Authors: Leonard Rosen
All Cry Chaos (18 page)
When he landed in the lobby, Poincaré felt the familiar buzzing of his cell phone and discovered an update from Gisele De Vries:
NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab says bomber most likely worked at some point for them or equivalent lab in France, Russia, possibly China. Amsterdam APCP too specialized and mix too unstable to produce anywhere else. All academic labs capable of mix affiliated with space programs. GDV
The news was not unexpected.
All mirrors and marble, the lobby confused Poincaré enough that he lost his bearings and exited onto an unfamiliar street. Opposite the office tower and behind a police barricade, he saw a dozen protesters walking an orderly circle, holding signs, their chants led by a bull-horned man dressed—what was it, Poincaré wondered—like a Trobriand Islander: woven grass skirt, shoeless on the sidewalk, shirtless, copper skinned and heavily tattooed with concentric circles and geometric patterns, his hair jet black and thickly braided, falling to mid-back. The scene was so incongruous in a district otherwise populated by men and women in business suits that Poincaré half thought he had stepped onto a movie set. The tattooed man yelled into the bull horn: "IMF, INTERNATIONAL MOTHER FUCKERS. THE FIRST WORLD SMILES WHILE THE THIRD WORLD WEEPS!" Then a call: "GLOBALIZATION!" And response: "KILLS!" "GLOBALIZATION . . . KILLS."
Again and again.
Stationed nearby, a police detail looked thoroughly bored. The protesters attracted little attention despite their noise; still, Poincaré found himself interested enough to approach an officer: "How often do they march?" he asked.
"This particular group?"
Poincaré noticed a chocolate stain on her collar.
"Every month or so they try to make the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. Major financial centers are getting picketed. New York, daily. London, Hong Kong. They call themselves natives restless for something or other. Who knows."
He looked again at the man with the bullhorn.
"The Indigenous Liberation Front?"
"That's the one," said the officer, yawning. "They're everywhere. But I say if they're so damned clever, why didn't they just beat us back with their sticks five hundred years ago? We defeated them fair and square, so why all the whining now? Buck up and get on with it. Compete like the rest of us. No one's giving
me
anything, for damned sure."
me
anything, for damned sure."
Poincaré walked on and felt a buzzing in his breast pocket, then heard a familiar chime. The LCD glowed—a call from France. Not Claire. The Interpol exchange. He pressed the cell phone to his ear and used his free hand to block out the street noise.
"Henri."
"Bonjour, Albert."
A pause.
"Henri. They've struck. Come home."
PART II•
Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the shadow of death?
— JOB 38:17
CHAPTER 17
Eva Laval cleared her throat before entering the room, carrying a tray with coffee, a poached egg, and a crust of last night's baguette with a smear of jam. She set the tray on a rough wooden table, and Poincaré looked up from his book.
"Thank your grandfather for taking those chickens off my hands. I know you end up feeding them and cleaning up. I'm sorry for that."
"It's no bother, Monsieur."
"You'll be back at noon?"
Laval's granddaughter wiped her hands on an apron. Besides himself, Eva and her mother were the only ones Claire let touch her. With other attendants she would curl into a ball and groan— just as she had with Eva until Laval's granddaughter, barely fourteen, took Claire's hand with the tenderness that comes so easily to children and put it to her face, holding it there until the groaning stopped.
It's Eva, Madame. Remember—you're teaching me to paint
. She had prepared breakfast and lunch daily for the Poincarés. With school in recess, she would stay nights when Poincaré went up to visit Etienne and his family in the hospitals in Paris.
It's Eva, Madame. Remember—you're teaching me to paint
. She had prepared breakfast and lunch daily for the Poincarés. With school in recess, she would stay nights when Poincaré went up to visit Etienne and his family in the hospitals in Paris.
He set aside his reading and placed a napkin across Claire's lap. "Coffee," he said, putting the cup to his lips to test the temperature. "Laval says the harvest will be decent this year. Do you remember our first harvest, Claire—the Everest of grapes and our not knowing if the wine would be drinkable? But then it's never a brilliant vintage from Chateau Poincaré—is it? We drink it, though. We drink it. . . . Claire?"
