“You had fifty-five thousand dollars on you the night of the robbery?”
“You get used to it. With three of us, we felt pretty safe. We took measures. We never flashed that much money. We stayed in cheap places and drove cheap cars. But I was winning some big hands that night, and somebody may have noticed and followed us.”
“Where were you playing?”
“Harrah’s first. Then Prize’s. We had supper, then we gambled for about four hours. About average. Who told you about the card counting?”
“Silke, on the phone.” Silke wouldn’t have objected to Nina using her name to elicit the story, Nina felt sure. “She had the cash?”
“Oh, God. Silke.”
“No offense, Elliott,” Nina said gently, “but it sounds to me like you were in love with Silke.”
“I’m still in love with her. I’ll never love anybody else. Only her.” He drank some more, but his voice stayed steady. “Let’s have another one.”
“Let’s wait, Elliott. Talk to me a little more first.”
“Okay.”
“You had already crossed the street and you walked through the covered entry to the vending machines when it happened, right?”
“The three of us. Silke was thirsty. I gave her some change for a soda. She had just put the money in the vending machine when this guy comes in from the street with a ski mask on.”
“What else do you remember about him?”
“I’m sure Silke told you this. He-something was wrong with his left leg. The foot turned outward. But he could still move fast.”
“Yes. He moves very fast.” So it had definitely been the shooter who followed Nina and Bob at Spooner Lake. Bob had told her about the limp. “He has been watching me and my son too,” she said, her voice shaking. “He tried to kill us, too.”
“God, I’m sorry.”
“What happened then?”
“He came up behind us and said, ‘Turn around slowly.’ I couldn’t see the gun very well, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I had never seen a real gun before. There wasn’t much light. The window to the office was right behind us and I was hoping the clerk was dialing 911. Raj said, ‘Everyone please be cool.’ Silke pressed up against him. Her bag was hanging off her shoulder.
“The man said to Silke, ‘Give me your bag.’ She took it off and laid it on the ground in front of her. Then he said, ‘Empty out your pockets and take off your jackets and leave them, too.’ I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” Nina said.
“Because my notebook was in the inside pocket of my jacket. I always carry it on me. I just couldn’t let him have the notebook. I couldn’t.”
“What was in the notebook, Elliott?”
“The proof I’m working on. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”
“Tell me about this proof.”
“What’s your math background?”
“Average.”
“Let’s just say, it’s about predicting large primes and factoring large composite numbers.”
“I found out that you were working on prime number theory from the bookstore at Tahoe.”
“The Crandall-Pomerance book? I did buy it there.”
“So I’ve been doing some reading myself.”
“It’s pretty abstruse,” Elliott said. “You’re not going to get much just diving in. You need a background in number theory and quantum mechanics.”
“I’m a lawyer,” Nina said. “That’s what I do all day, make sense out of difficult sets of facts. Each case has its own realm of knowledge and I learn the basics fast.”
Elliott shook his head. “Not this stuff,” he said.
“It’s just logic, a special vocabulary, processes,” Nina said. “Go ahead, talk to me. Pretend I’m Leibniz or Fermat. They were both lawyers, weren’t they? Are you working on the Riemann Hypothesis?”
Elliott closed his eyes and stretched his back. “Not anymore. I think it will never be proved or disproved. The Riemann Hypothesis is fun to play with, but it doesn’t predict where the primes are.”
“I thought that was how the mystery of the primes was going to be solved.”
“I tried for a long time. If you look at an X ray of Riemann’s Zeta Function, you see two curved lines overlapping in different ways around the zeros. The lines are out of phase with each other. Two phases are superimposed on each other within a very short interval. I was looking for the equations that would bring the phases back into coherence. I decided the Riemann function is too indirect to find an exact error term. Even using a quantum mechanics model.”
It sounded like gobbledygook, but amazingly well-spoken gobbledygook, considering the state Elliott was in. He was staring into his empty glass as though it contained a secret. His face was slack and exhausted.
Nina persevered. The lawyer’s tool is asking questions. “Then-how are you approaching it?”
“Well, quantum mechanics has a fatal flaw-it doesn’t explain why individual events happen. Bohr said not to think about it. What a crock. I went back to early Einstein,” Elliott said. “He always thought that the universe wasn’t based on random events, as quantum theory says. He said God doesn’t throw the dice. Elementary particles may seem to move randomly, but that’s only because the real laws are behind the quantum veil. And they are deterministic, Newtonian laws.
“Classical physics, behind the quantum veil, can use all variables and is therefore continuous. But quanta are discrete information packets. As information passes through the quantum veil, some of it is lost because it becomes discrete. What is not random looks random.”
Nina nodded. “We have a legal concept that is very similar. It’s called the corporate veil. An individual incorporates, and the corporation becomes a protective veil between the individual and the rest of the world. If someone wants to sue the person, they can’t. They can only sue the corporation, and the individual’s money is protected.”
“The real treasure is hidden behind the veil,” Elliott said. He tried to grin, but his face just twitched a little. “Yeah. In the case of the quantum veil, the underlying pattern is hidden behind the veil.”
“Sometimes you can pierce the veil in law. Get at the hidden assets.”
“That’s what I think I did. I pierced the quantum veil. I think I really may have done it. I don’t know why it happened to be me who figured it out.”
“Why does physics come into it?” Nina asked.
Elliott said, “What’s a number? Ah, shit, this is what Silke and I used to talk about.”
He got up and came back with another small tumbler of whiskey, and Nina realized that his expansiveness would soon turn to the snoring escape of deep drunkenness. In the meantime, though, this young man she had sought for so long was lying on a couch a few feet away, talking into the air, and the moment would never recur. She felt, as she had before, urgently and without much foundation, that Elliott’s work had a profound relationship with Sarah Hanna’s death. She intended to go wherever he wanted to go.
“What’s a number?” she answered. “It’s that thing you count with.”
“One sheep, two sheep. What’s a one?”
Nina held up a finger.
“No,” Elliott said. “That’s a finger. ‘One’ is an abstract piece of information. ‘One’ doesn’t pick your nose. True?”
“True.”
“What’s a hydrogen atom?”
Nina said, “Let me guess. Another abstract piece of information?”
“Correct. It’s the energy state of the atom, in terms of the forces that bind its electron to its nucleus, as described in Schrödinger’s equation. That and other mathematical descriptions constitute an atom. The information about its behavior is all there is. There is no other ‘there’ there.”
“You mean the hydrogen atom isn’t a thing?”
“All we can know about it is the math, which completely describes it. There’s nothing else to be said about it. It’s real in the way you and I are real. We’re made of atoms.”