Chapter 19
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM
YOUR SISTER
The winter of 1997–98 had been unusually mild and wet around the world, a climate anomaly that meteorologists blamed on the presence of a warm current in the eastern Pacific Ocean known as El Niño. In the Chicago area, the gray, rainy weather had persisted well after spring had set in, but there was not a single cloud in sight the morning of April 15, when Jule and Laura met with Trench and Richter to discuss the state of the Pythagoras search operation. That same morning, one thousand kilometers away, Johanna Davidson was driving from Boston to Montreal to attend a much anticipated mathematics lecture at McGill University.
They were meeting in the Temple’s Council Room, where the Order’s highest authority held its official sessions. An oval table with eight upholstered chairs around it occupied most of the space. On the wall at the end of the room hung a gold-framed oil portrait of the enigmatic Mr. S, the Order’s founder, a silent observer of the Council’s deliberations. Jule and Laura stared at the picture of the austere-looking man with the white beard and piercing black eyes before taking a seat on one side of the table. Trench and Richter sat across from them, facing the two large windows through which the morning sun was pouring in. The purpose of the meeting was to take stock of the situation and to plan the future course of action. The mood in the room was gloomy, in sharp contrast with the splendid weather outside.
On one front, progress had been minimal: for all her efforts and numerous trips to libraries and museums, Laura had been unable to identify the place where the drawing depicting the serpent might have come from. She had sought the help of colleagues and other experts—being careful not to reveal the true reasons behind her interest in the information—but to no avail.
The only bright note came from a friend of Laura’s at Yale University, Dr. Frieda Schneider, a specialist in Gnostic sects, lending weight to Jule’s interpretation of the drawing. After having examined it, she had e-mailed Laura:
“It’s quite possible that your picture decorated the wall of a place of worship. Although unintelligible to the profane, to the members of a sect such as the Naassenes the scene would have evoked their dogma, where the serpent, whom they regarded as the Spirit, grants every living being grace and beauty according to its nature.
Another reference to the Naassenes is the shape of the lozenge containing the serpent, which resembles that of an almond. A pre-existent almond symbolized for the Naassenes the Father of the Universe.”
The lack of concrete results had not dampened Laura’s resolve; she still expected her persistence to eventually bear fruit. She told Trench as much: “I never thought the investigation would be short or easy, and I’m certainly not ready to give up yet. Besides Dr. Schneider, who took a particular interest in the affair, and myself, I have two graduate students working on the case. My hunch is that the temple or shrine we are looking for might have been discovered by one of the early German or British expeditions at the beginning of the nineteenth century, complete records of which are very difficult to obtain.”
“You have our full confidence, Dr. Hirsch,” Trench reassured her. “It never occurred to us to impose any deadline on your work.”
“When we hired you and Dr. Davidson, we didn’t expect results after a specific period of time,” Richter said with an even voice, echoing Trench’s words, “but we entertain no doubts as to the ultimate outcome of your team’s endeavor: our reunion with the Master reincarnate. It is a certainty we cannot explain; we just know it, that’s all.”
Developments had hardly been more encouraging on another front. With Houdini’s help, and despite their disapproval of the method, Laura and Jule had been able to get their hands on Galway’s translation of the medieval book auctioned in London. According to the Oxford professor, the book was the Arabic version of a letter written by one of the Pythagoreans. Besides relating the circumstances of Pythagoras’ death, the letter mentioned the existence of a scroll by the Master himself but gave no indication of its location whatsoever. So, even though this new information about the philosopher’s death delighted Laura, who intended to use it in her upcoming book, it was not really helpful as far as the search for his reincarnation was concerned.
If the results were meager, it was not for lack of effort. For the last three months, Laura and Jule had put all their talent and energy into the task. On a typical day, when they were not away doing research or following some lead, they would arrive at Richter’s place by taxi at around 8:30 in the morning and work until 6:00 p.m.; they worked five and sometimes six days a week. They had lunch with Richter in the dining room followed by a short break before resuming work for the rest of the afternoon. At the end of the working day, a taxi would take Jule back to his hotel and Laura to her cousin’s place. Emma Hirsch was not a real cousin but was descended from a branch of the Hirsch family that had emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. She worked as a hairdresser and lived alone in a modest but spacious apartment in North Chicago. When Emma offered to put her up, Laura readily accepted the invitation, preferring such an arrangement to staying at a hotel.
