All Cry Chaos (11 page)

    "Chloe—she's alright?"

    "The boys were playing, Papa. They found a laser pointer in my bag. Just before we came down, I gave a presentation in Paris. They were
playing.
" Etienne sat him up. "Lucille. Please, some water."

    "Chloe?"

    The child turned and sniffled. Etienne nudged her into his father's arms. "She's fine—see?"

    "Papi, you scared me." Chloe put a hand to his cheek.

    Poincaré pulled her close and waited for Lucille's return. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he said over and over, fighting for composure. They must see him strong. "I have something to tell you," he said as Claire knelt beside him. "I have difficult news."

    In their room that night, the window open to a hint of summer, Poincaré lay waiting for Claire, who had gone to check on the children. The bedroom door creaked open and she went to a bureau to comb out her hair before climbing into bed. No one could say how old the bed was—possibly older than the farmhouse itself, the documents for which could be traced back three hundred years. It had come to them along with every other well-used furnishing as part of the sale. Claire gave everything to the parish church save the farm table by the hearth and the bed, which had seen who knew how many births and deaths. Poincaré watched her tie a scarf through her hair before turning off the light.

    She drew close beneath the duvet. Her head rose and fell with his breathing. "Henri," she said. "How bad is this?"

    "Bad," he answered.

    "Will that man hurt us?"

    "I'm afraid he'll try."

    "We can't hide. I won't do that, you know."

    He listened for unusual sounds in the night and relaxed only on realizing that if professionals came, Claire and the others would be dead before anyone heard a thing. He could say none of this. He hardly knew how to speak of Banović to himself.

    "We'll do what we have to," she said. "Interpol will protect us. It's you I'm worried about. You're already a challenge to live with. You're about to become impossible."

    He stroked her hair.

    "We'll be alright," she said. "You know, Etienne laughed at me just now."

    "Why?"

    "Because when he came to check on the children, I was already checking on them. We stood there a moment, watching them sleep."

    "Then he's no better than you."

    "And Lucille. With her schedule—everyday, it's another project with them. Yesterday morning she asked Marc Laval if the children could gather the eggs. You should have seen the chaos! The chickens flying, Chloe and the boys screaming. Marc stood in the doorway, arms crossed. He wasn't angry exactly, but I could tell he wasn't pleased, either. . . . Do you know Georges and Émile set up a table at the end of the driveway to sell the eggs. For three hours they tried, but not a single car came down the road! Finally Laval bought the eggs himself."

    "He didn't."

    "He did!"

    "But the man collects them every day for us. He has his own chickens!"

    Claire propped her arm on a pillow. "What do the children know of that? They have a little money in their pockets and think they're rich. Lucille will have them up in the morning working on some new project. She's wonderful with them, Henri. Better than I ever was."

    "That's not true."

    "I didn't have her energy, and God knows I don't, now."

    "You did." He kissed her hand. "You're just too senile to remember."

    She poked him. "I've finished a painting—did I tell you? I'm in the middle of crating it for an exhibition in June. New York this time."

    "What of?"

    "You mean
who."

    "Alright. Who?"

    "You, my dear."

    Poincaré sat up.

    "Relax. It's abstract, even for me. Not even Etienne will see you in it. But it's you just the same."

    "And this is going to hang in some stranger's house?"

    "We'll decide that after the exhibition."

    "I'll buy it. Don't send it off."

    "I've made a commitment. And I'm not selling—to you, anyway. Possibly to Etienne for a euro or two."

    "Claire, please. . . . Have you titled it?"

    "I'm considering 'A Serious Man.' Or just your initials, above mine. When we're back in Lyon, you'll come for a look." She slipped a hand beneath his shirt. "Did you see Etienne trying to be stern with them at bedtime? It's an impossibility, same as it was for you." She laughed, and Poincaré listened to her breathing and to the creaking of the farmhouse. Through the open window came a scent of honeysuckle and a fluttering of leaves. Claire turned, and he drew her to him and they kissed. Their lips parted, barely enough to let a secret slip through, and they lay like that for a time, breathing one another's air as moonlight slanted across the bed. Claire opened her gown. "I'm just a country girl," she said, "but I know some things." And with that, for a time, Poincaré forgot Bosnia and Amsterdam and every damned place that had ever claimed a piece of him. He was with Claire, and the world was right.

