there any way to get a hold on it so he has to use it for medical purposes?”
“You’ll have to talk to another lawyer about that, Roger,” Nina said. “He’s my client. I’m not comfortable talking about something like that without him present, and I think he’d probably object.”
“Oh. Of course. Sorry.”
“I understand.” She not only understood, she agreed with him, but she was in no position to say so.
“He doesn’t want to move on, you know,” Chelsi said softly. “I believe he just wants to be left in peace to slowly kill himself. He misses her so much.”
“I hope you’ll continue to be patient with him,” Roger said.
“Come on, Dad. Let’s go home. Uncle Dave has definitely kicked us out. Thanks for doing all this, Nina. See you Thursday for your massage,” Chelsi said.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Nina started up the Bronco, her briefcase on the seat beside her, relieved. The case would probably be over on Tuesday, and she had helped Hanna some.
He wasn’t the most charming client she had ever had. She wouldn’t miss him. She felt sorry for him, though. You can’t blame a wounded dog for snapping.
She rejoined the line of cars winding up toward South Lake Tahoe. At twenty-five miles an hour, she thought it would be safe to make a cell-phone call. The German time zone was nine hours ahead of California, making it about 8:00 P.M. at Kurt Scott’s home in Wiesbaden.
His number was in the phone memory. She hadn’t spoken to Kurt since Bob’s last trip to Europe, but if she was going to stamp out the idea of another trip she would have to do it before Bob made enough money for a ticket.
He answered immediately.
“It’s Nina.”
“I knew that.” He had a deep voice. “Is Bob okay?”
“He’s great.”
“Good.”
“How are you?” Nina said.
“Apparently you heard I’m back in Germany.”
“Bob told me. Why’d you leave Sweden and go back there?”
“The doctor says I’ve pounded my fingers on piano keys so many millions of times that I wore them out. It feels like rheumatoid arthritis and the joints get swollen, but he says it’s just a nasty tendonitis.”
“You’re taking time off from the Stockholm Opera Company?”
“It’s permanent. I’m finished as a performer.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “My hands were bugging me, so I dosed up on ibuprofen. Every day, maximum dose. One day, that didn’t work anymore.”
“Oh, Kurt, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not crippled. The old hands work fine for most things, just not toccatas. Nina,” he paused, “do you remember what I was doing for a living when we met?”
They had met at Tahoe fifteen years before and embarked upon a passionate romance that lasted three weeks. Then Kurt had gone away, not because he wanted to, but Nina hadn’t heard the full story until years later. She had been angry when he left, so angry that she hadn’t tried to find Kurt to tell him about her pregnancy. “Remember?” she asked. “I was camping in one of the cabins at Fallen Leaf Lake. You came around to warn me that bubonic plague had been found in the area. Of all things.” She recalled her reaction. She had thought, What a line.
“I had to convince you to quit consorting with raccoons and squirrels.”
“You were a park ranger.”
“And you were an argumentative law student. Barefoot and beautiful, sitting on the rickety steps of that little place you had rented, painting your toenails, as I recall.”
Embarrassed, Nina said, “Anyway.”
“Anyway, I’ve missed the outdoors. I always regretted that a person can’t play the piano outside. Meanwhile, I have some free time to consider my future. I thought I’d do some camping in the Taunus woods, not far from Wiesbaden. Then Bob called me and I thought, I’ll take him along. I suppose he mentioned that?”
“He said he wanted to visit you. It’s why I’m calling,” Nina said. “He’s worried about you.”
“He thinks I’m lonely.”
“Are you?”
“Now and then.”
“I think he’s concerned that your hands-that the changes coming up…”
“He’s a good kid when he’s not being a rascal. I’d send him a ticket, but I can’t get at my money. Long tangle with the bank, which amounts to I’ll get things straightened out eventually but meanwhile I haven’t got the ready cash.”
Nina felt worse and worse about the purpose of her call. “Kurt, listen. Bob’s moved to Carmel and back in the last ten months and made a trip to Sweden to visit you,” she said. “He’s back in school now. He needs stability.”
“You mean you do.”
“What?”
