Imagine there’s a country where every town and village has a public library, and in the capital is a central library. One day, the chief librarian realizes he doesn’t know what books all the local libraries have, so he sends out a directive. He tells them to catalogue all their books, and send a copy to the central library so there’ll be a record of all the library books in the country in one central location. As good as gold, all the local librarians catalogue their collections, and send copies of the catalogue to the central library.
Now the chief librarian has a stack of the catalogues, hundreds of them, and decides another level of reference is necessary for people to be able to find the right catalogues easily. So, he sits down to create a catalogue of all the catalogues.
Are you following this? Good.
But he finds a problem. The local librarians haven’t all catalogued their collections in the same way. No AACR2 to guide them, see? All the local libraries have put their copies of the new catalogue they just drew up out for the use of their patrons, but some of them have decided that the catalogue itself is therefore part of their collection, and must therefore list itself. The other librarians haven’t. So you’ve got catalogues that catalogue themselves, and catalogues that don’t.
The chief librarian decides—for no good reason apart from it makes the example work—that he’s going to put the two types of catalogues into two separate catalogues. One lists catalogues that list themselves, the other lists the catalogues that don’t.
All this is completely representable in mathematical form.
But now … do you see the problem? The paradox? When the chief librarian has finished, then for consistency these two catalogues must also be catalogued as they’re part of the central collection. The catalogue of catalogues that do catalogue themselves can safely be listed in its own pages. But what about the other? If it’s added to the catalogue of auto-catalogues, it’s inaccurate because it’s not listed in itself. If it’s added to the catalogue of catalogues that don’t list themselves, then it’s just listed itself and so it’s in the wrong place.
* * *
“There was a seismic shock in math. Set theory had a hole you could drive a truck through.” He shrugged. “They patched the hole, but that’s all it is. A change in semantics. The hole’s still there, but now it has a bunch of mathematicians in front of it telling you to move on, nothing to see here. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What else is broken in the ‘purity’ in math.”
Colt had stopped smiling quite early on in his flight into didactics. Now he seemed very serious indeed, almost angry. He realized he was still standing there with Lovecraft with two books in his hands, and smiled again. It was just a crease in his face.
“How much are these?”
* * *
Carter kept a bookshelf between himself and Colt while the mathematician paid for the books and left with “Have a nice day.” Lovecraft said nothing in response. The bell rang, and Colt was gone.
Carter found Lovecraft backed up against the wall behind the counter, the back of her hand to her mouth, and her eyes wide. She looked like she’d just witnessed a serious accident, not sold a couple of books to a mathematician. She was staring in the direction of the door where Colt had left a moment before. The last reverberations of the bell still hummed, the last high vibration leaving the metal.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She ignored him until he stepped behind the counter and gently touched her upper arm. She cried out then, and looked at him with horror.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus fuck! Did you see him? Where were you?”
“I was right over there the whole time. Calm … calm down, Emily. I was right there, watching. If he’d pulled anything, I would’ve shot him.”
“Pulled anything? Jesus Christ. Didn’t you hear what he…? Don’t you…?” She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “No. Of course you d— Look. It’s nothing. I just got a bad vibe from him. I … thought you’d gone. Some guys, you don’t want to be in the store alone with them.”
She was lying. Carter didn’t need to draw on his police experience to know that Lovecraft had known he hadn’t left the store. Colt had represented a threat to her that even the presence of Carter with a gun at his hip did nothing to ameliorate.
“How do you know him?”
She frowned, and looked at Carter. This confusion, at least, was sincere. “What are you talking about? I’ve never seen him before.”
“You don’t know who that was?”
She was starting to look worried again. “Should I?”
Carter frowned, too, now, looking at Lovecraft as if he didn’t know what to make of her at all.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. She was becoming angry, reacting against her earlier fear. “I’m not lying. Why the hell would I know who some random guy coming in off the street is?”
Carter didn’t know whether he should tell her. But he had a feeling he was going to need allies, and that meant going from a position of trust. She might have just lied to him, but she had her reasons. That much was very evident.
“That was Colt. William Colt.” He’d never mentioned the name to her before, and it was plain that it meant nothing to her now. “The man I’m investigating for the Belasco and Atlantic City deaths. Him. He’s the guy.”
“Him?” Lovecraft looked at the door. She seemed to be finally understanding something. “It was him,” she said under her breath.
Chapter 16
COOL AIR
Lovecraft didn’t want to talk, and began mentioning that she was going out with Rothwell soon and had to go. Carter didn’t like the way the air had soured between them. There seemed no reason for it. She clung to the lie that she thought she’d been alone with Colt in the shop, and he could see that challenging her on it would cause things to deteriorate between them still further, so he let her be.
William Colt, on the other hand, he was not about to leave be. No fucking way.