On the last day of April 1998, as the taxi arrived at his hotel after their day’s work, Jule decided on the spur of the moment to invite Laura for a drink. She hesitated.
He insisted: “C’mon, it’s been all work and no pleasure for weeks.”
“All right. But you must promise not to order whisky.”
“That’s easy, I never drink whisky anyway. But why?”
“Never mind, it’s a long story.”
They got out of the taxi, entered the hotel lobby, and headed for the bar. Shortly after they had ordered their drinks, a bellboy approached Jule: “Mr. Davidson? There’s a call for you. You may take it in the booth near the front desk, on your left.”
Jule entered the telephone booth and picked up the receiver without bothering to close the door. “Hello.”
“I knew I would find you in the bar.” Johanna enjoyed teasing her twin brother.
“That’s not fair! I haven’t had a drink in weeks. I was just unwinding with a colleague.”
She wasn’t interested in his social life. “I’ve got news for you—big news,” she said. “Did you get my message? I tried to call you on your cell phone but there was no answer.”
“I know, the battery is down. What’s your big news?”
“It’s about a book I’m reading, Life of a Genius, the biography of Norton Thorp.”
“I know the guy, and I’ve no doubt he is a genius. But what’s the connection?”
“I thought you would be interested in reading a couple of passages from the book and then draw your own conclusions.”
“Can’t you tell me a bit more? I’m not exactly in the mood for biographies at the moment.”
“Just trust me. It’ll be worth your time. What’s your fax number?”
Jule gave it to her. The conversation then moved to other subjects, notably Johanna’s recent breakup with Kevin, after a relationship that had lasted a record nine months. Jule listened patiently but didn’t say much. He knew better than to interrupt her with well-intentioned but ill-advised “You should have . . .” or “Why didn’t you . . .” An attentive ear was all his sister looked for.
Johanna eventually got back to the purpose of her call. “I’ll fax you the pages tomorrow morning. Take care,” she said before hanging up. The call had lasted some twenty minutes.
Jule hurried back to rejoin his forsaken colleague in the bar. The soft notes of a piano had produced a relaxing effect on Laura, who was leaning against the backrest of her chair with her eyes closed.
“Terribly sorry it took so long,” Jule apologized, startling Laura out of her reverie. “It was my sister. She lives in Boston, and we don’t see each other very often.”
“Everything okay?”
“Oh yes, only she sounded a little mysterious about a book she’s reading. She’s faxing me some pages she absolutely wants me to read.”
“What’s the book about?”
“It’s a biography; the biography of Norton Thorp, the famous mathematician.”
“I’ve heard about him. He came to Urbana last year to give a talk at the university. It was announced all over the campus, you couldn’t have missed it. A high-profile event, with press and TV coverage. He’s some kind of modern-day Einstein, I hear.”
“I suppose you could say that, except he’s interested in mathematics rather than theoretical physics. But his works have changed the face of mathematics just as Einstein’s theories revolutionized physics. Actually, some of Thorp’s mathematical results have applications to string theory.”
“String theory?”
“It’s one of the hottest topics in physics. The ultimate constituents of matter, so the theory goes, would be some stuff in the shape of infinitesimally small stringlike filaments, and the elementary particles would be vibration patterns of those strings in spaces of ten dimensions or more.”
“You completely lost me,” said Laura, almost apologetically. “I must be a romantic, because the word ‘strings’ only brings to my mind memories of violins and chamber music.”
Jule smiled and looked straight into her black eyes. “You are a true romantic, then,” he said softly, “but of the quiet type. I hardly know you after all these months of working together.”
“Blame it on my former life. When you live under constant surveillance, you quickly learn to tell as little as possible about yourself. You don’t trust anybody, not even those you think are your friends. Your feelings, your opinions, even your pastimes, you keep to yourself.”
