All Cry Chaos (2 page)

    The prisoner laughed. "Why the visit?"

    Poincaré stared at him.

    "Come on, now—a clever man like you."

    "You disgust me."

    "Ah—honesty! There's a start!" Banović held up two fingers, a peace sign, and pointed them at Poincaré's eyes, then his own. "I do declare, Inspector: you came to look in the mirror."

    "Go to hell."

    "Too late . . . I've been here years already. Admit it—I
fascinate
you!"

    "What I admit is a strong desire to see you rot."

    "And keep the world safe from bogeymen like me?" Once more he pointed to Poincaré's eyes, then his own. "Take a closer look. . . . You know, you really should have killed me when you had the chance."

    Poincaré leaned close to the bars. "I nearly did," he whispered, drawing Banović closer still. "It would have been an easy thing to report that the arrest went bad and we shot you. But that would have been your way. No. I saw what you left in the ravine. You'll stand trial, you'll be convicted, and you'll rot."

    Not before he was halfway down the corridor did the wave of bellowing and invective rush past him like effluent from a sewage pipe. "They were animals! You read my file, Poincaré. You knew I had a family! Three children raped and disemboweled—in front of their mother, my Sylvie. Sylvie raped in front of her parents! Then her womb with our unborn child split open and her parents left to stagger through their lives, begging for someone to kill them. You
read
that, Inspector! And still you came. Did you once stop to think why a man becomes a killing machine? I was an ordinary man. A
good
man! I had a family, a job. Then a war I did not make and did not want ruined us. I will put you in my shoes before I die. I swear, you will walk in my shoes!"

    
I don't let people go
, the inspector said to himself, repeating the words like a talisman to get him through the gate at the end of the cellblock, and through another gate, and through another until the final gate closed, steel on steel, and he stood outside the prison walls beyond the reach of Banović's agony.
These are not my decisions
. Poincaré leaned hard against a truck and slipped two pills between his lips.

    He felt an attack coming on.

    The train from The Hague to Amsterdam ran past acres of fields laid out in rectangles gaudy with color. Against a screen of heavy clouds rumbling off the North Sea, the famous Dutch tulips were an antidote to weariness itself. Poincaré needed the help. More than he cared to admit, Banović had unnerved him. Even now, an hour later, his heart beat erratically—if not from fear exactly then from the knowledge that a prodigious hatred was trained on him. It'
s nothing
life-threatening
, doctors had assured him.
A nuisance arrhythmia. Too
much wine can bring it on. Also cold drinks, and sometimes stress. Do
you have a stressful job?

    Soon enough, the pills would kick his heart back into a normal rhythm, and his life would begin to look orderly again. It had all happened before, this confrontation with the blunted, redirected rage of men he had put behind bars. He would set aside Banović's outburst, as he had learned long ago to do.

    He flipped open his phone and waited through dead air, hoping she would answer. "It's me," he said finally.

    "Ah—Henri! Are you OK? You sound tired."

    "Not exactly."

    "It's that man in Den Haag. You said you would quit him."

    "I know."

    "Well, then . . . quit him. Etienne called last night. He and Lucille and the children will join us at the farmhouse after all. You know what an ordeal it is for them to juggle their schedules. Promise—take it easy with work until we're back in Lyon."

    "You know I'll be busy through the weekend," he said.

    She did not answer. She hardly needed to.

"I'll come straight home from Amsterdam. I promise."

"Enough already. Retire."

    A distinct possibility, given the morning. For the thirty years he had worked at Interpol, rising through the ranks, he had taken virtually no holiday that had not been delayed or interrupted by some special request from headquarters. Once, in Patagonia, in a river basin as remote as the Marianas Trench, a local official arrived on horseback to request that on returning to France might Inspector Poincaré first consult with the national police in Buenos Aires on a matter of stolen art. "Interpol-Lyon telex," began the official, hat in hand and so clearly apologetic for interrupting a family on holiday that Poincaré hadn't the heart to object. Claire, by contrast, placed her hands over the young Etienne's ears and, rather than attempting to kill the messenger, turned on her husband. "Could we be any further from civilization, Henri? Should we try for the Arctic next time?"

