“Would you like something to drink? I have coffee made. Or I could make tea?”
“Coffee would be great,” I answered. I’d only had one cup of weak coffee at the hotel. Wolhardt left the room and I heard a cupboard open, a cup clink on a counter. I wandered over to the mantel. Standing there, proud and gold, was an Emmy award. It had Wolhardt’s name on it and was for the musical score from a mid-eighties TV drama. Next to it, mixed in amongst a few decorative objects, was a photo of a younger Julian Wolhardt with another man. Like a washed out memory, time and sunlight had faded the photo until nearly all detail was gone but it was clear they were a couple. The other man was handsome with short, dark hair and a moustache. Wolhardt had a moustache in the photo too.
“My partner, Jim,” Wolhardt said. He stood next to me, a coffee cup in his hand. “He’s been gone for over thirty years now. The eighties were a hard time.”
“Sorry,” I said, accepting the cup and pointing to the Emmy, not wanting to linger on a painful subject. “You compose for television too?”
“Yes. Mostly retired now although I take on a small project now and then. I’ve written for films, television, commercials, a few commissions for small ensembles here and there. Nothing very interesting or famous,” he said, waving a hand. “Your friend Valerie’s father was a fan though. When he was the U.S. ambassador in Norway he heard one of my pieces played by the Oslo Sinfonietta and tracked me down. That was how we met.” Wolhardt paused, looking inward for a moment. “But let’s talk about what you came here for,” he continued, the shifting of internal gears clear in his voice. He gestured toward the sofa and chairs. We both seated ourselves and Wolhardt heaved a sigh. “How to begin? Do you know the Enigma Variations? Edward Elgar?”
“Elgar? Yeah. I know his cello concerto. It’s one of my favorite pieces of music. I can’t say I know any of his other music very well.” The mention of Edward Elgar made me think of my old fence Domenico. I hadn’t spoken to him in a while. I had asked Domenico and another acquaintance for help finding the thief who stole Valerie’s painting. I still didn’t know which one of them had come through for me. I would have to find out and pay that favor back eventually. Domenico was a classical music aficionado and it was he who had introduced me to Elgar’s cello concerto.
“I want to play something for you, then,” Wolhardt said, standing and walking to the piano. He sat, flipped his sheet music to the beginning, then began playing. It was the same music I had heard from outside the front door. The piece began very slowly and quietly but built up until the melody swelled outward, grabbing me, dragging me into its melancholic embrace, and then assaulting me with waves of sad harmony. The music slowed back down, became quieter, and ended on a sustained chord. We were both quiet for a moment, then Wolhardt stood and sat back down across from me. “That was the ninth of the variations arranged for piano. There are fourteen altogether. It’s called the Nimrod variation. It’s probably the best known. It’s a kind of play on words. It’s named for Elgar’s friend August Jaeger. Nimrod was a biblical character who was known as a great hunter. Jaeger is the German word for hunter. Jaeger was a good friend and encouraged Elgar to keep writing music when he wanted to give up. Elgar wrote the piece for him. It was played at Princess Diana’s funeral.”
“It’s beautiful but I’m not sure I understand what it has to do with the reason for my visit.”
“Of course. Allow me a moment to explain,” Wolhardt replied, holding his hands up. “It’s not simple. Sir Edward Elgar wrote the Enigma Variations between eighteen ninety-eight to ninety-nine. They were debuted in London in eighteen ninety-nine. In the playbill, Elgar wrote the following.” He closed his eyes, paused a moment, then recited from memory. “The Enigma I will not explain—its dark saying must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the connection between the variations and the theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme goes, but is not played. So the principal theme never appears, even as in some late dramas the chief character is never on the stage.” Wolhardt opened his eyes and looked at me pensively.
“So, there’s a theme that unifies the variations?” I asked.
