All Cry Chaos (23 page)

    "But she must log into their server with a unique IP address."

    "No. All she needs is a username and password, and she's in. Same as it would be for you sitting down to another person's computer anywhere in the world and accessing your email. If you wanted to find her, and she didn't want to be found, all she would need to do is not use the same computer twice. I don't know your business, Henri. But from my dealings with Ms. Chambi, I found her to be forthright and personable. There's no doubt she's dedicated herself to Dr. Fenster's legacy. See for yourself." Roy scribbled a Web address on a sheet of paper.

    Poincaré stood and folded the URL into a pocket.

    "Later this year, the Math League will sponsor free tutoring classes at every school in the Cambridge system—with real, live tutors. Dr. Fenster inspired it all. . . . By the way, did you ever find his birth certificate?"

    In fact, the day following their meeting in April Poincaré instructed Interpol's legal staff to secure a court order. Not unexpectedly, the process had taken nearly three months to complete, and he came across the correspondence when reviewing the file Monforte had assembled in his absence. "It's odd," said Poincaré. "The Ohio adoption office found a long paper trail documenting Fenster's passage through their system, but they couldn't locate his birth records. Misplaced, they said. There's nothing before his change of names by the first foster family. Apparently, he was never born."

    Roy smiled. "Bureaucracies . . . I deal with this every day." He stood and extended a hand. "One last thing, Henri. A favor."

    "Of course."

    "On the way out, don't kiss my mother-in-law."

W
HAT HAD struck Poincaré as diffidence at their first meeting—Jorge Silva's refusal to meet his eyes, the nervous tugging at his hands— seemed now an act of heroism. Well into his eighth decade, the man rose each day and maintained this hideous brick box of a building as if it were Windsor Castle. The mulched beds of impatiens, the painted rails, the trimmed grass, the pointed brickwork: all told a story that Poincaré had missed on his first visit. He found the caretaker sweeping the walkway in front of the apartment.

    "I'll just finish up," he said at Poincaré's approach.

    Silva had swept grass clippings into a neat pile, which he then deposited into a bag instead of pushing them back into the lawn. He leaned heavily on his broom and reached for a candy wrapper. "The kids on this street," he said, turning the wrapper in his hand. "Half go to Harvard, half to MIT and not one of them thinks twice about fouling up this neighborhood. What are they teaching, anyway?"

    Poincaré produced a card and was about to reintroduce himself when Silva said: "There's nothing wrong with my memory, Inspector. Did you catch the people who killed Jimmy?"

    "Not yet," said Poincaré.

    "What are you waiting for?"

    "It takes time, Mr. Silva."

    "You know, I may not have a lot of time. Get me news." Silva dropped the wrapper into his bag. "They rented his apartment last week."

    "I heard," said Poincaré. "Did the state police leave much?"

    The caretaker nodded. "They told me to keep it all, sell it all, donate it, burn it—they didn't care. And that was it. I had Goodwill come for the furniture. The clothes—perfectly good, but I had to throw them away. I couldn't stand the thought of someone else wearing them. I kept his books, not that I can read any. Only a few in English. None in Portuguese. Maybe the university wants them."

    "And his photographs?" said Poincaré.

    "Those I've got. I'm keeping two. You're welcome to the rest. They should go to a museum, I was thinking. I'll show you."

    Silva's apartment would have appealed to Fenster. Poincaré was visiting unannounced, yet he found the simple, unadorned space as clean and tidy as if it were being shown to a prospective buyer. Silva checked a pocket watch. "The Red Sox just started a day game over at Fenway. I could switch it on and show you how Jimmy and I worked the scorekeeper's book."

    Poincaré had called Hurley's office and set up an appointment for the following morning at the Cambridge Police Station. His search for Dana Chambi—the 'Resident Expert'—could proceed online, at any hour; so he removed his suit jacket and draped it over one of the two chairs at Silva's kitchen table. "I remember your saying you would listen to the games and eat pizza. Let me buy us some," said Poincaré.

