All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  Postmarked Zurich, two weeks after the bombing. So she had slipped out of the Netherlands after all. "I understand the money went to the Math League," said Poincaré, "and that Rainier saw none of it. Still, I'm never surprised when money sits at the bottom of a case. Would you mind if I reviewed Fenster's financial records? Perhaps you could copy his bank statements and canceled checks. Anything along these lines could prove useful."

  "It's pretty sleepy stuff," said the attorney. "But help yourself. He maintained all his finances online with a single bank here in town. I've got the past five years of his savings, checking, and credit card accounts on a flash drive. You're welcome to it."

  Poincaré rose to shake the attorney's hand. "I'll be direct," he said. "I consider Madeleine Rainier a suspect in James Fenster's murder. Interpol has issued a warrant, so at present she's a fugitive from justice. This means that if you hear from her again—"

  "Of course," said Roy. "I didn't share her contact information before—"

  "You were perfectly within your rights, and hers. She wasn't a suspect then. It's just that attorney-client privilege often complicates my work."

  "A necessary complication, Inspector."

  "I know, I know," Poincaré sniffed. "Rule of law."

  Roy walked him to the tiny receiving area. "Give me a moment to copy Fenster's financial records. In the meantime, take a seat. You can watch Gladys abusing my next client."

  MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE was alive with the bustle of city life in fine weather. Poincaré consulted his map and determined that he could take a Red Line train across the river and then walk to a building near Government Center where the state police kept the contents of Fenster's Harvard office. At the entrance to the subway, he folded his map to music drifting from below—a disembodied saxophone playing "My Favorite Things" in a sad quarter-time. Raindrops on roses . . . He paused as people hurried up and down the subway stairs; to his left, a line formed for arepas at a food cart; across the street, a piano moving company attracted a crowd as large men lowered a baby grand from a third-storey window. City life hummed around him, set to a melancholic tune. When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad . . . The musician turned that last note into a plea that shook loose from Poincaré memories of his own favorite things: of Etienne, at six, on his lap explaining the intricacies of a new tower he had designed; of Claire's discovering him at a gallery, each there secretly to buy the other the same gift; of Chloe leading him to a barn door, saying: Papi, look! What would he not do for them? If the doors of a jet bound for Paris opened before him that instant, he would have boarded.

  A car horn shook Poincaré back to the moment and he descended the stairs, prepared to thank the saxophonist. Instead, he nearly stumbled into a strange young man with a soft beard, wearing sandals and a robe—and holding a placard. Just as if Poincaré had dropped a coin into the slot of a mechanical fortuneteller, the Soldier of Rapture—for that's who he must be, Poincaré decided—raised a hand and broke into a recitation of the words on his placard, delivered with righteous anger:

  . . . the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then He will send forth the angels and will gather together His elect from the four winds, from the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven.

  — MARK 13: 24-27

  "The Rapture?" asked Poincaré.

  "Verily."

  He stifled a laugh. But then there was nothing funny about the social worker in Barcelona or mutilated children beside an ice cream shop in Milan.

  "Tell me," said Poincaré, "how much time is left?"

  "Enough to save yourself, Brother! Signs and portents are everywhere around us. Armies on the move. Husbands beating wives. Mothers aborting children. Children shooting other children in our streets. Hurricanes, tsunamis, AIDS. Tell me: have the times ever been so twisted? The end draws near!"

  He said it with conviction, at least. Behind him, decades of grime sloughed off metal girders. The platform smelled of machine grease and urine. An approaching trolley on the far tracks screamed against the rails.

  "The Rapture," said Poincaré. "Days away or months?"

  "Look to your faith, not the calendar!"

  "That's hard."

  "Of course, it's hard! Only one question matters anymore: Do you know God in your heart?"

  "I try to make things right, if that counts."

  "Don't we all!"

  On this point Poincaré was perfectly clear. "No, we don't. Not everyone."

  "True, praise God! Yes! Fall on your knees and pray for those who reject His path. Conquer pride. Embrace the redemption that is right here, right now—waiting. God is waiting! Pray for the fallen! Join us!"

  Poincaré did not envy Laurent's making sense of this rant. Instead of bending a knee, he said: "I want to learn more." He leaned close. "What's your name, son?"

  "Simon."

  "Simon, tell me how to learn more. I want to be redeemed. I do!"

  Poincaré expected a phone number scribbled on a piece of paper, but the Soldier surprised him with a brochure dedicated to New Testament proofs of the Second Coming. On a reverse panel was a toll-free number, the addresses of Rapturian welcome centers in New York and Los Angeles, and the URL of a Web site. Laurent would want to see this.

