Hunting for Hemingway

by Diane Gilbert Madsen

  "This is the second time tonight the fates have smiled on me," I said, inspecting my ripped blouse.

  "What else happened?" he asked.

  "My car wouldn't start, so I took the elevated, and somebody hit me from behind as I was climbing the stairs to the platform. Luckily, another passenger came along."

  "My God, DD, you are on somebody's list." He continued to support me with one arm while he reached into the car and pulled out the laptop with his other.

  We walked slowly into my building.

  "I was wondering if any of what's been happening to you might be related to our case and not Hemingway," he said.

  "I don't think so. Things started happening before I agreed to help Barry. And now with David's attorney dead, too, I'm quite sure it's something to do with the Hemingway manuscripts. That's why I needed the information in this computer."

  Normally I don't discuss my cases with anybody, but he really reminded me of Scotty. As we walked up the stairs to my door, I told him everything-the Hemingway manuscripts, finding the bodies of both David and Beth, being a suspect, and how every room I walked into lately seemed to have been ransacked.

  "Don't you think we should call the cops about the almost hit and run down there?" he suggested as I unlocked the door. I flipped on the lights and cleaned off a space on my messy coffee table for the laptop.

  "No," I said as Mitch set it down gently.

  "You're right. This place looks really awful," he said, looking at the shambles.

  "I'm definitely not up for another encounter with the cops tonight," I told him. "Anyway, what good would it do? Did you get the license plate? Can you describe who was driving or what kind of car it was?"

  "Not really," he said after some thought. "It was a dark twodoor, but I'm not even sure of the make. It all happened so fast. I suppose it would be useless. What about letting your attorney know?"

  "Oh, it is you," Glendy chirped as she entered the apartment carrying Cavalier.

  "We heard voices and came to check things out;" Lucille chimed in just behind her.

  Meanwhile, Cavalier rushed over, sniffing Mitch's pant leg, meowing for attention. Mitch picked him up and made a fuss over him, which of course the little brat ate up like catnip.

  "You can't be too careful," said Glendy.

  "Not after what happened here," Lucille added, seeing Mitch. "Oh, it's the nice man who brought us the roses. You're back. That's good."

  "We'll go now," Glendy said, looking at my ripped blouse. She picked up Cavalier and headed for the door.

  "Yes, you two are busy," Lucille winked at me as they waved and left.

  I closed the door.

  "So, they're kind of your guardian angels?" Mitch asked.

  "First of all for the record, they ... Oh, never mind. It's too complicated," I said, turning on the laptop. "But thanks for not telling them about what happened downstairs." I couldn't help noticing his strong jaw line as he looked into my eyes. I kept feeling guilty about Scotty, but was attracted to him nonetheless.

  "You're an interesting woman, DD. Very interesting."

  I watched him and tugged at my blouse to minimize the tear.

  The computer came to life, but it was still all snow.

  "Since you're the expert, can you get it to boot up?"

  "Probably needs a low-level format," Mitch said thoughtfully. Then I can reinstall the operating system," he advised, smiling.

  "I know a little about computers," I admitted, thinking of Scotty. "A friend of mine once told me that a format would destroy all the data on the hard disk, and I want to read whatever's there."

  "Oh, that's a lot more complicated." Our eyes met again, and a warm glow engulfed me.

  "Want something to drink?" I asked, breaking the spell. "Coke, wine, a gin and tonic?"

  "Make it a G & T. Lots of ice, light on the gin and lime."

  "That's how I like mine," I said, and left to prepare the drinks, hunting for ingredients and unbroken glasses in the messy kitchen.

  "Thanks," he said, taking a small glass from me.

  "Sorry, but this was all I could find that wasn't broken."

  He patted the sofa. "Here. Sit down next to me."

  I did so. When our knees touched, I felt a shock of electric warmth.

  "I'm worried about you, DD. What happened down there wasn't a random act. Someone is after you. Someone wants to kill you. Doesn't that scare you?"