“But you ran away from all that long ago. And besides, you have nothing to fear now; the German Democratic Republic no longer exists.”
“Yes, I did escape,” she said, staring into space. “But I paid a heavy price, and I made my mother and sister who stayed behind pay a terrible price too.”
Her eyes had that characteristic brilliance announcing the imminence of tears.
“I did escape, eventually,” she repeated, “but not on my first attempt.” There was a silence, as she prepared to tell—and relive—a painful experience. “I was in Vienna, at an international conference. I had a friend at the American Embassy, or rather a friend of my late father, a woman whom I absolutely trusted. She was going to help me make the jump to freedom. Halfway through the conference closing session I was to discreetly leave the conference site, a magnificent eighteenth-century palace in the outskirts of the city. A car sent by my friend would then pick me up and take me to the embassy, where I would become a political refugee. As I was leaving the building, a man approached me and called my name: ‘Dr. Hirsch? Your car is waiting, please hurry up.’ A car pulled up; we quickly got in and the car drove away at full speed. I realized from the anxious way the man sitting beside me kept looking back that another car was following us. I feared the worst and felt much relieved when we finally managed to shake it off. But just when I thought I was safe, my heart stopped beating: it was not to the U.S. Embassy that I had been taken but to the Soviet Consulate. Someone had betrayed me.
“I’ll spare you the details of what happened to me when I got back to Dresden. I spent almost two years in jail. It was an all-female prison, but the warden would occasionally let male officers pay nightly visits to helpless inmates, in exchange for God knows what favors or bribes. One night, I had the honor of being chosen to provide free entertainment for a two-hundred-pound drunken brute. All I remember—and I suppose that’s all my brain allows me to remember—is the smell of his breath reeking of cheap whisky as he pressed his sweating flabby face against mine.
“Now you understand why I asked you not to order whisky,” she said, unable to control her tears any longer.
Later that night, back in his hotel room and still under the emotional impact of Laura’s confidences, Jule had forgotten all about the book his sister had urged him to read. A blinking red light on the telephone panel informed him he had a new message. He took it. It was the message Johanna had left him that afternoon, and it ended with an enigmatic “I think I’ve found the solution to your problem.” “What problem? And why does she want me to read that book?” he thought, remembering his sister’s earlier call. He couldn’t think clearly, he had had a drink too many. Better wait until tomorrow to sort this out, he decided, and went straight to bed.
When he got to the office the next morning, Johanna’s five-page fax was waiting for him. He sat down at his desk and began reading it.
The first page was an excerpt from the introduction of the book. The author claimed to have had access to Thorp’s aunt’s personal diary, which provided hitherto undisclosed details of the famous mathematician’s childhood and youth; among these, two seemingly paranormal incidents involving some strange and inexplicable behavior of the young Norton.
The remaining pages elaborated on the nature of those incidents. The first one took place when Thorp was five years old. One evening, his aunt found him sitting at the piano, playing a piece of classical music with the skill of an accomplished pianist, even though he had never taken piano lessons or even touched a keyboard before. The second bizarre episode occurred some ten years later, when Norton was in high school. The author quoted from an entry in Therese Thorp’s diary dated April 28, 1979:
I met with Mrs. Witherington, Norton’s literature teacher. She’s as bewildered as I am by Norton’s homework. The class was studying masterpieces of world literature, and she had chosen a passage from The Odyssey relating Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops, a mythical tale particularly appealing to young readers. The students were to read the chapter and write a short essay on it. She was about to finish reading Norton’s essay when she noticed something odd: the last few lines looked like meaningless scribbling. On closer examination, she realized the “scribbling” was an unbroken sequence of Greek letters, six lines deep. She thought she knew what was going on: Norton had, not very adroitly, copied it from some book where the English and Greek versions of the poem were printed side by side. To confirm her suspicion before confronting Norton, she showed the page to her brother-in-law, who taught classical languages at the university. His conclusion, after having discussed the matter with some colleagues, only deepened the mystery. It was Greek all right, and its general sense roughly corresponded to a passage from Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey. However, it didn’t exactly match any of the published versions of the poem he had seen.
