“Can you see anything?” he asked.
“This is really crazy.” She didn’t look up. Just automatically lit another cigarette.
“What do you mean?”
“Who did this?” She blew a cloud of smoke over the table. “The killer?”
Niels moved closer. “What do you see?”
She ignored his question. Apparently, he was expected to earn an answer. Niels was about to ask his question again when she started murmuring: “Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, Urdu, Devanagari . . .”
Niels stared at her. In a whisper she was intoning: “Mesopotamian, the vigesimal system, Celtic numbers, hieroglyphic numbers, Babylonian numbers . . .”
“Hannah.” Niels raised his voice. “What’s going on?”
“They’re all numbers. Nothing but numbers.”
“Where?”
“He’s right. The man I talked to.”
“Tommaso?”
“Yes. They’re numbers. This one is the number thirty-one. Vladimir Zhirkov.”
“Thirty-one?”
“It’s the number thirty-one in various number systems. In tiny little numbers. It looks like small broken blood vessels under the skin. As if the blood vessels formed the number thirty-one.”
“How would that be done?”
She shrugged. “I’m not a dermatologist. But . . .” She changed her mind and fell silent.
“But what?” Niels again sounded impatient.
“I know that the surface of all the blood vessels is formed by a so-called single-layer epithelium. It’s called the endothelium.”
“Is there anything that you don’t know? Sorry. Go on.”
“As I was saying, I’m not an expert, but if the endothelium is damaged, the blood comes into contact with other cellular and tissue components—” She stopped abruptly. “No, I can’t tell you anything more. I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I have no idea how those numbers were made.”
“And you’re sure that it says thirty-one?”
“I’m positive. I know quite a few different number systems.”
“It’s the same number repeated over and over? Thirty-one?”
She didn’t answer as she looked again at the photo.
“Hannah?”
She nodded. “Yes. Thirty-one. Just thirty-one.”
“What about the other one?” asked Niels. “The woman from Peru. Maria.”
Hannah studied the pattern on the back of Maria Saywa. “It’s a six. The number six written out in hundreds of different number systems. Systems that are used today and systems used in distant places in ancient times. The images aren’t clear, so it’s hard to see, but this man . . .” She took out another picture from the box and held it up. “He has the number sixteen on his back in hundreds of variations. I recognize the hieratic number.”
Niels looked at the photo and searched through the faxed text. “Jonathan Miller. American researcher found at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica on August seventh of this year. But . . .” He put down the picture of Miller, not sure what to say. “How many number systems are there?”
“In every era, every culture has had a need to count. To systematize the world and create an overview. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Arabs, the Chinese. All of them have number systems that originated long, long ago. With myriad variations. Bones have been found from the Stone Age, marked with tiny scratches that constitute numbers. The cuneiform from Mesopotamia is from circa 2000 B.C. Initially, numbers were just used for counting, but people soon realized that they were also symbols.”
“Were symbols? Or do you mean that people made them into symbols?”
“It’s that old dilemma of which came first, the chicken or the egg.” She shrugged. “Do we create number systems, or do they already exist? And if two plus two equaled four before there were any people around, who then created the system? For the followers of Pythagoras, numbers were the key to the laws of the cosmos. They were symbols in a divine world order.”
“That’s pretty impressive.”
“According to Novalis, God could just as well reveal Himself in mathematics as in any other science. Aristotle said that numbers not only signify a specific quantity, they also possess inherent qualities. He called them the ‘qualitative structures’ of numbers. Odd numbers were masculine. Even numbers were feminine. Other Greeks talked about spiritual numbers.”
The cat jumped up on the table, and Hannah just as quickly removed her without interrupting what she was saying. “Mathematics is filled with mysteries. Mysteries that can solve our problems. That was what Gustav was talking about when he made the statement that brought you here.”
“That it will be a mathematician who saves the world?”