  He pocketed the brochure and stepped through a turnstile onto the subway platform, where he found the saxophone player—a man his same age still singing for his supper. On another day, Poincaré would have taken him to lunch and learned his story. Instead, he dropped a few dollars into an open case. At the approach of a train, a gust blew from the tunnel and lifted the front page of that morning's paper from a trash heap. It spiraled, dipped, then stalled before Poincaré's face long enough for him to read the headline: "Earthquake Shakes Pacific Rim!" The train stopped and he boarded. When he turned, the shepherd smiled and raised a hand in benediction.

  CHAPTER 14

  That evening Poincaré confirmed that the life of James Fenster, as told by a scrupulously balanced checkbook, was both orderly and unremarkable. A credit report showed that he used a single credit card once or twice a month for internet or phone purchases and to guarantee car rentals when he traveled to conferences. Over the course of two years, on the income side, Poincaré noted automatic deposits of Fenster's Harvard salary; on the debit side, he found checks written at weekly intervals for groceries, two or three checks a year to clothing stores, and monthly rent checks. On Mondays he would withdraw $140 from an automatic teller for the week. The man was an anachronism: he rarely used plastic money, carried no debt, and saved most of what he earned. An Internal Revenue summary of Fenster's tax history and the absence of a criminal record or traffic violations showed James Fenster, private citizen, to be exactly what Peter Roy claimed: modest, quiet, and unexceptional.

  By 2 AM Poincaré had all but concluded this inquiry when, scrolling through the last of the cancelled checks, he found an anomaly. For two years, the man had either cleaned his own apartment or paid someone, perhaps an undocumented worker, in cash to do so. But Poincaré doubted the expense, inasmuch as Fenster gave himself an allowance of only $20 per day—too little to accommodate even a modest man's needs let alone extra for paying a cleaner. Yet during the course of a single week before departing for Amsterdam, he had written three large checks: one for $1,500; another for $2,025; and the last for $2,750—all to local cleaning companies. Poincaré saw no notes written in the memo lines of these checks, so after a few hours of sleep he located the companies and made inquiries. On successive days, it turned out, Fenster had hired professional cleaning crews to work on his apartment—the last specializing in "laboratory and surgical clean room standards" according to its Web site.

  "Strange but not unprecedented," said the owner of MicroScrub. "Usually, local biotech companies or the universities h
ire us to maintain their clean rooms. You know, for biomedical work or manufacturing computer chips. Every once in awhile we'll get a call from a civilian, so to speak."

  "What did you do for Dr. Fenster?"

  As the man consulted his paperwork, Poincaré checked his cell phone for text messages. Nothing from Claire or Etienne. "Standard mopping and disinfecting. At the client's request, we wiped every surface with a mild bleach solution, including books, dishes, utensils, walls, door knobs and drawer pulls."

  Poincaré removed his reading glasses and looked out the hotel window, across the Charles. On a footpath, a lone runner paralleled the river. "It was the apartment's third cleaning in three days," he said, reviewing the checks once more. "Did you know this?" The owner of MicroScrub did not but added that the crew chief 's notes indicated the apartment was already clean. Spotless was the word in the report. "Why would someone clean an apartment that was already clean?" Poincaré asked. "You say you've done this before for individuals."

  "Medical reasons usually," the man answered. "Earlier this year we did a similar wipe-down of a house in Lexington. The owner was just coming home from one of those cancer treatments where they knock out your immune system. For the first month he had to avoid infections at all costs, so the family hired us. I'll sometimes get similar calls during allergy season—though for these people we're cleaning pollen, not germs. So we do get requests of this sort. But for the most part it's biotech and the universities."

  "Did the customer explain his reasons?"

  "Mr. Fenster wasn't home," said the man. "The notes show that a Mr. Silva let us into the unit and locked up behind us. The caretaker. We were paid by check in advance."

  Poincaré leaned back in his chair, working through the possibilities. He had read the state police report. The investigators had full access to Fenster's medical records and certainly would have noted a health crisis. True, it had been allergy season, but a single cleaning would have managed that problem and, in any event, during the previous spring Poincaré found no similar expenses. Fenster did not hire three cleaning services to rid the apartment of ragweed.

  The building was a three-storey brick box that blighted a neighborhood of century-old Victorians. Poincaré made his way down a tree-lined street along brick sidewalks that bucked and heaved. Two men stood at the entry of the apartment building, one young and slender, dressed in a suit plain enough to be a mechanic's uniform; the other, thickset with lacquered gray hair and a forest of eyebrows. From what Poincaré could see, the older man was unhappy in the extreme at being forced into polite conversation with a kindergartner who also happened to be an FBI agent. Eric Hurley was howling mad as he read, then signed, a sheet of paper. At Poincaré's approach, the veteran cop said: "I suppose you're Interpol . . . another burr in my ass. This case was closed."

  Poincaré shook the detective's hand, then Agent Johnson's.

  "I've heard the stories, Inspector. It's an honor. Truly."

