All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  Everything was fine, he assured her. "What's happening there?" In fact, she had answered his question by answering the phone. He relaxed.

  "Nothing's changed. I told you we'd be OK, and we are."

  "Etienne and the family . . . you've checked?"

  "They're also fine. Really. Come, kiss me goodnight. I was just turning in. Call earlier tomorrow."

  Poincaré made a sound with his lips. When he flipped his phone shut, he imagined lying beside his wife in their bed at Fonroque, listening to the crickets and to the field mice rooting around the foundation of the house, looking for a morsel and a warm bed of their own. Perhaps this arrangement could work, he thought. He would call, she would answer, and all would be well.

  CHAPTER 13

  Poincaré groped for his phone, unsure of what continent he was on. "What?" he mumbled, knocking over a glass of water. He sat up and shielded his eyes against a sunburst at the edges of a hotel curtain.

  "Henri, news."

  "Paolo?"

  "Borislav's real name is Christof Mladic, and he was Banović's number two in Patriots for Greater Serbia. Interpol issued a Red Notice for his arrest two years ago, but the Dutch border police missed him both coming and going. I found him in Banja Luka, living above a laundromat." A delay, clicks and static, then a reconstituted voice: "It's true, I'm afraid. Banović bought four contracts: on Claire, Etienne, Lucille, and the children—he counted them as one. He may or may not have taken a contract on you. I've alerted Albert."

  "Their identities, Paolo. Who?"

  More data would not change grim facts; but he listened for some detail, some overlooked nuance that might suggest a defense or, better still, an angle of attack. He swung his legs to the edge of the bed.

  "That's a problem. Mladic didn't know the contractors. He worked through a middleman to add a layer of security. At Banović's instruction, he passed names, addresses, and money to the middleman, who then made the arrangements."

  "Made?"

  "I was three days too late. The contractors are likely solo operators from formerly Eastern bloc countries, ex-Stasi types. I'm in the process of locating the middleman now. He's Hungarian, and I'm in Budapest looking for him. Mladic was able to give me that much before his accident."

  Poincaré did not ask.

  "This information is solid, Henri. I'll call with news as it develops, but I thought you should know."

  Poincaré dropped his head into his hands, for nothing he could do on this side of the Atlantic or that could alter Banović's decree. He dialed Monforte, who assured him that the news merely confirmed the wisdom of arrangements already in place. "Ludovici's report changes nothing," the director told him. "Ambassadors don't get the kind of coverage we're giving your family. Trust the system, Henri."

  Poincaré had entrusted his life to that system; but he demanded something better for his family, a guarantee that did not exist. If prime ministers and presidents could not evade determined assassins, how much easier a target, then, a child on the swings at a park or Etienne, stepping into his car on a run for milk? He showered, found a quick cup of coffee, and read enough of the Boston Globe to confirm that his personal world was not the only one in collapse. Ethiopian separatists were executing Chinese oil riggers; Sunnis had drilled holes into Shiites, calling it God's work; Shiites were decapitating Sunnis in the name of that same God and dumping bodies in alleyways; and in a spot of local color, a college student in Massachusetts had murdered thirteen classmates. Just because.

  Poincaré left the hotel. The day was clear, and a bright sun had turned the Charles into a reflecting pool on the surface of which rowers glided in pairs and foursomes, nimble as water spiders. He climbed a footbridge and positioned himself mid-river, the cities of Cambridge to one side and Boston to the other waking around him. Cyclists and joggers plied the footpaths; traffic buzzed along the boulevards. He watched and he waited, until he could wait no longer.

  "Claire?"

  He could see her smile on the hammered surface of the water. Talk, he instructed himself. She had begun a new canvas? Excellent. The children were learning to swim. And Etienne—he won a commission to design a new wing for a museum in Brussels. That they were living ordinary lives reassured him not at all. He scrubbed the anxiety from his voice. Face-to-face, he would have given it away. He could hear her breathing.

  "Claire?"

  "Yes, Henri?"

  A rower emerged from beneath the bridge in a long glide. The oars dipped, the back straightened. A surge of power. With reasonable connections, he could be home by dinner.

  "Nothing," he said. "I just wanted to hear your voice."

  NOTWITHSTANDING THE uncertainties in France, Poincaré had come to the States with a full agenda: to learn more about Fenster and his work; pin a history to Madeleine Rainier; discuss rocket fuel and its off-label use as an explosive with a propulsions expert. Before Ludovici's call, it had all seemed manageable in a three-week visit that began in Boston and ended at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Now, just arrived, he wanted to cross the Atlantic and erect steel barriers around his family.

  Barely a mile out of Harvard Square, he compared the address on a slip of paper with the less-than-promising match before him, a badly weathered door sandwiched between The Bombay Bistro and Mike's True Tattoo. He pressed a buzzer and listened to a receptionist mangle his name over a call box wired sometime before the Eisenhower administration.

  "Ponky—who?"

  "Raaay," he said, leaning closer. "Pwon – Ka – Raaay."

  "Interwhat?"

