He turned around and banged on a door. Elisa thought life with Valente Sharpe must be anything but dull. The door opened, revealing a dark hallway and the shadowy features of a man. Valente went in and turned to her.
"If you want to come in, hurry up. Otherwise, fuck off."
"Come in?" Elisa glanced into the darkness. The olive-skinned man watched her, a strange glint in his eye. "To where?"
"My house." Valente smiled. "Sorry it has to be the service entrance. Still standing there? Forget it." He turned to the man. "Slam the door in her face, Faouzi."
The heavy wood door closed in her face with a resounding boom. But almost immediately, it opened again, and Valente's amused face peeked out.
"By the way, have you already answered the questionnaire? How did they get you to do it? Was it that guy talking to you at the party? Who did he say he was, a journalist? Student? Admirer?"
That was it. It was as if someone had handed her the missing piece of the puzzle, the thing she'd unconsciously been searching for right from the start. And now she could see it all so clearly.
It was so obvious, so clear, so appalling.
Valente burst out laughing, though it was an almost silent laugh: all he did was open his mouth wide, giving her a quick glimpse of his pharynx, and squint.
"Judging by the idiotic look on your face, anyone would think that... Don't tell me you liked that guy!" Elisa stood very still, unblinking, not even breathing. Valente seemed to come to life, as if her expression delighted him. "Unbelievable. You're even dumber than I thought! You might be good at math, but you have the social skills of a hippopotamus, hey, sweetheart? How disappointing! For both of us." He made as if to close the door again, and then asked, "Are you coming in or not?"
Elisa didn't move.
09
THE place was strange and creepy, like its owner. Her first impression turned out to be right: it wasn't a house, but an apartment building. Valente confirmed this as they climbed up what must surely have been the building's original stone staircase.
"My uncle bought all the apartments. Some of them belonged to his father, some to his sister and his cousin. He totally renovated them, and now he has more space than he needs. I, on the other hand," he added, "don't have as much as I need."
Elisa wondered how much space Valente thought he needed. She realized that this damp, dark den buried in the middle of Madrid was three times the size of her mother's apartment. But, as she followed his footsteps up the stairs, she was sure of one thing: she could never live there, in that murky darkness that smelled like mildewed brick.
From someplace on the first landing came a ghostly voice; it sounded like a starving man, repeating different versions of the same word over and over. She could vaguely make it out: "Astarte," "Venus," "Aphrodite." Neither Valente nor his butler turned a hair, but when they reached the first floor, Faouzi, who was ahead of them, stopped and opened a door. While she was crossing the hall toward the next flight of stairs, she couldn't help but try to see through the door. It was an enormous room, and she spied a man in pajamas sitting beside a lamp. The butler approached him and spoke loudly, with a strong Moroccan accent. "What's the matter with you today? Why so much complaining?"
"Kali."
"Yeah, yeah, Kali, I know."
"That's my uncle. My father's brother," Ric Valente said, still climbing up the stairs two by two. "He used to be a philologist. Then he went senile, and now he spends all day reciting goddesses' names. I wish he'd die. The house is his; I have only one floor. As soon as he dies, I'll get the whole thing. It's already been decided. He doesn't recognize anybody, doesn't care about anything, doesn't even know who I am. So his death will benefit everybody."
He'd said it with such indifference, without even hesitating. It wasn't just the words themselves, which she'd immediately thought were cruel, but the cold way he'd pronounced them that Elisa intensely disliked. She remembered Victor's warning (Be careful with Ric), but when she stood at the door being insulted, moments ago, she'd decided that she wasn't going to back out. She wanted to know what Valente had to tell her.
The sheer size of the house dumbfounded her. The landing they were on, which seemed to be the last one, opened out onto a foyer with two doors on one side and a hallway straight ahead, with several more doors coming off it. This floor smelled different than the other ones, like books and wood. There were wall lights with dimmers, and it was clear that this whole part of the building had been recently remodeled.