    It would not have mattered. Interpol put Poincaré to strategic use, holiday or no. He had become for many in the security offices of Western Europe and the Americas the agent who had aged with grace. What he had lost physically he gained in intuition. He could anticipate a criminal's moves as if he were the pursued, and his perseverance was legendary—Banović's capture being only the latest example.

    Persistence did take its toll, however; on days like this his heart argued for less strenuous work, and he considered retiring to the Dordogne. But he could not, just yet, because the question that had drawn him so improbably to police work—how to hold in one thought the abomination of a Banović in a world that was, in so many ways, sweet beyond description—had not been answered.

    There was always the next case.

Paolo Ludovici was a sinewy whip of a man. On loan from Interpol's National Central Bureau in Milan, he met Poincaré at Amsterdam Centraal and handed him a dossier, sparing them both preambles. "Trouble," he said. "While you were in The Hague, an explosion blew the top off a hotel along the Herengracht."

    "No rest for the weary," Poincaré said, opening the file.

    "We don't know if it was related to the World Trade Organization meetings. But the apparent victim was James Fenster, a tenured mathematician from Harvard who was scheduled to give a talk at the Friday morning session. Graduate and undergraduate degrees from Princeton. No wife, no dependents. Born in New Jersey. Politically agnostic. No debt to speak of."

    Ludovici grabbed one of the coffees Poincaré had bought and slipped into an unmarked car borrowed from the Dutch police. "Fenster was the one registered to the room, in any event. What's left of him looks like burnt roast beef."

    Poincaré closed his eyes.

    "He was thirty. . . . Christ, I'm thirty."

    "Tell me something useful, Paolo."

    "Alright. Dental records will be faxed from Boston. The Massachusetts police have already secured Fenster's office and apartment. They're collecting samples for a DNA analysis that we'll compare with the results we get off the remains. But there's not much question about
who,
Henri. A hotel clerk confirmed that Fenster picked up the room key to 4-E at the front desk twenty minutes before the explosion. Video cameras in the lobby show him entering the hotel at 9:41. The bomb detonated at 10:03, erasing room 4-E." Ludovici started the car. "And for your information, the bomber used ammonium perchlorate."

"Qu'est-ce que c'est?"

"Rocket fuel."

    Paolo revved the engine and pulled the Renault onto Prins- Hendrikkade as if merging onto a Grand Prix course. Just as quickly, he slammed on the brakes to avoid an old man pedaling quarter- time, mid-street, spilling Poincaré's coffee.

    He twisted hard off the seat and watched a stain spreading across his lap. "Paolo!"

    "It's only coffee, for Christ's sake. Get over it." Ludovici honked and threw the car into gear. "I'll pay for the cleaners."

    He was furious, but Ludovici didn't notice or didn't care. Poincaré grabbed a wad of napkins from the glove box. The good news was that the shock had pumped enough adrenaline through his system to snap his heart back into rhythm. He checked his pulse to be sure— ba-bump . . . ba-bump . . . ba-bump, a veritable metronome—then dabbed at the coffee stain with the napkins. Paolo had done him a favor after all, but he would arrive at the crime scene looking like an incontinent schoolboy.

    What could be done with Ludovici? Poincaré's sometimes protégé, whom he had requested for this assignment, was a package one accepted completely or not at all. He operated at a single speed, fast forward, his metabolism rivaling that of a hummingbird. He routinely worked eighteen-hour days, boosting the efficiency of anyone who wandered into his orbit. He ate quickly, talked quickly, reached conclusions, generally correct, quickly, and cycled through girlfriends with a speed and callousness that shocked even the open-minded Poincaré.

