A light, warm breeze ruffled the banners at the ballpark and when I glanced back the downtown skyline seemed to shimmer. Seagulls gave me the side eye as I crossed over the old bridge at McCovey Cove and then turned east to take Terry Francois Boulevard, tacking along the edge of the water. Walking in San Francisco on a warm day is one of the finest experiences a person can have but the feeling of contentment I had built up imploded when I arrived at the front door of the cinder block cube I called home and found it unlocked.
I paused for a moment, hand on the doorknob, thinking fast. It was possible that Mr. Lee, owner and manager of the garment manufacturing business that occupied the lower level of my building, had forgotten to lock it. It had happened before. It was also possible that he was in the building but that was unlikely. He sometimes came in on Saturdays to finish up paperwork but rarely, if ever, on Sundays.
My palms prickled with an intuition. Something was not as it should be. I decided to go around back and have a look instead of walking in the front door. There was an alley that ran behind the building. I walked to the end of the block, turned, and came back up the alley, moving slowly and keeping to the near edge of the neighboring buildings so I wouldn’t be visible from the rear windows.
There was an emergency exit that let out onto the alley from the first floor but I didn’t normally carry the key for it. I tried the handle silently and the door didn’t budge. It was locked as it should be. I put my backpack down behind the small dumpster Mr. Lee kept for fabric scraps and walked back to the neighboring building which had a fire escape ladder that gave access to the roof. The bottom of the ladder was high enough to discourage casual climbers but I was able to run, kick off the wall, and grasp the bottom rung. My neighbor’s roof was four feet higher than mine. I crept to the edge and dropped silently to my own roof. There were two skylights over my studio space at the back of the building. I approached one and looked down. My work in progress, sheathed in a spattered drop cloth, the back wall where I kept my tools—I couldn’t see much else. Still, my pulse was up and I felt strongly that there was someone inside. I went to the other skylight. From there I could see part of my kitchen but no intruder. A sudden, loud bang like a rifle shot made me jump. It was the front door of the building I realized after a moment. I rushed to the edge of the roof overlooking the street and arrived in time to see the driver door of a white van with tinted windows slam shut. The engine roared to life and the van pulled away, accelerating down the street. I squinted at the bumper. There was no rear license plate but there was an instantly recognizable rental company logo on the back. I watched it go, my mind racing. There were many possibilities to consider but first I needed to see what the intruder had been up to. I never kept anything of value in my home but a burglar wouldn’t know that. The places he had chosen to search could be instructive.
I went back down the way I came up, retrieved my backpack, and entered my building from the front. Most people think of it as one of the worst kinds of violation to have someone break into their house or car. I had no business being offended or outraged. As a professional, I just wanted to investigate my fellow professional’s work. The front door had two locks, the knob set and the bolt. They were both good locks but not immune to picking. I inspected them but could find no evidence that either had been forced. Mr. Lee might have left them unlocked, or the intruder could have picked them. Picking seemed unlikely though. It would have taken time and the door was in full view of the street. The foot traffic on the street was sporadic but I wouldn’t count on being able to pick my front door locks during daylight hours before at least a couple of people had wandered by. Also, the mystery intruder would have wanted to check that the place was empty before going in. He must have entered from the roof or a window, gone downstairs and unlocked the front door to make sure he had a clear exit path, then back upstairs to search. If he had been upstairs at all. I still didn’t know that. He might have been trying to burgle an industrial sewing machine.
I climbed the stairs. The interior door to my second floor flat was unlocked as well. There was no chance I had left it open. So, the intruder had definitely been inside. Did he have an accomplice in the van acting as lookout? I entered cautiously and climbed the stairs to the roof door. It was open. The lock had been drilled out. I had been too preoccupied to notice when I was on the roof only minutes before. Back downstairs, I searched quickly through every room. In the big main room where I had my workshop, office/sitting area, and kitchen/dining area, my filing cabinet had been rifled, kitchen cabinets searched, and all my tool chests opened. In the bedroom, everything had been pulled out of my closet and drawers and dumped on the floor. I had a storage bin where I kept all of the specialized gadgets—tools of my shadier trade—I had built or accumulated over the years. It had been pulled out and dumped on the bed. I sighed. It would take a while to get everything back in order. I could think about who might want to search my place while I worked. I was pretty certain it was not a random burglary. The intruder had been looking for something specific.
