All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  Johnson opened his forensics kit. "Mr. Silva, did the cleaners wear socks over their shoes?" He held up a blue bootie, standard issue for forensics personnel at crime scenes.

  "Different color, but that's right."

  "And you said they were wiping things."

  "Books, glasses in the kitchen. Everything."

  Poincaré pulled a photograph from his briefcase. "Do you recognize her?"

  The caretaker, hands shaking, opened a hard shell case at his belt for a pair of glasses. "Sure—that's Madeleine. His fiancée. She stayed over some nights."

  "And you know this because—?"

  "Because no one comes or goes I don't know about." Silva shifted his weight. "I walk people's dogs, I sign for deliveries. I let workmen in, guests. I know what goes on here."

  "When was it you last saw her?"

  Poincaré waited for Silva to remove his glasses and snap the case shut. "Awhile ago—months, anyway. She stopped coming. And don't ask me why because I never asked."

  So strong was Fenster's presence when Poincaré opened the door that Fenster himself may as well have greeted them. What Poincaré saw was more gallery than efficiency apartment. A single line of photographs, in pairs and also groupings of three or more, extended in a horizontal line at eye level across every vertical surface—windows and kitchen cabinets included. Poincaré had seen some of these, or ones very like them, in Amsterdam: photos of trees in full leaf and in winter, lightning strikes, mountain ranges. Each image was trimmed to an identical dimension and was set in an identical black frame with cream matting against stark white walls. Fenster had moved what few pieces of furniture he owned toward the center of the room to create a perimeter space for his gallery, a layout that forced the observer to regard images in their groupings and from a set distance. Nothing had prepared Poincaré for the beauty and strangeness of this display.

  "Not your average genius," remarked Johnson.

  Poincaré scanned the room.

  "With the place wiped down by three different crews, Inspector, I'm wondering how the state police found any prints or DNA, let alone samples that corroborated your results in Amsterdam. Back in Virginia we'd call that a puzzle."

  Poincaré took a quick inventory: wooden table, boney chair, thin mattress on an iron spring frame, single bookcase, galley kitchen with a frying pan, pot, and tea kettle. No radio, no television. No phone. No crosses on the walls or Buddhas on altars. Only Fenster's monkish belongings in a room that, photos aside, was as spare as a prison cell. A large box held dozens of additional photos, which Fenster must have rotated through the gallery.

  Johnson approached a grouping of six images that had rattled Poincaré the moment he entered the room. When the agent reached for the first in the series, Poincaré said: "Vive la France. It's the national boundary."

  "The next image shows the borders of my country's twenty-two regions. Next, the one hundred departments. Then the three-hundred forty-two arrondissements."

  "And finally, the country's smallest administrative units, the communes. There are some thirty-five thousand. From the looks of the coastline, these are the communes for Bretagne, Normandie, Nordpas-de-Calais, and Picardie."

  Johnson found a magnifying glass in his forensics kit and paused over the communes. He moved the glass to the preceding images in the series and returned to the communes. "Each is a smaller version of the one before," he said. "The units repeat—though not exactly. They're related—"

  "Geometrically."

  "That's right. Let's see about this last one. It looks like a magnification of several communes. Fenster was thorough in laying out his sequences, in any event. Large to small to smallest." Johnson lifted the sixth and final image of the set off the wall and read the caption.

  "A close-up?" asked Poincaré. "I wasn't aware of a smaller administrative unit than the communes. But it's the same geometry, no doubt." Johnson handed over the frame. On the reverse side was the following:

  Grain boundaries, alloy of Al-Mg-Mn

  Poincaré sat hard into Fenster's chair and waved off Johnson, who was about to caution him against contaminating potential evidence.

  "What?" said Johnson.

  "It's not a magnification of the communes or of any other map of France."

  "So then?"

  Poincaré looked to the wall, then back to the image in his hands. "The line in the box at the lower right shows a scale of 20 one-millionths of a meter in length. This is a photograph of a piece of metal under high-powered magnification. These are the crystal boundaries in an alloy of aluminum, magnesium, and manganese. The equation is a mathematical description of the alloy."

  Johnson stepped around a chair. "Why," he asked, "should the crystal structure of a metal look like the communes or regions of France? Or the national boundary, for that matter?"

  Poincaré was staring into the dead space at the center of the room. That would be the right question, he thought. Fenster was bending his mind in two directions to make a single point. First, the outlines of France's communes reproduced the fractal shape of the country's successively larger administrative units and then, improbably, the national boundary itself. It was not conceivable that eighteenth- century bureaucrats in Paris set the borders of 35,000 communes with an eye to reproducing the geometry of France's coastlines and mountain borders. Second, a photograph of a piece of metal under intense magnification showed the identical geometry. With colleagues Fenster would have used mathematics to make these comparisons. For lay people he had assembled this gallery, which was just as much an argument—the same argument he was set to make in Amsterdam in his talk on globalization.