“Yes,” Wolhardt answered. “Of course there’s the opening theme in G minor that we hear and know to be the theme that all the variations derive from but in his text Elgar alludes to another theme that we don’t hear. It somehow binds the variations together but is never heard. Most enthusiasts believe it must be a melody from a well-known piece of music that would blend with the variations if they were played together at the right tempo. In music theory this is known as counterpoint. Valerie told me you’re a sculptor?”
“Yes.”
“Imagine an abstract stone sculpture. Now imagine there is a second sculpture that slots into the first, shaped precisely to complement the positive and negative space of the first piece so that the two together become a unified work. It’s like that except with music. The larger theme that goes over the whole set, as he says, is like that second sculpture but instead of fitting the shape it fits the harmony.”
“I understand. But Elgar never said what it was?"
“No. He never said. He took it to his death bed. He died in nineteen thirty-four. He did leave a sealed envelope behind though. It’s kept at the Elgar Birthplace museum in Lower Broadheath in England. It’s supposed to be opened in twenty thirty-four. The centennial of his death. Maybe the solution is in the envelope. People have been trying to figure it out for over a hundred years. Famous musicologists have come up with theories. Pieces by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Hymns, symphonies, songs. One even declared the solution was the song Auld Lang Syne even though Elgar himself said it wasn’t.”
“What about the other part though? What was it about a dark saying?”
“The Enigma I will not explain—its dark saying must be left unguessed,” Wolhardt said, closing his eyes again.
“What does that part mean?”
“No one’s really sure. It’s vague. But a lot of enigma scholars think it means there’s some kind of message or dark saying coded into the music somehow. Elgar was into cryptography and he was really good at it. He actually broke an old Russian cipher that other cryptographers had been working on for years. He liked to write coded letters to his friends too. It was a game of his. He wrote a letter to his friend Dora that was just a bunch of squiggles. It’s known as the Dorabella Cipher and it still hasn’t been broken.”
“So he encrypted some kind of message into the Enigma Variations and that’s why he called them the Enigma Variations?”
“Presumably, yes.”
“And you’re one of the people working on breaking the code?”
“Yes. I’ve been interested in it for a long time. I studied music at the New England Conservatory. One of my teachers there was an Elgar aficionado. He introduced me to the variations and the mystery surrounding them. I’ve been working on it off and on ever since. Let me show you.” Wolhardt rose and beckoned to me. He led me down a hallway off the living room and stopped at the first door on the left, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a set of keys. A calico cat poked its head out of a door further down the hall and meowed, giving me a distrustful look.
“That’s JiJi,” Wolhardt said. “She doesn’t like visitors.” He pushed the door open and passed through into a small bedroom converted to a study.
In contrast to the rest of his house, it was a mess. There were haphazard stacks of papers and notebooks on the floor, a file cabinet with one drawer half-open and filled beyond capacity, an overflowing bookcase, and a desk scattered with papers. Wolhardt walked to the desk and pointed to a piece of graph paper on top of the pile. Hand written letters and numbers in columns covered the page. His writing was small, cramped, distinctive.
“These are all of my research books, notes, files,” he said, gesturing. “It’s years and years of work.” The cat entered the room with a prrrt, scooted past me, and twined itself around Wolhardt’s legs
. He stooped, picked the animal up, and turned back to me. “In the last few months I had a breakthrough. I’m certain I am very close to cracking it. About three weeks ago I began to have an eerie intuition that I was being watched. I’m very sensitive to things being out of place or out of the ordinary. A couple of times, there was a car parked on the street I didn’t recognize—a van with a rental company decal. I heard a noise one night, and got up to look around but didn’t find anything. JiJi was rattled though. Her hair was standing on end.” He stroked the cat’s head as he spoke. “The next day, I went out to dinner with a friend and when I came home it was clear that there had been a break in. My office had been ransacked.”
“How did they get in?”
“The patio door. It was open when I got home.”
“And the office? Was it locked?”
“No. I had the lock installed after the break in. There’s more though. I was feeling paranoid so I locked my most current notes up in my safe. The safe is well hidden in another part of the house. The notes I left out on my desk—and that were stolen by the thief—were an old version. They point to a very convincing but incorrect solution. They will, however, partly reveal my method for deciphering the code.”