****
“So you think he was looking for something? Like what?” Ashna asked, then looked away, gesturing with her empty glass to the cocktail waiter who was passing by.
“Yes,” I answered when she turned her attention back. “It was a methodical search. He must have been there for a while before I arrived.”
“Anything for him to find?”
I shook my head. “I never keep anything worth stealing in my house. And nothing that could possibly incriminate me in any way.”
“Laptop?”
“I had it with me.”
“Good.”
“Yeah. I can’t escape the feeling that this has something to do with the Wolhardt job though. The timing is too weird. Somebody knew I was out of town.”
“What about the Corsican guy in France, who you thought had Valerie’s painting?”
“Antonetti? I don’t think so. If anything, he would send somebody to kill me, not search my place.”
“Somebody you talked to in Seattle?”
“Just Benderick but he was pretty convincing. I don’t think he’s mixed up in this. I didn’t get that vibe from him. And Valerie’s friend Maggie too but I don’t think she would have told anyone.”
“Maggie huh? Another old friend of Valerie’s? I need to hear about this.”
“Nothing happened. She’s married and has a kid. Or maybe two kids? I probably should have asked her about that. Anyway, she was just a favor Valerie called in to get me into the reception so I could meet Benderick.”
I filled Ashna in on my meeting with Benderick, telling her his theories about the Enigma Variations, that his ‘dark saying’ had something to do with the occult, and the possible connection to Benvenuto Cellini.
“Cellini?” She said, draining the dregs of her second cocktail. “Never heard of him.”
“Seriously? You took the same two semesters of art history as me.”
“Yes but that was a long time ago and you know I never gave a shit about sculpture. Except yours of course. You sculptures are good I guess.”
“Thanks so much for your effusive praise.”
“Whatever. I’ll read his book. Let me tell you what I found out while you were gone. I cracked another identity. Still working on the last one but I know who Crowley eighteen seventy five is. His name is Lester Dworkin.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. Lester the molester. I had a gym coach in middle school whose name was Mr. Lester and that was what we called him. I don’t think he was actually a molester, it just rhymed. Kind of a dick move now that I think about it. Making fun of somebody’s name. Anyway, Dworkin wasn’t easy to phish. He seems pretty paranoid. But I got him at last. I made a guess based on his screen name and the kind of stuff he posted on that music nerd forum that he wasn’t actually named Crowley. I figured he was into Aleister Crowley the weirdo occult guy. By the way, this is an interesting coincidence with the stuff Benderick told you. Anywa
y, those kinds of dudes always have like homemade computers running Windows so I packaged a key logger in a windows executable file and sent him an email that spoofed the address of a publishing company. The email said the attachment was an excerpt from a previously unknown manuscript by that racist fuck H. P. Lovecraft. All those crypto white supremacist Crowley fan boys love them some Lovecraft.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I work in tech! Half the dudes I work with are obsessed with this shit. Either that or they’re Ayn Rand spouting libertarians. Okay, realistically, maybe only ten percent of them. But enough to hear about their batshit ideas pretty regularly. So, he opened the attachment and my key logger wormed its way deep into his OS and pretty soon I started getting transcripts of everything he typed sent to a burner email account I set up. That got me passwords for his email, bank, and surprisingly mundane porn accounts. He lives in Philadelphia and works at a bookstore that specializes in sci-fi and fantasy. He lives in an apartment walking distance from the store. His mom forwards him a lot of chain emails. He doesn’t seem to have many friends. So, long story short, Philadelphia, home of the liberty bell, is your next destination.”