Hill’s Books was nowhere near the university campus. It wasn’t impossible that he’d decided to hunt around local bookstores to see if he could find those Jung books, but the timing made it unlikely. “Synchronicity.” Carter knew that was the idea that there might be something behind coincidences, but he didn’t buy that, just like he didn’t buy that Colt had just decided to wander into that store right then on a whim. He’d come in knowing damn well that Carter was there, and he’d intimidated Lovecraft somehow. That, Carter admitted to himself, was something that confused him. His experiences of threats were legal, financial, or physical. He couldn’t see how you could scare the shit out of somebody with math, but it seemed you could. Well, okay. Just because he didn’t understand the threat didn’t mean it wasn’t one, and he wasn’t going to stand by and watch a self-satisfied fucker like Colt walk away from having laid it on Carter’s business partner. That wasn’t happening.
Carter realized he was getting almost unreasonably angry over something he didn’t understand. He was pacing up and down in the apartment over the bookstore, leaving Lovecraft to close up.
He heard the bell, and the sound of the door being locked, and realized she’d gone without even saying good-bye, and that just made him angrier still. He went to the window and watched Lovecraft cross the road. She waited on the corner for about a minute, before Rothwell, punctual as ever, arrived in a blue Buick Verano Turbo. Carter watched disconsolately as they drove away; the Buick was one of three different and expensive cars he’d observed Rothwell driving or, sometimes, being driven in on the four occasions he’d seen him pick up Lovecraft. The man’s garage must look like a luxury dealership.
He was watching it disappear into the distance when he saw a red Mazda3 swing out of a parking lot down the way and head in the same direction.
Carter was past believing in coincidences.
“Motherfucker,” he swore as he went down the stairs three at a time. Unlocking and relocking the door behind him took too long, and by the time
he reached his car—a two-year-old white Toyota Camry, chosen specifically because they were a common sight on the roads—both vehicles were long gone.
Undeterred, Carter followed the road in the hope that he might regain sight of the distinctive Mazda. Ten minutes of frustration and too many sets of red lights later, he gave up. The chance of them staying on the same road fell every minute and the pursuit was already becoming a fool’s errand. Instead he pulled over and called Lovecraft to warn her. He was shunted to voice mail twice before he gave up in frustration. He sent her a text message in a last attempt, but doubted she’d bother to check her phone until it was irrelevant.
He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and tried to think what to do next. The first thought that came to mind was a bad, idiotic, dangerous one. In the normal run of things, he would probably have disregarded it for exactly those reasons, but he was angry and frustrated, the encounter in the bookstore had left him feeling marginalized and stupid, and any distance he felt in the Colt investigation had just gone out the window. Colt had decided to make it personal, to beard the lion in his den.
Fine, thought Carter. Let’s see how you like it, fucker.
* * *
Carter had learned Colt’s home address when he did the follow-up research after his investigations at Clave College, but had had neither the opportunity nor the necessity to check it out firsthand. He’d been expecting a small apartment in a block or even a shared house, but what he found surprised him. Colt had a good, three-bedroom house all to himself on a residential street. It sat alone, the lawn out front well tended, the boards of the house pristine white. Not for the first time, Carter wondered how it was that Colt just seemed to blunder into money. It didn’t seem to matter enormously to him—the choice of the practical, unostentatious home and car showed that—but the stuff just stuck to him. Carter had seen his credit ratings and at least gotten an idea of his bank balance, and the man was making math look lucrative.
The business in Atlantic City was perhaps an insight; Colt was very good at squeezing cash out of coincidence. Carter had a feeling Colt could be a millionaire or more easily enough by playing the markets, but that would be time-consuming and time was more precious to him than money. He made enough so he didn’t have to think about it, and that was enough.
Carter had to admit the world would be a saner place if people shared Colt’s cool view toward the pursuit of money, but that left another question to be answered. If money wasn’t Colt’s primary motivation, what was?
If Belasco and Hayesman were any indication, and if Colt was actually involved in their deaths, then revenge seemed pretty important to him. He certainly seemed to be on a hair trigger when it came to taking offense. Belasco had slapped his wrist for not focusing on his thesis and general jackassery, and Hayesman had barred him from the Oceanic for suspected cheating. He’d even let Colt keep his winnings, but that hadn’t saved him from a grotesque death. It was all pretty thin for killing, but Colt had done it anyway.
Seemed to have done it anyway, Carter had to remind himself. There still wasn’t a scrap of real evidence. Just coincidence and intuition. Synchronicity and intuition.
There was nobody around, and Colt hadn’t troubled to put an alarm on the place. Two minutes’ work with lockpicks at the rear door and Carter was in.
* * *
Carter’s first impression was that he’d wandered into a show home. The place was unnervingly clean and tidy. A note from Colt’s cleaner and the hum of a Roomba making the rounds of the den showed he was very keen on keeping his home fastidiously dust-free.
Carter wondered if he was bacteriophobic or just thoroughly anal-retentive, as room after room showed the same sterility. Books shelved in perfect order suggested the latter.
There were some oddities. Everything was in its place except for a boxed set of Blu-rays lying by the TV, the individual discs left carelessly on top of the box. Carter didn’t examine them closely, but just read The Meaning of Life from the uppermost.
In another room, he found a shelf of board games that, upon closer examination, were all playable solo. He could draw two conclusions from that, both equally likely and probably both correct: that Colt had no friends, and that he was more interested in the idea of playing against blind chance than against other people. If he could beat a randomly shuffled deck of cards or the roll of a die, then that was enough.