“You reported this to the police?”
“Yes.” Wolhardt sighed and stroked the cat’s head absently. “They were very nice and professional but basically told me there was very little they could do. An old man’s stolen notebook isn’t very important compared to an active murder case I’m afraid.”
“Why would somebody want your notes? And how would they have known you were close to a solution?”
“Good questions. Right to the heart of the matter. I did something stupid. There’s an online forum where people working on the Enigma Variations meet up, ask questions, and post about their progress. Right before I started to feel like I was being watched, I posted in the forum that I was on the edge of a breakthrough.”
“So that’s how they knew,” I replied. “But why would they go to the trouble of stealing your notes? Just so they could be the first to break the code?”
“Unfortunately, no. There is a reward offered. A British banker, filthy rich, named Morgan Jutting. He’s also interested in the Enigma. He put up a one million pound bounty a little over a year ago to be awarded to the first person to break the code. He named a panel of internationally recognized experts as judges. A majority must agree that the solution is correct.”
“So, you want me to figure out who took your notes and get them back?”
“In a nutshell, yes. If a good cryptographer studies my notes, they’ll probably figure out that the solution is incorrect. They will realize that my method is productive though. They might use it to get to the solution before I do.”
“What kind of timeframe are we talking about?”
“Maybe a few weeks, a month.”
“Any suspects?”
“Maybe a couple.”
“Okay. This is intriguing.” I stopped speaking and looked around the office. The place felt creepy, a little too personal—like reading someone else’s journal or looking through their medicine cabinet. Wolhardt was a fanatic but his problem was interesting. “I’m going to need more information,” I said. “Let’s sit down and go over it again. I have a partner I work with. I’ll have to talk it over with her and we’ll decide together whether or not to pursue it.”
Chapter 5
Eine Kleine Nacht Hacking
June 23: San Francisco
Passing through clouds at thirty-three thousand feet, slumped in the window seat, I watched tiny drops of water hit the glass, instantly elongate into impossibly thin streaks of silver, then dissipate, leaving nothing behind to show that they were ever there. I imagined each droplet as a human soul in an eternal cycle of birth, brief flash of life, death, coalescence back into the aether, formless waiting in between. It was maudlin but it was something to focus on while, in another part of my brain, the pieces of Julian Wolhardt’s story drifted slowly, forming and reforming. I searched the story for patterns, angles, wrong notes but it all seemed to hang together.
As was often the case, as soon as I was on a plane, on my way home, everything I had experienced while away began to take on an unreal dreamlike quality. My memory had always been highly visual. It has been reported, but never scientifically established, that some people have photographic memory—the ability to recall with exact precision anything they have ever seen. My memory wasn’t quite that good but I could often run through past experiences like watching a video in my head or pull up high fidelity images in my mind’s eye and examine them for details I might have consciously missed in the moment. However, my memory of Wolhardt’s house—where I had been just a few hours before—had a kind of intense, washed out, prismatic quality as if the harsh summer sunlight of southern California had overdriven my visual perception.
Wolhardt had seemed on the surface like a normal, rational guy. There had to be a bit of crackpot underneath though. If his story was true, he had been working on breaking Elgar’s enigma for close to fifty years. No normal person pursues such a fruitless, disappointing hobby for so long. I liked him but also felt like there was something missing. He came across like a latter day Parsifal, eternally seeking the grail, obsessed but dignified, an incomplete human until his quest is resolved.
Before I left his house, he had given me a few leads. There was the web address of the forum where he and other enigma enthusiasts posted their questions and progress updates. Then there was the name of the wealthy banker who had offered the reward for breaking Elgar’s code. Finally, he had also given me a list of people who, over the years, had offered solutions to the enigma, what their solutions were, and why they had been rejected.
