Most of the room was empty, all the furniture had been pushed into one corner and covered with a large sheet of canvas. Cans of paint were scattered about, sitting on sheets of newspapers. There were at least five ladders of various sizes leaning up against the walls. The walls by the pile of covered furniture—about a quarter of the room—were still covered with old whitewash peeling off the red brick. Another quarter of the room had the whitewash stripped off the brick. The rest was a mural in progress. The painting was all a single scene, as if Gideon was looking out at an ocean sunset from some small atoll. He could see the surf crashing on the rocks near the floor, he could follow the waves, getting smaller and smaller until they reached a waist-high horizon, then the walls became a sky riotous with color. The depth was amazing, down to the sparkling reflection on the waves.
Gideon stared at the mural and wondered if this wasn't a 'great place' to talk because she was in the middle of this work, or for some more sinister reason. After what had happened so far, it was easy to believe that Dr. Zimmerman's sister would be watched by someone.
Ruth appeared from behind a set of screens opposite the pile of covered furniture. The overalls were replaced by jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black motorcycle jacket. She put on a pair of sunglasses as she walked toward him. 'Come on, let's go get some lunch,' she said.
She still had traces of paint in her hair and on her hands.
Gideon followed her down the steps, straining to keep up with her. She didn't slow down for him, didn't much seem to notice him. She turned away from the coffee shop and crossed the street and stepped inside an Indian restaurant. The restaurant was a few steps below street level, and it took a few moments for Gideon to get down the stairs. He was grateful when a woman with a sari led the two of them to a booth. The place was about half full, a large proportion of the lunchtime crowd wearing business suits and power ties.
Ruth stared across at Gideon, and he wished she'd take off the sunglasses so he could read her expression. When the waitress came with the menus, Ruth ordered something unpronounceable with lamb in it, Gideon ordered the same thing, even though he wasn't sure what it was.
When the waitress left, Gideon leaned over and asked, 'Can we talk about your sister?'
Ruth kept looking at him, the sunglasses hiding her expression. 'What's she done? You tell me.'
'I don't know, other than she's disappeared. From the look of her house, it was a well-planned disappearance.'
'Left without a two-week notice, I bet.'
Gideon nodded, 'If her history at MIT is any indication, she left with more than that.'
Ruth lowered her sunglasses and stared at him over the frames. 'You know about that?'
'I've talked to some people in Cambridge.'
Ruth nodded.
The waitress brought over a couple of glasses of water. Gideon took a sip and rubbed the ache in his wounded leg. 'She seems to be very possessive about her work.'
Ruth laughed. She raised a hand to stifle herself and started shaking her head. 'You can't own the sacred mysteries.'
'What?'
'I don't think you understand Julie.'
'I'm trying to.'
'You've got to picture our family—'
'I've met them already.'
Ruth nodded. 'Then you've seen it.'
'Seen what?' That your mother's gone off the deep end?
'They've done everything except change their name.'
Gideon shook his head. 'I don't understand.'
Ruth took off the sunglasses and set them on the table. 'No, I guess you wouldn't. I suppose it's hard for someone to pretend they aren't black.'
'You'd be surprised.'
'What it is, I think, what happened to me and my sister. Is that our folks decided to stop being Jewish. They just stopped sometime before Julie was born. Didn't move, or change their name, but between the two of them they just let the tradition lapse.'
'What? Did they convert?'
Ruth laughed again. 'No, that would require thought, planning. They didn't make a decision, they just stopped working at it. Laziness and disinterest more than anything else.'
'And this helps explain Dr. Zimmerman's behavior?'
'You need to understand that before you can understand her—or me for that matter.' She drank from her glass and set it down. 'Do you know where atheists come from?'
'Huh?'
'Passionate atheists almost always come from religious families. You have to know something before you reject it.'
'But you're not an atheist?'
Ruth shook her head. 'In college I tried being a pagan, but I really couldn't find the belief in me. Me and Julie were left without a heritage, our folks just left a void in our lives and both of us tried to fill it as best we could. I'm still trying. I've made friends with a Reform rabbi and I'm trying to make up for some of what I've lost. You know the closest I've been to a seder until last year was watching The Ten Commandments.'
'How did Julia fill that void?'
'She took a page from the ancient Greeks.'
'What? She believes in Zeus?'
Ruth shook her head, but this time she didn't laugh. She looked at him with an expression of grave seriousness. 'No, Pythagoras.'
The New Pythagoreans, Gideon thought. He remembered all the papers he had copied from MIT. What Dr. Nolan said, about the people at the ET Lab believing in her work started to take on a whole new connotation.
Dr Cho had said, 'Some might call mathematics a religion . . .'
The waitress brought their food, and while they ate, Ruth told him about Julia Zimmerman.
A long time ago, before Julia went off to college in California, Ruth had asked her if she had believed in God.
'God?' Julia had said. Julia had been rummaging in her dresser while her younger sister sat on the edge of her bed, feet dangling, barely touching the ground. Julia stopped what she was doing, leaned back on the dresser, and looked down at her sister. The expression on her face was deep, as if she was looking past Ruth, or into her. 'I can tell you about the time I first knew that there was a God.'
It had been in the fifth grade, when she had a class with Mrs. Waxman. She was the youngest child in
the class, having already skipped a grade. By then her ability with mathematics was already beginning to flower. She played with numbers more than she did with other children. She had already discovered esoteric operations that her classmates didn't know existed. While they were just starting to reach for fractions, she had touched upon squares, logarithms, roots, and was just making tentative steps into trigonometry.
She'd do the multiplication drills with everyone else, and when she was done, she would spend the rest of the time doodling magic squares on the back of the papers.
Mrs. Waxman never liked her. She was convinced that somehow Julia was cheating. She would call Julia to the board repeatedly to try and catch her in some error.
Julia hated Mrs. Waxman.
Then, near the end of the school year, Julia's resentment at her teacher boiled over when she was convinced she'd caught her teacher in an obvious mistake. Mrs. Waxman was at the board, talking about the number line;
-2-1012
Mrs. Waxman marked off the whole numbers on the line and stated that the number line went off to infinity in both directions. That made perfect sense to Julia. She already understood enough about the integers, she had a clear image of the whole numbers marching off to infinity.
Then Mrs. Waxman said that there were an infinity of fractions on the number line, as many fractions as there were whole numbers. She divided up the number line. Again Julia understood, while it took Mrs. Waxman a
