All Cry Chaos (10 page)

    He walked inside. Though he had tried over the years, he never understood Claire's faith. He attended church occasionally because she asked and because he was comforted, for her, as she slipped a hand into his when the priest, in defiance of orders from Rome, reverted to the Latin mass. She had insisted Etienne be baptized, and he agreed though he thought the ceremony little more than voodoo. How surprised he was, then, at the emotions rising in him when the priest offered a blessing and sprinkled holy water on the forehead of his son. That some could consider water holy; that Etienne, who
was
holy in Poincaré's sight, would be blessed by another in the name of mysteries larger than them all; that this sacrament could take place in a cathedral built when oxcarts plied the muddy streets of Lyon; that his wife and her family, without embarrassment, could welcome Etienne into a fellowship two thousand years old; that he, Poincaré, a rank non-believer, could be moved so nearly to tears at the ceremony that he forced himself to turn away, sharply, in search of control—all this stood as evidence to a single fact: that Henri Poincaré was a man who longed to believe, a man who was moved by mystery and beauty but a man for whom belief was impossible. He was too much a scientist, ever the investigator in a world bound up in webs of cause and effect that had served him well in every regard save one: that at the hour between dusk and darkness, when the sky slid from deepest cobalt into night, he suspected something large, momentous even, was out there just beyond his reach, the shape of which flashed into his awareness now and again but vanished whenever he tried to grasp it.

    He stood and nodded to a priest, whose footsteps clicked in the great silence. He had time enough to return home and shower before catching a train south. There was time, yet, before he would face the ones he loved to explain the chaos that he, in an effort to do a difficult job well, had heaped upon their innocent heads. What would he say? He thought of the man in the old story who had wept himself dry and, in the process, filled a lake with his tears. A child of the district woke the next morning and approached the man: "Monsieur," she said, "this is a wonder. Why are you sad?"

    Seeing the goodness in her, he told the truth: "Because life is so sweet."

    The child tugged at his sleeve. "Monsieur, I don't understand."

    And the man, weeping anew, said: "Neither do I."

He arrived in Fonroque after everyone had gone to bed. Half-roused from sleep, Claire opened her arms. For several hours he lay awake and, finally giving up, checked on the children before stepping outside to lose himself in the mists that gathered over the vineyards before sunrise. Poincaré was in trouble, and he knew it. The transcripts from Banović's interview with his so-called attorney were both explicit and chilling. "Lay not a finger on Poincaré," Banović had instructed his lieutenant with the diction of an eighteenth-century divine. "But touch the others. Touch them all."

    The moon lingered above the horizon like a condemned man above a gallows door. Poincaré began to walk: one row down, the next row up. Down and back he walked, casting a long shadow in the spectral light until he ran out of rows at a stone wall that marked the ancient property line. An hour had passed and as the moon died, birds woke. Jacques, their mean-spirited but fertile rooster, shattered the morning with his cockle-do, and pheasants answered from a nearby copse. Down valley, undulating fields lay beneath a mist so thick that a stranger might have mistaken this corner of the Dordogne for lake country.

    Behind him, smoke rose from the chimney at the farmhouse. Claire so enjoyed the pleasure he took in poking embers in the massive hearth that she likely woke, found him gone, and made a fire for his return. There would be fresh eggs and bacon from Laval's farm—and, with the children visiting, morning buns. Everyone he loved was rousing in that old, rough house with its leaky roof. He fought the urge to leave Fonroque without a word and race to The Hague, where he might kill Banović outright. But that would not protect his family; for the librarian had spoken and somewhere that morning, safe in the comfort of a warm bed, Borislav would wake to a breakfast of toast and poached eggs. He would consult his Rolodex and arrange meetings with men who longed for the good old days, when civil strife made the world safe for murder. They would be professionals: ex-military, versatile, and beyond remorse.