I had already texted Ashna while waiting to board my flight:
—Free tonight? Possible job.—
—Yes. After 8 pm.—
—Okay. Come by my place? Want dinner?—
—Yes! See you then.—
I trusted Ashna’s judgment on whether or not to take the job. The case was cold, as they say. Wolhardt’s notes had been stolen over two weeks before. There was little chance of identifying or catching the thief via conventional means. If we were going to find any clues we would probably have to rely on her specialty rather than mine. I had an intuition that she would find the case intriguing though. The combination of great art, mystery, cryptography, genius, and a sizable reward appealed to me and it would appeal to Ashna too if I knew her special interests at all.
I settled back in my seat and opened my laptop. I could do some preliminary research while the plane did its thing.
I arrived home from the airport late in the afternoon, left my suitcase inside, and hopped on my bike. Cooking for Ashna meant I would need supplies. I rode by the nearly deserted Caltrain station, then up Brannan all the way to Division. The freeway hummed above me and the gritty exhaust filtered down. As I rode I thought about the Wolhardt job in an abstract way, not considering the merits of the job itself but just thinking about my shift in profession and whether or not it was really what I wanted. I had spent many years as a successful burglar. I had stolen a lot of art and I had never been caught. My unusual choice of career had netted me my home, my leisure, and a reasonable portfolio of investments but it had always been something I did without much self-examination. I had started out believing that I was a kind of social justice warrior, taking from the rich to support my spartan lifestyle while I pursued Art with a capital A. Then I moved on to thinking of myself as a kind of craftsman or master thief on the order of Leonardo Notarbartolo, Bill Mason, Vjeran Tomic, or Hajime Karasuyama. I romanticized my pursuits as a way of deflecting the censure of my own growing moral qualms. Slowly, though, as I became economically stable, stealing art from rich people went from something I did out of necessity to something I did simply because I had the skill and it was what I was used to doing—like an accountant who dreams of a career as a school teacher or a standup comic bu
t can’t let go of the comfort and safety of his profession. Half a year before, when my girlfriend of sorts Valerie asked me to help recover a stolen painting, it had started me on a new path. I had done two recovery jobs now and it seemed like a good compromise. I got to use the talents I had developed while pursuing a life of crime while reuniting people with things that mattered to them.
Wrapped up in these thoughts, I wheeled up to my favorite grocery in San Francisco: the Rainbow Co-op. It was deep hippie territory—ten-thousand square feet of bulk, fair-trade quinoa, spelt bread, valerian root supplements, and the freshest, most delicious produce in the city. I snaked slowly around a fancy lady in a luxury SUV and a square jawed guy in an Audi wagon, both waiting to enter the tiny garage but held back by the parking attendant who couldn’t let them in until someone else left. A common sight now, there was never a line of people in expensive cars waiting to park at Rainbow in the old days. Just one more reminder of the changing face of the city—hippies, artists, freaks, gutter punks, bodhisattvas all moving out and tech money people moving in. I parked my bike at the rack just inside the garage and headed for the entrance to the store.
Inside, I made my way through the crowd of blissed out yoga people, patchouli scented gurus, and three percent body fat Lululemon ladies, shopping as efficiently as possible given the no hurry vibe. I picked up a variety of vegetables and some firm tofu. Rainbow didn’t carry any meat but Ashna had gone back to vegetarian so it wasn’t a problem. I had known her to switch back and forth between vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore multiple times in a single year.
Back home, I relaxed for a little while, catching up on email and social media, then started dinner. Ashna arrived just as I was pulling pans of roasted carrots, tofu, brussels sprouts, and fingerling potatoes from the oven. The air outside was warm and still, wind and fog held back temporarily, so we ate on the roof, looking out over the bay. We had just passed the summer solstice, retreating from the longest day of the year, and the sun was taking its time dipping down behind Potrero Hill. We sat there in the golden light and long shadows, listening to the faint sounds of a baseball game at Oracle Park, while I told her the story of my trip to LA.
Enigma Variations Page 5