“Why not?” Nina said.

“Because my notebook was in the inside pocket of my jacket. I always carry it on me. I just couldn’t let him have the notebook. I couldn’t.”

“What was in the notebook, Elliott?”

“The proof I’m working on. I’ve been working on it for a long time.”

“Tell me about this proof.”

“What’s your math background?”

“Average.”

“Let’s just say, it’s about predicting large primes and factoring large composite numbers.”

“I found out that you were working on prime number theory from the bookstore at Tahoe.”

“The Crandall-Pomerance book? I did buy it there.”

“So I’ve been doing some reading myself.”

“It’s pretty abstruse,” Elliott said. “You’re not going to get much just diving in. You need a background in number theory and quantum mechanics.”

“I’m a lawyer,” Nina said. “That’s what I do all day, make sense out of difficult sets of facts. Each case has its own realm of knowledge and I learn the basics fast.”

Elliott shook his head. “Not this stuff,” he said.

“It’s just logic, a special vocabulary, processes,” Nina said. “Go ahead, talk to me. Pretend I’m Leibniz or Fermat. They were both lawyers, weren’t they? Are you working on the Riemann Hypothesis?”

Elliott closed his eyes and stretched his back. “Not anymore. I think it will never be proved or disproved. The Riemann Hypothesis is fun to play with, but it doesn’t predict where the primes are.”

“I thought that was how the mystery of the primes was going to be solved.”

“I tried for a long time. If you look at an X ray of Riemann’s Zeta Function, you see two curved lines overlapping in different ways around the zeros. The lines are out of phase with each other. Two phases are superimposed on each other within a very short interval. I was looking for the equations that would bring the phases back into coherence. I decided the Riemann function is too indirect to find an exact error term. Even using a quantum mechanics model.”

It sounded like gobbledygook, but amazingly well-spoken gobbledygook, considering the state Elliott was in. He was staring into his empty glass as though it contained a secret. His face was slack and exhausted.

Nina persevered. The lawyer’s tool is asking questions. “Then-how are you approaching it?”

“Well, quantum mechanics has a fatal flaw-it doesn’t explain why individual events happen. Bohr said not to think about it. What a crock. I went back to early Einstein,” Elliott said. “He always thought that the universe wasn’t based on random events, as quantum theory says. He said God doesn’t throw the dice. Elementary particles may seem to move randomly, but that’s only because the real laws are behind the quantum veil. And they are deterministic, Newtonian laws.

“Classical physics, behind the quantum veil, can use all variables and is therefore continuous. But quanta are discrete information packets. As information passes through the quantum veil, some of it is lost because it becomes discrete. What is not random looks random.”

Nina nodded. “We have a legal concept that is very similar. It’s called the corporate veil. An individual incorporates, and the corporation becomes a protective veil between the individual and the rest of the world. If someone wants to sue the person, they can’t. They can only sue the corporation, and the individual’s money is protected.”

“The real treasure is hidden behind the veil,” Elliott said. He tried to grin, but his face just twitched a little. “Yeah. In the case of the quantum veil, the underlying pattern is hidden behind the veil.”

“Sometimes you can pierce the veil in law. Get at the hidden assets.”

“That’s what I think I did. I pierced the quantum veil. I think I really may have done it. I don’t know why it happened to be me who figured it out.”

“Why does physics come into it?” Nina asked.

Elliott said, “What’s a number? Ah, shit, this is what Silke and I used to talk about.”

He got up and came back with another small tumbler of whiskey, and Nina realized that his expansiveness would soon turn to the snoring escape of deep drunkenness. In the meantime, though, this young man she had sought for so long was lying on a couch a few feet away, talking into the air, and the moment would never recur. She felt, as she had before, urgently and without much foundation, that Elliott’s work had a profound relationship with Sarah Hanna’s death. She intended to go wherever he wanted to go.

“What’s a number?” she answered. “It’s that thing you count with.”

“One sheep, two sheep. What’s a one?”

Nina held up a finger.

“No,” Elliott said. “That’s a finger. ‘One’ is an abstract piece of information. ‘One’ doesn’t pick your nose. True?”

“True.”

“What’s a hydrogen atom?”

Nina said, “Let me guess. Another abstract piece of information?”

“Correct. It’s the energy state of the atom, in terms of the forces that bind its electron to its nucleus, as described in Schrödinger’s equation. That and other mathematical descriptions constitute an atom. The information about its behavior is all there is. There is no other ‘there’ there.”

“You mean the hydrogen atom isn’t a thing?”

“All we can know about it is the math, which completely describes it. There’s nothing else to be said about it. It’s real in the way you and I are real. We’re made of atoms.”

“Okay. But what has the hydrogen atom got to do with locating and factoring prime numbers?”

“Prime numbers are raw information. They have the same properties as fermions-the elementary particles that make up things like hydrogen atoms.”

Nina said, “Are you telling me that you think numbers are real, like particles?”

“What does ‘real’ mean? I’m telling you they’re the same thing. They have identical properties, so they’re identical. The basic problem with both of them is the same: location, the exact location of each quantum and the exact location of each prime. The Riemann real part one-half corresponds precisely with the fermion spin of one-half. The symmetry of the Riemann zeros corresponds to fermion symmetry. And of course fermions contain odd numbers of subparticles, just as primes are odd-numbered, except for the number two, which is too close to the beginning of the number line to worry about. And the fermions behave randomly within a specific set of limits, just like the primes. The identities go on and on.”

“Very interesting.”

“And on and on,” Elliott said very definitely. He had sat up straight and was now for some reason holding his glass so that he could see it in the mirror above Kurt’s fireplace.

“I think I’ll have a shot of that whiskey,” Nina said. She poured herself a shot of Jim Beam. Maybe it would help her understand.

“I went back to the basics. To the li line. Let me think how to say this. The prime number line drags along forever below the li line, unless you believe Littlewood, which I don’t. It’s not really a line. It’s a zigzag sequence. But”-he pointed his finger at her before continuing-“each prime point wants so much, so very much, to be in a close relationship with the li line.”

“What do you mean, wants?” Nina said.

“Can you imagine what it would feel like to be able to see where you belong, but not be able to move toward it? She-she-it’s too late. It is so sad. So-damn-sad.”

“You should have a glass of water.”

“I can have a glass of water when I’m dead.” But he accepted the glass Nina brought him. “I really ought to be dead, too, after today. I wonder what it feels like to be dead. No, I don’t wonder. It’s too awful. I don’t want to wonder. I don’t want to think about Silke right now. Let’s talk about math some more.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you how I see the li line. The li line is like law,” Nina said. “Primes are like individuals in a society, unruly and unpredictable on their own, but society as a whole does follow the law. QED.” She tipped her shot glass back.