“I’m going to go dance,” Roberto said.
“Okay, I’m going to wander for a while,” I replied, moving off toward the cube. I paused outside, curious. The interior seemed quiet and serene in contrast to the chaos of the party.
“That’s Molly’s mobile bedroom pod,” a voice behind me said, close to my ear. I turned to face the speaker. It was the tall woman who had gotten us into the building. “Completely soundproof. You can go in there and close the door and you won’t hear the music at all. You’ve never been here before, have you?”
“No. First time. What’s that?” I asked, pointing to an enclosed loft above the DJ stage.
“That’s Molly’s sanctuary. He never lets anyone in there. Computers and stuff I think. I’m Anna by the way.” She held her hand out.
“Justin,” I said as she twined her long fingers around mine. “Interesting. Where is he? I’ve never met him.”
“He’s dancing.” She pointed. “The guy with the cowboy shirt and beard.”
He was a big guy—the kind of person who was born to plow fields and hunt wooly mammoths with a stone tipped spear. The sleeves of his cowboy shirt were, indeed, missing. He jumped from one foot to the other, turning in circles like a Russian dancing bear. Nearby, I saw Roberto dancing with the Doctor Who cosplayer. She was a good dancer, animating and doing isolations. Roberto was good too, moving his lanky frame around in sinuous waves.
“Do you think he keeps the sleeves? After he rips them off?”
“What?” The music had gotten louder all of a sudden, killing any possibility of communication.
“Going outside,” I yelled, pointing toward the door. Anna nodded, mouthed something that looked like ‘see you later’ and turned away, headed for the dance floor.
Fog rolled in, cold and damp. The party had mostly moved inside. A few stragglers were leaning on the parapet that wrapped around the edge of the roof, smoking or just staring at the city lights. The outside area took up about a third of the roof with the penthouse covering the other two thirds except for a narrow walkway on both sides. I strolled casually around to the right and followed the walkway all the way to the back edge of the building where it turned ninety degrees and continued. With the outside wall of the penthouse on my left and the parapet on my right, I continued on.
There were no windows on this side except for one, high up and near the northeast corner about where Molly’s loft sanctuary should be. It was a multi-paned casement window with hinges on the left, open a few inches. The wall was smooth blockwork but there was a metal pipe that ran up through the roof near my feet, continued to about where the floor of the loft would be, made a ninety degree bend, and poked through the wall. It was probably carrying a fiber internet connection up to his work area. Fiber was often run through heavy duty steel conduit because it was expensive to fix if cut or chewed through by mice looking for nest material. The pipe was attached to the building every few feet with metal harnesses. I was pretty sure it would hold my weight but getting from the pipe to the window ledge would be difficult. I would have to wedge a toe between the pipe and the wall, essentially standing on the topmost harness, then push myself up to the left and get my hands on the window ledge. My Stan Smiths would probably get scuffed. I looked up at the window for a moment longer, gauging distances and considering best options. If I was going to do it I needed to do it then, before someone else wandered around the building or Molly decided to take a break in his sanctuary. I looked over the edge. Two stories down, the roof of the neighboring building stretched away, fading into the fog. If I screwed up, that was where I would land. If he had Wolhardt’s notes they had to be up there. Where else would he keep them? His house had only two places where he could have any privacy. I doubted he would keep them in his rolling bed pod. I shrugged, grasped the pipe, and started climbing, leaning out with my feet against the wall, hand over hand. I reached the top quickly, placed my toe on the harness I had scoped out, and pushed off, straightening my leg and reaching for the window sill. My fingers wrapped around it and I hung for a moment, then let go with my left hand and quickly pulled the window open wide enough to get my body through. Hand back on the sill, I hung for another moment, then pulled up, reached in, got one foot up on the sill then the other, and crouched in the opening, hands bracing me on either side, breathing heavily.
The loft was dark inside except for a lot of glowing LEDs. I fished my keys out of my jacket pocket and turned on the tiny flashlight I kept on the ring. The beam illuminated a room maybe twelve feet wide by eight deep. A counter height workbench ran the whole width of the loft. Beyond that, a short section of varnished plywood floor, then built in shelves on the far wall. I hopped off the sill, clearing the workbench and landing softly on the plywood. Not wanting to waste time, I began to search quickly and systematically. There was a lot of equipment under the workbench and on top of it—computers, laptops, two giant monitors on movable wall mounted arms, soldering iron, 3D printer, laser cutter, a few technical manuals, but nothing that looked like Wolhardt’s notes. I turned to the shelves. They were almost completely taken up with a vast collection of vinyl, CDs, and DVDs. On the floor below the shelves were three plastic file bins. I flipped through the neatly organized files—phone bills, bank statements, taxes, correspondence, investment accounts. At the right edge of the shelves was a small section devoted to books. There were several on cryptography, a biography of Edward Elgar, some programming language references, a dictionary. I did another search around the room and found a safe I had missed earlier. It was under the workbench and had several old, partly disassembled laptops stacked on top of it. The door hung partly open. I had stopped being surprised by safes left open or unlocked long ago. People with safes often left them open, only locking them when they would be gone for an extended period. Inside, I found two big kilo bags full of off white powder, a lot of smaller Ziploc bags, a .45 caliber handgun, a tidy stack of cash, passport, and a file folder containing Molly’s birth certificate and social security card. The powder, I guessed from his nickname, was probably ecstasy. Unfortunately, I was not interested in stealing his identity or becoming a drug dealer. Why, though, was he dealing drugs on this level if he was a dot com millionaire? The answer was probably in his bank and investment statements if I wanted to hang around and look. He had probably blown all his money. I emphatically did not want to hang around though. The never-ending party made a lot of sense now. It brought with it a never-ending supply of customers. Molly had an interesting game going on, one I wanted nothing to do with.
