Final Theory

by Mark Alpert

  David leaned over the now-prostrate man. “Okay, let’s try it again,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you so late. My name is—”

  “Freeze, motherfucker!”

  David looked up and saw Monique in the doorway, pointing a gun at him. Her gorgeous eyes glowered as she held the snub-nosed revolver in both hands. A bright yellow nightshirt hung down to her thighs and swayed gently in the night breeze. “Drop the bat and step away from him,” she ordered.

  David did as he was told. He let the bat clatter to the porch and took three steps backward. “Monique,” he said. “It’s me, David. I’m—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” She kept the gun pointed at his head, obviously not recognizing him. “Keith, are you all right?”

  The bare-chested man propped himself up on his elbows. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said, but he sounded a bit woozy.

  “Monique, it’s me,” David repeated. “David Swift. We met at Strings ’89, when you delivered your paper on Calabi-Yau manifolds.”

  “I told you to shut up!” she yelled, but David could tell he’d gotten her attention. Her brow furrowed.

  “David Swift,” he said again. “I was a grad student at Columbia. Relativity in a two-dimensional spacetime. Remember?”

  Her mouth opened in recognition, but as David had predicted, she wasn’t pleased. If anything, she seemed angrier now. She frowned as she lowered the revolver and flipped the safety switch. “What the hell’s going on? Why did you come here in the middle of the night like this? I almost blasted your head off.”

  “You know this guy, Mo?” Keith asked. He managed to rise to his feet.

  She nodded. “I knew him in graduate school. Barely.” With a flick of her wrist she opened the gun’s cylinder and dumped the bullets into her palm.

  A light came on in the house next door. Shit, David thought. If we don’t quiet down, someone’s going to call the cops. He gave Monique a beseeching look. “Listen, I need your help. I wouldn’t have bothered you if it wasn’t important. Can we go inside and talk?”

  Monique kept frowning. After a few seconds, though, she let out a sigh. “Ah hell. Come in. I won’t be able to get back to sleep anyway.”

  She held the door open for him. Keith picked up the bat and for a moment David thought he was going to take another swing at him, but instead he shook his hand. “Hey, man, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were one of those Nazi assholes. They’ve been giving Mo some trouble.”

  “Nazis? What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll see when we get inside.”

  David stepped through the doorway into a small living room with a brick fireplace on one side and a bay window on the other. He remembered from his previous visit that a handsome wood mantelpiece hung above the fireplace, but now it looked like someone had taken an ax to it. The varnished shelf was scored with deep gouges along its whole length. The fireplace itself had been vandalized, too; at least a dozen bricks had been dug out or chipped off. The living room’s walls were pocked with gaping holes that must have been made with a sledgehammer, and the floorboards had been ripped up in several places, creating dark, jagged craters underfoot. Worst of all, there were swastikas everywhere: carved into the mantelpiece, chiseled into the remaining floorboards, spray-painted on the walls. A pair of large red swastikas had been painted on the ceiling somehow, and between them were the words NIGGA GO HOME.

  “Oh no,” David whispered. He turned to Monique, who’d put the gun and bullets on the mantelpiece and was now staring at the ceiling.

  “Skinhead punks, probably high school kids,” she said. “I’ve seen them hanging out at the bus stop, in their leather jackets and Doc Martens. They probably saw the picture of me in the newspaper and thought, oh boy, here’s our big chance. A nigger bitch living in the house of the world’s most famous Jew. What could be better?”

  David winced. “When did this happen?”

  “Last weekend, when I was visiting some friends in Boston. The fuckers were clever about it. They waited till no one was home, then they pried open the front door. They didn’t spray-paint the outside walls because they knew someone might spot them from the street.”

  David thought of the study on the second floor. “Did they vandalize the upstairs rooms, too?”

  “Yeah, they hit almost every part of the house. They even tore up the lawn in the backyard. Luckily, they left the kitchen alone and they didn’t do too much damage to the furniture.” She pointed at a black leather sofa, a chrome coffee table, and a bright red Barcelona chair, all items that had obviously never belonged to Einstein.

