No One You Know (19 page)

Twenty-seven

F
IRST NAME
S
TEVE
,” T
HORPE SAID, “LAST
name S-t-r-a-c-h-m-a-n.”

We were sitting at Simple Pleasures out in the avenues on a Monday night. I’d had an appointment earlier in the evening with the owner, Ahmed, who had been buying his beans from Golden Gate Coffee since the eighties. Although we still provided the beans, he had recently begun roasting them himself in a storefront two doors down from the popular café. The beautiful bronze machine was situated right in front of the window, and around four in the afternoon, neighborhood kids would gather on the sidewalk to watch it rumble to life. It was live music night, and a folksinger named Patrick Wolf was setting up in the little alcove beyond the kitchen.

I jotted the name Steve Strachman into my notebook, and read it back to Thorpe to make sure I’d spelled it correctly. “It rings a bell,” I said.

“He was a grad student in the math department at Stanford,” Thorpe said. “He was a contender for the Hilbert Prize.”

“The one Lila was supposed to get.”

Thorpe nodded.

The Hilbert Prize was awarded in the February of even-numbered years to a promising graduate student for work related to any one of David Hilbert’s famous unsolved problems. Nineteen-ninety was rumored to be Lila’s year. The prize had been a sort of beacon on the horizon in the months leading up to her death. She was giddy about the prospect of winning it.

“At the same time Lila was working on Goldbach,” Thorpe explained, “Strachman was working on the Hodge Conjecture. Not one of the Hilbert problems, mind you, but Strachman believed that progress on Hodge might ultimately shed light on the Riemann Hypothesis. Like Lila, he was somewhat of a prodigy. He’d made a name for himself as a high school student during the International Mathematics Olympiad in 1982. From what I gathered during my interviews, he wasn’t well-liked at Stanford. He was arrogant, competitive, used to irk the other students by trying to hone in on what they were doing, listen in on conversations without ever adding anything to the soup. Mathematicians as a group are extremely interconnected, constantly sharing information. But Strachman was notoriously cagey. Anytime he came up with an idea that he considered particularly interesting or valuable, he mailed it to himself in a sealed envelope so he’d have evidence of exactly when he’d first made note of it. He was so paranoid that someone would try to steal his ideas that he kept his math notebooks, and all those sealed envelopes, in a locked drawer at home. And here’s an odd little detail—the cops once came out to the house on a domestic disturbance call. Seems he caught his mother trying to break the lock while she was cleaning his room, and he went ballistic.”

“He lived with his mother?”

“Indeed he did.”

“Strike one,” I said. “Then again, Lila lived at home, and I never thought twice about it.”

“Right, but he was a guy—it’s different.
And
he was older.”

Wolf began to sing. He sounded good.

“Let’s move outside,” Thorpe said. “It’s getting noisy in here.”

On my way out I said hello to Wolf’s girlfriend—a preschool teacher named Mary—and to Peggy and Matt, who owned the Pilates studio across the street. I loved that about San Francisco cafés: spend enough time in any one of them, and you started to recognize the faces, learn the personal stories.

The temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees in the last hour. The fog, which had been gathering over the ocean when I arrived in the early evening, was advancing up the avenues. When the fog was low to the ground like this, it reminded me of the cloud forests of Costa Rica and Peru. I pulled on my jacket and sat down opposite Thorpe at a small wooden table. He leaned over to pet a shaggy white dog that was tied to a parking meter.

“Are you cold, little guy?” His tenderness caught me off guard. Then he glanced up, as if to make sure I saw him, and it occurred to me that his affection with the dog, like so many other things about him, might actually be a calculated move to manage his image. After all, if he loved dogs so much, wouldn’t he own one?

“This Strachman,” I said. “So he was weird and competitive. That description fits a lot of people I know.”

“Granted. But listen to this. A few days after Lila died, Strachman asked one of his professors about the prize.”