She did not answer. For six weeks she had not answered. The doctors assured him the problem was psychological and that there was no actual physical reason she did not speak or open her eyes. But since the attack, or more precisely three hours after the attack when she learned the fates of the children, the Claire he knew had departed. As a forensics team combed the Lyon apartment and the medical examiner's staff removed two bodies—her attacker's and the Interpol agent he had killed, Claire frantically called Paris to check on Etienne and the children. When news finally came, she screamed, tore her hair, and collapsed. A physician sedated her, and it was in this diminished state Poincaré found his wife when he finally reached the hospital.
She progressed to a certain point, then no further. She would allow herself to be bathed and fed, and she would lift an arm through a sleeve as he prepared her for bed. She would startle at a loud noise but never made a sound, even in her sleep. "In cases of severe catatonia," one specialist advised, "the outcome isn't assured. If the trauma is great enough, the refusal to engage can last years. I recall one patient—" But Poincaré did not want to hear about other patients. Early on, he put as great a distance between the doctors and Claire as he could in order to pursue his own cure, which began each morning with an embrace and whispered assurances they were all alive.
Barely. In a synchronized attack, Banović's contractors had moved on Claire, Etienne, Lucille, and the children. Only the Lyon assassin's eagerness to begin a brutal business averted the worst in Paris; for when Luc, the agent on duty in Lyon, failed to call a coordinator's desk at an appointed time that changed daily as a security precaution, the desk agent at Interpol-Lyon immediately alerted two colleagues in perimeter positions to move on the apartment. They found Luc dead at his station and Claire bound hands and feet to a bed frame, naked, her mouth duck-taped, her attacker standing over a roll of surgical instruments laid flat on a bureau. They shot him from behind as he was stepping out of his pants. Blood from the exit wound sprayed across Claire's face and torso.
The alert went simultaneously to Paris, and it was only the premature move in Lyon that gave the perimeter agents protecting Etienne and his family time to spot and take down the attackers—but not before they detonated well-concealed bombs stuffed with nails and ball bearings. Instead of killing the Poincarés, as planned, the blasts merely maimed them. Georges lost his right leg below the knee and would not have survived had one of the agents not cinched a belt above the wound. Émile, eardrums shattered, was blown so violently against a tree that two vertebrae splintered. In separate blasts, Etienne suffered a crushed hip and collapsed lung and Lucille, third-degree burns on her back and arm. Chloe, burned over seventy percent of her body, lay in a coma breathing with the aid of a ventilator.
Banović's men had breached Interpol's protective net. "They planned to strike within the same minute," Albert Monforte explained, "so that one attack would not alert us to the others." Poincaré had flown all night from Boston and, after rushing from one horror to the next in Paris, boarded the TGV to Lyon where Monforte met him at the station. The director was pale as he delivered news. "She's alive," he said. "Not a mark on her. But she's in trouble, Henri. The worst was about to happen."
"She was conscious through it all?"
"Conscious? Claire must have heard Luc fall and gone to investigate. The contractor dragged her to the bedroom, and there were gouges on his face and neck, and several bites that drew blood on his arm. We've already run IDs, and Paolo was correct: every one of them former state security, East Germany. They traveled on Italian passports and had been in the country for two weeks, watching the family." Monforte's famously steady right hand was shaking.
With Claire in the hospital in Lyon and Etienne and the others spread across three hospitals in Paris, Poincaré shuttled between cities, sleeping two or three hours a day, determined to sit by their beds even if they could not register his presence. One of Claire's doctors advised him to moderate his pace or risk a breakdown. Poincaré ignored that. He pushed past exhaustion as he raced to their sides only to watch in silence, as if manic energy alone could undo the damage. He moved Etienne, Lucille, and the boys from three hospitals to a private ward in Etienne's hospital, where—he hoped—they might somehow comfort one another and heal that much sooner.
At two weeks, Georges was conscious though he had not been told he lost a leg. Lucille, burned severely, swam in a delirium of morphine. Émile floated in a strange, quasi-coma and would respond to pinpricks one day but not the next. And Chloe—Chloe, who at the worst possible moment ran from her bodyguard to catch a grasshopper for an insect zoo she was assembling for her brothers, grazed her legs against the very backpack that all but took her life. She lost an arm outright and suffered shrapnel wounds and third-degree burns along her entire right side. The doctors conferred in hushed tones along the corridors of the burn unit and spoke in less than optimistic tones about her prospects. Her breaths were so shallow and irregular that without a ventilator they doubted she could live.
