All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  "Do you believe there was a Golden Age? An Eden—a world without suffering?"

  "I don't know a thing anymore."

  "Well, it's never been different. This world's been about to end forever, and I could bore you with a catalogue of the Doomsday cults who thought so because I've researched them all. When we wake up on August 16th, the Rapturians will become one more fringe sect in a long line. The Bombers-for-Christ will stop bombing, the schismatics will stop their assassinations, and life will return to normal— whatever that is—until the expiration of the Mayan calendar. That will launch a new hallucination with contours all its own that will look, if I live to see it, just like the contours of this Rapturian madness. Round it goes, Henri. Different names, the same thing."

  Poincaré walked two fingers down his arm. "A path through chaos. I like that. . . . I could use a path straight through the Fenster case. If everyone's telling the truth, I've got nothing. I've got a hard drive with secrets and one in a couple of billion billion chances of cracking it. I haven't found my granddaughter's killer. I believe everyone is lying to me, Serge."

  "Well, that is progress. You must be getting close!" Laurent raised a glass. "To my dean of Inspectors, Henri Poincaré. My Inspector General of the Corps de Mines, Keeper of the family flame. A miner! To Henri, to digging!!"

  They clinked glasses.

  Poincaré could stand it no longer and grabbed Laurent's boney arm. "Come stay with Claire and me. We'll set up a room. Better yet, we'll put you in one of the horse stalls where you belong. Don't die alone, Serge."

  Laurent shook Poincaré loose and reached for a cigarette. He struck a match and took a drag, deep as his ruined lungs would allow. "Just how stupid are you?" he said.

  "You're still smoking—and asking me this?"

  "I'll tell you how stupid you are. You're stupid enough to pull yourself along with what's left of your family down into my hole— not that I'm going to occupy it much longer. Last I checked, your hole was deep enough." He looked over Poincaré's shoulder to the lounge entrance and waved at two women. "Ah! My 11 PM appointment. Ladies!" He motioned them across the dance floor. "Come meet my friend, Henri. He's quite famous in policing circles. Also French."

  The women were showpieces, real enough but as much a part of the Las Vegas cartoon as the half-sized Eiffel Tower. The one who looked like Marilyn Monroe slid her arm around Laurent's waist. The other one said: "Come party, Hank. Serge needs us both tonight, but we've got friends."

  "No, my dears. He's got important work to do. Big questions to settle." Laurent kissed one on the top of the head and whispered: "If you can keep a secret, he's digging. Don't tell." He peeled fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills onto the table. Looking directly at Poincaré, he said: "Goodbye, Henri. I don't suppose we'll be seeing each other again." He turned from the lounge, a woman on each arm, and was gone.

  CHAPTER 34

  In the corridor that evening, a woman giggled: "Bobby, stop! I'll unsnap it when we get to the room!"

  Lit by the glow of his computer screen, Poincaré had once again laid everything he owned on the Fenster case across a hotel bed: folders each for Roy, Bell, Quito, Rainier, Chambi, Family Services of Minnesota, JPL, Randal Young, the Ambassade bombing, Günther's autopsy report, and Agent Johnson's fingerprint and DNA analysis. He sat in the middle of it all with his laptop and Fenster's hard drive. The key to the password if not the password itself would be found in some combination of these folders—or nowhere. Sixtyseven nonrandom characters, ninety-five possibilities for each: if it was a number known to mathematicians, a constant or a series, he would never find it. This much he had already demonstrated. A phrase, then, or nothing.

  How would Jules Henri have approached this puzzle, he wondered. His great-grandfather had been calling to him this entire case, so why not invoke his ghost once and for all. Grand-père—you who were blessed with a gift for pointing to large truths hiding in plain sight . . . take a look. Poincaré placed his hands on the files. What is it? What am I missing?

  Poincaré opened the folder marked: Fenster, Apartment and, within that, Agent Johnson's report. One by one, he worked through the images from the gallery. This time he forced himself to look beyond the beauty of surfaces and see what Fenster had assembled. An impact crater on Mars, recorded through an orbiting telescope, resembled the cells of a leaf on Earth and also city streets. He turned to his notes and reread his summary of the captions: River delta + cauliflower leaf. Common lichen + Ireland (imaged from space). Lightning + veins of eye + sidewalk crack + tree + mountain ridge. He read fifty such groupings and forced himself to state as directly as he could Fenster's conclusion: that what was radically and irreducibly its own in this world was, at the same instant, not. Both different and not. Singular and plural. The same.

  Poincaré had seen it in the fountains of the Bellagio. He turned to another page of notes, where he had recorded the phrasings Fenster had posted above his captions. The same name. Difference? Mathematics is an art. He turned to the inside of yet another folder, where in a careful hand he had copied what Jules Henri had observed a century before and what Fenster had taken on as his own life's work. Guiding the tip of his pencil, he counted words. Twelve. He counted the characters in the words. Fifty-five. He counted the characters plus the spaces between the words: sixty-six. He added the period: sixty-seven.

  Taped to the computer for all to see, hiding in plain sight like every other mystery Jules Henri and Fenster had plumbed, a declaration deeper than biology, older than this world or any: Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. This time when Poincaré typed the password, his computer screen blinked and a file opened like a rose at its appointed hour.

