“I consider it an arrest when I put the cuffs on.”
“Right. Right. But consider this.” The economist paid him no attention. The office contained no file cabinets, but one wall was a whiteboard. Art Lewin leaped across to it as though spoiling for a fight and began sketching with a pair of colored markers. He drew a vertical line, and a horizontal line stretching right from its base. Bruce recognized the axes of a graph. The professor drew a squiggly line and labeled it f(x). “This function is, say, the probability of arrest, by age, right? See how it slopes? It’s nonexistent for babies—we’re just doing males, okay?—and it gets higher in the early teens, and then—boom—here—we have a maximum, in the late teens, early twenties; and then it declines in a fairly regular fashion here. Above thirty, it’s real low. Fifty, nobody gets arrested. All this is well known, right? Now. This curve—this is tricky—this represents the population according to age. We’re aging fast. We know what that means, I assume. Answer: crime is going to go down. Has to. Inevitable. Because it’s all the young men”—tapping the board with his marker—“who are the criminals. Follow the same cohorts as they get older, they stop doing whatever they were doing. No more crimes. Well, okay, not zero, but an arbitrarily small number.”
“Because they’re in prison.”
“Very funny. Good one. But no. No. Why do they commit fewer crimes? Answer: because they’re older. Now we can—”
“Professor Lewin, please. Please. We can have the lecture later.”
“I know, I know. See, here’s the thing. Look. See the multiple intersections? Know what that means?”
“Please, Professor Lewin. That’s enough. Arthur!”
The economist pivoted slowly, innocent gray eyes, for a moment, not in the room. Then he was back, but sullen, a child genius in the act of showing off, cut short by a callow grown-up. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be interested.”
Bruce did not want to give offense. “It’s fascinating, Professor. Really. And perhaps another time you can explain it to me in detail.”
“I did a paper on it. I have a copy”—he delved into a stack on a shelf behind his desk, neatly labeled REPRINTS OF PUBLISHED, and pulled out an article of eight or ten pages—“which you can read at your leisure. Then we can talk some more, okay?”
“Sure.”
“A lot of the data on this topic are just wrong. I proved it.”
“I believe you.”
A sheepish smile. “I know I babble. I love my work, Bruce. I just love it.”
Bruce smiled back. Smiles cost nothing. “I can see that.”
“You know, Bruce, back in the forties and fifties—we’re talking about the postwar years, when America stood alone, unchallenged, all that silliness?—the mathematicians thought they could draw the right function and solve every social problem. Even crime. I’m talking about economists who did math.”
“And now?”
“Now, I would say, mathematical treatments still dominate. You have to know your theory, but the profession—and I would say properly so—is getting more and more interested in applied mathematics again. A lot of us think it’s time to march out and save the world. I know you think I’m exaggerating, but, okay, listen for a minute.” Both hands waving now, fingers pointing in all directions, the man’s energy amazing, like a third person in the room. “Listen. What is economics, really? The dismal science? No. Answer: it’s the study of the distribution of goods and services subject to constraint. Well, what isn’t subject to constraint? Answer: nothing. Military strategy, political campaigns, eggs, even sex. Everything is subject to constraint, Bruce. So, in a way, economics is a kind of summary of everything that matters in human existence. We really do hold in our hands the tools to save the world. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Is that what Kellen Zant thought?”
Arthur Lewin’s manic energy began to flag. He did not move from the whiteboard, it was plain that he had no intention of sitting, but his narrow shoulders sagged slightly, and he nodded his grizzled chin twice, as though conceding the intrusion of reality.
“Yeah. Kellen. What a bummer.”
“Can we talk about him for a minute?”
“About Kellen? Listen. Don’t get the wrong idea about him, Bruce. It’s not true what people say. He wasn’t in it just for the money. He always said economists could make the world better, if we would just turn our attention to the right problems.”
Bruce said gently, “That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to talk about.”
“No? What, then?”
“Well, for one thing, we could talk about who’d want to kill him.”