  Keith stepped over one of the holes in the floor, his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans. David noticed now that he had a tattoo of a rattlesnake on his left shoulder and the fresh, earnest face of a twenty-one-year-old. “When we heard you ring the bell, we thought it was one of the punks again, checking to make sure the house was empty. We figured the kids would just run away if we turned on the lights, so I went out the backdoor to surprise ’em.”

  Monique slipped her arm around Keith’s waist and leaned her head against his tattooed shoulder. “Keith’s a sweetheart,” she said. “He’s stayed with me every night this week.”

  Keith responded by grasping Monique’s hip and kissing the top of her head. “What else could I do? You’re my best customer.” He turned to David, a big smile on his youthful face. “See, I work on Mo’s car. At the Princeton Auto Shop. She’s got a bitchin’ Corvette, but it’s temperamental.”

  David stared at them for a moment, confused. Monique, a renowned string theorist, was dating her car mechanic? It seemed so unlikely. But he quickly dispelled the thought from his head. He had bigger things to worry about. “Monique, could we sit down somewhere? I know this is a bad time for you, but I’m in a lot of trouble right now, and I need to figure out what’s going on.”

  She raised an eyebrow and looked at him carefully, as if sensing for the first time how desperate he was. “We can go in the kitchen,” she said. “It’s a mess but at least there’s no swastikas.”

  The kitchen was large and modern; it had been added to the house a few years before to replace the cramped galley kitchen where Einstein’s second wife, Elsa, had once cooked. A wide marble-topped counter ran under a bank of cabinets, and a round table sat in a breakfast nook. But though the kitchen was big even by suburban standards, every available space was filled to overflowing with boxes, books, lamps, and knickknacks that had been displaced from other parts of the house. Monique led David to the breakfast table and removed a stack of books from one of the chairs. “Sorry about this,” she said. “I had to move some stuff down here because the study is such a disaster area.”

  David helped her clear the table and chairs. As he carried a stack of books to the windowsill, he recognized one of the volumes near the top. It was On the Shoulders of Giants.

  Monique let out an exhausted groan as they sat down. Then she turned to Keith, gently placing her hand on his knee. “Baby, could you make some coffee? I’m dying for a cup.”

  He patted her hand. “Sure thing. Colombian Supremo, right?”

  She nodded, then watched him walk to the coffee machine on the other side of the kitchen. Once he was out of earshot, she leaned across the table toward David. “All right. What’s the problem?”

  WHEN SIMON WAS IN THE Spetsnaz, fighting the Chechen insurgents, he’d learned a useful technique for locating the enemy. It could be summed up in ten words: to find someone, you have to know what he wants. A Chechen rebel, for example, wants to kill Russian soldiers, so you should look for him in the mountains near military bases. Very simple. But with David Swift, there was a complicating factor: the Americans were looking for him, too. Assuming this history professor had any sense at all, he’d steer clear of his apartment and his office at Columbia and any other place where the FBI might be waiting. So Simon had to improvise again. With the help of the Internet, he began an investigation into David Swift’s secret desires.
<
br />   At 3 A.M. he was still staring at his laptop in the overpriced suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. He’d managed to hack into Columbia’s internal network and soon made a fortunate discovery: the network administrator was monitoring the Internet activity of the faculty members, probably to make sure they weren’t watching porn during office hours. Simon chuckled—the Soviets would’ve loved this. And better yet, the activity records weren’t even encrypted. With a few keystrokes he was able to download the URLs of every Web site David Swift had visited in the past nine months.

  A long list of Web addresses ran down the laptop’s screen, 4,755 in all. Too many to examine individually. But there was a way to shorten the list: look at the Google searches only. What you search for reveals what you desire, Simon thought. Google was the new window on the human soul.