  After too many minutes of this, he must have uttered the right combination of syllables, for a lock on the door buzzed and he stepped inside to find Peter Roy at the third-floor landing, ready with an apology. "My wife's mother," he shrugged. "If I fire her, I'll have to find another bed to sleep in."

  Roy could have been one of the rowers Poincaré had seen. Lanky and graceful, he showed his visitor into a modest reception area appointed with a worn leather couch and a few folding chairs. Across the room, Roy's mother-in-law sat behind a government surplus desk ready to leap at his throat or bake him cookies, he couldn't tell which. Skin hung in heavy folds from her neck and upper arms, and even from a distance Poincaré could smell the powder she had dusted herself with that morning.

  Roy shouted his introduction. When she cupped a hand to her ear, Poincaré understood their tussle at the call box.

  "He's French?" she said, brightening. "I went to France thirtyseven years ago with my first husband. We saw the Eif—"

  "Gladys, I'm sure the inspector is interested but he's very busy right now. Maybe later." He nudged his guest towards the conference room, but not before Poincaré reached for the old woman's hand and kissed it. She was just the age to have fallen for Maurice Chevalier in Gigi.

  "Think of her as the mother of the woman you love," he said moments later, taking a seat.

  "In theory," answered Roy.

  The conference room had at some point in its recent history been an oversized closet. Poincaré could see poorly patched screw holes for coat hooks and brackets, still attached, to hold poles. At the plastic table before him, he counted five folding chairs. The walls were bare, save for two diplomas in gilded frames—one from Princeton and the other from Columbia Law School. The room's single window opened to a brick wall across a narrow ventilation shaft.

  "I've got nothing more to offer than when we spoke by phone," said Roy.

  This was not a problem, Poincaré assured him. He had come to learn about James Fenster from people who actually knew the man, even if slightly. "One can't investigate a name," he said, reaching for a notepad.

  "I'll try to help, then. . . . I met Dr. Fenster only once," he began. "For about ninety minutes—but that was enough to form an impression. He arrived one day, without an appointment, for help completing a will he had printed off the Internet. I never paid much attention to math, so I hadn't exactly heard of him. But he made such an impact that after he le
ft I looked him up and confirmed what was fairly obvious: the man was the kind of brilliant that has to slow itself down to interact with the world. Fenster was altogether friendly, but as you spoke with him you got the sense he was downshifting to a speed you might have a hope of understanding. He had this way of taking fifteen or twenty seconds to frame a simple sentence, like—Yes, I printed this document off the Internet. You heard it and thought you were the one who had missed something obvious. There were galaxies spinning in his head. I knew as much even before I read the bio and discovered all the papers and awards.

  "Don't misunderstand," Roy continued. "The man wasn't patronizing. You could see him trying to communicate, but at some level he simply couldn't. Put him in a computer lab or a library, stand him in front of a lecture hall, but heaven forbid you should invite him to a cocktail party. He was a rail thin six feet with a halo of blondish, curly hair—at twenty-nine still boyish looking. Meek socially, ferocious intellectually. The very last person on earth someone would kill out of malice."

  "So people say, Mr. Roy. Your only business with him was the will?"

  "Peter, please. That's right." The attorney rolled his sleeves and folded heavily calloused hands. In fact, Poincaré noted, he may have been a rower.

  "Who was the beneficiary?"

  "The estate's settled, so there's no harm in telling. A $60,000 term life policy became seed money for an after-school Math League in the City of Cambridge. Dr. Fenster said he didn't believe in insurance. The money came from a university policy that he couldn't have disclaimed if he wanted to. He needed merely to fill in a beneficiary."

  "No family, then?"

  Poincaré knew the answer but waited for confirmation.

  "None that I could find. Fenster didn't list anyone with Harvard's human resources department or with any office at Princeton. In its admissions files, Princeton had a mailing address for him in Ohio, so I tried that. Nothing. So I engaged a private investigator in Cleveland who discovered that he had been a ward of the state—bounced through five foster homes over eleven years. The investigator contacted each provider and heard more or less the same story. Fenster was not considered adoptable—apparently not the son fathers want to play ball with or take on fishing trips. The Department of Youth Services wouldn't release his birth records without a court order, and I decided to drop the inquiry since the sums involved were not large. I would have needed to hire a local attorney and in the process eat up half of his estate filing papers, so I let it go and just last week issued checks to the Math League, once the will cleared probate.

  "But a certificate of birth exists?"

  "The denial was automatic, so I doubt anyone checked. In some adoption cases, not even the adoptee can access the records. I don't know if that's the case here. We never got that far."

  "Well, presumably he was born. I'll have Interpol request the file as part of my investigation." Poincaré made a note to himself.

  "It would make no difference," said Roy. "You'll need a court order. Of course I'll e-mail you the full investigator's report, but I can tell you now it makes for some pretty grim reading. I don't doubt the foster families' hearts were in the right place, but they didn't know what to do with that kind of intelligence. School was Fenster's one anchor, and even there teachers didn't know how to handle him. I'd say that between the ages of four and fifteen, he suffered from benign neglect until Princeton rescued him with a full scholarship. He completed his doctorate at twenty, went to teach at Harvard the next year, and was tenured three years after that. Not only did Fenster have no family or siblings, he almost certainly had no social life here in Cambridge. As a first-year professor, he couldn't very well socialize with undergraduates—people his own age. And as a young twenty-something he wasn't going to be accepted as a social equal by his colleagues, regardless of his gifts. He was an adult to the undergraduates and a child to his faculty colleagues. He never fit."