She wrote down the English translation for me:
“We came to the land of the Cyclops race, arrogant lawless beings who leave their livelihood to the deathless gods and never use their own hands to sow or plough; yet with no sowing and no ploughing, the crops all grow for them—wheat and barley and grapes that yield wine from ample clusters, swelled by the showers of Zeus.”
What is more, her brother-in-law added that the passage was written in an ancient Greek alphabet (Ionic, I think), without separation of words, whereas all known versions of The Odyssey—the oldest one dating from the tenth century AD—were written in either Hellenistic or Modern Greek. Therefore, in his opinion, Norton’s text had definitely not been copied from any book.
I knew he hadn’t copied it. Cheating is certainly not in his nature, and besides he doesn’t need to cheat, he always gets the highest mark anyway. I believe what Norton told us, Mrs. Witherington and I. He was working late on his assignment when he fell asleep at his desk. It was well past midnight when he woke up and went to sleep in his bed. The next morning, he picked up the sheets from his desk, convinced he had finished the essay the night before. He turned it in without ever reading it again.
I don’t understand, but I gave up trying. I still remember what Morris and I went through ten years ago when we tried to understand. He’s an exceptional child, a child like none other; that’s all there is to understand.
Jule stopped reading, lifted his head, and whispered “Unbelievable” to himself, in a state of shock and elation at the same time. He remained at his desk for long minutes, sitting still but for a slight motion of his head, after which he turned to his computer and looked at a particular file. Then he got up, went over to Laura’s desk across the room and gently tapped on her shoulder to get her attention. When she turned to face him, he very calmly said: “I’ve found him.”
Jule had Laura read the excerpts from Thorp’s biography. When she finished, she reached for his arm and pressed it without saying a word—she didn’t need to.
“And you know what? There was a clue right under our noses all the time,” said Jule.
“Remember your translation of the Greek poem on page six?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“Are you sure it’s accurate, I mean, are the verb tenses right?”
She searched for the file in her computer and a few seconds later the words appeared on the screen:
He is a man of exceptional wisdom
Versed in the secrets of number;
One who of all men
Has the profoundest wealth of intellect.
“Yes, that’s correct. As far as I can tell it’s a faithful translation of the poem. What’s the matter with the verb tenses?”
“Unlike the original verses by what’s-his-name . . .”
“Empedocles.”
“Right. Unlike his verses, which are in the past tense—I’ve just checked it—as they should, because he’s referring to Pythagoras after his death, this poem is in the present tense.”
“So?”
“So the poem in the parchment sheet is not really a shorter version of Empedocles,’ it is a clue to recognizing the living Pythagoras: “He is a man versed in the secrets of number; one who has the profoundest wealth of intellect; in other words, he is a mathematician of genius!”
Soon afterward, a series of events took place in quick succession. They called Trench—Richter was out of town—requesting an urgent meeting with him. When they presented their case, he became very excited. “Excellent, excellent,” he kept repeating.
That evening, the Council of High Companions met to hear Trench’s report and make a decision. He lay out before them what he considered to be compelling evidence that Norton Thorp was Pythagoras reincarnate: “a man versed in the secrets of number; one who of all men has the profoundest wealth of intellect” was a fitting description of a mathematician of genius. The little boy who had never touched a keyboard before magnificently playing the piano as if in a trance—the Master was a consummate musician: Wasn’t his spirit guiding young Norton’s little hands that evening? And finally, the Greek passage in the Ionian alphabet without separation of words: only an educated 500 BC Greek familiar with Homer’s epic poem could have written it.
“I’m aware that any one of these three elements by itself is not sufficient evidence for reaching a conclusion,” Trench said to the attentive group sitting around the oval table, “but taken together they constitute as convincing a proof as we can expect to get.”
The vote was unanimous in favor of Trench’s recommendation, so the second phase of the operation could now be activated: Rocky and Houdini would prepare and execute a plan to bring Thorp-Pythagoras before the Council.