  Simon found 1,126 searches. Still too many, but now he could focus on the search terms. He had a program on his laptop that could identify the Christian names in any sample of text. An analysis of the remaining URLs showed that David Swift had typed a name in 147 of his searches. Now the list of Web addresses was short enough that Simon could inspect each one, but Swift had made the job much easier for him. There was only one name that appeared more than once. On three separate dates since September, David Swift had searched for someone named Monique Reynolds. And when Simon did the search himself, he quickly saw why.

  He called the hotel’s reception desk and told the concierge to have his Mercedes ready in five minutes. He was going to New Jersey to visit the last home of the wandering Jew from Bavaria.

  DAVID TOOK A DEEP BREATH. “Hans Kleinman’s dead,” he started. “He was murdered tonight.”

  Monique jerked backward in her chair as if she’d been struck. Her lips parted, forming a bewildered O. “Murdered? How? Who did it?”

  “I don’t know. The police said it was a burglary gone bad, but I think it was something else.” He paused. His theory about the professor’s murder was sketchy at best, and he was even less sure how to explain it to Monique. “I talked to Kleinman in the hospital just before he died. That’s how this whole nightmare started.” He was about to tell her what had happened at the FBI complex on Liberty Street, but he stopped himself. Better take it slow. No need to frighten her just yet.

  She shook her head, staring blankly at the polished surface of the kitchen table. “Lord,” she whispered. “This is awful. First Bouchet and now Kleinman.”

  The first name gave David a jolt. “Bouchet?”

  “Yeah, Jacques Bouchet of the University of Paris. You know him, don’t you?”

  David knew him well. Bouchet was one of the grand old men of French physics, a brilliant scientist who’d helped design some of Europe’s most powerful particle accelerators. He was also one of Einstein’s assistants in the early fifties. “What happened to him?”

  “His wife called the director of the Institute today. She said Bouchet died last week and she wanted to set up an endowment in his honor. The director was surprised because he hadn’t seen Bouchet’s obituary anywhere. His wife said the family had kept it quiet because it was a suicide. Apparently he slit his wrists in the bathtub.”

  David had interviewed Bouchet as part of his research for On the Shoulders of Giants. They’d shared a magnificent dinner at the physicist’s country home in Provence and played cards until three in the morning. He was a wise, funny, carefree man. “Was he sick? Is that why he did it?”

  “The director didn’t say anything about that. But he did mention that the wife sounded very distraught. Like she still couldn’t believe it.”

  David’s mind began to race. First Bouchet and now Kleinman. Two of Einstein’s assistants dying within a week of each other. Of course they were all quite old now, in their late seventies and early eighties. One would expect them to start dying off. But not this way.

  “Do you have a computer I can borrow?” he asked. “I need to check something on the Web.”

  Looking confused, Monique pointed at a black laptop sitting beside a box on the kitchen counter. “You can use my MacBook, it’s got a wireless connection. What are you looking for?”

  David moved the laptop to the table, turned it on, and called up Google’s home page. “Amil Gupta,” he said as he typed the name into the search engine. “He also worked with Einstein in the fifties.”

  In less than a second the search results appeared on the screen. David quickly scrolled down the list. Most of the entries were about Gupta’s work at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. In the 1980s, after he’d spent thirty years as a scientist, Gupta abruptly left the world of physics and started a software company. Within a decade he was worth several hundred million dollars. He became a philanthropist, donating his money to various quirky research projects, but his main interest was artificial intelligence. He gave $50 million to the Robotics Institute and a few years later became its director. When David had interviewed Gupta, it had been a real struggle to keep him on the subject of Einstein. All he wanted to talk about was robots.

  David scanned at least a hundred search results before he satisfied himself that there was no terrible news about Gupta. But it wasn’t much comfort. He could be dead already but no one had discovered the body yet.

  As he stared at the laptop’s screen, Keith came to the table holding a mug of coffee in each hand. He gave one to David. “Here you go,” he said. “You want milk or sugar with that?”