“No crime there.”

Thorpe leaned forward. “His exact question, according to my source, was, ‘Who’s next in line for the Hilbert Prize now that Enderlin is out of the picture?’”

“And you didn’t find this important enough to put in your book?”

“I did put it in,” Thorpe said. “My editor cut it. She thought it confused matters to throw yet another Stanford mathematician into the mix. She had a point; a reader can only keep up with so many characters before they all start to run together.”

“Who was your source?”

“The professor to whom Strachman posed the question.”

According to Thorpe, everyone had known for months that the prize would go to either Lila or to Strachman. They had been neck and neck. But following the success of a paper Lila presented at Columbia in November, the odds had shifted; Lila’s victory was almost certain. Although she never would have admitted it, I knew that Lila wanted that prize so much she could almost taste it.

“Did Strachman win the prize?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

I braced myself for the news: that he was a world-renowned mathematician, that the Hilbert Prize had paved the way for grander successes, that he had proved the Hodge Conjecture and become something of a star. He’d be well into his forties now, living off the largesse of his earlier accomplishments. But I had it all wrong.

“He gave up math a long time ago. Tried his hand at engineering, and when that didn’t pan out he became a contractor. He was in the news a couple of years ago for repairing the Treasure Island on-ramp to the Bay Bridge after that fuel tanker disaster.”

“You’re kidding. It’s
that
Strachman?”

“Yep.”

The story had been big at the time. A truck carrying three hundred gallons of fuel had crashed through a barrier in the middle of the night, sending a fireball shooting high into the sky. The driver had been killed, but what really caught the public’s attention was that the much-used on-ramp had been destroyed. With one crash, a tanker truck had turned a twenty-minute commute into three hours, minimum. Strachman’s company had won the bid to rebuild the ramp. It was supposed to take six months, but Strachman did it in thirty days. The entire Bay Bridge had been closed down on Labor Day weekend to complete the project early, and there was a lot of speculation in the news that the bridge couldn’t possibly reopen by Tuesday. But folks heading home late Monday night found that the bridge had actually reopened eleven hours ahead of the new schedule. It was this last bit of engineering finesse that had made Strachman somewhat of a local celebrity. His picture had appeared on the front page of the
Chronicle,
under the headline, “Most Efficient Man in SF.”

What was it about the Bay Area, that people always stuck around? The place was a vortex, an inverted pleasure dome on the banks of the frigid Pacific. Despite the outrageous cost of living, the gloomy fog, the certainty of an impending major earthquake, and the blight of homelessness, the Bay Area behaved like a giant swatch of flypaper. I couldn’t remember how many people had told me over the years that they’d arrived in San Francisco with a plan of staying for a couple of years, but had ended up digging their heels in for decades. Would-be rock stars, genius mathematicians, struggling writers, aging hippies—it seemed no one could find it in their hearts to leave. Maybe it had something to do with the water that flowed down from Hetch Hetchy. Maybe it was the climate. Or the food. Maybe it was the music. No matter—I understood completely.

T
HAT NIGHT, AFTER LEAVING THORPE, I WENT
home and found Strachman’s problem in Lila’s notebook. At the top of one page she had written
Hodge Conjecture,
and below it:

Let
X
be a projective complex manifold. Then every Hodge class on
X
is a linear combination with rational coefficients of the cohomology classes of complex subvarieties of
X.

It was impossible to understand a problem when I couldn’t even comprehend its most basic terms. It felt like reading an excruciatingly complicated passage in a foreign language.