“Bob told me you split up with Paul.”
“It was inevitable. But that has nothing to do with…”
“Bob seems confused.”
“You mean-because I took away his father substitute?” Nina said. “That’s ridiculous. He never viewed Paul as a father.”
“He liked Paul. They had a relationship, too.”
Stung, Nina said, “I can’t help that. I really can’t. What’s your point, Kurt?”
“Hey, just be honest about what’s going on.”
“I’m trying.”
“Let him come, Nina. He can miss a week or two of school. He’s a smart guy. He’ll make it up. He can write a photo-essay about Germany.”
“I just think that Bob-”
“Ah, it’s so frustrating. I have no power in this situation, which makes me angry.”
“Kurt, it’s tough. You live half a world away. Okay, I do rely on him, maybe more than I should. And I don’t want to keep him from you, but I don’t like him putting his energy into schemes to get back to Europe all the time.”
“You’re used to having him all to yourself. Wait. I don’t mean it that way.”
“You can always make me feel guilty.” She had kept Bob’s existence a secret from Kurt for twelve years. Now he liked being in his son’s life. Naturally.
“I’m not trying to bring up old business, Nina. Let’s deal with this right now.”
“Right now I feel like I’m in some kind of popularity contest with you that I might lose.”
He laughed, easing some of the tension between them. “You’re joking, right?”
The car in front of her came to an abrupt halt. Slamming on her brakes, she realized minutes had passed and she had no consciousness of driving. “I have to go.”
“We aren’t finished, Nina.”
She knew that, and she knew they had reached an impasse.
“Give my love to the boy.”
And the feeling in his voice almost changed her mind, but swerving left, distracted by a car broken down alongside the road, she kept her good-bye brief. They hung up. The Bronco toiled up the winding road along the American River with the other trucks and SUVs. Nina felt guilty, but Bob would stay home. He would understand when she explained it to him, and Kurt would support her. He had no choice.
8
FOR SEVERAL DAYS IT RAINED STEADILY on the island. Elliott and his father had a thousand-piece picture puzzle to work on. Gloria brought in the groceries. Elliott spent a lot of time in his room, worrying about the man in the mask, thinking about the robbery two years before. He couldn’t concentrate on working on the proof. He stared out the window at the new streams running down the steep ravine behind the house into the cove.
Elliott never had been able to prove that irrational numbers don’t exist, but his father gave him a canoe anyway the day he turned twelve. That was when Elliott dropped out of school and started teaching himself, though his mother made him take piano lessons and volunteer at the library.
Not far from the house the woods gave way to a small, stony beach and a sheltered cove bounded by tumbled rocks. Elliott spent his teenage summers pulling rhythmically on the oars, circling the cove, mostly alone, thinking. His parents didn’t bother him, and he had no friends, so he was free to think. Sometimes he thought about girls, but mostly he thought about calculus. He began carrying a spiral notebook with him to record his thoughts. When it filled, he would start a new one.
Numbers: the integers, the irrationals, the transcendents, the imaginaries; numbers that presented mysteries brighter and more challenging than the mysteries of religion, because they could be solved with logic, someday, by someone.
He had first met the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of the prime numbers, when he was ten years old.
How these building blocks of all numbers are distributed along the great number line has never been understood. They seem to occur at random-2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17-and so on and on forever to those regions of monstrous limitlessness where Elliott’s little breeze blew. An integer was a prime number if you couldn’t divide it by any other integer except itself and one. But no formula could predict the sequence of primes. No formula could find the factors of large numbers, except by the crude method of searching one by one along the number line.
Yet all the great minds in mathematics over all the centuries agreed on one thing: The primes could not be random. If they were random, the ground of the universe was random, and this could not be, not with planets revolving around stars, not with the soaring bridges and skyscrapers people have built, not with the human eye, which seeks and finds harmony everywhere.
No, the primes could not be randomly distributed. One day as he furiously rowed across the flat water, Elliott made up his mind to devote his life to the primes. If he introduced a new devil into the world, if he found a truth that added to chaos instead of harmony, he would hold his answer close and decide then what to do with it.