“Philadelphia? Never been there,” I said, thinking about logistics and already reaching for my phone to search for a flight. “Oh, by the way,” I said, looking up from my phone, “Interesting coincidence. Wolhardt said he noticed a rented van parked on his street before his place was broken into. The person who broke into my place also had a rental van.”
Chapter 9
Philadelphia
June 31: Philadelphia
Thirty six hours later, I landed in Philadelphia. There was a train into the city but I decided to rent a car in case I needed to be mobile. My hotel was downtown, near Washington Square and Independence Hall, a short drive from the airport along the industrialized banks of the Delaware River. I exited the expressway when my phone told me to, rolled my windows down, and drove slowly along tree-lined Market Street. A liquid shimmer glistened in the still air which seemed to ooze rather than flow into the car. Golden sunlight lit up the brick facades of buildings old and new lining the street. Everything looked a little blurry—simultaneously close and distant, vast and tiny like in a tilt-shift photograph. I soon felt damp and lethargic from the heat but I didn’t mind. I always hated air conditioning more than being hot.
I found my hotel, turned the car over to a valet, and checked in. My room was on a high floor with a view over the historic old town and the river. I would have been happy to sit in my generic box of a room, enjoying the view and reading some more of Cellini’s tales of random violence and goldsmithing—the more I read, the more he struck me as a Holden Caulfield type but instead of just complaining about phonies he punched or stabbed them and instead of getting kicked out of prep schools, he got banished from Italian city-states—but, rather than loaf around the hotel, I decided to get started on tracking down Lester Dworkin. I felt a sense of urgency to get on with the investigation. That intuition of being on a promising track I had felt on the way to Seattle was beginning to drift. I needed to re-center and find the trail before it disappeared.
The bookstore where Dworkin worked was called Eldritch Tomes and was only a few blocks away. Ashna had not been successful in finding his work schedule. She said the bookstore didn’t appear to even have an internet connection. The owner probably wrote the schedule out by hand and tacked it to a bulletin board in the stock room. I would have to stake the shop out if I wanted to nail down Dworkin.
I walked slowly down Chestnut Street, sauntering in the heat, until I reached the old city with its eighteenth century row houses and historic buildings. Eldritch Tomes occupied the bottom floor of a narrow, two-story building on a cobbled street just wide enough for two cars to pass in opposite directions. Brick sidewalks rose in waves like ribbons around the roots of big old zelkova and ginkgo trees. I paused for a moment, scoping out the neighborhood. A four story tenement squatted atop a coffee shop across the street from the bookshop. They had a chalkboard sign advertising sandwiches and smoothies and a few tables out on the sidewalk. I was hungry so I decided to sit, eat lunch, and watch the store for a while.
I had just found a table outside and set my iced coffee and plate down on it when I heard a tinkling of bells and glanced across the street to see the door of the bookstore open and a man emerge. I knew immediately that he was Dworkin. Ashna had shown me his social media profile photo. A tall and paunchy guy, with big, heavy limbs, sloping shoulders and curly, sandy-blond hair cut short, he walked with a kind of side to side amble. He wore all black despite the heat—a long sleeved button up and jeans, a wide belt with two rows of silver grommets, black combat boots with the cuffs of his jeans tucked in. He looked like an aging punk whose heyday was in the nineties. I watched him lumber across the street and enter the café. Through the open patio doors that let out onto the sidewalk seating I saw him order, wait for his food, then collect it. He walked back across the street carrying his lunch in a brown paper sack. The underarms and back of his shirt were soaked with sweat. The front door of the shop banged shut behind him.
