“It beats headaches. Okay, the pleadings look good. Let’s serve ’em. Have Wish drive them to Palo Alto as soon as he gets back from the Reno airport.”
“ Palo Alto ’s four hours away. And Echo Summit just reopened, so it’ll be slower than usual. Five hours.”
“Which means he can get them there by five o’clock, easily.” An elderly couple walked in and Nina brought them into her office. The will consultation took almost an hour, and when she was free again, Sandy said, “He’s been and gone. I made sure he had the money to stay at a motel if he can’t get home.”
“I wish I could see their faces,” Nina said. “Professor Braun and the gang.”
“If you’re wrong about any of this, they’re going to pulverize us,” Sandy said. “We can’t fight a big company like that.”
“Watch me.”
“Your judgment is shot. You’re taking this personally,” Sandy said, impassive.
Nina started to speak, to defend herself, but Sandy held up a hand.
“That’s the only reason we got this far,” she said. “Bullheadedness. Don’t stop now. There’s a phone message from the college teacher on your desk.”
Nina nodded and went back into her office. Mick wanted to talk to her.
“Hard feelings?” he asked.
“No.”
“It’s rare to meet a mature woman.”
“Don’t push your luck,” Nina said.
“Right. Well, I read the page you copied of Wakefield ’s work. The physics were too hard for me, so I called a physicist friend of mine. The math was too hard for him.”
“So you can’t evaluate it?”
“You need some topflight guy in the field.”
“The field of what?”
“Well, mathematical physics. Michael Berry is your man. He’s a Brit. Bristol.”
“Just tell me what it’s about, Mick.”
“Oh, sure. Write this down. Tell the world. Wakefield claims the primes are eigenvalues of a Hermitian quantum operator associated with a classical Hamiltonian.”
Elliott wasn’t the crazy one for pursuing this, she was, but she made Mick spell the words and wrote everything down. “Is there an English translation?”
“He’s trying to predict prime numbers using properties of real matter. Atoms and their components.”
“Did he succeed?”
“My friend can’t say. We’d need the complete notebook plus a few months.”
“So-we don’t know what he’s doing?”
“Word is he was in a psychiatric hospital. Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” Nina said. “Maybe.”
“Too bad for him, but just about all the greats spent some time weaving baskets in an institution. André Weil did some excellent work on Riemann’s theories while in prison during World War II. Incarceration in general has inspired some astonishing leaps forward in human knowledge. Anyway, we have contemplated licking Elliott Wakefield’s feet, Nina. But we’re not sure if he deserves it or not.”
“You’re no help, Mick.”
“Look, he treats prime numbers as if they were real. As if numbers were matter. As if-following this, Nina? As if the actual universe we live and laugh and cry in is nothing but a stream of mathematical information. All for the purpose of finding the error term between the actual distribution of the prime numbers and the li line.”
“He calls it a damping coefficient. The error term. I guess the question is, is he succeeding?” Nina asked.
“Give me more.”
“I don’t have more.”
“He has three hundred more pages, you say?”
“Just about.”
“What do you expect from a single page? The math is hard. Hard like diamonds are hard.”
Mick wouldn’t commit himself to anything more. “So-I didn’t break your heart?”
“My heart?”
“You do have one, don’t you? It’s a physiological necessity, I believe.”
“Oh, that heart. No.”
“I could have gotten pretty passionate about you, but I knew I’d be moving.”
“I hope you stop someday,” Nina said. “For your sake.”
“Don’t judge me, Nina.”
“I just don’t see how anyone on the move all the time can be happy.”
“I don’t see how anyone standing still can be happy.”
“Try having a child,” Nina said. “You put down a root. You feel the wet earth. You don’t want to skitter along the surface anymore.”
“Very poetic,” Mick said. “However, no offense, you move plenty yourself, from man to man and place to place, and I might even hypothesize that your heat on this subject has to do with your own lifestyle. I’m not feeling this rootedness from you that you talk about.”
Nina did not like hearing this. He was turning her judgment back on her. And it was stingingly accurate.
“Touché,” she said.
“Furthermore, there is a hot babe waiting for me at a certain Mexican restaurant. Still friends?”
“Enjoy your dinner.”
“I’ll send you a bill.”
So dinner was on her. She drove to Matt’s with her comforter and pillow, drank a glass of wine in front of a big fire with him and Andrea, and fielded their questions, and really, she wanted to be depressed about Mick and men in general, but she nodded off early and didn’t get around to it.
December 15 rolled around. Christmas shoppers had joined the skiers along Lake Tahoe Boulevard. There was art of the carved-grizzly-bear variety, turquoise jewelry, sporting goods including the new snowshoes that left your heels free, denim jackets with sequins for the slot-machine players, snowmobile rentals. The casinos brought in heavy hitters for the season and vacancy signs disappeared. The concrete pools of summer held three-foot drifts and the white walls along the road were higher. Every inch of snow was a million-dollar windfall for the resorts, and it looked like a heavy winter.
The lawyers took their cut in traffic accidents, divorces, and business disputes. Sandy tried to fit in the new business. She knew that the courthouse would go as dark as a playless Broadway theater around the twentieth.
“If I were a serial killer, this would be the time,” she remarked to Nina the next morning.
Nina said, “I sent Bob’s presents to Germany this morning. Some clothes, a book, and a stuffed bear. Like he was still three years old.”
“This case’ll be over by Christmas.”
“If it isn’t, I’ll be separated from him.”
“You’ll come to Markleeville and eat with Joseph and me and the family.”
“That would be nice.”
“We do spaghetti on Christmas Eve. You’ll like it.”
“That’s nice. Thanks.”
The phone rang, and Sandy answered.
“Just a moment.” She wagged her head toward Nina’s office, and Nina went in, shut the door, and picked up.
“Ms. Reilly?”
“Yes?”
“The name is Branson. We met in Boston.”
Oh, no, not Branson. She had hoped Branson would not flap his leathery wings so far west.
“I am of counsel to the firm in Palo Alto that will be handling your suit against XYC. We would like to meet with you before this goes any farther.”
“Come on up.”
“We realize you are a busy lady. Could we fly you down tomorrow for a meeting?”
“Fly me down?”
“A private plane will be waiting at the Tahoe airport at eleven. I believe that’s only a few miles from your office.”
“True.” The Tahoe airport served only private pilots these days.
“We could have you back by four at the latest. It’s just a jaunt. I guarantee you a good lunch.”
“What is the purpose of this meeting?”
“To get to know each other. And see if something can be worked out.”
It was ear candy to a lawyer. Nina said, “I’m looking at my schedule now. It does appear that I could clear my calendar.”
“Very good. Just go out onto the landing strip at eleven and look for the blue-and-white Cessna.”
“Okay.”
“See you then.” Branson’s manner had been completely proper. Nina thought to herself: Ally? Or enemy?
Now, why in the world would she even begin to think of him as an ally? Cockeyed Irish optimism was the only way to explain it. She would gird her loins firmly on the morrow, assuming for purposes of argument that women have loins, and that girding would not involve tight spandex.