Chapter 8 - The University on the Lake
In January, the city froze solid.
The Chicago River turned into an expanse of green ice that groaned against the bridge pilings with the sound of grinding teeth. At Vance Capital, we closed three deals before the middle of the month, but my calendar had begun to look different. The 4:00 p.m. slots on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were blocked out in solid blue: NON-NEGOTIABLE.
My partners thought I was seeing a specialist for my heart.
In a way, I was.
On the third Thursday of the month, I drove down to Hyde Park alone. I didn't take the Maybach; I took the old Range Rover that Rebecca had used for trips to the nursery in Michigan, its leather smelling of dried cedar needles and salt.
The Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago was housed in Eckhart Hall—a Gothic fortress of Indiana limestone with narrow, leaded windows and corridors that smelled of floor wax, damp wool, and ninety years of chalk dust.
I sat in an office on the second floor, across from a man named Professor Gregory Thorne.
Thorne was seventy, had wild white hair that looked like it had been combed with an electrostatic generator, and wore an ancient tweed jacket with leather elbow patches that had worn through to the gray thread beneath. On his desk sat two things: an unwashed mug containing three inches of cold tea, and the thin yellow legal pad that Maya had used during her first session in the Astor Street library.
Thorne had been staring at page four for twenty minutes.
"Where did you get this?" he asked, not looking up. His voice sounded like two dry slates being rubbed together.
"A girl who sits behind the Clark Street library," I said.
Thorne turned the page. The paper made a dry, rasping sound against the oak desk. "This isn't Clark Street work, Arthur. This is an alternative derivation of the Riemann curvature tensor using discrete combinatorial networks. Nobody teaches this. You don't find this on the internet. This is what happens when someone with an extraordinary spatial intuition spends six months with nothing to look at except railway tracks and brick walls."
"Her name is Maya Lin," I said. "Her father was David Lin."
Thorne’s head snapped up. His thick, silver eyebrows gathered into a knot above his wire-rimmed glasses. "David? The bridge guy from Youngstown? The one who wrote the monographs on dynamic load distribution for the Ohio Department of Transportation?"
"You knew him?"
"He was my doctoral student in 1994," Thorne said, his voice dropping into a register of sudden, profound grief. "Brilliant boy. Stubborn as an iron mule. He went back to Ohio because his father had an engineering practice that was failing, and he wouldn't let the old man go under alone. I heard about the crash. I tried to reach the girl through the probate court in Warren, but the clerk told me she had disappeared."
"She didn't disappear," I said. "She was in a laundry on 26th Street."
Thorne pushed the legal pad away, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose until the skin was red. "What do you want from me, Arthur? I have seventy applicants for every undergraduate seat. The admissions committee has algorithms now. They want extracurriculars; they want leadership essays; they want recommendations from congressmen and three years of volunteer work at an organic farm."
"I don't care about your algorithms, Gregory," I said, leaning forward and placing a single piece of paper on top of the legal pad.
It was a personal check from Northern Trust, made out to the University of Chicago Department of Mathematics Endowment Fund.
The number had seven figures before the decimal point.
Thorne glanced at the check. He didn't blink. Men who run university departments in Hyde Park are accustomed to checks with many zeros; they see them every time an oil magnate wants his name carved into a limestone lintel.
"This is an endowment for an independent research fellowship in topological dynamics," I said, my voice level and cold. "The fellowship carries full tuition, a living stipend of thirty-five thousand dollars a year, and private quarters in the graduate residences on 57th Street. The selection of the fellow is at the sole discretion of the department chair."
"And the high school diploma?" Thorne asked, his eyes narrowing.
"Under Illinois Administrative Code Title 23, a university department chair may admit any student of exceptional promise under an extraordinary portfolio review, provided the student passes the comprehensive departmental qualifying exam within ninety days of matriculation."
Thorne looked at the check. Then he looked at Maya’s yellow legal pad, where the parabolic curves intersected with the neat, small notes about the minus sign.
A slow, terrifying smile spread across his ancient face.
May you like
"She'll have to take the exam on Monday," Thorne said. "Four hours. Advanced calculus, linear algebra, and real analysis. No notes. No calculators. Just a wooden pencil and a stack of blue books."
"She won't need a calculator," I told him, rising from my chair. "She doesn't like them. She says they make too much noise when you're trying to hear where the path turns around."