  "It hasn't sunk in yet," I said dully, wanting to be truthful. "I suppose it's true and I suppose I ought to be panicky. Probably I'll get there later tonight."

  "Exactly. Now what I want to talk about is this. I'm staying here with you tonight and..."

  "You don't have to..."

  "Never mind what I have to do or don't have to do. The decision's been made. I'm not leaving you alone. If you want to call in a private detective, that's fine. I'll leave. But unless you do, I'm not letting you stay alone here tonight. In fact, I'd prefer it if you came to my place."

  "No. That's impossible." "

  I thought you'd say that. So here I am and here I stay. Capisce? Discussion over. Now I need to know a few details about what happened to this computer," he said as he bent over the computer, his remarkably long, tan fingers blurring over the keyboard. I couldn't follow what he was doing, so I spent the time admiring his deft hands and wrists and trying to suppress thoughts I was having about him being naked in my bed. What was wrong with me?

  "Do you know any details about what happened to this machine?"

  I snapped out of my dream world. "I don't know. I found it like this in David's office. Which, by the way, was also trashed."

  "Mmm..." he murmured, totally focused on the problem. "This is one sick puppy. This isn't going to be easy."

  The next half-hour dragged like the Ice Age while I watched him work in silence. His concentration was complete, and he didn't pause to explain his manipulations.

  "The hard disk is still configured," he said finally. "All the sectors and tracks that hold information are still there and functional, but all the files providing access to information have been deleted. Windows-your operating system-has been erased from the machine, and it can't get to them."

  "So, where do we go from here?" I asked as our shoulders touched. I was glad he was a software guru, and I hoped to hide my own ignorance. A vision of a talking Barbie doll uttering "Math Is Hard" flashed through the lowest level of my consciousness.

  "Well, I can reinstall Windows first of all. Then we'll take a look at what damage might have been done to the file structure itself. The Windows files may still be there but not be functional. I need my utility kit," he explained with a warm, conspiratorial smile as he got up and went to the door. "Be right back. Luckily I've got all kinds of stuff in the car."

  He returned with a bag and drew out some software packets. His face contorted with concentration as he placed a CD into the port and started punching keys.

  "Can you really figure out what's wrong here?" I asked, impressed.

  "Means a lot to you, huh? I'll play doctor." He smiled and lightly touched my hand. "You know, I feel as if tonight I've met the good twin. You rob, you lie, but it's evident you're doing it all for a good cause. And saving yourself on the elevated train was unbelievable. You're quite a fascinating woman, Miss DD McGil."

  "I am?" I asked as he softly traced an indefinable pattern up my left arm. He moved a bit closer as he turned back to the computer. Maybe the old adage was true. In the midst of death, we need life, or something life-affirming like sex. Our knees touched as he began to work again in earnest.

  "What happened here? This is bad. Real bad."

  "What?" I couldn't understand what he was seeing on the screen. "Tell me, please."

  "Computers are another life form, DD," he pronounced as he reached into his bag and pulled out a software package decorated with lightning bolts labeled ZAP.

  "What we have here," Mitch explained, his brown eyes reflecting the excitement of the cha
se, "is no less than the neutron bomb of the computer world." He pointed at the ZAP package.

  "Somebody Zapped this computer. This little program will access a file, overwrite it with zeros, and then save the file in its altered state with all the zeros. Then it deletes the file in the usual way, changing the name in the file allocation table so the machine won't display it anymore. There's no information in the files anymore, only zeros. It's like a file doomsday package, guaranteed to ensure that you can't restore the file anytime, anyplace, anywhere." He paused, his eyes now hard and clear.

  "All you got left here is a lot of little zeros. Sorry." He blinked and took my hand again.

  My heart sunk. "Damn," I muttered. "Whoever erased everything was pretty clever."

  Mitch turned to look at me, his mouth serious, his eyes still in the hunt. "I've got an idea. Maybe he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. Let's see here..."

  We were sitting even closer now so as to both be in on the chase. I inhaled his maleness and watched him work.