The grin returned, but without the earlier glee that told you how much Arthur Lewin loved his work. This time, he was merely acknowledging an absurdity. “Well, I guess you could say I would.”
(II)
THEY WERE WALKING across the main campus, because Art Lewin had decided he wanted to be on the move to talk about this, and he was the kind of man who did pretty much what he wanted: a fully grown Nathaniel Knowland, only with a lot more charm. Slushy dark snow swished underfoot. Bruce reminded himself that Art Lewin was a rising star. His recent predecessor as director of campus safety lost his job because of scandal, and the scandal was worse because he had not properly managed his relationships with the faculty.
“Let me tell you something about Kellen’s work. I don’t mean Zant-Feldman—”
“Excuse me, Professor. Others have also mentioned Zant-Feldman, but nobody has yet told me exactly what it is.”
Art Lewin smiled again, and Bruce smiled back, impressed that the young man had not, as so many professors would have, rolled his eyes. It occurred to the onetime detective that loving a subject was a true advantage in a teacher: if you enjoy talking about your field, you will never treat a question, or a questioner, as dumb.
“It’s a formula for valuing securities, especially stock options, except, unlike, say, Black-Scholes, it’s backward-looking. What I mean is, it’s a way of answering the question, ‘In light of what we now know, what was the value of this particular option when it was awarded ten years ago?’ It’s actually a really clever measure of stochastic volatility, using the differential of—well, never mind. Okay. See, Kellen was in grad school at Dartmouth when he figured it out. Then this guy Feldman at Columbia helped him refine it, when Kellen spent a couple of years there as a post-doc? And, you know, Bruce, it’s not true what they say, that Kellen couldn’t have finished it himself. That’s just racism, okay? But I guess you know all about that, right? So, anyway, the thing is, Zant-Feldman got Kellen lots of consulting work. Okay?”
Bruce found himself no wiser. “Okay.”
“But lately he wasn’t just doing Zant-Feldman any more. He was trying to use some more sophisticated tools, to build futures markets on events? Try to see if experts could predict what will happen next year or in ten years in, say, commodities markets? Because, you know, this idea that the mass of people might know best is very hot right now. It’s an old idea in economics. It’s how markets work. Chaos theory touches on it, too. You’ve seen some of the literature? A lot of it gets into the popular press these days.” He made popular sound like an obscenity.
“I’m afraid I’ve missed it.”
A dubious nod. This was not, Bruce saw at once, Art Lewin’s thing. “Like, say, suppose you want to know how many jelly beans are in a jar? It turns out that the best thing to do is ask lots and lots of people and then average their answers. Even if none of the answers is close, chances are the average will be. The more people who guess, the better the answer. Because the net cognitive errors balance each other out, right? Or—you want to guess the outcome of an election. Should you ask people who they’re going to vote for? Answer: No. That’s media silliness. No. You get a better prediction if you ask people who they think is going to win. If you put together, say, an electronic market, and let people buy and sell futures contracts on the election? Turns out you’ll usually get pretty close to the actual perc
entage of the vote. Pretty cool, huh?”
Again Bruce called him gently to heel, persuaded that, if not stopped, Art Lewin would go on like this all afternoon. “Professor, this is all very interesting, and someday when we both have more time, I’d be happy to hear the details. But, for now, I’d like to be a little more concrete.”
“Concrete?” the economist echoed, with a revulsive shudder, as if to signal that what really mattered were the great abstractions. “Concrete how?”
“Like, say, to talk about Kellen Zant. Not the work. The man.”
“The man was his work. You can’t understand him if you don’t understand his work.”
“I’m not trying to understand him just now, Professor. I’m trying to understand exactly what happened to him.” He rushed to press his advantage while Art Lewin was still thinking this over. “Why don’t we start with the last time you saw him?”