    Silva made the call and switched on the radio.

    "Jimmy didn't watch television," he said. "He told me listening reminded him of when he was a kid. He had four, maybe five, foster parents, and he said they were strict about bedtime. So he'd sneak a radio under the sheets and listen, with an earpiece. When he came down to visit, we'd switch on the radio, which I liked just fine." He checked his watch again. "We've got maybe twenty minutes before the pizza arrives. Come on back here."

    Poincaré followed him to a small bedroom, bare except for a crucifix on one powder blue wall and, opposite, a triptych that hung originally in Fenster's apartment: photos of lichen from the Alaskan tundra, a single-celled sea creature magnified ten thousand times, and human lung tissue. Without the captions on the reverse of the frames, one had no hope of telling them apart.

    Poincaré heard a loud click beyond the wall, followed by a low thrumming—the boiler firing up to heat the building's water. "Here," said Silva, pointing to a pair of boxes. "The books and the rest of his pictures. Help yourself."

    Silva left to meet the delivery boy and Poincaré to flip through the collection with the reluctance of a tourist forced to sprint through the Louvre. He had minutes, and one could spend days. From the next room, he heard the game. With runners on first and third, no outs, the announcer breathless with what David Ortiz could do if he only relaxed at the plate and rediscovered his swing, Poincaré worked through Fenster's gallery. The photo marked
Erosion pat
terns, stream bed
, shared a striking resemblance to the photo marked
Graph, cotton futures, 100 years ending 1934
. Here were the images of France, again, and tree limbs juxtaposed with veins of the human eye. On the reverse of each frame, above each caption within each set of images, Poincaré found a word or phrase—in the case of erosion patterns and cotton the word
Difference
with an exclamation point. He flipped through the collection a final time to record everything Fenster had written.

    The apartment door opened and closed, and Silva returned to find two photos propped on his sitting room couch. "Those!" he said. "I was thinking about those for myself. . . ."

    They sat eating pizza, listening to the Red Sox throttle the Yankees. "Here's how Jimmy and I would work it," said Silva. "First, the scorebook. You list the players for one team on this page and the players for the other team here—in their batting order." Silva worked through the particulars of scoring a baseball game, and what struck Poincaré was the complexity of the recordkeeping and the potential to generate mountains of data.

    "I'd keep score," said Silva, "and after each inning Jimmy would repeat to me every play up to that point, from memory, without looking at what I wrote. It'd be easy for the first few innings—who got a hit, who got out, who caught fly balls. As the game got longer, he'd still be able to do it. All the way through the ninth, he'd replay the game, hit by hit, from the first inning. I'd check against my scorekeeper's book for accuracy. What was scary is that he could do this for every game he ever heard. I'd test him on the ones we listened to together. Some, a year or two old. And he'd get it right! You French don't know baseball. But do you have any idea that people just don't do this?"

    "I have some idea," said Poincaré.

    "It gets better, Inspector. He'd bring his computer and open it to a baseball statistics site. When a guy comes up to hit, Jimmy gives me his batting average, his on-base percentage, and his slugging numbers. I'd check the computer, and he'd be right! He'd memorize the opposing team's statistics before each game. He'd say things like 'So-and-so hits .270 with two outs and a man in scoring position.' I asked how he did it, and he gave me one of these who-knows looks—that that was the way it always was for him, from the time he was a kid. He said it was how he made friends, moving from one family to the next. Because everybody likes baseball, he said."

    Poincaré finished a second slice of mushroom with sausage, and though the game had hours yet to be played, he thanked the caretaker and gathered his things—including the photos. At the door, pointing to them, Silva said, "I see these and I think of Jimmy. Now we'll both think of him, Inspector. But after us, there'll be no one. Some people deserve to live," he said. "Some people should never die."

>Hi. I'm Antoine.
>I'm your tutor today.
>What's your name?

>Call me Tutor, OK? You go to Cambridge Rindge and Latin?

>Yup. 10th grade summer enrichment program. >Great. What's up?

