The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [42]
“Pythagoras taught that some of those numbers had specific attributes. The decad represented the sum of everything. Perfection. The power of all things. You and me and all the gods together. The consciousness of man in perfect harmony with the cosmos.”
Kloska hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.
Cepeda’s hair was graying and cropped close to his oblate head. He wasn’t large—“fun-sized” was how Kloska would describe him later to other detectives in an Ashland Avenue cop bar—but looking at Cepeda’s tight, pressed dress shirt, he sensed the definition of a once-serious athlete. “To an ordinary person, it’s complicated.”
An ordinary person. That had to be an insult. Kloska asked, “Why didn’t she just write your name next to your number the way everyone else would do it?”
“Who knows. Maybe she wanted to remind herself that it was my number but put it in a code.” He leaned forward. “Didn’t you ever keep a secret phone number? For your bookie.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Or maybe your mistress.”
Kloska flinched, a lifetime of girls’ phone numbers disguised as the digits of sources and snitches flashed across the inside of his skull. “Were you having an affair with Marlena Falcone, Dr. Cepeda?”
“Goodness no.” Behind his glistening eyes, he seemed to be considering the idea for the first time.
“Then what?”
Cepeda glanced skyward. “Dr. Falcone called me several times over the past few years to ask questions about a project she was working on.”
“Dr. Falcone? I thought she lost her medical license.”
“She went back to school to get her Ph.D.”
“In what field?”
His smile turned satisfied. “Mathematics. She was one of my students.”
He could feel Traden deflate behind him. The only clue they had, the tetraktys, was looking like nothing more than a scribbled shorthand between teacher and former student. The whole fucking day wasted.
As long as they were there, though. “What project was she working on?”
“She never said. Her inquiries were very narrow. Carefully posed. Marlena was circumspect. It makes sense that she’d draw a tetraktys, actually. In my class, we spoke a great deal about Pythagoras. About the history of mathematics. The intersections between math and physics and nature. About harmonia.”
Kloska had never gone to college, but he was as uncomfortable as one of Cepeda’s students on quiz day. “What’s harmonia?”
“It’s an old-fashioned name for an ancient proposition, but modern physicists would probably call it ‘the theory of everything.’ See, today we have theories like relativity, which explains the role of gravity in the universe, and then we have quantum theory, which explains how electrons and protons and subatomic particles behave. Both make perfect sense, but they don’t agree. Many scientists have searched for an explanation that unifies these theories. Well, Pythagoras recognized similar contradictions in nature twenty-five hundred years ago. He thought nature resolved this tension mathematically through something called harmonia.”
“You’re going to need to back this up for me a little,” Bobby said.
Cepeda straightened, cracking every vertebra up his spine. “Pythagoras was especially interested in the connection between music and math. Pythagoreans believed that the harmonic ratios in music—the numerical relationships between pleasing musical notes and chords—were the mathematical fundamentals, the organizing principle, of the entire universe. Did you know Pythagoras secretly taught a heliocentric view of the solar system? This was two thousand years before Copernicus.”
“Yeah.” Kloska felt the discussion lurching to a complete stop. “Harmonia?”
“Pythagoreans believed that the motion of the planets could be translated into music: a perfect symphony composed by the universe itself. The Harmony of the Spheres, some called it. They