"Is this ... your floor?"
"Yep, all of it."
She would have liked him to give her a tour of the bizarre museum-like house, but Ric Valente did not appear to be a man concerned with niceties. She watched him stride down the labyrinthine hallway and stop at the other end, grabbing a door handle. All of a sudden, he seemed to change his mind and opened the double door on the other side, reaching in to flick on the lights.
"This is my headquarters. It's got a bed and table, but this isn't where I sleep or eat, just where I come for entertainment."
Just that room alone, Elisa thought, would have been the biggest bachelor pad she'd ever seen in her life. Though she was used to her mother's domestic luxury, it was obvious that Valente's wealth was on a whole different scale. This room was like a loft, with two different levels and incredibly high ceilings, white walls, an industrial column shooting up the middle of it, and a spiral staircase that led to a platform with a bed. The lower level was full of books, speakers, magazines, a whole slew of cameras, two strange stages (one with red curtains, the other with a white screen), and several spotlights.
"This is fantastic," she said. But Valente was already gone.
She tiptoed out, as if she were afraid to make any noise, and went into the room to which he'd originally made his way forward.
"Sit down," he ordered, pointing to a blue sofa.
This room was of a more normal size, and a laptop sat open on a small desk. There were several framed pictures, mostly black and white. She recognized some of the Hotshots: Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, Stephen Hawking, and a very young Richard Feynman. But the biggest picture, and certainly the most conspicuous, was very different. The last picture was a brightly colored drawing of a man wearing a suit and tie, stroking a naked woman. The expression on her face made it clear that this was not a pleasant situation for her, but she couldn't do much about it given that her hands were tied behind her back.
Elisa thought that if Valente had noticed the look she'd had on her face ever since she walked in, he certainly wasn't letting on. He sat down at the computer, but turned the swivel chair to face her.
"This is a safe room," he said. "What I mean is it's not bugged. Actually, I haven't found any bugs in the whole house, but they put a transmitter in my cell and they've been tapping my phone, so I'd rather talk here. When they tagged me, they tried to claim that the electricity was down. But I sealed this room off and gave Faouzi strict instructions. When they came, we convinced them that this was just a storage room with no outlets or anything. And I have a few surprises. You see that thing in the corner cupboard that looks like a radio? That's a microphone detector. It picks up all frequencies from fifty megahertz to three gigs. These days you can get them on the Internet. The green light means we can speak freely." He rested his pointy chin in his hands, fingers laced together, and smiled. "We really ought to decide what we're going to do, sweetheart."
"Well, I still have a few questions." She was irritated and anxious—not just by everything he'd told her, but also by the loss of her phone, which she was now starting to regret (though he hadn't even mentioned it). "How did you even get in touch with me, and why did you pick me to begin with?"
"OK. I'll tell you what happened. First, they made me fill out the questionnaire at Oxford; that was what first got me suspicious. They said it was a 'vital prerequisite' in order to attend Blanes's course. When I got to Madrid, I started seeing beggars everywhere, and it seemed as if they wer
e spying on me, and then came the power outage ... But I'm forgetting something. Weeks before that, a bunch of U.S. universities called my parents to ask questions about me, claiming to be 'interested' in me. Did that happen to you? Did anyone ask your family about your life, or your personality?"
"One of my mother's clients," Elisa recalled, growing pale. Very, very well connected. "She just told me about it today."
Valente nodded at her approvingly, as if she were a diligent student.