“Just think of the work they’re doing over there in the Bella Center. Curves, graphs, numbers. Nothing but numbers. The correct interpretation of numbers determines whether we live or die. It’s life or death. That’s something that every scientist understands. That was why Tycho Brahe got his nose sliced off in a duel.”
“Because of numbers?”
“Because he claimed that so-called complex numbers existed. And his adversary claimed that they didn’t.”
“Who was right?”
“Tycho Brahe. But he lost his nose.”
She paused to allow Niels to consider this. “Have you ever heard of Avraham Trakhtman?” She didn’t wait for him to answer before going on. “A Russian immigrant to Israel. A professor of mathematics, but he couldn’t find a job, so he ended up working as a bouncer in a club. While he stood there trying to calm down hordes of drunken teenagers, he solved one of the greatest mathematical mysteries in recent times: The Road Coloring Problem. Does that mean anything to you?” She was breathing so hard that she seemed almost winded.
“Not really.”
“The question is extremely simple: A man arrives in a strange city to visit a friend, but he doesn’t know where the man lives. The streets have no names, but the friend phones and offers to guide him by saying only, ‘Right, left, right, left.’ Can the man find his friend’s house based on these instructions, regardless of location?”
“If he’s lucky.”
“The answer is yes. I’ll spare you the proof. Are you familiar with Grigori Perelman? He’s the Russian who solved the Poincaré conjecture.”
“Hannah!” Niels raised his hands in the air like a cowboy surrendering. She sighed. “Okay. Sorry.” She pushed back her chair and looked out at the water, where a couple of motorboats had come into view.
Niels got up. He wanted to ask a lot of questions, but there were so many that they seemed to be colliding in his mind, and he ended up not asking any of them. Hannah was the one who broke the silence.
“But why do the victims have these numbers on their backs?” That was the scientist speaking.
It was the police officer who took over. “And who made those marks?”
Hannah sighed, glancing at her watch and at the stack of papers. Then she smiled. “You’ve been here almost an hour, and we haven’t even started reading yet.”
Homicide case: Sarah Johnsson
Niels straightened all the pages into a neat stack on the coffee table. It looked like an oversize brick.
“All these pages are about the murder cases?” Hannah lit a cigarette.
“I think so.” Niels cleared his throat. “Sarah Johnsson, forty-two years old. Thunder Bay.”
“Does this mean she was the first one to be killed?”
Niels shrugged. “Maybe. For now it just means that she was the first person mentioned in the faxed pages. Here’s what she looked like.” He placed on the table a photo of a woman with a pageboy haircut and a mournful expression. “She died on July 31, 2009. So she wasn’t the first,” he said. “The woman from Peru was murdered in May.”
“Thunder Bay?” Hannah stared at the big world map that she’d spread out in front of her.
“Canada. On Lake Superior. One of the biggest lakes in th
e world.”
Hannah searched for a moment, then got out a black marker and put an X where Thunder Bay was located.
“Sarah Johnsson was a doctor at a hospital. She lived alone, she was unmarried, and she had no kids.”
“Is the text in English?”
“Part of it. The list of basic facts, anyway. I think some of the report is in Italian.”
“All right. What’s next?” Hannah was ready with her marker.
“There’s more about Sarah.” Niels scanned the page. “A lot more, in fact. I think this is an obituary from the local newspaper.”
“Obtained by the Italian policeman?”
“Apparently. It says that she completed her medical training at the University of Toronto in 1993. There’s also an interview in English.”
“With Sarah Johnsson?”
“Yes.” Niels leafed through more pages.
“She’s quite beautiful,” said Hannah, staring at the photo. “She looks like Audrey Hepburn.”
“Wait. I was wrong. The interview is with someone she studied with. Megan Riley.”
“Why was she interviewed?”
“It looks like some sort of transcript. Maybe from a radio interview about Sarah Johnsson.”
“Why did the Italian send that to you?”