Interpol had laid the thickest of blankets over Poincaré's family. Short of moving two households in two cities into a single fortress, the plan could not have been more thorough—with armed guards standing four-hour shifts around the clock; electronic surveillance of perimeters; and coordination with local police, with increased patrols. But Poincaré felt he could do more and took an indefinite leave of absence to coordinate his family's security. Well into that effort, with no end in sight to projects that were turning his apartment in Lyon and Etienne's in Paris into mini-police states, Claire's mood darkened. She warned against destroying villages in order to save them. She advised, gently, that he return to work. He ignored her complaints even though they triggered a painful memory of the time she took Etienne on a month-long holiday, alone. "Love us first," she insisted. "Love your family first, then your job." In time, they compromised: while his assignments might take him away for weeks on end, when he returned he would do so in body
and
mind. He would shield his family from the business of police work. For three decades, the agreement held—until Banović voided it.

    In a corner of their kitchen one morning, she took his hand and pressed it to her cheek. "I'm suffocating," she said. "Etienne called to say he doesn't want you visiting anymore. You're scaring the children." She leaned into him. "The agents watch us every second. Please. Let us breathe."

    "Those men are out there," he insisted. "You have no idea—"

    "You're right," she said. "I don't."

    "Banović will win if you don't go to work," she said. "He's winning now."

    "I can't. Not with you and Etienne exposed like this."

    "Go to work, Henri. We're protected, and you're driving us mad."

    "No."

    She reached her arms around him. "My love, I'm not asking."

    Poincaré knew she was right. "The case I'm working on will take me to the U.S. I'll work again if we can talk each day," he said. "Then, if you need me, I could get back to Lyon within hours."

    "That would be fine. Go."

    "Promise me you'll be OK."

    She promised, but that changed nothing.

T
HE MAIN lecture hall in the Science Center of Harvard University was a concrete bunker set into a building as chilly and bare as a mine shaft. After he cleared customs at Logan airport, Poincaré had time enough to hail a taxi and catch the last twenty minutes of Dana Chambi's final class of the term. As Fenster's senior graduate student, she had taken on his "Mathematics of Nature" when he did not return from Amsterdam. Poincaré wanted to see Chambi at work before interviewing her.

    The steeply pitched amphitheater funneled to a platform with a lab bench, a demonstration table, and a lectern. Chambi stood by the bench and a computer as some two hundred students looked on. She must have succeeded at a difficult task, he reasoned; for though Fenster was gone, having taught just two classes of his perennially oversubscribed course for non-majors, the students remained. Poincaré took a seat.

    "So, then," she said. "Which three brave souls will share their answers to the final exam question? You were to write an equation, run it 100,000 times on your computers, graph each data point— and model this:

"A common fern. From the number of you who sought help this past week, you probably don't care to see another one ever again."

    The students laughed.

    "But consider. Stroll through a forest and you'll find millions of ferns, yet no two are identical—even if you can't distinguish them genetically. They will be similar, but not identical. Just like oak trees, Macaque monkeys, snowflakes, and people." Poincaré thought of the twins. This was true. "How does a fern decide, if I can use that word, where to place its branches, how long they should extend, in which direction? It's as though nature has a rough model called 'fern' to which individual ferns are attracted, but which leaves room for individual variations. Your job was to write, then graph, an equation that could serve as a model for this fern. Volunteers, please. Let's share the wealth—and perhaps end the semester with some entertainment."

    The room buzzed as students anticipated who would risk a public hanging. Chambi leaned against the lab desk and made an exaggerated show of impatience, tapping her foot and folding and refolding her arms. She said: "If I announced that the first volunteer would receive an A for the term, would that change anyone's mind?"

Twelve students stood.

    "Excellent," she said. "I haven't said that. But as long as you're standing, you—" She pointed to a slender young woman. "Ms. Cheng, I believe? Please. And you—" She pointed to a heavily tattooed man seated two rows before Poincaré. He thought she registered his presence before moving to her third choice. The students made their way to the pit of the amphitheater.

    "Don't worry," said Chambi. "The first time I tried modeling a fern—" Ho
w long ago?
he wondered. She was in her late twenties, at most. "I produced something that looked like a porcupine on a stick. So be patient. Our math majors—all four of them in this class—will get other chances. No one else need bother. But the next time you read a weather forecast or a prediction about climate change, you'll know that mathematical modeling is involved. I wrote this exam to offer a hint of how difficult the job can be—and modeling those systems, I can assure you, is infinitely more complicated than modeling a fern."

    The first student, the tattooed one who also wore metal rings in his lips, attached a flash drive to Chambi's computer and pulled up the image of a fern on hallucinogens.

The class erupted as the young man deadpanned: "People think only dogs look like their owners." Even Chambi was laughing. "My initial values were clearly wrong for
x
and
y
, and I couldn't find a way to properly represent the function of chance in the equation. If I saw this thing in a dream, I'd wake up screaming." He left the lectern to applause, with students congratulating him all the way to his seat. The second young man looked as though he stepped directly off a yacht into the lecture hall. He wore salmon-colored shorts, a white polo shirt with an upturned collar, and an expression not quite sardonic enough to mask his terror. "Mr.?"