  "We've got him, the bastard." He turned to face me. His eyes danced, and he smiled triumphantly. "Whoever did this was a real overachiever. See this?" He pointed to the screen with one hand and slipped the other around my waist.

  "What?" I asked, putting a hand on his knee.

  The monitor displayed a directory of file names. I wasn't sure I understood, and the Barbie vision flashed again. I felt completely confused. I felt comfortable, like I was sitting next to Scotty, but it was Mitch. I didn't need this turmoil. I needed Scotty back again. But since I couldn't have that, I was awfully glad Mitch was here.

  He smiled a wicked smile. "Now we know why the machine shut down. Whoever did this planned to nuke the whole system at one fell swoop-like a massive air strike designed to eliminate every living thing in sight."

  Mitch paused and lifted my other hand to his lips, slowly kissing each finger.

  "That tastes wonderful," he whispered in my ear. My stomach felt like the biblical fiery furnace. He kissed me behind my ear. "I did save your life, you know."

  "That's true," I agreed softly.

  "And helping hijack this stuff has already engaged us in mutual criminal activity."

  "True again." I smiled.

  "Good. That's settled then. Now, let's get back to this problem. Whoever fooled with this was in a big hurry. He stupidly tried to zap the entire hard disc. See, the ZAP program is designed to kill individual files or small blocks of files. That's why the machine shut down. The ZAP program killed all the Windows files first, which made everything stop before any individual files got erased. With me so far?" He smiled and caressed a lock of my hair, like Scotty used to. God, it felt wonderful. What was I doing? What if Scotty came back? This was awful.

  "So does this mean we can get to the files after all?" I asked.

  "In a word, maybe. Let's give it a try. I've reinstalled Windows, so we can get to the directories. Now we have to coax out all these deleted names from the file allocation table to restore the files."

  Somewhat anti-climactically I found myself in the hunt. "Just how do you do that?"

  "By substituting a letter for the dollar sign the ZAP program used to overwrite the file names. That'll make the files available to us again. You choose the letter," he offered, his eyes sparkling with the possibility of victory on the horizon.

  "Make it a D, for David."

  "D it is. For DD." Mitch grinned and punched it into the keyboard. "You see," he said, lightly stroking my arm, "you can think of a computer as a big file cabinet with a lot of drawers. All the addresses-that is, the sectors and tracks-where the information resides, are still in there, a little bit stored here and little bit stored there. Think of it as putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again. Ahhh, here we go."

  He returned both hands to the keyboard as together we hunted through several directories, none revealing anything of special interest. David had kept extensive records on his students and on his course work, but we found nothing on the harassment case or his problems fighting for the chairmanship of the department.

  Finally we entered a directory labeled "BL&NM" Flashing colors and lights took us into a word processing program that popped onto the screen, prompting us for a password. I groaned my disappointment.

  Mitch asked, "Can you guess what David's password might be?"

  "No idea. What do people usually use?"

  "There is no usual. Everybody picks something they won't forget, like their mother's name. Look, don't worry" Mitch flashed a devious smile. "We should be able to get around this pretty easy. All these programs leave a hole a mile wide, a trap door, to cover their asses if somebody forgets a password. It happens all the time" He punched a few keys, waited, then punched a few more.

  I had an idea. "Mitch, BL&NM. I think that might refer to Broad Lawns and Narrow Minds. What Hemingway said about Oak Park. Does that help?"

  "Not really. That's just the directory. Wait a minute. Here. Got it," he said as the program released its files to us. We leaned forward in synch, scrutinizing the screen together. Our shoulders touched and he moved closer, pressing his leg against mine.

  He said, "You're very beautiful. But of course you know that"

  "You're not so bad yourself." I grinned.

