All Cry Chaos (35 page)

    Serge was vanishing. How thin life would be without him.

    They listened to music until the wine arrived. After a second glass, Poincaré imagined sitting beside his old friend at the stern rail of a ship, watching the wake churn in the moonlight.

    "Lyon wants me out," he said.

    "You got that memo, too? I suppose we're now men of a certain age. . . . You know," said Laurent, staring out the window, "not one of my wives could compete with the adrenaline rush I got from being out in the field. All four of them needed me to come home. I needed to be out here, and I got exactly what I asked for. Now I'll be cared for by strangers in the end. To hell with that. I'm going to die on top of a woman, not in a hospital."

    The DJ switched from salsa to merengue, and Serge began tapping out the rhythm with the silver nugget on his finger. "I don't care if Las Vegas is a fantasy. I love the place!" A fresh fit of coughing bent him over, and this time Poincaré saw a red stain on his handkerchief. Laurent noted the change in Poincaré's face and said: "Do not fuck me up by getting sentimental. This is hard enough."

    Poincaré closed his eyes.

    "I'll tell you about my work—it will be a diversion."

    "Go ahead. But we'll need another bottle, which I can't afford."

    Laurent held up the empty and motioned to a waitress. "You already know how much I detest the Soldiers of Rapture. But give credit where it's due: their marketing, if you can call it that, has been nothing short of brilliant. How many people could you find who won't be looking to the sky on August 15
^th
?"

    Poincaré was staring through the arch of his steepled fingers, watching the fountains. "The countdown calendar I saw at the airport this evening read twenty-five. I've been in five cities in as many days. The calendars are everywhere."

    "Exactly my point," said Laurent. "There are three strains of Rapturians, best I can tell. The harmless ones you see preaching on street corners in robes wouldn't understand Christian theology if they stubbed their toes on Saint Augustine's grave. The earnest ones, also on street corners, actually know their gospels and are spreading the Good News best they can. These are the original Soldiers. I think of them as Jehovah's Witnesses in robes. Finally we have the schismatics, in two delicious flavors: the ones killing doers of good works to hasten the Second Coming. They scare the shit out of me."

    "But not as much as the suicide bombers for Christ?"

    "They're total lone wolves, Henri. The schismatics meet in groups to work up their hit lists. The bombers have absolutely no connection to the Rapturians. They've got no religious or political agenda, and at the moment they're putting on robes and shouting
Jesus
because it gives their pathology a higher calling. What amazes me is the countdown to August 15
^th
. Everyone knows the date—it's spread like a flu pandemic. Same model."

    Poincaré sat up.

    "Don't look so surprised. Mathematicians study rumor the way epidemiologists study disease. They use computer models to simulate spread and discover ways to block it. In one case you've got a virus and in the other, a rumor of the Second Coming. Both leave markers: people with a fever or the appearance of countdown calendars. The dynamics are remarkably similar. When you map these data points, something interesting emerges. You could be looking at the plot of a rumor infiltrating a workplace, a city, a county, a region—and even a nation or continent. Set the graphs side by side, and you can't distinguish the spread at one level from the spread at others. Ditto for flu. Do you remember, in Amsterdam, how Quito told us about the coastline of Christchurch, New Zealand? How—if he enlarged one section of the coast—we couldn't tell which was the one-kilometer slice and which, the forty kilometer? Same thing with influenza and rumors. When you look at a part—"

    Poincaré knew the rest.

    Deep in his pocket, he found himself working the contours of the buffalo nickel as he might a polished stone. He rubbed the coin thinking a genie might appear, rubbed it for all the luck that had turned bad and—in this casino, why not—rubbed it for new luck, better luck. For that's what the world turned on, he decided. He had tried goodness and right behavior, and where had that gotten him or the ones he loved? He released the coin and allowed that something he had resisted for a long time was demanding a name.

