All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  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. Ponder this, the former librarian was calling across the continent: Reduce a man to dirt. Destroy all that he loves, and watch what he becomes.

  CLAIRE 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, Teaching 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 rea
ch 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.

  "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.

  CHAPTER 12

  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 wan
t 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."

  In the living room, he poured himself a tall glass of Rémy Martin and collapsed onto a seat overlooking Lyon. When they had found this apartment just before their wedding, with only a bed and a single pot to their names, they drank too much wine one evening and, standing naked before these same windows, watched the remnants of a storm break apart and sail away. They toasted the future, drank more wine, and made love until their exhausted bodies cried for sleep. All these years later, the lights of Lyon had not changed much—this ancient city, ever young. But Poincaré had changed. In recent weeks he had felt the pull of gravity. His bones ached and his head throbbed. He drank his cognac, then another. Claire joined him and laid her head on his shoulder.