“Good question. Megan Riley describes Sarah as ‘antisocial, a bit weird, with a difficult love life. Nice, but she never seemed to be really happy.’ ”
“Poor girl,” said Hannah with sympathy.
Niels nodded. “Look at this. Tommaso even got pictures of Sarah as a child. If this is her, that is.”
Hannah looked at the picture of a six-year-old girl perched awkwardly on a swing.
“These pages look like various statements from doctors and psychiatrists,” Niels noted.
“Aren’t those types of reports confidential? The Italian policeman couldn’t have gotten access to those on his own.”
“Yes, he could have,” said Niels. “If he was persistent enough.” He scanned the signatures. Some of them were illegible. “Something must have happened to Sarah in 2005. She began showing signs of psychological instability. Anxiety attacks, insomnia, paranoid tendencies.”
“Is there any cause given?”
Niels shook his head and went back to the faxed pages. “Wait a minute. I think I overlooked something in her obituary. Maybe this means something: She was fired from her job in 2005 as the result of an incident that got a lot of attention in the local press.”
“What kind of incident?”
“It doesn’t say. Give me a minute.” Niels fumbled with the pages. “Okay, here’s something about it. A newspaper clipping.” He considered reading the English out loud, but it was a long article, and he was uncertain of his linguistic abilities.
“What does it say?”
“It says that Sarah Johnsson was fired, effective immediately, when it came out that she had administered an unapproved medication to save the life of a boy who was thought to be incurably ill. The boy recovered, but since the incident had major professional repercussions and prompted considerable criticism, the hospital directors felt they had no option but to fire the doctor.”
“An unapproved medication?”
“That’s what it says. As far as I know, it can take up to fifteen years to get new medicines approved, and Sarah Johnsson couldn’t wait that long. So she broke the rules and saved the boy’s life.”
“And that had something to do with her subsequent paranoid tendencies?”
“Where are the medical reports?” Niels was looking through the pages. “It doesn’t mention anything about that. It just says that her paranoia grew more and more pronounced and that in both 2006 and 2008 she was admitted to the Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital in Thunder Bay. A psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Aspeth Lazarus characterized Sarah as ‘periodically almost totally crippled by anxiety. With a growing feeling that someone was out to get her.’ ”
“Out to get her? Who was out to get her?”
“It doesn’t say. But whoever it was, they succeeded, because on July thirty-first, Sarah was found dead in her car in front of the Sobey supermarket. ‘The police have refused to rule out . . .’ ” Niels skimmed over the rest of the article and translated: “They have refused to rule out the possibility of murder, but no arrests have been made in the case. It may have been poison.”
“Poison?”
“Yes.”
“Does it say anything else?”
“It says that Sarah Johnsson was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Thunder Bay.”
“What about the pattern on her back? What does it say about that?” Niels read some more, then went back to the previous pages. “There’s nothing. Wait a minute. Here’s an excerpt from an autopsy report. ‘Skin eruption or rash on the back.’ ”
“Could that be why the police suspected poison as the cause of death?”
“Probably. But the case has been closed.”
Hannah nodded and put out her cigarette. Niels got up and walked across the room. When he reached the far wall, he turned around and came back. “I don’t understand it,” he said without looking at her. “Why did Tommaso di Barbara collect so much material?”
Niels sat down again. The wicker chair creaked under his weight. Then there was silence in the room.
“Shall we go on?” asked Niels after a moment. “Do you think there’s any point to all this?”
“Let’s look at the next case. Open up the Dead Sea Scrolls again, so to speak.”
“Okay. Murder number two, based on the order in which the pages were sent. The next one is in the Middle East.”
Homicide case: Ludvig Goldberg
This time Niels sat down on the floor and spread out all the material so it looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: twelve pieces covered with text that formed a picture of Goldberg’s life and death.
“So what do we have?” asked Hannah.