I left the second half of my desultory sandwich and crossed to the bookstore. From the outside, it looked ragged around the edges. The sign—perhaps painted sometime in the nineteen-seventies—was faded and dirty. I couldn’t see much through the one large window but vague piles of books stacked on a counter. Inside it was dim, oppressively warm, and filled with the musty, mildew odor of old pages and leather bindings. Eldritch tomes indeed. A wooden counter supported what looked like a hundred year old cash register made of tarnished brass and ebony. Dworkin sat behind it, eating his lunch and drinking a sweating can of soda. Another worker lurked behind the counter too—a shorter guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts. They both had open books and barely glanced up when I entered. A small boom box on the counter played The Pixies at low volume while a slow fly orbited the geographic center of the shop in senseless circles. I wandered toward the back and began to browse, taking random books from the shelves and pretending to peruse them. They had sections for science fiction, fantasy, occult, some classic literature, and rare books in glass cases near the front. After a couple of minutes Hawaiian shirt guy raised his head.
“Les. Did you decide whether or not you’re going to the Boston book fair? Klein wants to know.”
Dworkin raised his head and focused his eyes on his co-worker. “Yes. I’m going,” he answered in a deep voice. “Of course I’m going. I’m the buyer.”
“I know you’re the buyer. I was just asking.”
“You don’t know any of the vendors. I’ve been dealing with them for years. They respect my knowledge.”
“Fine. I was just asking.”
They both went back to reading their books. I didn’t want to try to speak with Dworkin in front of the other guy so I put down the volume I was pretending to read and slipped out the front door. Hawaiian shirt looked up as I left, an expression of mild surprise pinching his eyebrows as if he had completely forgotten that I was in the store.
Outside, I wandered down to the end of the block where there was a sports bar on one corner and a mini-mart on the other. It was almost one PM. Eldritch Tomes closed at six. My guess was that one of the workers opened the shop and one closed it, overlapping shifts in the middle. That meant one of them would probably leave around three PM. I didn’t know which one so I would have to be watching. I wanted to approach Dworkin when he was alone. So, I needed to either wait until Hawaiian shirt guy left or, if Dworkin left first, be there so I could follow him.
Instead of waiting around until three, I walked back to my hotel for a quick shower, and a change of clothes. It was just after two-thirty when I got back. I strolled slowly past the book shop and glanced in the window. Dworkin and Hawaiian shirt were both still at the counter, reading. I bought another iced coffee and sat down again outside the café. At two forty-five on the dot Dworkin emerged from Eldritch Tomes, turned right,
and headed up the block. My guess had been right. I was glad I didn’t have to wait until five o’clock.
I waited for him to get halfway up the street, then stood and followed. He turned right at the end of the block and disappeared from sight. I hurried after him and turned the corner, expecting to see him not too far ahead but he was gone. An elderly woman was coming toward me, walking a small rat-like dog. A guy with enormous biceps wearing a white tank top sat on a stoop close by. But Dworkin was gone. I scanned the block again and noticed that a garage door just ten feet ahead was open. I began walking toward it but a van backed out, forcing me to stop. I could see through the open passenger window that Dworkin was at the wheel. The van was white and stenciled on the side was the logo of the book shop. Dworkin punched a garage door remote clipped to the visor, finished backing into the street, and drove off. I couldn’t very well follow him on foot so I stood still for a moment, thinking about my options. I could try again the next day. I could stake out Dworkin’s apartment. Or, I could go back to the shop and question Hawaiian shirt guy. Maybe I could get him to tell me where Dworkin was headed, if he knew. It seemed unlikely that Dworkin drove a van with the bookstore logo on it unless he was on business for the shop. Ashna had not found any record of him owning a car. Deciding on the third option, I turned and walked slowly back toward the shop, conducting some quick research on my phone as I strolled.
By the time I got back, I was ready. I thought it was unlikely that Dworkin’s co-worker would recognize me from earlier. I was wearing different clothes and he had barely seen me. Also, one of my most useful features was my generally generic appearance. Few people, seeing me for the first time, could pinpoint my ethnicity or find any distinguishing features to focus on. I had relied on this many times in the past and felt confident I could rely on it this time as well. Still, I was prepared to adapt my approach if he did remember me. The bells tinkled again as I entered the shop. I approached the counter, glancing around as if appreciating the vast array and selection, then turned my attention to Hawaiian shirt guy. I reached a hand out, offering to shake.
Enigma Variations Page 9