  Above the caption on the rear of the last image, Poincaré read three words: The same name. Curious, he thought. He returned the frame to its hook and flipped the preceding image. Above its caption: The same name. He moved down the line and found that each image on Fenster's walls had both an explanatory caption and, above that, the three words. Fenster had paired a cauliflower leaf with a river delta photographed from space. He had paired aerial photos of mountain ranges with lightning strikes and the root structures of plants. Most improbably, he had paired Ireland, as photographed from a NASA shuttle, with a thumbnail sized piece of lichen and the shadows of cumulous clouds on summer farmland. Each was a version of the others.

  "What's the point?" asked Johnson.

  Poincaré was sure he didn't know. But one thing was certain: the waters in which he swam had gotten very deep, very quickly.

  CHAPTER 15

  "So explain this," said Johnson. "How could the state police have lifted such perfect prints from an apartment wiped down by three successive cleaning crews over three successive days? If I'm recalling the forensics report, they also found Fenster's DNA in dried urine. Am I to believe the man hired all this help and someone forgot to scrub his toilet?" Johnson removed tools from his forensics kit. "Give me thirty minutes," he said. "This Fenster-man's got my attention now."

  At the bookcase, Poincaré reached for a volume at random: Mahābhārata, Epic of Ancient India. A second: The Aeneid. Another, well known to him: La Chanson de Roland. On his haunches, he ran his fingers across the spines of some forty books: poetry, history, philosophy—not a volume of mathematics. Nor did Poincaré find translations. Only books composed in English were printed in English. The others, with Fenster's handwritten notes in the margins, were printed in their language of origin: Sanskrit, Latin, French, and Greek. Across the room, Johnson was standing on a kitchen chair, shoes covered with booties, to dust a light bulb.

  "Have you ever tried screwing in a bulb without leaving prints?" he asked.

  Poincaré had not. He returned to Fenster's reading chair to examine a cigar box left on the book shelf, which turned out to be a time capsule of sorts. Fenster had divided the contents into three neat sections: photos tied with string; a small plastic case with baby teeth; and a stack of medals with faded ribbons. He began with the photographs. Each showed Fenster between the ages of eight and
fourteen, according to the date stamps, shaking the hand of a different adult beneath more or less the same banner: Geometer of the Year, Advanced Calculus Champion, Albert Einstein Young Scholar Award. He counted some two dozen photos in all, twenty-four awards distributed across seven years. Poincaré laid out the photographs chronologically and studied the progress of an awkward, lanky child growing before his eyes. In each image the boy looked pleased enough with his award, but also posed and uncomfortable in the extreme, his smile forced. The clothes fit poorly. Could the foster parents have pocketed the money provided by the state and kept the child in hand-me-downs? Across this entire span of years, the young Fenster looked pale beneath his halo of blond curls—even though he had won at least four of his awards during the height of summer. Poincaré held up one of the photos. "Agent Johnson," he said. "Could you take prints off this?"

  Johnson had climbed down off the chair and was now bent over Fenster's laptop. "Bring it over." he said.

  "Who keeps your memories," asked Poincaré.

  Johnson looked at him.

  "Your memories of childhood—until you went off to college. Who keeps a record of your childhood, besides you?"

  "My parents and brothers, I suppose. They have pictures—but mostly stories. Like the one of my brothers and me in a three-way boxing match. Instead of gloves, we used paintbrushes—we were painting an iron porch railing at the time. We each dipped two brushes in red Rust-Oleum and started jabbing. The one with the most paint on his face lost. That was me." Johnson chuckled at the thought. "My mother came tearing around the corner, screaming— but she had the good sense to take a picture, at least. She swore she was going to blackmail us when we got married."

  "And has she?"

  Johnson made a thumbs-up sign. "The funny part is, I was only five or six at the time and I don't actually remember getting painted. But I'm in the picture and my mother and brothers tell the story—so it happened, I suppose. . . . What are we talking about?"

  Poincaré handed him the photo. "Fenster lived in five foster homes between the ages of four and fifteen. We have no idea about the circumstances of his birth, but he was apparently abandoned and then handed along until Princeton rescued him with a scholarship. The only proof he had of a childhood is in this cigar box. Besides the box, he had nothing—no stories, no boxing matches. Imagine a child that young knowing that if he didn't collect these things, no one would."

  Poincaré returned the cigar box to the bookshelf, but Johnson called him back. "I need you to look at something," he said. "Fenster's laptop obviously won't boot because the state police took the hard drive. They left an evidence tag, so it's all kosher. Here's the thing—the slip of paper he taped along the side of the monitor. Are you related?" Using tweezers, Agent Johnson held before Poincaré a strip of clear tape laid over a narrower strip of paper on which Fenster, likely, had printed twelve words and a name:

  Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. — Jules Henri Poincaré

  "My father's father's father," he said. The explosion in Amsterdam, on his watch; the death of a mathematician who happened to venerate his great-grandfather: the case, it seemed, had chosen him. "And no, I never met him."

  "True?"

  "It is. Jules was a mathematician—apparently a hero to Fenster."