    Across the boulevard, reflected in the waters, Poincaré saw gold atoms measured in microns and galaxies measured in light years. He saw rivers in mountains and mountains in trees and lightning strikes in the lungs of a friend who would never again draw a full breath. For weeks, the deepest of deep structures had sung to Poincaré like an angelic host, and he could resist no more. Had this casino been a church, he would have uttered a Name. But Poincaré could not—not yet—because across the ocean his family was broken and in the seat beside him his friend was dying. Would that Name have permitted the murder of a child? The suffering of innocents? For thirty years he had watched good men and women stricken, raising their hands to Heaven. He uttered a cry that Laurent mistook for a question.

    "I'll tell you why a rumor spreads, Henri: because we demand a path through chaos. I'm dying. Don't you think it would be pleasant for me to accept the Rapture and the prospect of sitting at our Lord's right hand?"

    "You don't believe?" said Poincaré.

    "I don't believe."

    "You think there's nothing after this?"

    "Nothing at all," said Laurent. "And along come the Rapturians who offer eternal peace. You grab hold and you're happy. I could but I won't. Was it ever different?"

    "I don't know," said Poincaré.

    "Do you believe there was a Golden Age? An Eden—a world without suffering?"

"I don't know a thing anymore."

    "Well, it's
never
been different. This world's been about to end forever, and I could bore you with a catalogue of the Doomsday cults who thought so because I've researched them all. When we wake up on August 16
^th
, the Rapturians will become one more fringe sect in a long line. The Bombers-for-Christ will stop bombing, the schismatics will stop their assassinations, and life will return to normal— whatever that is—until the expiration of the Mayan calendar. That will launch a new hallucination with contours all its own that will look, if I live to see it, just like the contours of this Rapturian madness. Round it goes, Henri. Different names, the same thing."

    Poincaré walked two fingers down his arm. "A path through chaos. I like that. . . . I could use a path straight through the Fenster case. If everyone's telling the truth, I've got nothing. I've got a hard drive with secrets and one in a couple of billion billion chances of cracking it. I haven't found my granddaughter's killer. I believe everyone is lying to me, Serge."

    "Well,
that
is progress. You must be getting close!" Laurent raised a glass. "To my dean of Inspectors, Henri Poincaré. My Inspector General of the Corps de Mines, Keeper of the family flame. A miner! To Henri, to digging!!"

    They clinked glasses.

    Poincaré could stand it no longer and grabbed Laurent's boney arm. "Come stay with Claire and me. We'll set up a room. Better yet, we'll put you in one of the horse stalls where you belong. Don't die alone, Serge."

    Laurent shook Poincaré loose and reached for a cigarette. He struck a match and took a drag, deep as his ruined lungs would allow. "Just how stupid are you?" he said.

    "You're still smoking—and asking me this?"

    "I'll tell you how stupid you are. You're stupid enough to pull yourself along with what's left of your family down into my hole— not that I'm going to occupy it much longer. Last I checked, your hole was deep enough." He looked over Poincaré's shoulder to the lounge entrance and waved at two women. "Ah! My 11 PM appointment. Ladies!" He motioned them across the dance floor. "Come meet my friend, Henri. He's quite famous in policing circles. Also French."

    The women were showpieces, real enough but as much a part of the Las Vegas cartoon as the half-sized Eiffel Tower. The one who looked like Marilyn Monroe slid her arm around Laurent's waist. The other one said: "Come party, Hank. Serge needs us both tonight, but we've got friends."

    "No, my dears. He's got important work to do. Big questions to settle." Laurent kissed one on the top of the head and whispered: "If you can keep a secret, he's digging. Don't tell." He peeled fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills onto the table. Looking directly at Poincaré, he said: "Goodbye, Henri. I don't suppose we'll be seeing each other again." He turned from the lounge, a woman on each arm, and was gone.

In the corridor that evening, a woman giggled: "Bobby, stop! I'll unsnap it when we get to the room!"