    He was also handsome, not so much magazine pretty as supremely self-confident, which in many creates the same impression. People noticed when he entered a room. He had a fondness for coats slung across his shoulders, Fellini-esque, and more generally a sense of style that Poincaré could tolerate only in Italians. His single worrisome flaw was a habit of taking chances, some foolish, with a near-deluded confidence that nothing could touch him. The day they met, on assignment in Marseille two years earlier, Ludovici had defied direct orders by entering a drug smuggler's hotel room without a protective vest, without a wire, without a weapon, just to "talk." Two dozen special operations police had surrounded the hotel, each positioned behind a protective barrier. The agent and the fugitive had their chat, within full view of snipers' scopes, and an hour later Ludovici emerged alone. "He wants pizza and a bottle of Mas de Gourgonnier 2002," he said when the others pressed him for news. So the command sent out for pizza and found the wine. The fugitive ate and, after profoundly miscalculating the chances of shooting his way out of a tight spot, died by a single sniper shot to the head. When Poincaré went to introduce himself to the young agent who had discovered the smuggling ring in Brindisi and, through Interpol-Lyon, arranged for this welcome party in Marseille, he found Ludovici sitting alone on an upended crate eating the last of the dead man's pizza. "You don't suppose this has any forensic value, do you?" he asked.

    Poincaré liked him immediately.

    "The title of his talk . . . give me a second." Ludovici wrestled a scrap from his pocket and read while weaving through heavy traffic. He slammed the car to a stop again, this time inches from a teenager who had stepped from a curb, his pommes frites and mayonnaise now scattered on the road. Paolo rolled down the window and threw money at the problem, yelling for the kid to watch where he was going. "The Mathematical Inevitability of a One-World Economy," he said, turning to Poincaré. The teenager banged the hood of the car with a fist before Ludovici sped off. "I
nevitability
of a One-World Economy? Fenster must have been the darling of the WTO. This explains why he was in town, anyway."

    They sped through a square with a plump Dutch merchant from the city's Golden Age frozen on a pedestal, clasping a book soiled by generations of pigeons. "Who," asked Poincaré, "kills a mathematician . . . ruling out the usual reasons—debt, failed romance, et cetera?" Traffic slowed several blocks ahead in another square presided over by yet another well-fed burgher. Beneath the statue, in a narrow rectangle defined by police barricades, a knot of protesters stood chanting: "WTO . . .
No
! WTO . . .
No
!" Poincaré noted the sign, a bed sheet painted with a cash register, its drawer open, straddling the earth. Where bills should have been, peasants labeled with Third-World country names were caught wriggling as if in a bear trap.

    Ludovici hit the accelerator. "So who kills a mathematician, other than another mathematician? They're supposed to be jealous as hell of each other's success. Maybe the question is who would kill to sabotage the WTO?" He geared down to make a turn and pointed to a knot of emergency vehicles, their lights flashing.

    Poincaré looked across the canal to a narrow, cobbled street with brick houses packed as tightly as kernels on an ear of corn. Centuries before, these had been warehouses, and many had fixed hoists used for lifting goods to the upper floors. Most hid their gabled roofs with brickwork in the shape of bells, steps, and spouts. But one building lacked an elaborate façade. Its top was blown off.

    Ludovici set his jaw and nodded. "This is as close as we get," he said, parking the car. "We walk from here."

The scene that greeted Poincaré at Herengracht 341, the Ambassade Hotel, defied understanding; for the devastation was confined precisely to one room on the top floor, as if a claw had descended from the clouds and plucked the room with its gabled roof, straight away. The hole left behind was hideous and gaping, in its way a work of art: the rooms on both sides and below the missing room were intact in the way a cake is intact when someone carefully removes a first slice. On the street—intermingled with shattered bricks, roof tiles, and beams thick enough to have framed old merchant ships— were some of the victim's personal effects, each with an evidence number: a sock, a pair of sunglasses with cracked lenses, a tube of American toothpaste, a ripped shirt. Poincaré turned from these remnants of an ordinary life, just as he turned from what lay beneath the blue tarp twenty meters to his left.

    
All this to kill one man?

    The fire crews had left behind a soupy, rank-smelling mess, everything in their wake—cars, street, hotel, debris from the explosion— soaked with the canal water they had pumped to extinguish the blaze. Poincaré watched a man in blue coveralls and latex gloves arguing with one of the firemen.