"My father had already told me about that. They're well-known strategies, though I never thought they'd try them on me. Anyway, so I made a simple deduction: all of this started happening after I decided to sign up for Blanes's course, so the surveillance must be related to the course. But then I spoke to Vicky ... Oops, my mistake"—he gave a childlike, apologetic look and corrected himself—"... to my friend Victor Lopera, I think you know him, we've been friends since we were kids and I really trust him. But don't call him Vicky or he'll get really pissed off. Anyway, when I asked him about it, he said they hadn't made him fill out any forms. I was curious to find out if I was the only one who was being spied on, so the next logical step was to ask you, since we got... about the same score on the entrance exam." She smiled to herself, thinking that those four one-hundredths of a point really killed him, but she kept quiet. "Then I saw you talking to that guy at the party at Alighieri, and that pretty much clinched it. But I couldn't just stroll right up to you and say, 'Hey, are they watching you, too?' I had to prove it to you, because I was sure you were an innocent little lamb and wouldn't believe me just because I told you to. I had to discard the possibility of any normal form of communication..."
He paused, stood up and walked toward the corner of the room, where there was a tiny basin, a faucet, and a glass. He turned on the faucet and filled the glass.
"All I can offer you is water," he said. "And we have to share it. I'm an appalling host. I hope you don't mind putting your lips on the same glass as me."
"I don't want any, thanks," Elisa replied. She was starting to get hot and took off her cardigan. All she had on underneath was a sleeveless T-shirt. He glanced at her for a split second as he drank and then returned to his seat.
"So, then I remembered a trick my father taught me. 'When you want to send a secret message, use porno.' That's what he told me. Only idiots send secrets in inconspicuous e-mails. In his world, anything 'inconspicuous' is conspicuous. But nobody really investigates spam, especially pornographic spam. So that's what I did, but I had an ace up my sleeve. I was sure that some pictures based on Euclid's diagrams would look like porno to anyone who didn't have comprehensive knowledge of math. And as far as the ad and 'mercuryfriend,' those were just arbitrary details, like hacking into your computer."
"Hacking into my computer?"
"Easiest thing in the world," Valente said, scratching an armpit. "Your firewall is Stone Age. Or should I say Abacus Age? Besides, I'm a pretty decent hacker. I've even started creating my own viruses."
Despite being impressed by his brilliant plan, Elisa felt exceedingly uncomfortable. So that's it. He has no scruples about rummaging around in my private life and he wants me to know it.
"So why bother to tell me? Why would you care whether or not I knew I was being watched?"
"Oh, believe me, I wanted to meet you," Valente said, adopting a serious expression. "I find you very interesting, as does almost everyone else... Yeah," he admitted after a second, "I'm sure Blanes finds you interesting, too, even though he always calls on me. There aren't too many girls in theoretical physics, and at Oxford there are even fewer than in Madrid, believe me, and even fewer like you. I mean, I've never seen a girl who knows as much as you do and has a hooker's mouth, with tits and ass to match."
Though Elisa had heard him perfectly, her brain took a moment to process the information. Valente's tone hadn't changed one iota; it was almost hypnotic. And her trancelike state was not helped by his marshy eyes, staring out from that gaunt, lean face. When she finally realized what he had said, she didn't know how to respond. For a second, she felt paralyzed, like the woman in the painting, with her hands tied. Certain people, like certain snakes, had that power over others.
At the same time, though, she was sure that he wanted to offend her, and deduced that he would chalk up a victory for himself if she reacted to his vulgarity. She decided to bide her time.
"I'm serious," he continued. "You're fucking hot A little weird, like me, but hot. I have a theory about it. I think it's all organic. The best physicists have always been pathological. Admit it. The Homo sapiens brain can't take in all the profundities of the quantum or relativistic world without serious side effects."
He got up again and pointed to his portraits, one by one, as he spoke.
