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.
CHAPTER 2
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. "Inevitability 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."
CHAPTER 3
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 merch
ant 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.
"Forensics is angry as hell," said a woman. "The fire crews saved the block but drowned the evidence."
Gisele De Vries shook Poincaré's hand, insisting on formalities. As the local agent that Dutch security services had assigned as liaison to Interpol, De Vries was the one member of his team Poincaré had not personally selected. Interpol agents, by charter, held no powers of arrest and were bound in every case to work alongside local or national police of their host country. The flinty De Vries had immediately impressed Poincaré. Give her a data-gathering task and she would finish ahead of deadline, not only collecting information but presenting analyses in multiple views. Her desk was neat; her clothes, carefully pressed; her shoes, square-toed and sensible. Only her long, auburn hair, clasped loosely at her neck and hanging to mid-back, hinted at a rich inner life.
"If you didn't know better," she said, "you'd think someone carved out the room with a laser cannon from over there." She pointed across the canal, where a crowd had gathered.
She handed him a photograph. "Taken ten minutes ago from a police helicopter. The blast patterns are the same on both sides of the building, consistent with a bomb placed here, beneath the sink." On a second sheet she showed Poincaré a schematic of the hotel room. "Fenster must have been leaning over it at detonation. Aside from being burned beyond recognition, what's left of the torso is splintered with porcelain. And then there's this." She reached for a piece of wet, charred wood, sniffed, and held out her hand. Poincaré winced.
"Ammonium perchlorate," she said. "Rocket fuel, believe it or not. Burns like a flare and, under specific conditions, will explode. If the bomber had used as much C-4, the entire block would be gone. In fact, it was an elegant job."
Poincaré had seen the effects of all manner of explosives in his career, but this was a first: rocket fuel used for a purpose other than breaking heavy objects loose of Earth's gravity. "Not typical, is it."
"Hardly," said De Vries.
"Well, let's collect some residues." He sniffed the charred wood again. "Send samples to the lab here in Amsterdam for a quick analysis, but I also want the European Space Agency looking into this. And NASA. This could narrow our search."
"To die bent over a sink," said Ludovici. "I suppose there's a moral in that."
Poincaré glanced at the tarpaulin and, again, turned away—an aversion that had nothing to do with squeamishness. He had worked with his share of corpses; but he also lacked the capacity to regard them as pieces of meat once the heart stopped beating. There was this thing called Life—the way Claire would sometimes look up from her work and smile at him—and not Life. Death. Wonder at one entailed wonder at the other, and Poincaré simply could not feel nothing at the sight of a burnt-out corpse. Soon enough, he would shut down certain sensors and approach the remains.
"A moral?" came a booming, sepulchral voice from the hotel entrance, three steps below street grade. Serge Laurent clapped a hand on Ludovici's shoulder. "Young man, the moral here is that cleanliness is next to godliness."
Poincaré's closest friend and confidant in or out of the service checked his watch. "Almost three hours post-explosion and the desk clerk is still shaking. The man needs a new diaper and likely an injection of some sort, but he won't leave his station. Professional pride."
Poincaré watched Laurent note the coffee stain on his trousers and then restrain himself from making a crack about water management and men of a certain age. Both agents had given their careers to Interpol and were so unlike in temperament, so different in their approaches to a case, that no one could have predicted a friendship. If Poincaré faced oncoming force with a kind of mental jujitsu, sidestepping trouble and studying opponents as they tripped from their own momentum, Laurent preferred collisions. If he were a physicist, he would have smashed atoms for a living—precisely the quality that doomed his marriages.
"Forensics just about came to blows with the fire crew for making a mess of the crime scene," said Laurent. "Extracting evidence will be challenging in the extreme, but they've established one salient fact: clean prints off the doorknob to the room and the window cranks match prints on the room key, which match the left thumb and right index fingerprints of the victim—which, since you asked, are the only digits not reduced to jelly or blown into the canal. The torso was lodged in that tree"—he pointed—"and a leg knocked a guy off his bicycle." Laurent closed his notebook. "When I die, for pity's sake let it be in one piece."
Across the Herengracht, a crowd had gathered; some watched from open windows. "Alright, then," said Poincaré. "We've got internally consistent prints, which is not the same as a positive ID. What are we doing to confirm the ID?"
"Data from Boston is due tomorrow morning," said Laurent. "Oh—I nearly forgot." He opened a folder and produced a clear plastic evidence bag with a photograph, which he set, still in its bag, on the hood of a Mercedes half-crushed by a roof beam. "Fenster's— the victim's—prints are all over it." They gathered around the image.
Several moments passed. "Come on, people. It's not a game if no one plays. There's a caption on the back. Two euros to the winner."
Ludovici went first. "The spine of a mountain range. I flew over the Alps last week when I went home. Just like this—central spine fanning out to ridges."
"Gisele?"
"An angiogram. When my mother had a stroke, the doctors showed me a scan that looked something like this. It's a blood vessel, I think. But then again it could be a river with tributaries. Or the roots of a plant."
"Wrong again. Henri?"
"Spare us, Serge."
Laurent flipped the photo and read the caption. "Lightning. Negative image." And then: " 'Series 3, Image A, WTO talk.' Apparently, there are other images we haven't found. Destroyed, I suppose." He surveyed the wreckage. "How did no one else manage to die? Did you hear, there was another explosion today—in Milan. Old-fashioned dynamite."
"Milano?" said Ludovici. "Where?"
"Galleria Vittorio Emanuele."
"No. . . ." It was his birthplace. He dug into his jacket for a cell phone and left them to place a call.
"Six people died in that one," said Laurent. "A man wearing robes called on Jesus to heal the world, then blew himself up. There's nothing remotely religious about our bombing, I suppose."
De Vries thumbed through a sheaf of papers. "Nothing here about anyone wearing robes. I'll check into it. But did you say the reversed image of lightning was related to Fenster's talk? He was speaking on globalization, Serge. What's the connection?"
Laurent smiled. "That's what we call a mystery, my dear."
CHAPTER 4
Sunlight played across the floor of the bakery where Poincaré had come to gather his thoughts. The shop was quiet, a pair of café tables dominating the tiny space. The window display of fruit tarts and cookies had drawn Poincaré in, but he had chosen poorly. The proprietress, at first a model of Dutch hospitality, by small degrees suffocated him with attention: she cleaned his already spotless table as he began reviewing a long afternoon's case notes; she insisted on straightening a display of chocolates on a shelf by his shoulder; she even swept and mopped the floor, asking him to move. He stayed because this was the only coffee shop in the area and because he needed to sit with a cup of something warm.
"A third espresso," she said. "You're certain?"
He should have thanked her for the interruptions. Wh
at he had seen made too little sense, and sometimes he found that the straightest course to clarity required that he forget facts altogether and allow his mind to wander. This woman, at least, kept him from stitching one thought to the next.
"One couldn't properly call this a body," he had told the medical examiner not forty minutes earlier. All afternoon—whether he was examining what remained of the apartment, working alongside a firefighter to retrieve the shoe caught high in a tree, or bending over a field microscope to examine a sliver of porcelain—the victim's remains had called to Poincaré. Not until the men in hazard suits were preparing to shovel what was left of the victim into a bag did he steel himself for a look.
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