it. But did you say the reversed image of lightning was related to Fenster's talk? He was speaking on globalization, Serge. What's the connection?"

    Laurent smiled. "That's what we call a mystery, my dear."

Sunlight played across the floor of the bakery where Poincaré had come to gather his thoughts. The shop was quiet, a pair of café tables dominating the tiny space. The window display of fruit tarts and cookies had drawn Poincaré in, but he had chosen poorly. The proprietress, at first a model of Dutch hospitality, by small degrees suffocated him with attention: she cleaned his already spotless table as he began reviewing a long afternoon's case notes; she insisted on straightening a display of chocolates on a shelf by his shoulder; she even swept and mopped the floor, asking him to move. He stayed because this was the only coffee shop in the area and because he needed to sit with a cup of something warm.

    "A
third
espresso," she said. "You're certain?"

    He should have thanked her for the interruptions. What he had seen made too little sense, and sometimes he found that the straightest course to clarity required that he forget facts altogether and allow his mind to wander. This woman, at least, kept him from stitching one thought to the next.

    "One couldn't properly call this a body," he had told the medical examiner not forty minutes earlier. All afternoon—whether he was examining what remained of the apartment, working alongside a firefighter to retrieve the shoe caught high in a tree, or bending over a field microscope to examine a sliver of porcelain—the victim's remains had called to Poincaré. Not until the men in hazard suits were preparing to shovel what was left of the victim into a bag did he steel himself for a look.

    "Burn cases can be disturbing," Dr. Günter allowed. As medical examiner, she had taken charge of and controlled all access to the body at the crime scene. Before they met, Poincaré smelled her chewing gum from twenty paces and guessed she was the coroner, many of whom ended up addicted to mints of one sort or another. Something about the sweetness of decaying flesh followed them from the autopsy table, and oil of peppermint proved less complicated and less toxic than gin. "This one didn't suffer," she observed. "A man who knew what was coming would have turned away. He took the full impact here." With her telescoping pointer she touched what used to be the victim's chest, a cavity now blown open to the spinal column. "No lungs, no heart, no viscera: all tissues burned out. Notice that we see no impact wounds on the sides or back. He did not turn away."

    Poincaré focused on the tip of the metal rod, trying to hold off his nausea by regarding the corpse as he might an anatomical chart. "He's no less dead for taking it full on," he said.

    "True," replied Günter. "Care for a stick of gum?"

    He declined.

    "Henri, stop by my office on Sunday, and we'll review the case file. By then, I'll have received the DNA report from Boston and we'll have processed our own labs." She dropped the tarpaulin. "Dead is dead," she observed with all the emotion one musters for covering a pile of leaves. "I'll reconstruct the
how,
" she said, "and you, my friend, will reconstruct
who
and
why
. These will be the last favors anyone can do for him."

    He stared out the shop window to a small, bricked courtyard, contemplating what favors the world owed the dead. He had answered that question once when he spent the better part of two years hunting Banović. He glanced over his case notes and supposed he would be answering it again. "You'll get jittery with all the caffeine," the woman warned, setting down his espresso and yet another plate of cookies. "I use Sumatran beans, roasted in one kilo batches to concentrate potency. Here—you can smell the potency." She inhaled deeply. "Do you smell it? I would eat the cookies for ballast if nothing else. Did you know—"

    Poincaré pointed to the two plates, uneaten, already crowding the table. He held up a hand. "Please, no more."

    "But you get three with each cup. That's our special on Thursdays. Three cookies, one cup. Three for one. Did you read the sign?" She pointed to the counter.

    "My Dutch," he said, "is not very good."

    "No matter, I'll wrap them."

    "No, thank you. Please."

    "I insist. I make them right here." She leaned over to show him her latest batch. "This one I call the Fantine. Do you see the shape— the profile of a young woman wearing a bonnet. She's sweet but was wronged. This is why the lemon, for tartness. She's also angry, which explains the dash of cayenne."

    Poincaré stood to leave, and she grabbed his arm.

    "Alright, then. I'll just set these down on the counter and go to the kitchen."

    She retreated behind a curtain, and he reached for a newspaper folded on the table beside him, opening to the financial pages. Since he and Claire had bought a farm in the Dordogne, Poincaré was in the habit of checking the London and Paris stock exchanges to monitor the health of their investments. Between his salary and the several paintings she sold each year through galleries in Paris and New York, they had paid for their apartment in Lyon and for Etienne's schooling. Eight years earlier, free of debt and anticipating a serene, if not lavish, retirement, they had rejected the advice of two financial consultants and heavily mortgaged themselves to buy a vineyard in the south, complete with a leaky stone farmhouse. It made no sense, this projection of themselves into a bucolic future, for neither of them had farmed much more than harvesting tomatoes from a potted plant or two. Yet while on holiday that year, they amused themselves one afternoon by touring a property that sat on the crest of a hill overlooking working vineyards, a distant river, and an ancient village. It took them no more than fifteen minutes to say yes to an absurdity, and now Poincaré checked the markets daily, his hopes for early retirement waxing and waning with the fortunes of Airbus and Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd.

    As he folded the paper and prepared to leave the coffee shop, he noticed a news brief reporting on the murder of a gang counselor in Barcelona. The young woman, much admired by the police who employed her and beloved by the gangs whose members she counseled, had received citations of merit from the city and been acknowledged at an international conference on the prevention of youth violence. Murdered, then? The news reverberated beyond Barcelona, not the least reason being the circumstance in which the body was found: seated at her desk at the community center, a single gunshot to the back of the head and a note pinned to her blouse quoting Matthew 24: 24.