“Everything, as far as I can tell. Obituaries. Diary excerpts. Interviews. Something that looks like a poem. But a lot of it is in Hebrew. He looks quite nice.” Niels handed her a picture of Goldberg. Dark eyes with a worried expression. Intellectual glasses. A narrow face with delicate features.
“What’s that?” Hannah pointed at a slightly blurry section on one of the faxed pages.
“IDF. The Israel Defense Forces. His military papers, I think. He was once in prison.”
“He doesn’t exactly look like a soldier. Where should I put the X?”
“At Ein Kerem.”
“Where’s that?”
“A suburb of Jerusalem.”
Hannah looked at him. Either surprised or impressed. “Have you done a lot of traveling?”
“Quite a bit. In my imagination.”
She smiled, but Niels didn’t notice. He was reading a police report. “Ludvig Goldberg was found dead on June sixteenth of this year. He was lying in a . . .” He stopped reading and crawled across the floor to another page. “We’ll start down here. With the obituary.”
“From a newspaper?”
Niels looked at the pages. “From the Shevah Mofet secondary school in Tel Aviv where he worked as a teacher. Written in rather dubious English.”
“Maybe the Italian tried to translate it himself,” Hannah suggested. “Or used Google.”
“Maybe. He was born in 1968 and grew up on the kibbutz Lehavot Haviva near the town of Hadera. His family comes from Ukraine. His mother is from . . .” Niels gave up on trying to read the whole thing aloud. “There’s a long section about where all of his ancestors were from.”
“Family sagas are very popular in the Middle East,” said Hannah, then added drily, “Take the Bible, for example.”
Niels was reading a different section now. The page that was blurry and partially illegible. “This is a military report. He was suspected of being homosexual.” He looked up. “That’s what it says. Without comment. Goldberg was apparently in prison after breaching some sort of regulation.”
&nbs
p; “What did he do?”
“I can’t tell. But he was sentenced to a year in a military prison, so it must have been quite serious. There’s also an excerpt from an editorial in the Jerusalem Post from 1988, in which Ariel Sharon—”
“The Ariel Sharon?”
“I assume so, yes. Ariel Sharon calls Goldberg ‘everything this country doesn’t need.’ ”
“So the crime he committed must have provoked a lot of attention.”
Niels nodded.
“What does it say about his death? Is there an autopsy report?”
Niels looked through the pages. “No, but there’s something else,” he said. “An excerpt from a speech given by someone named Talal Amar on January 7, 2004, at Birzeit University in Ramallah and printed in Time magazine.”
“Talal Amar? Who’s that?”
Niels shrugged. “He said, ‘In the Middle East you never know what the future will bring, but after standing next to Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat while they shook hands in front of the White House, I’m quite optimistic. In fact, my hope for the future was already born back in 1988, during the intifada, when a young Israeli soldier disobeyed orders and released me and my brother from an Israeli detention camp and thereby saved us from years in prison. I will never forget the look in the soldier’s eyes when he released us. Until that day all Israelis were monsters to me. But from that moment I knew they were humans, just like me.’ ”
“Rabin and Arafat,” said Hannah. “He’s talking about the peace accord. What does Goldberg have to do with that?”
“Or rather, what does Talal Amar have to do with it?”
“Presumably a lot. Otherwise he wouldn’t be interviewed in Time magazine. Or be standing in front of the White House when the accord was signed. He must have been one of the Palestinian peace negotiators.”
“Here it says something about how Goldberg died.” Niels read through the text to himself before going on. “It says from an ‘unknown source.’ I’ll do my best to translate it. ‘In the days leading up to his death, Goldberg was in Ein Kerem, visiting the artist couple Sami and Leah Lehaim. Goldberg seemed to be unwell. He complained of pain in his back and thighs, and according to Leah, he seemed paranoid. As if someone were after him. On the evening of June twenty-sixth, Goldberg stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. When he didn’t return, Sami Lehaim went out to look for him. Goldberg was lying on the gravel outside the house. He was dead.’ ”
The Last Good Man Page 15