I went back to the window, checked to make sure no one was below, then climbed out and lowered myself, grasping the sill and dangling. One handed, I pushed the window back where it had been then let go, rotating as I fell. It was about a six or seven foot drop. I felt a jolt of pain in my knees when my feet hit the roof but I rolled through, somersaulting and coming back up to standing. I shook my legs out then started back along the walkway, heart rate slowing. Halfway around, I met Molly coming fast toward me.
“What are you doing back here buddy? Snooping around?”
I stopped. He took up the full width of the walkway. “Just getting some air,” I answered. “I got a little hot inside.”
“I don’t like people back here.” He stepped forward. Even in the dark I could tell he was very high. I could almost feel the quivering energy bursting off him. He pushed past me and glanced around the corner. “Go back to the party buddy. Nothing worth seeing around here.”
“Okay,” I replied.
Molly turned the corner and disappeared from sight, moving fast. I took a deep breath, norepinephrine levels stabilizing, and walked back toward the front. The music had grown more robotic, mixing metallic clanks and pings with weird phased bass and drum beats.
“Hey, I was looking for you.” It was Anna again.
“You found me.”
“Can I ask you a question? Is your friend gay? My friend thinks he’s coming on to her but he gives off major gay vi
bes to me.”
“Roberto? Yes, very gay. Sorry. He likes to dance with girls but he doesn’t like to do anything else with them. This has happened before believe it or not.”
“Oh well. Are you headed back in?”
“Yeah, I was just getting some air.”
Chapter 7
Variations in Seattle
June 28-29: Seattle
Passing through clouds at thirty-three thousand feet again—I couldn’t seem to stay away from airplanes. Being on the move felt right though. Working, whether welding together scraps of metal to form a sculpture or my new career chasing down things that had gone missing, feeling the pieces begin to fall into place, dealing with unexpected problems and finding solutions—all of those things made me feel purposeful. Without purpose, I had a tendency to drift and wash up on random shores. I imagined it was similar to how a bloodhound feels when on a promising trail—an instinctive feeling of rightness and momentum toward a desired goal. The stewardess passed by and I dropped my empty coffee cup in the garbage bag she proffered. I could see Mt. Rainier in the hazy distance. We would be landing soon.
Sea-Tac airport offers a very different experience from the barely controlled chaos of LAX or the slick, all-business atmosphere of SFO. It’s like landing in a small, previously undiscovered but fully operational Scandinavian nation. Lines are orderly, people speak at a hushed volume, even the café tables seem strictly arranged according to some well-communicated logic, like set pieces on a stage carefully aligned with their tape marks.
Outside, I strolled in the warm summer sun, looking for the light rail station. It wasn’t hard to find and the train, unsurprisingly, was on time. On our way downtown, we rolled through the industrial area south of the city which I remembered was called the Georgetown neighborhood. I had been to Seattle only once before for an exhibit at the Center on Contemporary Art that included one of my pieces. On that trip, I had crashed with a friend who lived in a warehouse space in Georgetown. I remembered the area being dark, deserted at night after the workers went home, and quiet except for the whistling of the frigid, damp wind that funneled down the streets between big old warehouses and factories. It looked like the area was coming up now. There were cafés, galleries, people out enjoying the good weather, and lots of new development. Like San Francisco, Seattle was a technology boomtown. The new development in Georgetown looked just like the new development in my own city—boxy, Bauhaus inspired stacks of expensive apartments or condominiums with street level retail. It had become so ubiquitous that the architects and builders had a name for it: five-over-one. The name referred to the five stories of living space over one story of retail. To me, the buildings looked like factories for producing ennui—an urban translation of suburban dissociation—but people seemed to like them. I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I supported the movement of people back into the urban core. Suburbs were a blight, made possible by unsustainable policies. On the other, the new housing being built in cities seemed to be mostly made for wealthy people. I understood that developers were conservative, preferring to continue with proven formulas rather than try something new. There had to a balance though—some way to keep cities diverse and affordable for everyone.
I got off the train at Pioneer Square station, having booked a room in a hotel nearby. It was the oldest part of the city. Most of the buildings dated from the eighteen-nineties and were built after the great fire of eighteen eighty-nine leveled the city. Stone and brick Romanesque revivals squatted along the tree lined streets and overlooked the park known as Occidental Square. A soft breeze carrying an aroma of garlic and sea food blew a discarded plastic bag past my feet. My stomach grumbled. I was hungry but I wanted to check in to my hotel first and see if I had any news. I had contacted Valerie and asked her to help me get an invitation to the reception following the performance. Johann Benderick would be there and I hoped to corner him and convince him to give me a meeting. Half a block up the street I spotted the hotel logo and quickened my steps.