That night, I read every page of Lila’s notes on the Hodge Conjecture. I copied them out and read them again. I looked up the problem online, parsing each of its parts, bit by bit. I discovered that the conjecture remained open, and was considered so difficult and so important that a million-dollar prize awaited anyone who could prove it. I found several different math sites which approached the problem with varying degrees of complexity, and studied each one until my vision blurred. I stayed up all night. In the morning, I was still no closer to understanding. It was the same way I felt about the problem of Lila’s murder. I could come at it from every angle. I could look at every possibility, compose any number of different stories. I could even turn the page upside down for a completely new perspective, as Lila used to do when she was stuck.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Einstein said. I had found this quote, along with several others, written in tiny cursive in the hidden margins of Lila’s notebook. It was as if Lila had gathered these bits of wisdom and stashed them away—encouragement, perhaps, for those days when a problem seemed insurmountable. I suspected that Lila’s genius had lain in her fierce imagination, her ability to envision things that she had not yet been taught, to put seemingly disparate concepts together in order to come up with something meaningful. Ultimately, I feared, my own imagination was not up to the task of figuring out what had happened to Lila. The problem might simply be beyond my means. Nonetheless, I had to try. I had to keep looking until I found the answer, or came to a complete dead end.

I ran my fingers over the page, brought the notebook to my face, and breathed in the musty smell of the paper, the very faint scent of lead. The meeting with McConnell had turned my life upside down. But in a way it had brought Lila back to me. This object from her life, this record of her days, was a window through which I could glimpse my sister as she had been at her best, her happiest. For so long, the missing notebook had nagged at me. I couldn’t stand the idea that the book into which she had poured all her greatest ideas might have ended up in a landfill, or worse, in the hands of the person who had killed her. Having it back provided an enormous sense of relief. More than that, it made me feel closer to her than I had in years.

Twenty-eight

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING AT
G
OLDEN
Gate Coffee, Dora wasn’t sitting in her usual place at the front desk. The cupping room was also empty. I pulled on the required paper cap and opened the door to the warehouse, where Reggie was feeding a batch of beans into the roaster. I had to shout to be heard over the noise of the machine. “Where is everybody?”

Reggie pointed over his shoulder.

“What’s going on?”

He grinned and shrugged.

In the holding room, Jennifer Wilson and the warehouse foreman, Bobby Love, were standing in a circle with Mike and Dora. The group was talking animatedly with someone else whose back was to me. “Ellie, look who’s here!” Dora said.

He turned around and smiled. He looked good, as always. Jeans, black sweater, unusual boots, messy hair.

“Hey, girl,” Henry said. “Long time no see.”

“Hi,” I said, and then, because it had barely been audible the first time, I repeated too loudly and cheerfully, “Hi!”

I moved into the group. Henry pulled me into a bear hug. I squeezed back.

Since the night Henry disappeared in Guatemala three years before, there had been many times when I’d imagined our reunion. But I’d never envisioned it like this, with a small audience of our friends. I never imagined I’d be dressed in jeans and a formless sweater, wearing a stupid paper hat.

Dora caught my eye and pointed at her tooth, the universal indicator that I had lipstick on mine. I rubbed my teeth with a finger.

“A little déjà vu?” Mike said. Everyone knew the story of how Henry and I met, right here in this warehouse seven years before. That day, he’d been interviewing for a job, and Mike had taken him around to meet everyone. Then, as now, I’d been wearing the paper hat. It wasn’t the kind of first impression I wanted to make. Moments after introducing us, Mike had been called to the office. As soon as Henry and I were alone together, he said, “The hat’s a good look for you. Emphasizes your dimples.”

“If you’re saying that so I’ll put in a good word with the boss,” I said, “I should warn you I have absolutely no pull around here.”

“I don’t care. Want to see Graham Parker with me this weekend at the Great American Music Hall?”

I already had plans, but I knew at that moment I was going to cancel them. When I finished showing Henry around the warehouse, Mike still hadn’t come back, so we walked outside into the sunlight.

I pulled off my hat. “I like that look even better,” Henry had said.

That afternoon, I told Mike he’d be a fool not to hire Henry.

