Case of Lies

“No.”

“No?”

“Well, sort of.” He waved his hand and went on. “I found a damping coefficient-that’s from quantum mechanics-that describes the amount of friction each prime has been subjected to. It’s like a relative error term. My damping coefficient is built into a function based around the natural logarithm, which explains a lot of patterns in nature. As soon as I had that, I could factor really large non-prime numbers, too, as a simple corollary. Are you understanding any of this?”

“I’m not sure. But you sound authoritative. That’s half the battle.”

“Maybe for lawyers. You only have to be convincing. Not in math. In math you have to be right.”

“So you know where the prime ought to be at any point on the li line and you know how far it has been pushed from the li line. It becomes simple to find where the prime actually is.”

Elliott blinked. “Egg-zackly,” he said. “The whole secret is that the continuum breaks into quanta as it passes through the quantum veil. It’s an artifact of the definition of primes, insisting that they have to be integers. Integers! There’s no such thing as integers! It’s time for math to blast out of that particular childish fantasy! Like I said before, what is not random looks random after it passes through. Get it?”

“I’m trying.”

“It’s One getting broken into little twigs. All of math is really found between Zero and One. Real part one-half is in there. But Riema

Nina smiled. “Okay. I give up.”

Elliott said, “Oh, well.” He sighed heavily.

“How long ago did you come up with this function?”

“Mostly after my breakdown. Junior year. Three years ago.”

“Tell me the function,” Nina said coaxingly. “Put it in words for me. I won’t understand it or remember it. I’d just like to hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because the way you love numbers, I love words.”

“I’ll tell you what I start with. The difference between pi of x and li of x is Big Oh of the square root of x over log x.”

It sounded like a guy dancing in a pentagram naked and trying to invoke a spirit, magical and improbable.

“I like that. Big Oh,” Nina said. She was sitting in a firelit cave with the shaggy Shaman of the Primes, hearing his incantations. She wished she could follow Elliott into his theories, appreciate the co

“Oh, it is gorgeous,” Elliott said. “That’s the part everybody knows. Then-my function.”

“Tell me the function. Just say it out loud, once. I bet you never have put it into words.”

“Why do you really want to hear this? Are you taping this or something?”

This moment of paranoia on his part snapped Nina back to reality. A lawyer again, she said, “It’s four o’clock in the morning, Elliott. The robbery might be based on your damping coefficient. People may have died because of it, I don’t know. I guess I just want to hear the information that might be the cause of all this.”

“Read it in the Journal of Mathematics in about a year.” His voice had taken on a ragged edge. He obviously wasn’t about to tell her his damping coefficient, not that she would have had a clue what it meant anyway. “So you think Silke and Raj died because of my discovery?”

Nina didn’t answer.

“Fuck,” Elliott said. “Maybe they did. You know the old Greek? Pythagoras?”

“The philosopher?”

“Yeah. The Pythagoreans worshiped integers. They killed Hippasus when he let out the secret of the irrationals, like the square root of two, that can’t be described using ratios of integers. I think they’re going to kill me, too.”

“Who?”

Elliott answered, “The Pythagoreans of Silicon Valley.” He laughed into his glass.

“And are these people who want to kill you real, or just abstract bits of information?” Nina asked.

“That’s a really stupid question.” He seemed affronted. Nina didn’t think it was so stupid, considering what he had been talking about.

“Okay, tell me about the Pythagoreans.”

“Now you’re just humoring me. But I’ll tell you anyway. These Palo Alto Pythagoreans take meetings. They have a lot of money and power. They can pick their noses. I’d say they’re real. The name of the company is XYC.” He then launched into a story about a meeting in Seattle in which Professor Braun had tried to buy Elliott so that the function would be suppressed.

He was talking faster and faster, like a sparkler that flares up one last time before it goes out. It sounded like raving, but Nina wasn’t going to challenge him on anything right now.

“But why try to rob you two years ago, and only a week ago try to buy you?” was all she said. “It’s backwards.”

“They offered me a lot of money. I bet I could have got them up to ten million,” Elliott told her.

Nina took this in, her mouth open. “Your notebook is worth that much?”

“Guess so. It would be a lot cheaper just to steal it. I don’t dare keep a copy, and I could never redo the work I have done on the proof.”

“But you’d still know your function, wouldn’t you?”

Elliott sloshed whiskey out of his glass as he sat up. “Now I get it! Now I get it! That’s right!”

“What’s right?”

“He was going to grab the notebook and then shoot me. I was supposed to die.”

“Where is it now? The notebook?”

“Right here with me.”

“Could I see it?”

Elliott said, “I don’t show it to anyone. I’m neurotic about that.”

“Is it real, Elliott?”

“Of course it’s real. What do you mean, is it real?”

“Then let me see it.”

“No.” He made a protective motion with his hand. He apparently was carrying the damn thing inside Kurt’s robe pocket.

“Put it into a safe-deposit box.”

“I’m still working on it. I thought about doing that, but I worry about it when it’s not on me.”

“Publish your results. That might make you safe.”

“Not until the proof is finished.” He drank the last of the whiskey and gathered the bedding around him. “It’s your fault. If you hadn’t talked Silke into doing this deposition here, they would have let her go. Oh, I shouldn’t say that, I know. Sorry.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Nina said. “Maybe I took it too far. But after my friend was killed, I was going to pursue it to the ends of the earth. Maybe I should have thought more about the human consequences.”

“Well,” Elliott said with a shrug, “you’re a lawyer. Maybe I should have thought more about human consequences too.”

“Well, you’re a mathematician.”

“Yeah. I’m going to sleep now. Here I go.” He laid his brain-heavy head onto Kurt’s couch pillow. And that was that.

24

A SOFT KNOCK AT THE BEDROOM DOOR. Kitchen smells.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Mom,” Bob’s voice said. “Dad’s cooking a turkey, and the police are here.”

“Guten Tag.” Two uniformed police officers, both men, sat with Elliott around the coffee table, papers spread in front of them. Elliott, wrapped in his comforter, nursed a mug of coffee.

“Excuse me.” Nina went into the kitchen.

Bob chopped onions on a board on the counter. Kurt stood at the stove, stirring something, a white dishcloth tied around his waist over his jeans. The kitchen air was hot and moist, with an old-fashioned dishwasher sitting in the corner, all its hoses exposed. The stove had legs, as she had noticed while cooking the eggs. But the smells were familiar.

“Happy Thanksgiving. Sleep all right?” Kurt said.

“How long have they been questioning Elliott?”

“Just a few minutes. You haven’t missed anything. They had some more details to go over. Here. Have some coffee.”

“It is Thanksgiving, isn’t it? I’d forgotten.”

“And I had quite a time finding a big turkey. Had to get a friend to buy it for me at the Hainerberg PX. It’s already in the oven. Turkey, chestnut stuffing, pumpkin pie. Home food. Nice job there, bud.”