“The last time I saw Kellen—I told this to the police—was the day he died. Friday. We were playing chess in my office, same as we did every Friday. Blitz. Five minutes a side. That way we could squeeze in enough games to have a realistic—” The economist stopped, the child in him erecting a defense against accusations not yet lodged. “Look, Bruce, it was just our way to have fun, okay? Some people play football, some people get drunk. No, wait, I do get drunk, that’s not a good example. But some people—I don’t know—fly kites or something.”
“What time was this? When he came by your office?”
“Oh, probably four. That’s what time it usually was. I mean, you know, I didn’t look at my watch or anything. But I would guess four.”
“Who won more games? On Friday, before he died?” Allowing a light touch, but just that, of impatience to show.
“Oh, well, I won more games,” said the economist, as if Bruce was missing the point. “But they don’t count. Kellen was distracted. His mind wasn’t on chess. And, besides, we didn’t really finish. Usually we played until about ten. Sent out for Chinese food, talked about work, played chess. But on Friday we stopped early.” Standing before a huge snowbank, he turned and held up a hand, forestalling an objection not yet offered. “Wait, Bruce. Wait. I want to make something clear here, okay? It’s not true what they say about Kellen. He was brilliant. As brilliant as I am. He didn’t just do his consulting work. He did care about scholarship. He wasn’t lazy. That’s just racism talking. He was working on this book about games, and it was serious for him. He had plenty of projects to keep him busy.”
“I’m sure he did,” said Bruce after a moment’s evaluation and mental filing. The sky glowered, but he had the sense that neither dark nor cold would slow Art Lewin in full excited academic stride.
“And he had this new project, too. Just in the last year or so. Very hush-hush. A new way of looking at an old problem. That’s all he would say. He was going to make millions. That’s what he said, Bruce. Millions.”
“I’m sure he was. But on the night he died, what did the two of you do?”
“We played chess. Then he just left.”
“What time was that?”
“It wasn’t late. I don’t know. Five. Five-fifteen. I asked Kellen—I asked him—I said, ‘What’s the hurry?’ He said he had an appointment. Now, Bruce, I knew his reputation, so I assumed it was with a woman. Probably a married woman. That was his preference, you know that, right? No? He used to say he liked married women better than single women, and preferably with two or three kids at home, the younger the better. It was less complicated, he said. Kellen was a little bit—I don’t know—commitment-shy, I guess. You can look at his preference for married women as a rational strategy for maximizing his sexual satisfaction while minimizing the risk of commitment. See, Bruce, commitment entails costs. There are opportunity costs—the consumption value of what you could be doing instead—and there are also considerable risks downstream. What we might call post-commitment risks. The risk of making a mistake, say. Of discovering you hate your spouse. Or that you love someone else more. Now, some people marry or make other kinds of commitment as a way of managing risk. The risk of a lonely life, for example. It’s a trade-off either way you do it, of course. Now, in Kellen’s case, the risk of being stuck was the one he wanted to avoid. Of course, there are multiple strategies available, and, actually, you can also look at his preference for married women as a form of insurance. Because, if you think about it, sleeping with married women is in certain ways more costly than sleeping with single women. That cost is the value of the risk of being caught—the harm if you really are caught discounted by the likelihood of its occurrence. That extra cost represents the amount that a person who is commitment-averse is willing to pay, we might say, to purchase insurance against winding up in a committed relationship that he—”
Again, very gently, Bruce Vallely brought his witness to heel. “If we could just get back to when Professor Zant left. He said he had an appointment, and you guessed a woman.”
“Right. That’s what I—”
“Did he clarify matters? Did he tell you if he was meeting a woman, whether married or not?”
They had made it all the way to the Science Quad, the grand, blocky monstrosity on which the university was betting its future as, a little late, it tried to position itself as a center for the new technologies. Students flowed around them in earnest, hurrying groups.
“No,” said Art Lewin, towering over Bruce because he had scrambled up a filthy berm of snow heaped against the side of the computer center by a plow driver who had decided, for an unfathomable reason, to remove the clean white blanket from the lawn. “No, he didn’t tell me. Except he made one little joke. He said he was thinking he might go to Jamaica.”