At the Great American Music Hall, during a break between sets, Henry told me the story of Francisco de Melho Palheta, the Portuguese Brazilian official who was called upon to mediate a border dispute between French and Dutch Guiana in 1727. Although Palheta was thought to be a neutral party, in truth he wanted desperately to get his hands on Guiana’s coveted coffee seeds, which could not be legally exported.

“So how did he do it?” I asked. My hand lay on the table between us.

“He seduced the French governor’s wife,” Henry said, touching the tips of my fingers lightly with his own. “When he left, she gave him a bouquet of flowers in which she had hidden a few coffee cherries. They ended up in Brazil.” He moved his hand so that it covered mine completely. “Have you ever heard Rumi’s poem about coffee?”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to start reciting poetry.”

“‘When the black spirits pour inside us,’” Henry said, speaking so softly I had to lean forward to hear him, “‘Then the spirit of God and air/ And all that is wondrous within/ Moves us through the night, never-ending.’”

If it had been anyone else, I might have laughed in his face. But that was Henry. He had a gift for delivery.

Now he was back, and I didn’t know how to act around him anymore. This was the man with whom I had hoped to make a life, with whom I’d thought I would have a child. Standing beside him in the warehouse, hearing his voice and breathing in the sand-and-pinecones scent of his skin, I was reminded once again that my feelings for him were not merely nostalgic.

In my addled state, I picked up enough of the ensuing conversation to understand that he’d just moved back to San Francisco from the East Coast, and that he was starting his own café. He wanted to buy his beans from us.

Mike excused himself for a meeting, clasping Henry firmly on the shoulders. “We’re glad to have you back,” he said. “I never did think you’d last long in New York. Blizzards, deli-style sandwiches, who needs that stuff?”

“We’ll see.”

“I’m going to leave Ellie in charge of you,” Mike said. “There’s some great coffee coming out of Nicaragua. She’ll tell you all about it.” The others excused themselves, too, leaving me and Henry alone together.

“You haven’t changed,” Henry said.

“Neither have you.” My mouth was dry. I had that old feeling I’d always had with him, like I wanted to get closer. Even during those last few months together, when we were fighting so much, the need to touch his skin and feel his hands on me never diminished.

“I’m actually heading out,” he said. “I have to go sign the lease on the new place. Want to have dinner on Friday?”

I couldn’t believe he would ask so casually, as if he’d never left. As if the last three years hadn’t happened.

“I’d love to, but I already have plans,” I said. And it was true. Ben Fong-Torres had called. He’d found the tape Billy Boudreaux gave him in 1999. He thought I might like to hear it.

We walked outside. The fog hung low over the buildings, and the world felt cool and quiet. There was a car parked just outside the door, a silver Prius.

“This is me,” Henry said, putting a hand on top of the car.

“You’ve gone green.”

“It’s a good city car,” he said, “pretty zippy. I still couldn’t bring myself to give up the Jeep, though. It’s sitting on the street outside my place as we speak. I have to move it every couple of days so I won’t get a ticket.”

“I loved that Jeep.”

“We were in an accident about a year ago in upstate New York,” he said. “The Jeep behaved like a dream. I was actually in the hospital for a couple of weeks. I’d probably be dead if I’d been driving this little thing.”

My first thought was,
What would I have done if I’d received news that Henry was dead?
And my second thought was,
Why is he using the plural pronoun?

For three years I’d wondered what had happened to him, what exactly had gone wrong. Dozens of times, I’d replayed that final fight in my mind, and had admonished myself for going out instead of staying in the hotel room with him to work it out. I wanted to ask him what had happened, why he had left, whether he had simply stopped loving me. And if so, when? But I couldn’t ask. Instead, we were talking about cars.

I looked at his left hand. He wasn’t wearing a ring. And then I said it, because I couldn’t stop myself. “Who’s we?”

“Come again?”

“You said
we
were in an accident.” Now I wished I hadn’t asked, but it was too late to back out.

“The Jeep,” he said, grinning. “I meant me and the Jeep.”