  "Was James Fenster his birth name?"

  "That much I know. The first family—the one that planned to adopt him—gave him the name James, or 'Jimmy' Fenster. They actually gave him back after a six-month trial, citing incompatibility. There had been some glitch in the paperwork, and when the time came to make the adoption official, the family balked. Then it was off to four more homes. The name stuck, though. Getting admitted to Princeton was the best thing that happened to Fenster. Altogether rescued him."

  Poincaré reasoned that at some point Fenster must have turned a corner socially. The engagement to Madeleine Rainier, though broken, proved that much. "Was he nervous around you?" Poincaré asked. "Did you sense that he thought himself in danger of any sort?"

  "No. He seemed calm enough."

  "Medical issues, then. Why make a will at so young an age? Was there any indication of sickness?"

  Roy shrugged. "He looked healthy in a sunken-chest sort of way. After the bombing, the police reviewed his medical records— apparently, he used the university's medical and dental schools for routine visits. All that looked fine, I was told. As for his state of mind, he seemed perfectly at ease about making a will. Absolutely no hint of crisis. Fenster sat where you're sitting and said he found me in the yellow pages and now that he was here, he appreciated—what did he call it—my austerity. You may have noticed all the mahogany and framed art in my office. My clients regard my services the way they do pizza. One slice is as good as the next, so you buy where you live. I'm the neighborhood attorney. I keep my overhead low and my prices low. Dr. Fenster said that this was just the way he liked things. Simple."

  "What do you charge per slice?" Poincaré was pointing to the diplomas.

  The attorney laughed. "When I was younger, quite a bit. Princeton and Columbia were useful at my last job at a downtown firm— former partner, large salary, larger ulcers. When the practice of law became too much of a business, I left to get back to a scale I understood. Here no one cares where I went to school as long as I can help renegotiate a mortgage or make peace with the immigration police. My services aren't free, Inspector—there are public agencies for that. But I don't charge $500 an hour, either. And if you happen to be short on cash, I'll negotiate. One client paid with a year's worth of homemade jam. So it all works out. Fenster paid by check. He had another $60,000 saved in a bank account, and that went to the Math League, too. He didn't own a car. He rented his apartment. I'm not sure when the investigators are going to release that back to the landlord."

  "His belongings—what will you do with those?"

  "Donate them, eventually. In my disposition of the estate, I've sorted through all his finances, which didn't take much time. He paid most of his bills by check and maintained a credit card only to make occasional purchases online. There was no outstanding debt. Nothing at all remarkable about his estate—except his laptop computer, the one he used at home. Harvard claims it holds Fenster's intellectual property and therefore belongs to the university. One of Fenster's funding sources, Charles Bell, says that it was his foundation's money Fenster used to buy the computer and that, therefore, it belongs to him. Strangely enough, the dispute is headed to court. At the moment, the state is holding the hard drive as evidence."

  "What's on it?"

  "That's just it," said Roy. "No one knows because no one can crack the password. The forensics lab hired a cryptologist, but Fenster apparently invented his own digital lock on the hard drive, so you can imagine how difficult this is going to be. Still, Bell and Harvard have already sued each other and the Commonwealth to release the drive."

  "What are the sums involved? How much did Bell give Fenster?"

  "I've heard the figure $8 million in conversation. Bell insists he's entitled to some return on his investment—return on a hard drive that's likely worth $400. Harvard calls the millions a tax-deductible donation to the university, not an investment. The fight could take years to resolve."

  Poincaré wrote down Bell's contact information as Peter Roy looked on, smiling.

  "What?" said Poincaré .


  "Judge the man for yourself. Let's just say he has a personality consistent with his success."

  Poincaré liked Roy. He liked the idea of accepting homemade jam as payment. He liked the bare walls and the outline of coat hooks under a rough splash of paint. He liked the plastic tables and the care Roy took in knotting his bow tie. He especially liked his mother-in-law. "So what does your lawyerly instinct tell you about Madeleine Rainier?" he asked. "Did you get any sense that she was after Fenster's money? A hundred twenty thousand dollars is not insignificant."

  "Ms. Rainier? I hardly think she was after money. She asked me to fax a letter to the Dutch authorities authorizing her as executor and then immediately hired me to dispose of the estate as quickly as possible, according to the will—in which she had no financial interest whatsoever. After a series of phone calls just after the bombing, I lost contact. The phone numbers I had used went dead, and my e-mails started bouncing back to me. I did get this, though." Roy produced a postcard with a "Welcome to Switzerland" arched in block letters above a photo of mountains and a cow grazing on a steeply angled meadow. On the reverse, in a script the authenticity of which Poincaré had no reason to doubt, was a simple note: Thank you for your help in a difficult time. M. Rainier.