  David took the mug gratefully. His mind was crying out for caffeine. “No, no, black is fine. Thanks.”

  Keith handed the other mug to Monique. “Listen, Mo, I’m gonna head upstairs. I gotta be at the shop at eight tomorrow.” He put his hand on her shoulder and leaned over a bit, bringing his face close to hers. “You gonna be all right?”

  She squeezed his hand and smiled. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Go get some rest, baby.” She kissed his cheek and then patted him on the butt as he walked off.

  David studied her face as he gulped down his coffee. Easy to see how she felt. She was obviously fond of the hunk. And even though Monique was twenty years older than her boyfriend, she seemed just as young at that moment. Her face had hardly changed since the last time David had seen her, on the couch in her tiny grad school apartment.

  After a few seconds, Monique noticed he was staring at her. Embarrassed, David brought the coffee mug to his lips and drank half of it in great scalding swallows. Then he set it down on the table and turned back to the laptop. He had one more name to check. He typed Alastair MacDonald into the search engine.

  MacDonald was the unluckiest of Einstein’s assistants. In 1958, he suffered a nervous breakdown and had to leave the Institute for Advanced Study. He went home to his family in Scotland, but he never recovered; he started behaving erratically, shouting at passersby on the streets of Glasgow. A few years later he attacked a policeman, and his family had him committed to an asylum. David visited him there in 1995, and although MacDonald shook his hand and sat down for an interview, he said nothing in response to David’s questions about his work with Einstein. He just sat there and stared straight ahead.

  A long list of results came up on the screen, but on close inspection they turned out to be different people—Alastair MacDonald the Scottish folksinger, Alastair MacDonald the Australian politician, and so on. No sign of Alastair MacDonald the physicist.

  Monique stood up and looked over his shoulder. “Alastair MacDonald? Who’s he?”

  “Another of Einstein’s assistants. This guy sort of fell off the map, so it’s hard to find any information about him.”

  She nodded. “Oh yeah, you mentioned him in your book. The one who went crazy, right?”

  David felt a flush of pleasure. She’d read On the Shoulders of Giants pretty carefully. He went to the windowsill, picked up Monique’s copy of his book, and opened it to the chapter about MacDonald. He found the name of the asylum, Holyrood Mental Institution, then bent over the laptop and typed the words into the search engine, right next to Alastair M
acDonald.

  Only one result came up, but it was recent. David clicked on the Web address and an instant later a page from the online version of the Glasgow Herald appeared on the screen. It was a brief news item dated June 3, just nine days ago.

  * * *

  INQUIRY AT HOLYROOD

  The Scottish Executive Health Department announced today that it would conduct an inquiry into a fatal accident at the Holyrood Mental Institution. One of the residents, 81-year-old Alastair MacDonald, was found dead in the facility’s hydrotherapy room early Monday morning. Department officials said MacDonald drowned in one of the therapy pools after leaving his room sometime during the night. The department is seeking to determine if lapses in supervision by the night-shift staff contributed to the accident.

  * * *

  David shivered as he stared at the screen. MacDonald drowned in a therapy pool, Bouchet slit his wrists in a bathtub. And he remembered now what Detective Rodriguez had told him at St. Luke’s Hospital: the police had found Kleinman in his bathroom. The three old physicists were linked not only by their history with Einstein, but by a horrible modus operandi. The same bastards who’d tortured Kleinman to death had also killed MacDonald and Bouchet, disguising their murders as an accident and a suicide. But the motive, what was the motive? The only clues were Kleinman’s last words: Einheitliche Feldtheorie. Destroyer of worlds.

  Monique leaned against David so she could read the news brief over his shoulder. Her breath quickened as she took it all in. “Shit,” she whispered. “This is very strange.”

  David turned around and looked her in the eye. Ready or not, it was time to present his hypothesis. “What do you know about Einstein’s papers on unified field theory?”

  “What?” She took a step backward. “Einstein’s papers? What does that—”