  "Well, don't start pissing yourself with excitement," said Hurley. "I'll unseal the room—" he looked at his watch—"and you'll call me when you're done and stay put until I get back. I've got things to do. And for the record, we had our best forensics teams out here after the murder. They produced IDs that confirmed all your findings in Amsterdam—so I don't mind saying that my opening this apartment so you can validate my work offends me. Just so we understand each other."

  The man was perspiring and smelled of buttermilk. "I understand," said Poincaré.

  "I don't care if you do or don't understand. Let me see that warrant again." When Agent Johnson produced the document, Hurley jerked open the vestibule door and climbed to the second landing, quickly for someone his size. He was just starting down the hall when he nearly knocked over a custodian who was vacuuming a carpet. In another moment, he stopped at a door where Poincaré saw adhesive labels set across the jamb at four spots, making entry impossible without breaking a seal. Hurley noted the time, initialed each label, then sliced them with a penknife. He unlocked the door and pocketed the key. "Knock yourselves out," he said. "And don't leave until I get back. Here's my number." He flipped a business card to the carpet.

  Rumbling down the hall, Hurley looked like a truck driver negotiating a narrow street. The custodian pinned himself against a door to let him pass, and Agent Johnson said: "I'm betting the only two people who ever loved this guy were his mother and his football coach."

  Poincaré laughed. "He's right, you know. Everything they found confirmed the forensics report in Amsterdam. As far as their end of the investigation is concerned, this case is closed." He had motioned to the custodian, who shut off his vacuum and approached. Poincaré explained their business.

  "Finally," said the man.

  "You knew Dr. Fenster?"

  "Well enough."

  "How well was that?" asked Poincaré.

  "We'd watch the Red Sox together some nights. He'd bring pizza over to my place, maybe carry-out Chinese. I live in the basement unit, next to the heating plant."

  Jorge Silva was a fragile-looking seventy-five or eighty with papery skin, sloped shoulders, and a preference for talking to the floor in the presence of strangers. He pulled at his hands to mask a tremor. "I thought the police gave up."

  "We haven't," said Poincaré.

  "Good. Because Jimmy Fenster deserved better. People here say good morning and make noises like they care. Only Jimmy cared. One time I got sick, and he came by twice a day for a week to bring soup and bread. Who else noticed? I got no family anymore. No kids to take care of me." Silva looked ready to spit. "When I think of him blown up . . ."

  Finally, Poincaré thought. "So you were friends?"

  "Yes."

  "And you'd see him how often?"

  "In baseball season, at least twice a week. Otherwise, maybe once. Sometimes we'd sit outside, on the bench. Just chatting, looking at things. He liked to look at tree limbs, clouds. We'd walk down the block sometimes and get ice cream."

  "What about clouds?"

  Poincaré was not even sure why he asked.

  "The white, puffy ones," Silva began. "He said on his very first airplane trip, to some kind of math competition, he was flying across the Midwest in summer. Just a kid at the time, maybe eight years old, and he saw the shadow of the clouds on the fields—he said they were islands and coastlines, the shadows. I said, They reminded you? And he said no, they were the same, clouds and coastlines. I don't know," said Silva. "We just enjoyed each other's company. With some people you do, with some you don't."

  "Before he left for Europe," said Poincaré, "before the bombing, he hired a cleaning crew. You let them in and out. Is that right?"

  "He left instructions. Three companies over three days."

  "How clean does an apartment need to be, Mr. Silva?"

  "It's strange. That's true."

  "Did you ask?"

  "No. Why should I?"

  "Was Dr. Fenster sick? Did he have to keep the place that clean to avoid germs?"

  "Not sick, no. He could have used twenty more pounds, but he was healthy."

  "Did he have a regular cleaner?"

  "No—he cleaned himself. It's a small place. You'll see."

  "And the last cleaning crew," said Poincaré, his hand now on the apartment door. "Tell me about them."

  Silva scratched his head. "They came with their own vacuums, detergents, dusters and a couple of machines I didn't know what. Three or four people, with gloves and paper socks over their shoes. I saw them wiping everything clean. I know somebody who does work like that down at Mass General."

  "When did you see Dr. Fenster last?"

  "It was a Wednesday because that night was the last game of the opening series with Tampa Bay. The Red Sox won. Jimmy stopped over with pizza. He was all packed and brought his bag with him to my place. He had just come from another trip out West, I think— gone a couple of weeks."

  Poincaré knew that Fenster had spoken at conferences in Tokyo and Seattle on topics unrel
ated to globalization—and that he had flown into Boston for an eight-hour layover before his flight to Amsterdam. "Go on," he said.

  "I think he must have come straight from the airport to have pizza with me. I'm not even sure he went back to his apartment because he told me he just came from his office and the pizza parlor, then straight here. He loved baseball. After about the fifth inning he called a cab to Logan from my place and I walked him out to the street. He said he was glad we were friends. He held up his hand and smiled."

  "You shook hands."

  "No." Silva raised his right hand as if he were swearing on a Bible. "He did this."