  "Pay dirt, DD," he pointed to the screen. We pulled up a file in which David described the battered valise he'd received in the package. He outlined his failed attempts to trace the package, then detailed his theories about the whereabouts of the manuscripts for the past eighty-nine years. He described the raggedy luggage tag still attached by a slim thread, but noted it was unreadable. In the file were his speculations that since Hadley and Ernest had only recently been married, their return address must have been the Michigan Hemingway residence. Like most young men who returned from the war, Ernest had found it difficult to fit back into normal life, especially in straitlaced, Puritan Oak Park, the Oak Park of Broad Lawns and Narrow Minds. The war had made Ernest a man; yet upon his return, his mother continued to treat him like a boy. His Michigan friends were more tolerant, and undoubtedly that's why he spent his time up in Michigan and got married there instead of in Oak Park before leaving for Europe. By what route, David wondered, had the greatest find of twentieth century American literature taken to travel from Paris to Michigan to him?

  There were also records of the research pilgrimages he and Martin Sweeney had made to Michigan. David advanced his belief that they had been absolutely correct in their suspicion that the valise had been returned to the lost and found in Paris, then forwarded to the states. He speculated that the stationmaster at the Seney, Michigan, stop on the railway line had decided to hold on to the valise until he could return it personally to Ernest, especially since it was well known that Hemingway and his family were not on good terms. But Ernest didn't return for many years, not until 1949 for his father's funeral. And by then, he guessed, the old stationmaster must have died or forgotten the valise, long hidden in an attic or basement.

  Another file described the papers in the valise. They consisted of eleven Hemingway short stories, the first part of a novel, and twenty poems, one of which, entitled, "Cats Are Good Luck," made me smile.

  Of particular interest in this file were David's speculations on who had sent the valise to him and why. He strongly suspected a member of the Hemingway family of sending it, one he'd personally interviewed who didn't get along with other family members, didn't like the Oak Park Hemingway Trust, and wanted to create problems.

  I pointed to the screen where David had worked out the anagram "Regacs Ma Fily" to be "Grace's Family."

  I looked at Mitch. "If that's true, then maybe whoever sent it killed David because he was going to auction off the material instead of donating it for research."

  We continued searching. Another file of 186,485 bytes came up with a blank screen and a "File Incomplete" message.

  The final file in the directory was the largest, and it had a different extension. Calling it up cleared the word
processing program from the screen and brought up a hash of words, symbols and numbers. As Mitch scrolled through it, some familiar words caught my eye. They were the same Hemingway fragments that had been printed in the paper.

  "You know, Mitch, I've seen something like this before. It looks like it's an analysis of the word patterns, punctuation, word occurrences, and sentence structure in the manuscripts. This is how you can spot a forgery from the real thing."

  Our heads were almost touching. Mitch turned to me, breathing huskily, and pulled me close. His touch was exhilarating. I swallowed hard, and as his deft hands moved down my body, I felt lightheaded.

  "Remember," he whispered in my ear, "I saved your life tonight."

  "Cad," I rejoined, bending closer.

  "And you've only got one bed."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I checked when you got the drinks."

  We kissed, first long and tender, then hard and demanding. The computer forgotten, he ran his hands up my legs and under my clothes. I could feel the delicious liberation as various fasteners gave way to his probing fingers. Our breath came in short spurts as we undressed each other with wild abandon. We kissed again, and as his mouth dropped to my breast, I knew it was too late to be cautious. I was glad he was staying. I shivered with a whole body thrill and succumbed to the moment.

  THIRTY-ONE

  DAY 5: THURSDAY

  If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

  -ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  I WOKE BEFORE DAWN, surprised to find a Prince Charming asleep in my bed. Then I remembered last night. Muted light from the street lamp outside my bedroom window illuminated Mitch's naked body. I watched as he slept, and the fierce flame he'd ignited last night rekindled. He reminded me so much of Scotty. I'm sure a psychiatrist would call it transference. Whatever it was, I guessed I was coming to the conclusion I'd never see Scotty again. I snuggled closer.

  The movement woke him. "You are real," he whispered. "Come here." Mitch cradled me tightly, enclosing my universe in his embrace.

  "I was afraid I was dreaming," he said.