Check-in was easy and I was soon in my room with my laptop on the desk and connected to the Wi-Fi. I had messages from both Ashna and Valerie in my ProtonMail inbox. I decided to read Ashna’s first.
Making some progress. I’ll be able to give you details on the other two soon. Let me know how things go in Seattle. Been checking out Benderick, tracing CC transactions, travel, email exchanges, etc. His life is an open book to a wicked girl like me. I’m thinking he’s not the one but still worth talking to him.
Short and sweet and interesting. I agreed with Ashna. Even if he wasn’t the one who stole Wolhardt’s work he was worth talking to. He might have some insights we could use. I turned to Valerie’s email.
Well Justin, I’ve come through for you yet again. You should consider doing me a favor some time in return. A friend of a friend from college is on the board of the Seattle Phil. She’s married to one of those tedious financial executive types and would love to have well known sculptor and man about town Justin Vincent escort her to the symphony tonight and join her in her box seats for the performance. Her name is Margaret Shaughnessy but she goes by Maggie. She’s small but I did once see her knock a drunken Duke Lacrosse midfielder out cold with one punch. Nonetheless, please avoid becoming involved with her. I’m not your personal, twisted version of Tinder.
Margaret’s cell number and email address followed. I smiled. Valerie was like a magnificent spider—at the end of each of the myriad strands of her web was some old friend or acquaintance that was happy to help her out with a favor. Each of those people had their own web and could reach out farther if needed. I had never doubted that she would find a way to get me into the reception. I called Maggie and she answered on the second ring with a deadpan, suspicious tone.
“Yes?”
“Hello, Maggie?”
“Yes, who’s calling?”
“It’s Justin Vincent. Valerie Walker’s friend.”
“Oh yes,” her tone lightened. “Sorry, I’m always suspicious when I get calls from unknown numbers.”
“Understandable. Valerie said I should give you a call.”
“Of course! I wish we could get dinner but I’m on the parent group board at my daughter’s school and we’re meeting to do some planning for the annual gala this afternoon. I’ll only just have time to pop home and then head straight to the performance from there. Can we meet each other? Say seven forty-five outside the main entrance?”
“Yes, that sounds perfect. I’ll plan on seeing you there. I’ll be the guy in the black suit.”
“Delightful. I’ll be the lady in the yellow dress. Or maybe red. Haven’t decided yet. I’ll text you a selfie so you can recognize me. You do the same.”
****
Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Philharmonic, was only ten blocks from my hotel so I decided to walk. Seattleites were out in sundresses and shorts, enjoying the warm evening. It was the beginning of summer in that latitude. Coming up Second Avenue, I saw the postmodern bulk of the Seattle Art Museum and cringed just a little. Robert Venturi’s buildings—with their weird nods toward classical architecture that blew forms carefully honed over generations all out of proportion, flattened them, and abstracted them into cartoonish grotesqueries—were not for me. The style made me queasy. I turned my gaze instead to Benaroya Hall across the street, shining like a lantern in the long summer twilight, lit from inside, its curving facade almost flying saucer-like. That was a building I could not just endure but appreciate.
I was a few minutes early so I took up a position outside the main entrance and watched the concert goers arrive. It was interesting to see how people dressed for the performance. I had long held the belief that when people talked about comfort they meant, usually unconsciously, psychological more than physical comfort. How people dressed when they attended formal events gave a lot of clues about their individual psyches. Some people wore fancy clothes effortlessly. The rich fabrics, bold colors, and stiff or unusual cuts seemed to almost float and drap
e about them. Others looked like their suits and dresses were only one step removed from medieval torture devices, clinging here, baggy there, rubbing necks or wrists raw. Others simply eschewed fancy clothing and came to hear the music in jeans, T-shirts, sweaters. Some of these appeared to be college students. Some appeared to be wealthy men who had taken on the uniform of the eternal teenager in an attempt to stay relevant—their only gesture to formality being the universal sport coat worn over their T-shirts. When I saw Maggie step from a white SUV I recognized her immediately. She looked just like the photo she had sent. I also knew at once that she fell into my first group of people who went formal effortlessly. She wore a red, sleeveless, A-Line gown with princess seams and one massive pleat at the front of the skirt. An emerald pendant sparkled above the plunging V of her gown’s neckline. She was small as Valerie had said but she moved confidently, striding up the steps toward the entrance. I waved and she waved back. She offered a hand and I took it.
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise Mr. Vincent, the mysterious sculptor. Shall we go in?” She said, twining her arm through mine.
“Of course,” I answered and we joined the ambling crowd making its way through the doors into the grand lobby.
“Valerie didn’t tell me much about your visit to Seattle or why you needed to attend this concert on such short notice. I hope it’s not a very big secret. I’m a curious person.”
“Only a little bit secret. I can tell you most of the details. Can I get you something first? Champagne?”
“Yes please. I’ve been running here and there without a break since I woke up this morning. I need to relax a little.”
Enigma Variations Page 7