    Poincaré had once trusted Paolo Ludovici with his life, and he had returned the favor. But to save an entire family—hope was not this elastic. And so Poincaré, the one to whom others turned for answers, despaired. He would have hunted down Borislav himself, but to leave Claire or Etienne was unthinkable. He stood in the vineyard, the countryside waking around him, and resolved never to leave. He would build a walled city; he would triple Montforte's security detail. He would . . . do no such thing, for to shut them away would give Banović his victory. P
onder this
, the former librarian was calling across the continent: R
educe a man to dirt. Destroy all that
he loves, and watch what he becomes.

C
LAIRE STOOD over the stove with Etienne at her side, the two reunited as a culinary team. Their son's single passion beyond architecture was food—and, happily, he had the metabolism to eat everything he cooked without gaining a gram. For years he and Claire had collaborated on elaborate dinners. Etienne's specialties were sauces and then plating completed meals as if they were submissions to a design exhibit. And why not? At eight, Etienne was constructing buildings from kitchen pans and utensils, with cantilevers and weight-bearing arches. By ten, he was stockpiling construction materials for model skyscrapers he would build deep into the night. At sixteen, he had turned his bedroom into a studio in which he might one week build models of urban villages that honored France's rural past, and in the next build lunar colonies. During those years, Etienne slept beneath the plywood platform he used as the foundation for his projects. In the blink of an eye he had completed graduate school and become the youngest partner in a Paris-based architectural firm with commissions stretching from Dubai to San Francisco.

    "Papa—up early, then?"

    "You'd think he'd be able to sleep here, of all places," said Claire. "Look at the bags under those eyes." She handed him his coffee. He reached for a piece of cauliflower, but she rapped his knuckles with a wooden spoon. "It's for soup, Henri. Lunch."

    Poincaré put a hand to Etienne's cheek and kissed his wife. "Where are the children?"

    Claire nodded toward the sitting room, her hands thick in a yeasted dough for morning buns. "They insist you see their project. Lucille calls it 'butter art.' " She shrugged. "From some magazine. It's easier if you go look than my explaining." So he walked to the parlor where he found Émile, Georges, and Chloe seated at the table before the fireplace, Lucille opposite with a bowl of softened butter, watching the children at work. For the first four years of their lives, Poincaré could not tell the twins apart. For a time he depended on Chloe to name her brothers without losing patience, no matter how often he asked. But when the boys discovered his weakness, they exploited it without mercy. Émile and Georges would answer randomly to their grandfather's calls. Poincaré asked Lucille to tie name-tags on strings, which the boys wore necklace style—dutifully at first. But then they switched tags, which sent Chloe into fits of laughter when either one of them entered a room. In the end, the Lord provided when on the back of his left hand Georges developed a cyst that had to be surgically removed. The scar revealed what the boys would not, and Poincaré never shared the source of his sudden knowledge.

    "What's this?" he said, leaning over the children.

    "Butter art, Papi."

    "See here," said Émile. "You take two plates of glass. You spread butter on one. You press the pieces together, pull them open—and look!" He was just separating the plates and proudly presented the result, which looked precisely like the veins of a leaf or the tributaries of a river.
Dendrites
, he said to himself. He searched the room for Fenster's ghost.

    "I've got two unused glass plates, Henri. Give it a try."

    "If you don't mind, I'll watch," he answered.

    Lucille handed him a magazine, T
eaching Science at Home
. "Suit yourself. You may as well know that the children have become proxies in a fight Etienne and I are having. He builds blocks with them and reads stories. I do math with them and science projects. And I don't see anyone complaining!" She was right. Fully absorbed, Georges and Émile ignored their mother and grandfather as they smeared butter on glass. Chloe stood by the window, inspecting her most recent effort.

    Lucille left Poincaré to sit by the hearth with the magazine. He was not supposed to have a favorite, he knew. But Chloe was his living treasure. She returned to the table to wipe her glass plates. "Papi," she said. "Look—if you change the amount of butter, you change the pattern." The boys had begun kicking each other beneath the table and finally abandoned their efforts and ran outside. Chloe gathered her brothers' glass, cleaned them, laid all out neatly, and with care measured out increasing amounts of butter across the set. "Do you like shapes, Papi?" She had Claire's round face and blonde hair; but the eyes were Etienne's and the budding scientist pure Lucille.