“Jamaica? That’s what he said?”
The economist nodded. “He said he had urgent business there. In Jamaica.”
“You’re sure he said Jamaica?”
Art was continuing to climb, as though the physical distance would grant perspective; or perhaps he had simply had his fill of interrogation. It wasn’t fun any more, and life for the Arthur Lewins of the world, raised to believe that all would be well as long as you just stayed smart, had to be fun, or it was not worth living. “That’s right. He said he was going to Jamaica, and that if I had half a brain in my head, I could figure it out. That was the kind of thing he used to say, Bruce. Half a brain.”
“He said you should be able to figure out where he was going?”
“Yes. Like it was just another of his games.” Art was all the way at the top now, his feet almost two meters above the ground, turning carefully in a small circle, lord of all he surveyed. He said, voice now softer, for Bruce had caught up, “I reminded him, if it was a puzzle, he was supposed to leave me clues to figure it out. Know what he said? He said, ‘I already did.’”
(III)
THEY HAD TRAMPED back down the snowbank, and Art Lewin’s shoulders were freshening their slump. No, this was not fun. Bruce thought he knew what the young man was thinking. That his friend and mentor was really gone. Reliving the good times they had together—the formulas, the chess, the arguments, the competition—had brought home to him how much he had lost.
“Think hard.”
“I am thinking hard.” Art Lewin’s tone was now petulant.
“No note? A last-minute e-mail? Maybe even an equation on a blackboard? Are you really sure he didn’t leave you any kind of clue to what he meant by Jamaica?”
“I’m sure. I’m sure.”
“Well, how about something anonymous. A note from a source that—”
“There’s nothing, Bruce. Honestly. Do you think I haven’t been racking my brains trying to come up with one?” A boyish sigh. They had reached the sidewalk, where rushing cars sent up frigid showers of dirty slush. He perked up. “I did have an idea, though.”
“Go on.”
“Well, you know, he liked women, like I said. So I thought maybe he was planning, you know, to meet some woman. A Jamaican, maybe. At a motel or something, spend t
he weekend.”
“Why would he need to go to a motel? He lived alone, didn’t he?”
“That’s true.” Art Lewin was irritated to have missed the point. Then he brightened. “So—maybe he had a Jamaican woman coming to his house?”
Bruce glanced at him as they walked, an idea forming. The professor, sensing the scrutiny and not much liking it, increased the distance between them. They passed beneath a wrought-iron gate and were back to the Original Quad, as it was called.
“Did you and Professor Zant ever discuss Lemaster Carlyle?”
The economist’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his scrawny neck. “Oh, well, everybody has, ah, opinions about Lemaster. But we would just shoot the breeze.”
“Do you know if Zant might have had some grudge against him?”
“Well, Kellen was the kind of man who had lots and lots of grudges, but most of them were about people he’d never met. You know. Politicians, activists, syndicated columnists, people he thought wasted their influence.” Back on safe territory, he stood a bit taller. “You know, Bruce, there’s this whole political-science literature about the incentives of politicians? What turns out to be the best way to predict their votes? Answer: the desire for re-election. Standing up for an unpopular principle is such a tiny part of politics that most studies can’t even pick it up. Kellen hated people who’d do anything to get ahead, and anything else to stay there.”
Like Lemaster Carlyle, Bruce was thinking, but he wondered whether his own biases might be playing him false.
“What about Mrs. Carlyle—”
The objection leaped across the space between them as if determined to strangle this idea aborning: “No, Bruce. Don’t think that, okay? It was over a long time ago. Kellen liked married women, but he wasn’t crazy.”
“Crazy?”
“You don’t mess around with the wife of a man like Lemaster Carlyle. You don’t dare. No matter what rumors you might have heard about what is going on, or not going on, between them. And, besides, I know Julia is good-looking, but isn’t she like forty or something? That’s kind of old for Kellen. He liked them younger.”
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