More than enough, to judge by the room of discarded technology Carter found. A utility shelving unit was half filled with cardboard storage boxes, each containing superannuated or broken laptops, tablets, phones, and desktop computer components, mainly hard drives, although he also found one with RAM strips and CPUs. Each was in an antistatic bag, labeled with exactly what it was and the reason for its abandonment. The vast majority said Obsolete, even if only a year old, sometimes even less.
Carter reluctantly put a perfectly operational third-generation iPad back into its box. According to the dates on the label, Colt had bought it on its first day of release, then wiped and stored it the very day the fourth-gen version came out six months later. Carter didn’t have a tablet at all, useful as it might be. He stepped back from the shelves and regarded them with truculent envy. It just wasn’t right, a man sitting on a treasure trove of usable gear like that. He hoped a burglar would come along and rip the whole lot off one of these days. He even knew a few who’d be glad of the tip.
Clearing his mind of pettiness, Carter continued the search for anything useful. It went quickly; the lack of clutter meant he could clear a room rapidly. He’d been involved in detailed searches of suspects’ apartments in the past, and wished they’d been even half as Spartan and organized as Colt’s. Everything was in its place and there was a place for everything. The very formality of the house meant that anything out of the ordinary would have advertised itself. There was nothing. If Colt had anything to hide, it would either require a structural search of the house that Carter simply didn’t have the time for, or he had it stowed somewhere else. A mental image of the house at the end of Waite Road appeared sharply in Carter’s mind, and he shoved it to one side. He didn’t even want to think of his experiences on Waite’s Bill, never mind contemplate breaking into one of the houses.
He finally found one single oddity amid the tidy files, folders, boxes, and drawers. A bill from the college’s Material Sciences unit for materials, workshop time, and staff help in a project that involved “rapid prototyping” puzzled Carter. What did a mathematician want that needed something called “DMLS” and four kilos of aluminum? He took a picture of the bill and put it back where he found it.
Carter checked his watch. He’d been in Colt’s home for almost half an hour, and that was probably too long. He carried out a last sweep of the house to ensure he’d left no traces before leaving.
He was in Colt’s bedroom at the front of the second story, staying back from the window but still with a view of the street, when he saw the red Mazda3. It was parked directly across the street, not in the house’s driveway.
Colt was leaning against it, arms crossed casually, watching his own house. He saw Carter and waved. He was smiling.
Carter froze.
Colt’s smile grew into a grin. He blew out his cheeks and held his nose, a pantomime of somebody holding his breath. He dropped his hand and started laughing. Carter watched as Colt got back into his car. For a moment he thought Colt was going to park on his own property, but no. He drove off.
Carter got the bad feeling to end all bad feelings. He’d walked into a trap, but exactly what kind of trap, he couldn’t tell. Whatever Colt had arranged, standing around in his house was not going to improve Carter’s situation. He would get out immediately, downstairs, back to the kitchen, out of the door—and fuck relocking it—over the backyard fence, and away.
Carter headed for the stairs. He was only a few steps down when he wondered if he was suffering a migraine. He hadn’t suffered one since his teen years, but he couldn’t think of any other
way to account for the flickering light he could see in the stairwell, dashes and motes. As he descended, they seemed to grow larger, and he found it more difficult to move. The carpet on the stair seemed sodden, sluggish with extra mass in among the strands, yet when he looked at it, it was perfectly dry.
Belasco.
He remembered Belasco, how he had died, drowning on dry land with no water closer than his car’s radiator.
Colt was going to drown Carter in exactly the same way, while he was elsewhere. Then he’d come back in a few hours, probably with a witness, and—Oh, my. Criminy, whatever has happened here?—discover Carter’s corpse.
Why, no, officer. I can’t imagine what happened here. I’ve never met this man before.
* * *
Carter waded through dense air. He could feel the pressure of nothing in particular making his pant legs cling close to the skin, but only a ghost of a sensation of cool wetness anywhere around him.
He had a sudden memory of one of his teachers at school inviting questions about anything, and some smart-ass trying to stump him with “Why is water wet?” The teacher’s answer seemed just sophistry at the time, like he was dodging the fact that he didn’t know, but in later years when Carter remembered that afternoon, he realized his teacher had been dead right. “Wetness, not in the technical sense of viscosity but as a sensory perception, is not inherent in water. Rather, it’s our perception of water, and how we react to its physical properties. You’re talking in a subjective rather than a scientifically objective sense. You want to know why water’s wet? Because we sense it as wet. We make it wet.”
The water that was up to Carter’s chest in the stairwell didn’t come close to ticking all the boxes that made him define it as “wet.” He couldn’t see it, except for the ripples of a nonexistent liquid surface catching light he wasn’t convinced came from anywhere in the world he’d been pretty sure was the only Earth up until that minute. It didn’t move against his skin in any way he could feel except for a sense of resistance, more like a steady wind blowing when he tried to move rather than a liquid. It didn’t make his skin cool when it was exposed to air. If anything, there was just a distant impression of coolness below the surface.
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