Victor followed Adam’s gaze and grinned. “Yes, those are what I wanted to show you,” he said. “I need to return them soon. A professor at the university up the street let me borrow them for some light reading.”
“Light reading?” repeated Adam.
“Well, light to me. At one point in my early life, I was a mathematician.”
Now, much like a writer, an actuary, or a professional dog-food taster, a mathematician has one of the most misunderstood jobs in the world. A mathematician’s work can be described as one similar to a detective’s. Both involve complicated puzzles and mysteries, and people in both professions try to find a logical pattern behind the puzzles. Consider Nicolaus Copernicus, for example, one of the greatest mathematicians in history, who helped prove Earth rotates around the sun, and not the other way around, as millions of people had believed. Or Florence Nightingale, whose mathematical study of hospitals improved their condition and thus kept numerous patients from dying. Throughout time, mathematicians have made possible what was previously thought impossible.
Adam had not thought much about what he’d like to be when he got older. For a brief period, he had wavered between veterinarian and zookeeper. But after listening to Victor explain what a mathematician does, he was convinced his future career was to be a mathematician too. He listened raptly as Victor recounted his university days solving equations and figuring out puzzles.
“I had a very cool idea for a project involving permutations,” Victor said.
“What’s a permutation?” Adam asked.
“I bet you’re familiar with the concept without knowing the word,” Victor said kindly. “Imagine you had a spoon, a fork, and a knife. How many ways can you arrange them? First the spoon, then the fork, and last the knife. Or how about, first the knife, then the spoon, and last the fork? Now, imagine you had one thousand spoons, each a slightly different color. What then? Red spoon, fork, blue spoon, green spoon, knife. Or blue spoon, fork, red spoon, green spoon, knife, and so on. You can have a near-infinite amount of combinations, if the set is large and diverse enough. In math, we call these permutations. That is the simplified concept of what was at the heart of my project. But my department ran out of funding before I could really get going on it.”
“You had no money?”
“No money,” Victor repeated. “My project was stalled. That was the end of my career as a mathematician. In truth, that was the first of a handful of big blows in my life. A slippery slope, from which I found it difficult to recover.”
Adam knew what it was like not to have enough money for something he wanted. “That stinks,” he mumbled. “If only we could change the past.”
“Ah, but it wouldn’t be that simple! Part of why I loved that project so much is the concept of infinity. Life is full of infinite possibilities. Many permutations. And once a permutation is set, it connects to the next one, as if on a string. It’s all intertwined. The string of my life has taken me places I never imagined, and I am who I am today because of my past.”
A former mathematician who’s now stuck working in the Hole, thought Adam. He didn’t say aloud how dismal that was.
One of Victor’s neighbors peeked in the doorway. He nodded at Adam awkwardly and shifted his hands inside his oversized coat. Then he bid Victor to rejoin them at the dinner table.
“There won’t be any bread left if you dawdle, brother!”
“Coming,” chuckled Victor.
After the man left, Adam asked, “That was your brother?”
“No, we’re not related by blood. But he’s my brother in every other way. He’s a friend. And friends are like family.” Victor smiled. “Sorry, but the party’s waiting. Don’t want all the baguettes to disappear!”
Adam bid goodbye to Victor, then headed home. As soon as the Biscuit Basket came into view, he could tell something was wrong.
Flashing blue-and-red lights of two parked police cars lit up the street. One of the bakery windows was broken. Three of Uncle Henry’s cakes on display were overturned. Inside, shattered glass and molten candle wax smeared the bakery floors.
Uncle Henry was in the middle of speaking to two police officers. He saw Adam and waved him inside with a sense of urgency.
“What happened?” Adam asked.
“Vandalism,” answered one of the officers. She held up a sharp rock the size of her palm.
Adam stared at the rock, baffled. “Do you know who did it?”
Uncle Henry told the story. He hadn’t yet pulled down the metal security screen in front of the bakery, as he’d been in the back room, preparing some dough for the next day, when he’d heard the glass shatter. He dashed out wielding a large rolling pin and found a tall figure, who immediately turned and ran out of the bakery. The cakes and the burning candles had already been knocked over, and Uncle Henry was too busy putting out the flames to chase the perpetrator into the street outside.
“You’re lucky this place didn’t burn down,” said the other officer. “Candles are dangerous to display in a shop. Huge fire hazards.”
“We snuff the candles out every night before bed,” Uncle Henry quickly reassured him.
Uncle Henry went to get a broom to sweep up the mess. Meanwhile, the police asked Adam if he saw anyone suspicious on the streets. He hadn’t—at least, not in a while. A chilly breeze passed through the hole in the window. Adam shivered, but for a slightly different reason.
“I think I know who it was,” he whispered.
He told them his theory that M had returned to the shop, though leaving out the part that M was chasing after a magic snow globe. Unfortunately, without evidence, the police couldn’t confirm the culprit was M. Besides, they told Adam, a name like M was not much to go on. But the officers jotted down Adam’s description of the man.
When Uncle Henry at last emerged with a broom and dustpan,