    Lit by the glow of his computer screen, Poincaré had once again laid everything he owned on the Fenster case across a hotel bed: folders each for Roy, Bell, Quito, Rainier, Chambi, Family Services of Minnesota, JPL, Randal Young, the Ambassade bombing, Günther's autopsy report, and Agent Johnson's fingerprint and DNA analysis. He sat in the middle of it all with his laptop and Fenster's hard drive. The key to the password if not the password itself would be found in some combination of these folders—or nowhere. Sixtyseven nonrandom characters, ninety-five possibilities for each: if it was a number known to mathematicians, a constant or a series, he would never find it. This much he had already demonstrated. A phrase, then, or nothing.

    
How would Jules Henri have approached this puzzle
, he wondered. His great-grandfather had been calling to him this entire case, so why not invoke his ghost once and for all.
Grand-père—you who were
blessed with a gift for pointing to large truths hiding in plain sight . . .
take a look
. Poincaré placed his hands on the files.
What is it? What
am I missing
?

    Poincaré had seen it in the fountains of the Bellagio. He turned to another page of notes, where he had recorded the phrasings Fenster had posted above his captions.
The same name
.
Difference? Math
ematics is an art. H
e turned to the inside of yet another folder, where in a careful hand he had copied what Jules Henri had observed a century before and what Fenster had taken on as his own life's work. Guiding the tip of his pencil, he counted words. Twelve. He counted the characters in the words. Fifty-five. He counted the characters plus the spaces between the words: sixty-six. He added the period: sixty-seven.

    Taped to the computer for all to see, hiding in plain sight like every other mystery Jules Henri and Fenster had plumbed, a declaration deeper than biology, older than this world or any: M
athematics
is the art of giving the same name to different things.
This time when Poincaré typed the password, his computer screen blinked and a file opened like a rose at its appointed hour.

The dream was vivid enough that he felt the sun full on his face— except it wasn't his face or possibly his but also his mother's or his father's, he couldn't tell. The emotions were his own, then theirs, then his again. The three of them had spent a morning hiking the lower elevations of Mt. Blanc, climbing meadow trails that with each turn presented another stunning view of the mountain. The air was bright and clear; the wind blew a steady plume off the peak, the edelweiss was in bloom. Twelve years old, Poincaré climbed steadily, happily. At one switchback he paused to check on his parents and found they had stopped—to look at him. It was at this point in the dream he became one of them, or both, and saw himself ahead, waving. Then he was himself once more, wondering why his mother on so magnificent a day would appear to be crying, yet happy, as she held his father's hand and waved. Then he was below once more, holding hands, looking up at himself framed against the meadow and mountain with the broad sky behind, and he felt a terrible ache that was also beautiful and sweet, and he woke in Claire's studio knowing exactly what his parents knew: that what we love most in this world, we lose.

    He had taken a late dinner and climbed to the studio and collapsed, waking at first light with his strange dream. He planned to stay in Lyon long enough to renew the lease, meet with the new director at Interpol, and catch a train to Fonroque. After the attacks, he could not bring himself to visit the studio or conduct any business on his wife's behalf. But the lease was now up and he would need to inspect the premises and come to terms with the landlord. Claire would not be painting here anytime soon, and it made no sense to renew now that they lived in the south—especially given the costs. Just the same.

    She kept a single bed and a hot plate for the manic, productive times when she refused to interrupt work by returning home for meals or sleep. Poincaré had learned the hard way not to disturb her. Her creative bursts would begin with a note that she was contemplating a new piece and would be spending some time alone at the studio. Once, after a four-day absence, he made the mistake of climbing to the garret and knocking on the door. She answered, saw him looking past her to the work on the easel, and then marched directly to the canvas and slashed it with a palette knife. "Not ready!" she yelled. "Not ready!!" They agreed during a more reasoned moment, when she was not painting, that she would leave a message each day on their answering machine. If he found it, he would not interrupt her; no message meant she was dead and he should come to collect the body. She apologized for the Jekyll and Hyde in her and explained that she had tried to shield him but that, in any event, he knew what he was signing on for.