    "Yes," he answered. "I like shapes. I want to see every shape that you make. No tricks! Show me each one."

    It had happened before in his career but never with quite such intensity, this confluence of finding like information in every direction he turned. He began to read the article Lucille had left on attuning children to patterns in nature. The boys were outside chasing chickens from the sound of things. Etienne called a tenminute warning for breakfast, and Poincaré felt a tapping at his knee. Chloe stood before him, hand extended, a yellow barrette hanging by a strand. He unfastened the clip and curled the hair away from her eyes.

    "Alright, then," he said, rising to follow. She carried her most recent sample of butter art in one hand and with the other led her grandfather through the kitchen, silently, past an admiring Etienne and Lucille. Poincaré paused to examine two pieces of cauliflower on the countertop—the small floret a miniature of the larger and both, versions of the whole. Chloe tugged at him to continue, and they were soon standing before a door to the barn, where inside the boys were attempting to corner Jacques. Poincaré warned them away from the rooster, and they buzzed past, back into the house. Chloe moved no further, so Poincaré knelt to his granddaughter's height and stared at the door, which had accumulated layer upon cracked layer of paint over a long history. The child pointed.

    "Alright, then," said Poincaré. "What do we have?"

    "
Look,
" she said.

    "I see a door, Chloe. I'm looking."

    She held her butter art beside the paint. "The patterns are the same. Why, Papi?"

    They were the same.

    "Why?"

    "I don't know, dear."

    His mind was racing.

    "It's very pretty."

    "It is!"

    "Do you know what I think, Papi? I think that God is tiny and also very large. I think God lives in the butter and the paint. He lives in shapes, Papi."

    Poincaré heard the boys rumbling around the corner, Georges calling: "I found a new toy in Papa's briefcase! Come on!" And they were gone, leaving Poincaré to wonder how an eight-year-old had seen what Fenster saw. Or perhaps Fenster's gift had been to see what children saw and attach a mathematics to that.

    They returned to the farmhouse, where Chloe resumed her project and Poincaré continued with his reading. Astonishment had become a new, steady state in all matters relating to James Fenster as Poincaré began to grasp the reach of the man's mind. The geometries Fenster studied were hiding everywhere in plain sight: cracks spread across plaster walls like lightning bolts frozen in time, like mountain ridges photographed from space, like the veins of Laurent's perpetually bloodshot eyes. Poincaré looked down and saw a forearm branching to a peninsula—a hand with five digits, and in that saw the fan of a river delta. He set the magazine aside and closed his eyes, willing enough to see rivers in lightning and lightning in mountain ranges. But he could not follow Fenster to the movement of goods and services across national boundaries. A
mathematics
of globalization? His purchase of a train ticket yesterday afternoon did not obey the same laws that governed the growth of the oak tree on his terrace.

    He could not make that leap.

    What happened when Poincaré opened his eyes came so quickly that he was able to reconstruct the event only moments later, as he lay on the floor with Chloe sobbing in his arms, everyone bent over him as if he had suffered a seizure. He had been sitting in his chair by the fireplace. Etienne, Lucille, and Claire were just finishing their preparations for a grand breakfast as the boys dodged in and out of the house with their game. When Poincaré looked up from his magazine, he saw Chloe bent over her project, a narrow red beam trained on her forehead. Before he could speak or think, he dove across the room, snatched the child, placing his body between her and the windows, then rolled behind the table. Chloe shrieked. Still holding her, he edged the two of them into the hallway, beyond view of the windows. Utensils dropped and in the next instant Poincaré was staring up at them all. "Laser," he stammered. "Targeting laser. Chloe's head." The child squirmed from his arms and ran to her mother.

    Claire, a hand to her own forehead, leaned against the fireplace for support. Etienne knelt beside his father and put a hand to his cheek.