“You can’t do this! I need him with me.”
“You have to sign the form.”
“I won’t.”
“Do you remember that time you wouldn’t leave the cabin at Fallen Leaf? The local squirrels infected with plague. Signs all around. Signs hammered into trees. Danger. Hints of an ugly death. Still you wouldn’t leave.”
“Of course I do. Note, please that I didn’t catch anything.”
“Then you were alone. You risked only your own life. I believe,” he said, “individuals should control their destinies, right down to choosing death, if they must. I admired your left-brained willfulness. You said the odds favored your survival.”
“Is that why you parked yourself out front and made me your mission?”
“My destiny was different. Mine involved-” He sighed. “Shall we walk some more? There’s a path around the lake.” His voice stayed calm.
They walked for a while along the gravel path. A pale setting sun broke through the cloud cover and more children came out. She couldn’t take her eyes off one particular chubby-cheeked toddler running back and forth across the grass, bundled into a sphere in his red coat.
“Look, Kurt, what I admire about myself is that I can admit it when I’m-occasionally-wrong,” Nina said, feeling pain with every breath. “Bob stays with you.”
He took her by the shoulders and turned her so she faced him, appearing entirely unsurprised at her change of heart.
“Did you already tell him?” Nina asked.
“No. We’ll tell him together. This will be a good time to consolidate our power. Two parents can prevail when one might not.”
“This murdering animal is ruining my life,” Nina said, unleashing only a little of the anger that burned in her. “The minute he’s caught, Bob comes home.”
“Of course. You could stay, too. Reconsider. Paris is only eight hours away by car.”
“No. I do my job. I always do.”
His head tilted as he considered that, as he considered her, in her wholeness.
Paul would be mad. Kurt wasn’t. What did it all mean?
“Sweet of you to offer,” she said.
“Once you would have followed me anywhere.” He was smiling now, looking at her with Bob’s deep-set bluish-green eyes. “We didn’t follow up very well after the trial.”
“How do you mean?” Nina said. “You and Bob got to know each other. He spent a whole summer with you in Sweden.”
“You were with Paul.”
“And you? Were you alone?”
“A girl from Uppsala. An artist.”
“Ah. The paintings in your room?” He nodded. “So…”
“So. When my contract ended in Sweden, I decided to come back to Wiesbaden. We met for a few weekends, once in Copenhagen. But it petered out.” He pondered this, then added, “Franz never accepted her. She sneezed when he merely rubbed demandingly against her leg.”
“You’re alone now?” Nina prodded.
“I’m used to it.”
“Well, just don’t get used to having Bob around.”
He offered her a wry smile. “I guess we should be getting back. How did you like the pie? Homemade. Momma Scott’s old family recipe.”
“Magnificent,” Nina said. “I didn’t know you could cook.”
“I remember you couldn’t, back when I knew every freckle on you.”
She felt a blush creeping up her neck, which she tried to stop by thinking of cool things, green trees, the ocean, the Truckee River splashing. “When Bob came along I had to learn. I’m good with macaroni and cheese. Someday, when this is all over, I’ll cook for you.”
“Or maybe I’ll cook for you. Frog legs in aspic. Something yummy like that. Sans noodles.”
“Or we’ll order food from people who know their food.”
“From a Moroccan waiter. And if you flirt with him, I’ll follow him into the kitchen and kick his butt.”
25
NIGHT ON THE PACIFIC, MOONLIGHT ON cloud-tops. A painted torpedo toy streaking through the vault of sky, stuffed with human beings ignoring their precarious situation.
Most people were sleeping. Elliott had purchased an airplane pillow at the airport. He slouched in his seat, pulled the inadequate blanket to his chest, leaned his head back, and let his mouth fall with gravity. His breath was sour with the wine he had drunk, and shaving had not been on the agenda.
Nina, in the window seat, waited until he had not moved for almost an hour. Then she carefully lifted the blanket away from his chest. He wore his parka, unzipped, over a striped shirt, the top buttons undone. His naked Adam’s apple moved regularly up and down and she could see scanty chest hair.
She inserted a hand inside the parka, just above his heart. He seemed to heave a sigh as she slowly removed the notebook, as though his heart noticed and regretted the theft. No jerky movements, she told herself as the hand snaked back home with its prize.
The seat light sent its focused beam onto a thick black leather-covered notebook, about four inches square, held shut with a laughable silver lock like the one on the pink diary Nina had kept in seventh grade.
The toothpick from the dinner plate worked, though she had several other possible tools ready. She wondered how this thing that Elliott protected like a dragon could have been locked so flimsily.
But it wasn’t the lock, of course, it was where he kept it, right next to his heart. She squeezed the ends of the lock and it clicked open. Reading glasses! They were gone, no, they were on her head. Don’t get excited, she told herself. If he woke up, she would calmly hand it back and admit it.
The inside of Elliott’s universe was as neat as the toothpick that had opened it, no loose scraps of paper, no cross-outs and scrawls. Obviously this was where he kept results, not work in progress. Flipping through it, she estimated that there were three hundred pages of neatly written notes and calculations and beautiful graphs. Each page was dated.
She turned back to the beginning. The cover page said, “Elliott Wakefield’s Theory of Everything. Do Not Enter. Or you are Cursed.” There was also a boy’s drawing of a skull and crossbones, and a curlicued “EW.” On the next page, the first date showed that Elliott had been keeping this same mathematical diary for ten years. He must have been in about eighth grade when he started it.
She flipped through it again. A doodle or two, no blank pages interspersed. Elliott had been rigorous with himself, amazingly so for the boy who had begun this venture. She glanced at him, at the boy in the man this time, and realized that she really, really wanted it all to be true-that he had solved the mystery of the prime numbers.
If it was true, what she held in her sneaky hands would be immortality. Prizes and honors would only be the beginning. This book would go to a museum.
She turned back to the first pages, where the writing was bigger. He had used a fine-tipped mechanical pencil throughout. The pages had gold edges. Water had stained the tops of some of them. The notebook itself was pliant, the cover soft.
The book began with the harmonic series, in some form she could barely recognize. Even at thirteen, Elliott was ahead of her. She saw signs she recognized as calculus, and some infinity symbols and ellipses, and knew he was working with series of numbers and their limits. That pi sign meant “prime number.” “Let something be the something of something something.”
If only Mick were on this flight. If only a copy machine were back there with the chatting flight attendants, right next to the microwave. Could she copy any of it on her napkin? What should she copy? She turned to the last page and did copy the equations as well as she could, though most of the symbols were new to her. The folded napkin went down her blouse, near her own heart.
Yet she couldn’t bring herself to give it back yet. She was touching the dragon’s jewel, running her fingers over the leather, feasting her eyes on page after page of the dragon’s magic formulae. Elliott’s universe.