CHAPTER 21
"Mr. Punky-ray. You come right up!"
Poincaré recalled Peter Roy's mother-in-law with affection, though in all honesty he had forgotten about the old woman until he tried negotiating, once again, the grimy call box on Massachusetts Avenue. She buzzed him into the building and greeted him at the office door with a smile and the same heavy-jowled crankiness he found so endearing on his first visit. This time, she extended her arm in the dim hallway light, palm downward—waiting. Poincaré bowed slightly and kissed the back of her hand. "Enchanté," she said. "Rachel's husband is expecting you."
"Rachel's husband?"
"Peter, my son-in-law."
Roy appeared behind her. "Browbeating our clients again, Gladys?"
She patted his shoulder on her way into the office. "You're the father of my grandchildren and you pay my salary—so I won't say anything unkind. But Mr. Punky-ray could teach you a thing or two about manners. You could start with a kiss each morning. Here, for instance." She put a finger to her cheek.
Roy cleared his throat. "Welcome to America, Henri."
Poincaré had also forgotten the appeal of Peter Roy, who reminded him of country lawyers he read about as a young man. Here were the suspenders, the bow tie, and the wire rims behind which dark eyes suggested principles that would not bend. Yet this country lawyer had hung his shingle above a tattoo parlor in an East Coast city.
"Gladys heard you were visiting and baked muffins," he said.
"Stop that! It's a surprise!" She rounded a corner with a tin of poppy-seed muffins, reminding Poincaré of Felice Laval introducing herself the morning Claire and he took possession of the farm. Overwhelmed by its ramshackle condition and suffering a brutal case of buyer's remorse, Poincaré was just working his hand through a hole in the foundation that he had somehow failed to notice before the sale when Felice arrived, croissants in a basket, a thermos of coffee, three paper cups and the reassuring news that field mice were a problem only ten months a year.
"With you being so far from home," said Roy's mother-in-law, "I thought you might appreciate some American hospitality. Does your wife bake muffins?"
"At the moment no, Madame."
She hobbled from view in search of coffee. Walking to the conference room, Poincaré said: "I suppose you understand how fortunate you are."
"To have Gladys? Half my clients bring her chocolates or flowers. The other half wonder how I haven't lost my mind. . . . What can I do for you, Henri? I seem always to be in a rush these days. When I was a partner at a downtown firm charging $500 an hour, I kept my meter running in ten-minute increments to make my billable quota each month. Now that I've set a rate my new clients can afford— $40 an hour, not even half of what a competent massage therapist makes—I run the meter at two-minute intervals just to keep the lights on. My time wasn't my own downtown, and it's not here. My wife says I've traded one prison uniform for another."
"And I'm not a paying customer," Poincaré offered. "Or am I?"
Roy smiled. "Sit, Henri. I imagine you want updates. I haven't heard from Madeleine Rainer again. And Fenster's estate is settled— all the legal matters are tucked away, save one. The battle over the hard drive has heated up. Eric Hurley, the Commonwealth's lead investigator on the case, contacted me two weeks ago asking if Fenster had left any indication in his will about the disposition of his laptop computer. My strong presumption, though no one has asked for my opinion, is that because James left everything to the Math League Trust he established to benefit the Cambridge school system, the burden will be on others to prove why his computer and whatever's on it shouldn't go to the Trust as well. In fact, no one knows what's on the hard drive—but the interest, shall we say, is high." "I'll call Hurley," said Poincaré. "We've met."
"You should. The State has finally released Fenster's apartment back to the landlord, who sued so he could rent the unit again. The investigation has tied the place up for—what has it been, now—four months? The man deserves his rent."
"Of course. What about Fenster's belongings?"
"Donated, I believe. The landlord put the caretaker in charge of that."
Poincaré slid three photographs of the same person across the table. Honey-nut skin. Jet black hair. Round face. One photo came off the Harvard Math Department's home page months ago. The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles mailed Poincaré the second. The last was a passport photo, provided by the Counsel General of Ecuador. Roy studied the images.
"She's fond of scarves," he said. "Beyond that, never met her."
"Dana Chambi," said Poincaré.
"Fenster's graduate student? She and I spoke by phone several times after the bombing, mostly about the Math League and how that could become an important part of Fenster's legacy. We never met in person, but from what I can tell she's bright and agreeable. What do you want with Dana Chambi?"
"She's a person of interest in my investigation."
Roy folded his hands. "I shouldn't think so—not the woman I met by phone. She was nothing but helpful, conscientious. You saying she's a murderer?"
"I'm saying she's a person of interest."
Roy nodded. "Well, then. I can tell you how to find her, but not where—if that makes any sense. She's the 'Resident Expert' at the Math League Web site. When students log on, they find study sets, puzzles, mazes, and so forth. There's also a message thread that she monitors, providing free tutorial services. She said it would be a way of staying connected to Fenster's mission. She built the entire Web site and is running everything for the summer on a trial basis, until other tutors take over. Fenster's fund pays for advertising here in Cambridge—small money. Ms. Chambi takes care of the rest, gratis. It's an impressive site by any standard, an entire math curriculum to supplement what goes on in the classroom. She consulted teachers system-wide on its development, and apparently there's support for introducing it into the curriculum. I believe summer enrichment classes are already using it. So you can find her on the Web. Where she happens to be seated physically, of course, is anyone's guess."
"Who hosts the site? Where does she rent server space?"
Roy opened a second file. "The Math League Trust pays all expenses. The domain registry, the site hosting . . ." He flipped through several pages. "Yes, here it is." He pointed to copies of invoices establishing the Trust as the purchaser of services. "Gladys wrote the initial checks to launch the site. It's a yearly fee, not much. I'm custodian of the Trust, temporarily at least. Following Ms. Chambi's instructions, we bought the domain name and paid for server space. The company we dealt with is located in Philadelphia, but the actual servers could be located anywhere. Chambi could be on a world tour at the moment and still maintain the site without disruption to end users. So there's nothing in any of this that establishes a location for her. You could subpoena the company in Pennsylvania, but they would only point you back here, since we're the only ones who really exist for them."
"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 acros
s 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."
WHAT 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 patterns, 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."
CHAPTER 22
>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?
All Cry Chaos Page 17