  CHAPTER 35

  The dream was vivid enough that he felt the sun full on his face— except it wasn't his face or possibly his but also his mother's or his father's, he couldn't tell. The emotions were his own, then theirs, then his again. The three of them had spent a morning hiking the lower elevations of Mt. Blanc, climbing meadow trails that with each turn presented another stunning view of the mountain. The air was bright and clear; the wind blew a steady plume off the peak, the edelweiss was in bloom. Twelve years old, Poincaré climbed steadily, happily. At one switchback he paused to check on his parents and found they had stopped—to look at him. It was at this point in the dream he became one of them, or both, and saw himself ahead, waving. Then he was himself once more, wondering why his mother on so magnificent a day would appear to be crying, yet happy, as she held his father's hand and waved. Then he was below once more, holding hands, looking up at himself framed against the meadow and mountain with the broad sky behind, and he felt a terrible ache that was also beautiful and sweet, and he woke in Claire's studio knowing exactly what his parents knew: that what we love most in this world, we lose.

  He had taken a late dinner and climbed to the studio and collapsed, waking at first light with his strange dream. He planned to stay in Lyon long enough to renew the lease, meet with the new director at Interpol, and catch a train to Fonroque. After the attacks, he could not bring himself to visit the studio or conduct any business on his wife's behalf. But the lease was now up and he would need to inspect the premises and come to terms with the landlord. Claire would not be painting here anytime soon, and it made no sense to renew now that they lived in the south—especially given the costs. Just the same.

  She kept a single bed and a hot plate for the manic, productive times when she refused to interrupt work by returning home for meals or sleep. Poincaré had learned the hard way not to disturb her. Her creative bursts would begin with a note that she was contemplating a new piece and would be spending some time alone at the studio. Once, after a four-day absence, he made the mistake of climbing to the garret and knocking on the door. She answered, saw him looking past her to the work on the easel, and then marched directly to the canvas and slashed it with a palette knife. "Not ready!" she yelled. "Not ready!!" They agreed during a more reasoned moment
, when she was not painting, that she would leave a message each day on their answering machine. If he found it, he would not interrupt her; no message meant she was dead and he should come to collect the body. She apologized for the Jekyll and Hyde in her and explained that she had tried to shield him but that, in any event, he knew what he was signing on for.

  That was true. They met at a juried exhibition in Paris in which she had exhibited and won a first prize. She was nowhere in sight when he approached her work—a wood-panel miniature that suggested a female nude or, possibly, a coconut palm downed in a storm. "What do you think?" a voice inquired from behind.

  "I'm not sure," he answered, eyes still on the miniature. "I believe I like it, though I couldn't tell you why. Is it for sale?" He turned and was startled by the directness of her gaze. Her hair was rolled into a tight bun through which she had stuck a brush. Her hands were smudged with that morning's palette, and she smelled of turpentine.

  "It's not for sale," she said. "But I'll give it to you."

  Which led to dinner, which in time led to her apartment.

  It was this history of Claire's leaving him and returning that gave Poincaré hope she would emerge from her present sorrows. When he woke, he found the workspace as she had left it months before: on an easel sat an unfinished urban scene, though he could not be sure. He thought he recognized city lights in a swath of reds and yellows. If he did not understand her art, exactly, he appreciated that others did. Claire had secured gallery representation in Paris, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, and Buenos Aires. She crated and sent off what she finished, and her agents sold what she sent. He came to regard her canvases as a series of moods made visual, much in the way melodies can evoke feeling.

  All these years later, Poincaré marveled at how Etienne had gotten the best of Claire: her fearlessness, for one, and her genius for thinking both spatially and in colors. He sat on the corner of the bed and pulled her pillow close, but the scent of her was gone. He circled the loft, trailing his hands across rolled tubes of paint and the contraption she used to stretch her canvases. He sorted through the junk she used as props. But try as he might, Poincaré could not summon Claire from any of it. The studio was no longer a living space.

  As he prepared to leave, he noticed leaning against a wall by the door a single crate addressed to her agent in New York. Poincaré knew what it was, the portrait she had teased him about months ago—the very idea of which he found mortifying. In the weeks he had spent in Lyon getting on her nerves by securing the house, she had asked several times if he would visit the studio and offer an opinion. "Aren't you curious to know how I see you?" she asked.

  "I am," he said. "But I also know that I'll see the piece and ask you not to sell it. You'll accuse me of meddling, which would be true, and we'll fight. So, no, I'd rather not."

