In two small towns, equidistant to north and south of the I-40, the highway down which Alex was travelling, two men fell back in love with their wives for the first time in forty years. The names of both men were ‘Herb’, and both of them had woken up that morning and rubbed their stubble sleepily while looking in the mirror and thought about shaving but decided not to bother. One of them was to live happily ever after. The other one was to fall down a well on his next birthday.
All over the state, brothers and sisters bumped into each other by chance as one was leaving the dry-cleaner’s, and the other was running in to try to pick up her laundry.
In Las Vegas, still many miles away, the odds tilted for the first time very slightly against the house in low-stakes blackjack. Red Queen would be told about this in due course – as soon as it became detectable.
Unknown to anyone but you, in the Gulf of Mexico a sailfish of prodigious size, aided by a freakish current off the coast, spent thirty minutes keeping pace exactly with Alex’s car. Then a shark took it.
Other things were happening. Things unknown to you, but known to me.
And other things, I suspect, were happening that are unknown even to me.
Chapter 9
You need to know, though, what happened when Isla Holderness met Banacharski. That’s where this begins. It begins with a woman with short, dark blonde hair, and a handsome pointed nose, and windburned cheeks, walking up a cart track in the French Pyrenees. This is May 1998, and the hills are very beautiful. Buttercups nod in the cold wind.
Isla is carrying an old-fashioned backpack – it belonged to her father, and has a frame made of hollow aluminium poles. She has on thick hiking socks, made of grey wool, and jeans tucked into them. She is tired. She has been walking and – where possible – hitchhiking around this area for nearly two weeks now. In her pocket is a passport-sized photograph snipped from an academic journal. It has been creased and recreased.
It shows a thin man frowning with an expression of, she judges, concentration or toleration of having concentration broken. His hair is dark, and very close-cropped, nearly a skinhead – a reaction, perhaps, to a hairline already prematurely receded. It suits him. His cheekbones are sharp and he looks handsome. He’s looking not at the camera, but downwards and slightly to one side. Something like amusement plays around his mouth. The photograph is ten years old.
She is excited, because she thinks she may have found him. She started from Carcassonne, and she has been walking from town to town, going deeper into the countryside. She told her colleagues, most of them at least, that she was going on a walking holiday. Nobody mentioned Banacharski, except Mike – Mike, she thought, liked her – who when he heard she was going to the eastern Pyrenees said: ‘Off for a tryst with your boyfriend, I shouldn’t wonder.’
She is on a walking holiday. She’s thirty-two years old and she’s happy. She has been camping most nights, not more than one night in three treating herself to an inn. It’s warm in the days, but most mornings she wakes in her tent with dew on her feet. She hasn’t got much money. She eats chunks of saucisson sec with a penknife, and tears bits of bread to go with it. She has, in a compartment of her backpack, a jar of cassoulet and a tin of pineapple pieces for an emergency.
But when she passes through each village, she shows the photograph. She enjoys doing what a tourist would do – sitting in the village square, if there is one; eating her lunch quietly. She asks, with her halting French. At first it was hard. Now easy.
‘Cet homme – un ami… vous savez ou il est?’ She’d show the photograph. Cheeks would be rubbed, grunts emitted, more grizzled friends summoned over sometimes.
‘Il s’appelle Nicolas. Nicolas Banacharski. Il est un… il fait le mathematique…’ Here, she’d find herself feebly miming something halfway between a scribble on an imaginary table and a scribble on an imaginary blackboard. Her mime for mathematics was no more necessary, nor more plausible, than her mime for telephoning, or typing – the former consisting of an imaginary Bakelite earpiece and the latter of a peculiar ragtime piano solo played at the level of her clavicles with her eyebrows around her hairline.
Still, all this seems to endear her to the gruff old Frenchmen. Most of them seem to have heard some stories of a crazy mathematician. She has been following, generally, whichever wave of an arm her last informant offered. She’s tried to pick market towns when there were markets. But she isn’t hunting. Her idea is simply to have a holiday – to give it shape by hoping she’d stumble across the great man, but that isn’t the point of it, not at all.
Then, yesterday, she was buying her lunch in a boulangerie in Nalzen and waiting for the orange-haired old chimp to ring up her sandwich. She was wondering how long that display of Chupa Chups lollipops had been there, when she looked out of the window over a display of baroquely iced cakes and exquisitely lacquered strawberry tarts.
It was him. To the life. He was going past on a bicycle, lolling, with one hand on the handlebars and the bicycle describing lazy, open sweeps back and forth across the empty street.
The woman squawked as Isla barged out of the shop to give chase. She left her backpack in the shop, yanked open the door and hop-skipped after him in her ridiculous socks.
‘M’sieu! M’sieu!’
Half of her had imagined that if she ever met him he’d run or yell at her. She wasn’t quite prepared for him simply to stop. He braked, and turned round. He looked startled, but not yet annoyed.
‘Pardon… pardon…’
‘Quoi?’
‘Nicolas?’
‘Quoi?’
‘Je suis Isla.’
His look was shifting from startled and sympathetic, to alarmed.
‘Isla Holderness – nous avons…’ She remembered he spoke English. They’d exchanged letters in English. ‘It’s me, Isla. We’ve – I mean, I’ve sent you letters. I’m Isla Holderness.’
‘Mam’selle…’
The man on the bicycle was kindly. He stayed put for her stammering explanation, and was gentle in telling her that the words ‘Isla Holderness’ meant nothing to him in any order at all, and that he was certain they had never exchanged letters. He was a handyman, not a scholar – he had used the word ‘scholar’, clumsily, when she’d said ‘mathematician’. He laughed when she showed him the photograph, though. He had to admit, it looked like him. No, no apology necessary. Au contraire. His name was Pascal. Enchanté.
But a mathematician? Lived alone? Pascal thought he might know him. Yes, bald. Not looking like this, though. He was an eccentric, sure enough – Pascal didn’t remember his name but it might have been Nicolas. He looked at the photograph, blotting out the lower half of the face with his thumb and looking at the eyes. Isla could see they were different, now, Pascal and Banacharski, about the eyes.
They were still standing in the street. It was a small town and no cars had come. Pascal rolled his bicycle back and forth with his hips, turned the handlebars lazily with his free hand. He seemed to be smirking.
‘Peutàtre.’ It was an old photograph. He couldn’t tell. But there was this type living in a shack up above Tragine. Pascal had gone to fix his septic tank. Had a lot of paper. He was – Pascal made a waving gesture with his hand… Big beard, Pascal said. Like a blaireau. People talked about him. Jewish, he thought. Maybe an inventor?