>Got a word problem today. "In 4 years Jon will be twice as old as Matt. Two years ago Matt was 1/4 as old as Jon. How old are the brothers now?" I can figure out the answer if I start with age 1 year for Matt and then keep trying with different years. Matt is 5 and Jon is 14. But that's not the point, my teacher says.

>Correct. Don't use brute force. Use your brain. Let the math do the work for you.

Poincaré had worked through the problem in advance and spent ten minutes recreating the fumblings of a tenth grader, so that— taking direction from Chambi—he produced the following:

>2M = 10. M = 5. Matt is 5 years old. >Which means Jon is how old? Use Matt's age in the equation for Jon.

>J = 4M–6. J = 4(5)–6 J = 14. Jon is 14
years old.
>Excellent, Antoine!

>Thanks. I've got one more question, though.

>What's that?

>The math is all on paper or in my head. What if Jon and Matt are real people? How does math connect with real things? >A mathematician's question! Good for you. But it's too late for me to get into this right now. I'm sleepy. Write me tomorrow or the next day with another word problem. When do your classes end each day?

>I can usually get to a computer in the library by 3.

>Good. 3 PM two days from now. I'll be sure to be online.

>It's only 7 o'clock. You're sleepy?? >Long day, Antoine.

>OK. Thanks. You're not in Cambridge, I
guess.
>Good night.

    For her, Poincaré thought. But the sun had yet to set in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He logged off the Math League Web site and e-mailed a colleague in Lyon, Hubert Levenger, who headed a recently commissioned office responsible for tracking cybercrime. In an earlier conversation, Levenger offered to infiltrate the Math League Web site and track the IP address of the person chatting with Poincaré—provided she did not use any of several tricks to mask the address. "If we can get her IP," said Levenger, "we can identify the service she used to connect to the Internet. That will give us a country of origin, at least. Depending on the service, we can get a location to within fifty miles, possibly closer."

    Poincaré waited for a return e-mail. When it arrived, the answer was not what he hoped for. "The person chatting with you used a proxy server positioned between her computer and the Math League to log onto that server as an authenticated user. She could be anywhere, Henri. Give me another shot when you chat next. I'm tired. See you later."

    Levenger had done him the favor of staying up until 1 AM in Lyon. It occurred to Poincaré that if Chambi was tired, too, she was not in the Americas. Seven PM in Boston was only 8 PM in Brasilia and Buenos Aires. Taking her at her word, it was
late
wherever she sat. At thirteen hours later than Boston, Hong Kong was not likely. He ruled out the Far East. It was Europe, he concluded, or Africa—chatting with him between midnight, Lisbon time, and 1 AM in Johannesburg.

    He logged into his Interpol account to confirm that a Blue Notice had been issued for Chambi. Immediately before leaving for the States, he had mastered his rage sufficiently to tie Interpol into his search. Monforte had poisoned everything he touched in Poincaré's life. Still, if Interpol could not guarantee personal safety, what it did well was track and arrest fugitives who crossed international borders. Because Chambi was not yet indicted and could not be held against her will, Poincaré issued an Interpol Blue Notice that, without detaining her, would yield information on her whereabouts and activities. Rainier's Red Notice listing, by contrast, would lead to her arrest. But with both women well out of sight, the system of Notices had yielded nothing. Eventually, he expected, one or both would make a mistake and when that happened the chase would be on. Monforte had seen to the details, and Poincaré updated Chambi's profile regarding her likely location. Before walking into Harvard Square for dinner, he sent a text message to Gisele De Vries:

Dana Chambi. Ecuadorian national. Was she on hotel list compiled in Amsterdam?

He pushed
send
, confident that De Vries would answer him within the hour.

    He didn't wait for an answer, and Poincaré followed him to a shop called the Busy Bee, where the detective greeted the woman behind the counter and wedged his stevedore frame into a booth. "The Fenster case got more interesting," he said. "Annie—coffee and a corn muffin. Grilled. Same for my friend."

    "What is it with Americans and muffins?" asked Poincaré.