  She had crated the painting, and he took a hammer claw and pulled the nails along the top edge, then turned the crate upside down, careful to keep his eyes averted. When Poincaré stepped to the middle of the room and looked, he grabbed a chair to steady himself; for Claire, who had said, "Believe me—it's abstract enough that no one will recognize you," had lied spectacularly. She had long disparaged art as photograph. He had never known her to render a close likeness of a bowl of fruit or a country lane, let alone a person. Yet here he was looking at his wiser, more generous self, wearing work clothes with a pruning shears in hand, seated on an upended box on the terrace at Fonroque, the oak tree behind and beyond that the vineyards. The hair was thin and graying; the musculature of his face was yielding to gravity. She was a faithful, pitiless recorder, which was precisely what plucked his heart: for though she showed a man who had climbed a steep hill in life and was easily a stride or two over its crest, she also showed someone who had gained by that effort. About the eyes and the mouth he saw a kindness at odds with the demands of brutalizing work. In the tilt of the head and the not-quite-resolute set of the jaw he recognized a dismay at how cruel the world could be. And in the strong hand that gripped the shears, he saw respect for someone who would answer that cruelty. Mostly what Poincaré saw was the artist's affection for her subject. He came upon the canvas like a widower who discovers the tenderest of letters from his beloved, never sent. The portrait desolated him.

  CHAPTER 36

  Poincaré placed the Tyvek envelope on a desk before Hubert Levenger, who lifted the package to feel its heft. "Smaller than a breadbox, larger than a Rolex. A present—you shouldn't have."

  "A hard drive, Hubert—from an IBM laptop. There's a cable in there, too."

  "What's on it?"

  "A wall of numbers: eight million, give or take, single-spaced at five columns per screen. I'm hoping you can make some sense of it— tell me what I have. There's no other information on the drive that I could see, but maybe you can confirm that, too."

  "You have paperwork for this, I assume."

  He was an ascetic-looking man who neither wore nor consumed animal-derived products—the expression of a politics that Poincaré had learned early on not to discuss; for a single question usually led to long discourses and pamphlets delivered to the home. Otherwise, Poincaré had found Levenger to be an affable, dependable colleague. "In fact, the drive came into my possession without paperwork. Sorry."

  "I should know where this came from, Henri."

  "From an ongoing investigation."

  Levenger screwed up an eye. "Ludovici's bad habits rubbing off on you? Next you're going to say that if anyone asks, I never saw this."

  "Suit yourself." Poincaré handed him a slip of paper. "The password. Remember to type the uppercase M and the period. . . . Nice," he said, straightening one of Levenger's photos. "How many grandchildren now?"

  "Eight. The little one—with the curls—just turned five. You should hear her sing 'La Marseillaise.' She could melt the Wilkins Ice Shelf if global warming doesn't do it first." Levenger read the password aloud, more as a question than a statement: "There must be fifty characters here. The national treasury doesn't use passwords this long."

  Poincaré shrugged. "What do I know?"

  "More than you're saying. But we'll keep that between you and your Confessor. Do you suppose it's true?"

  "What's that?"

  "About mathematics and different things."

  Poincaré glanced at his watch. "Got to run, Hubert—to a meeting with the new director. I believe I'm about to retire. . . . And yes," he said, halfway out the door. "I do, for what it's worth."

  "I'M VERY glad to meet you, Inspector!"

  An American this time, he thought, appraising his eighth Executive Director of Police Services. After the first was sacked for insubordination—having moved too aggressively to catch an art thief who turned out to be the press attaché at the Czech Embassy, which caused considerable embarrassment—Poincaré learned not to grow too fond of his bosses. The job was at least half political, and directors spent their days on phones and along corridors fighting two ends against a largely unsatisfying middle. There were the politically cautious who, out of deference to Interpol's international charter, squelched inquiries for fear of upsetting member nations. These were the know-nothings who bowed to autocrats crying 'internal affairs' whenever an inquiry threatened to expose corruption or abuses of power. Then there were the law enforcement professionals, the cops, who pushed hard for results in the field. There could be no serving both masters, so directors came and went. On occasion some were fired for cause, as Monforte had been, not politics; and it was in response to Monforte's perceived incompetence that Felix Robinson was hired: a former bureau head in Washington, famous for taking a statistical approach to crime—setting priorities in the field as if he were playing Sudoku.

  Poincaré expected an automaton but, on crossing the freshly laid carpet of what he continued to think of as Albert Monforte's office, found the director's desk to be reassuringly messy. Robinson apparently cared little for appearances, an impression strengthened by the coffee stain on his tie and a shirt that had be
en laundered well beyond its useful life. Poincaré extended a hand. "Sir, I've read the secretary general's letter on your qualifications. We're all impressed. Welcome to Interpol."

  "Felix, please."

  "Well, then. It's my pleasure. Henri."

  They sat on either side of Monforte's old desk.

  "I've read your file, Inspector. Bravo! Most agents burn out after fifteen or twenty years. What's your secret?"

  Poincaré observed him observing the courtesies. "I'm surrounded by good people, Felix—they keep me sharp."

  "Like Serge Laurent?"

  "Yes, like Serge."

  The director folded his hands and leaned forward. "You'll find me to be very direct, Henri. I'm aware that you and he are close. As you know, I'm sure, he's been investigating the Soldiers of Rapture— who'd be nothing but a boil on our collective ass if it weren't for what he's calling their schismatic cells. I have reason to believe Laurent is not healthy. Do you have an opinion?"

  It was a simple question with a thousand trapdoor answers. Poincaré was careful not to deny having just seen Serge. "I do have an opinion," he said. "Laurent is the finest agent I know. He'll pull himself from the field when he thinks he can't do the work."