To visit with Chloe in an isolation room meant scrubbing and gowning as if preparing for surgery. Poincaré would weep at her bedside, his tears steaming the goggles he wore as a precaution against infection. To clear the goggles meant stepping outside and scrubbing once more, which wasted precious visiting time. So he forced himself to sit quietly and look not at Chloe but at the wall calendar or at the grain patterns on the faux wood cabinet—anything to hammer down his grief. Where she had taken the force of the blast, the child's hair was burnt to a blonde thatch on a blistered skull. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were singed clean; the skin of her right cheek was crusty and festering; a tent protected the raw skin of her abdomen and legs.
Sometimes he would recollect family outings, speaking aloud in the hope she might hear him and be soothed.
Do you remember,
dearest, last summer at the beach? You and your brothers decided to enter
a sand castle contest and build a miniature Giza Plateau. Always such
a grand project with you three. The boys ran off—don't they always!—
leaving just the two of us to do all the work. But we won a red ribbon,
Chloe! Your brothers insisted it was their ribbon, too, and you agreed. I
was proud of you for that, but your father was prouder still. He talked
about your Sphinx for days and how soon you'd be working alongside
him. There will be more good days, Chloe. I promise.
Do you remember,
dearest, last summer at the beach? You and your brothers decided to enter
a sand castle contest and build a miniature Giza Plateau. Always such
a grand project with you three. The boys ran off—don't they always!—
leaving just the two of us to do all the work. But we won a red ribbon,
Chloe! Your brothers insisted it was their ribbon, too, and you agreed. I
was proud of you for that, but your father was prouder still. He talked
about your Sphinx for days and how soon you'd be working alongside
him. There will be more good days, Chloe. I promise.
W
HEN THE car pulled up to the farmhouse, tires crunching on gravel, Poincaré had just finished feeding Claire lunch and was helping her to a chair by the window, where he planned to read aloud or work a crossword puzzle, asking for her help. He might say, "What's a nine-letter word related to
seasonal
that begins with
d
?" She would not answer, but he would continue in this fashion for as long as an hour. Because she had a fondness for historical novels, he resurrected a copy of
Les Miserables
from his college days and read to her in thirty-minute intervals. Sometimes he would switch on the radio and search for a changed expression, perhaps the shadow of a memory passing across her brow. Try what he may, Claire would not return.
The vehicle on the drive could only be Laval's ancient truck, the old man arriving with news of migrant workers expected for the fall harvest. But when the door opened and closed without the usual protest of rusting metal, Poincaré walked outside to discover Paolo Ludovici, with suitcase, about to knock on the jamb. They stood on either side of the threshold for a moment, Poincaré reading in Paolo's face all he needed to know of his own slide into oblivion.
"Christ, Henri—leave it to you to find a spot in the middle of nowhere."
Poincaré did not invite him in just then. He stepped onto the terrace and walked Paolo through the vineyards, grateful they knew each other well enough to say nothing. It surprised Poincaré that he took comfort in his visitor. After six weeks without a single medical report that could be called hopeful, he thought all comfort gone from the world and that, in any event, he did not deserve comfort while his family suffered.
At dusk, the three of them sat on the terrace beneath the ancient oak, overlooking the vineyard and the valley. Poincaré had grilled chops from a hog Laval had butchered, and Eva had picked greens from the garden for a salad. Ludovici regarded the contents of his glass, then the unlabelled bottle Poincaré had set on the table. "It's drinkable," he said. "Barely. I'll leave this evening if you want. I didn't call because you would have said
no.
"
no.
"
"Stay the evening," he answered. "Eva will make up a bed."
Ludovici stayed the week. He rose early to take on jobs that Poincaré, in better times, would have tackled with pleasure. One morning found him on the roof with a bucket of pitch, hunting leaks. Rain the evening before had left the floor of the house in puddles, and Poincaré settled for placing buckets and hoping for the best. Another morning, Poincaré woke to the sound of a truck dumping a load of firewood, Ludovici having conferred with Laval and contracted with a supplier down valley. Each day saw another chore crossed off a list Poincaré had neglected to make. It was as if he could no longer project himself into a future in which he might appreciate a roof in good repair or a warm hearth in December. Poincaré, in fact, had no future because the attacks had reduced his life to a series of endless, blasted moments. Ludovici responded with work. The repair of a stone wall, the replacement of broken windows in the barn, the re-pointing of a foundation: every new project was a hand extended that Poincaré chose not to grasp.
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