The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [41]
His number-one assignment was a stationary dot on a gray screen, a dot representing a beautiful woman sitting in a bar, talking to a man who wasn’t him.
14
FRIDAY, JULY 16
KLOSKA WAS EXPECTING more from the office of a tenured math professor at an exclusive private school like Sampson University—maybe oak paneling and leaded windows and a cathedral ceiling with a chandelier. He was certainly expecting books, even a great big wall of them, with volumes stacked so high that you’d need a ladder to reach the dustiest ones at the top.
Instead, Professor Cepeda’s office was the size of a typical cell at county lockup and it contained about as many scholarly books. One short laminate shelf held half a dozen paperback bindings with inscrutable titles and Cepeda’s name along the spines. The rest of the office was covered in paper—faxes and printouts and scribbled calculations. Some of them were in Spanish and the rest of them, as far as Kloska was concerned, might as well have been. Cepeda’s desk was a banged-up old thing, a sorry twin to the dented and undignified piece of scrap in the cubicle Kloska shared with a second-watch detective back at Area 3. The only difference was Cepeda’s double-wide platinum flat-panel monitor growing out of the mulch of paper at its base.
The whole place was small enough that during the interview, Traden had to stand, arms folded, back against the gray metal door. Kloska sat in a narrow straight-backed chair with a torn upholstered seat, making preliminary scribbles in his tiny cell phone–size notebook, which he pressed against the top of his crossed thigh.
Professor Cepeda was examining the card found in Marlena Falcone’s wallet.
“Clever,” he said almost inaudibly.
“What’s clever about it?” Kloska asked.
“It’s my phone number.” Cepeda had been born in San Juan, but his American accent was so good that it made Kloska self-conscious about his nasally Chicagoese.
“I know. I’m wondering why she wrote it in a little pyramid like that.”
Professor Cepeda laughed, as if he was just teasing out the obvious questions. “It’s not a pyramid. That’s a tetra-CAH-tus.” He spelled it out on a random corner of a paper on his desk: T-E-T-R-A-K-T-Y-S.
“What’s a tetraktys?” He tried unsuccessfully to pronounce it like Cepeda had as he copied it into his notes.
“It was a sacred symbol to the followers of Pythagoras.”
“Pythagoras?”
“Greek mathematician. You know, the Pythagorean theorem? The formula for determining the dimensions of a right triangle. The sum of the squares of the sides equals the square of the hypotenuse. A squared plus B squared equals C squared.”
“Yeah, I remember.” Barely. Kloska looked through his Falcone notes for anything he’d heard about Pythagoras, or triangles.
“Funny, but the real Pythagoras probably had little to do with the theorem named after him. He was far more interesting and complicated than that. He wasn’t only a brilliant mathematician; he was a philosopher, a theologian, a teacher, a political svengali, a cult leader, a mystic. He eventually settled in a Mediterranean city called Croton, in what is now Italy, and set up an important school called the Semicircle. You might even call it a cult more than a school. Some of his followers thought he was descended from the god Apollo.” Cepeda took a pen and re-created Dr. Falcone’s pyramid on another corner of the paper on his desk. Instead of numbers, he drew black circles. “Ten dots. The decad—the number ten—had special significance for Pythagoreans.”
Kloska studied the revised drawing. It reminded him of a gang symbol. One chapter of the 14K Triad in Chinatown used a triangle for a tag, but not like this. “What significance?”
“Well, Pythagoras believed