"Schrodinger: sex fiend. Discovered the wave equation while screwing one of his many lovers. Einstein: psychopath. Left his wife and kids and married another woman, and when she died he said he was glad, because he could work in peace without her around. Heisenberg: Nazi. Active collaborator and the father of the H-bomb project under the Fuhrer. Bohr: neurotic. Obsessed with Einstein. Newton: vile wretch. Mediocrity incarnate. Lied and falsified documents just to offend anyone who criticized him. Blanes: mentally disturbed misogynist. You must have seen how he treats you. Probably jacks off thinking about his mother and sister. I could keep going for hours. I've read about all of them, even me." He smiled. "Yeah. I've kept a diary since I was five, and I'm a very meticulous recorder. I like to reflect on my own life. I swear we're all the same. We come from good families (some, even aristocratic ones, like de Broglie); we have an innate ability to reduce nature to pure math. And we're all freaks. And I don't mean just mentally. Physically, too. For example, I'm dolichocephalic, and so are you. In case you didn't know, that means we have long heads, like cucumbers. Schrodinger and Einstein, too. My body is more like Heisenberg's, though. I'm not kidding, I think it's genetic. And you. Well, who knows who the hell you take after, with a body like that. I'd like to see you naked. Your breasts are a little weird, sort of long, too, like your head. 'Dolicomammaries,' we could call them. I want to see your nipples. Why don't you take off your clothes?"
Elisa surprised herself, wondering if she should. Valente's voice was like radiation: you suffered the consequences of it before you even knew you'd been affected.
"No, thanks," she said. "How else are we weird?"
"Our families, maybe," he said, sitting back down. "My parents are divorced. My mother even wanted to kill me. By having an abortion, I mean. My father finally managed to convince her to have me, and my aunt and uncle took me in. So I came to Madrid and lived in this house for a long time before I went to Oxford. And even if you don't believe me, I have actually spent quite a bit of time with each of my parents." He smiled broadly, showing his eyeteeth. "Turns out that once I was far enough away, Mom and Dad realized they loved me. Let's just say we're good friends now. What about you?"
"Why ask me if you already know?" she replied.
Valente snickered.
"I know some stuff," he admitted. "That you're the daughter of Javier Robledo, that your father died in a car accident. Just what's in all the interviews."
She decided to change the subject.
"You were saying we should do something. Why don't we go to the police? We have proof that they're spying on us."
"You don't get it, do you, sweetheart? The police are the ones who're doing the spying. Not just the regular police, or even the secret police. The authorities. Bigwigs."
"But why? What have we done?"
Valente gave that irritating laugh again.
"One of the things you learn with my father is that you don't have to have done anything wrong for them to keep tabs on you. In fact, most of the time, if you're under surveillance, it's because you've done too many things right."
"But why us? We're students, we just graduated..."
"It has to do with Blanes, somehow. I'm sure of that." Valente turned arou
nd and typed something on his laptop. A series of equations appeared, equations from the sequoia theory. "Something to do with him or his class, but I have no fucking idea what. Maybe he's working on some project. At first I thought it was because of his theory, some kind of practical application or some experiment related to it, but it can't be that..." He flicked his index finger continuously, scrolling down through them. "The theory is beautiful, but totally impractical." He turned toward her. "Like some girls."
Once again, she resisted the temptation to get angry.
"You mean the trouble with solving the equation?"
"Of course. There's an insurmountable predicament. The sum of the 'past' end tensors is infinite. I've already calculated that, see? So, despite your ingenious response about curls this morning (which I had already thought of, by the way), there's no way to isolate the strings as individual particles. It's like asking if the sea is made of one single drop or trillions of them. In physics, the answer is always the same: it depends on how you define a drop. Without a concrete definition, it makes no difference whether the strings even exist or not."
"Well, this is how I see it," said Elisa, leaning forward to point to the equation on the screen. "If we take the time variable as infinite, the results are paradoxical. But if we use a limited delta t, no matter how great it is—say, from the big bang to the present—then the solutions are fixed quantities."
"But that's basing it all on a false premise," Valente retorted immediately. "You yourself are creating an artificial limit. That's like just changing a number when you're doing sums to make the figures add up to the total you need. It's absurd. Why pick the start of the universe as your time and not any other time? It's ridiculous..."
A marked change had overcome him. Elisa noticed that he'd lost his sneer and his cold tone, and now he was speaking animatedly. Now I've got you by the balls.