  "Well, this is strange."

  Agent Johnson could not begin to guess.

  "One more trick of the trade," Johnson said. "I dusted the outside of the tape for prints. This was likely wiped along with everything else. But there's no way to wipe the sticky inside of a piece of tape. Unless you're using tweezers or wearing gloves, you're going to leave prints on the adhesive when you lay it down."

  "When will you have results?"

  "Several weeks."

  Poincaré returned to the cigar box, this time for Fenster's baby teeth. "I'm assuming you can extract DNA from these?"

  "Pearly whites? There's likely some soft tissue dried up in there. And even if there isn't . . . We'll likely find something."

  Poincaré only half heard him, concentrating as he was on words floating in the ether: different, name, things, same. What language was this? Jules Henri had seen what Fenster saw, but they were both too dead to tell.

  Poincaré left Johnson to wait for Hurley and close the apartment, for he had seen too much. The room was too small. At the front of the building, on his knees with a spade and claw hammer, Jorge Silva sat working a slab of cracked concrete. "The builders poured this when it was cold," he said. "Concrete won't set well if you pour below thirty-two degrees. Sure, it'll look pretty for ten years. Then, after the contractor's long gone, you've got this mess." The caretaker pointed. "Who takes the long view anymore?"

  Poincaré saw the cracks and walked away.

  CHAPTER 16

  From his perch high above the financial district, Charles Bell ran the most successful mutual fund to have emerged in a dozen years. In just under eighteen months, the fund's holdings had ballooned to $24 billion, money following money until Bell became the young lion of the investment world. His portfolio consistently beat major stock indexes in up markets and, in down, offered the stability of municipal bonds. Unlike the blackguards who ran investment frauds, Bell opened his books to major accounting firms that confirmed his successes were legitimate, although no one outside the company could explain that success. The combination of high yields and low risk proved irresistible, and Bell was soon straddling a mountain of gold that impressed individual investors as well as the portfolio managers of universities, pension funds, and insurance companies.

  The man himself was famously philanthropic, with a Texas-sized personality transplanted in staid Boston. He sat on the boards of schools and hospitals, museums, and assorted defense funds for the indigent, all of which enjoyed his largesse. Charles Bell was also James Fenster's benefactor. According to a grants officer at Harvard, Bell's funding paid for Fenster's supercomputers, graduate student stipends, reduced teaching loads, and leaves of absence for research. Bell was to Fenster what Lorenzo Medici was to Michelangelo. Why was the question. More typically, foundations and corporations funded university research, not individuals.

  Poincaré's stomach churned as the express elevator shot him skyward, into precincts reserved for the rich and politically connected. The elevator glided to a stop, and he stepped uncertainly into a reception area set on an open ledge above Boston Harbor. The walls opposite the elevator were glass, floor to ceiling. One lived in the clouds at this altitude, among peregrine falcons.

  As he paused to acclimate himself, a voice boomed down a corridor. "Inspector Poincaré, I presume! It takes some getting used to, but it's a grand view!" It was Bell himself, recognizable from the fund's promotional materials, with a greeting that hit Poincaré like a blast wave. As he strode down the corridor, Bell rattled off instructions to an assistant who took notes and peeled off down a side corridor. He continued without breaking stride into the reception area, smiling broadly. "I am so pleased!"

  "Magnificent," said Poincaré, gesturing to the conference room and the harbor beyond. "Who can work with such a view? I'd get nothing accomplished. Congratulations on all your success, Mr. Bell."

  The man laughed like a horse whinnied. Clearly, he cared nothing for what anyone thought of him. "I'll tell you my secret," Bell confided, loud enough for anyone standing within twenty paces to hear. "If you work for me and don't produce, you lose the view. You're downgraded to a basement cubicle in our satellite office in Watertown. And if you still don't produce, you're out! Same rule for everyone—me included."

  "Effective," said Poincaré. "But given what I've read of your funds, I doubt anyone's in danger of losing the view. The performance is . . . historic."

  "Yes, well. We've been fortunate." Bell showed Poincaré into a glass-walled conference room, to the very edge of a cliff. "Sandwich, coffee? Pastries? Mineral water? Without waiting for an answer, Bell called: "Eleanor, mineral water."

  They sat at on
e end of a thirty-seat rosewood table, at each place a leather captain's chair. At the far end of the room hung a screen for video conferencing. Bell, all Armani, settled into his chair. His fingernails, Poincaré noticed, were manicured.

  "We're scheduled for fifteen minutes, Mr. Bell."

  "Please call me Charles."

  "Charles. Since I have only a few moments of your time, let's begin."

  "Play on, Inspector. You already know that James Fenster was a dear, dear friend, and I want to help any way I can."

  "How did you know him?"

  "Through his work."

  "You sponsored him, I understand."

  "I did. James and I agreed on a number that would be useful to him, and I wrote a large check—only to discover that Harvard adds sixty percent for something they call overhead—which is another word for thievery. So I wrote a larger check. It's outrageous. But yes, I believed in his work."