by Chris Knopf
CHAPTER 4
At sunrise I was on my computer, where I spent a few hours burning down and wiping out all the evidence I could find of Florencia’s money laundering activities. There was no such thing as permanently destroying data, but I could slow down any investigation considerably.
Of course, the best way to stay hidden was for no one to be looking for you. I’d relied on that from the beginning. But things had now changed irrevocably. If pursuers had the safe-deposit box, they likely had some or all of the fraud scheme, which could well lead back to Florencia despite my best efforts.
Though not necessarily to me. There were other players entangled in her underground operations who could draw attention, create diversions. But there was no way for me to know that, so I always had to assume the worst.
At least I had a distraction: the content on the flash drive taken from the bank on Grand Cayman. It was a Word document, a single page filled with numbers set within little boxes.
Code.
Before being smashed by a bullet, my brain was uniquely suited to code-breaking, something I did as a hobby, though sometimes it came in handy in my professional pursuits. The brain injury caused a thing called dyscalculia, which is a technical way of saying I’d lost most of my math skills.
As it turned out I was able, through persistent practice, to rewire my neural circuitry well enough to regain basic arithmetic, and even get a grasp on certain algebraic formulas, but that was about it. Looking at that sea of numbers on the computer screen caused a surge of loss that was almost nauseating. But it passed in a moment, as I realized I didn’t have to be a great code breaker. I simply needed someone, or something, that was.
As in all things today, the solution began with the Internet. I searched for “codes and cyphers” and settled in for a lot of reading.
Natsumi woke an hour later and made us coffee while I explained the situation. She looked over my shoulder at the code and said, “Reminds me of roulette, only with more numbers.”
“Indeed. Though a spinning wheel isn’t going to help us here.”
“What will?” she asked.
“I think it’s some sort of substitution technique. Presumably, the numbers stand for letters, though it’s not a simple 1 = A formula. Different combinations of numbers, running forward or in reverse, or diagonally, form part of the process. I’ve downloaded some off-the-shelf code-breaking software, which is running in the background, but I don’t have much hope.”
“How come?”
“There’s probably a key, something that generates the numbers, but not inherent in them. In her scam, Florencia had used the phone number from the apartment she rented during grad school. If I hadn’t guessed that, it would have taken a powerful computer to crunch all the possibilities within a string of ten numbers.”
“But it’s doable,” she said.
“I think.”
I spent the rest of the day on the code, pausing for about a half hour to arrange the trip to Europe. Which is all it took, online booking being the easiest code in the world to crack. The next morning, the guy at the front desk whistled at a cluster of cabs and their drivers, who were playing some sort of board game under a big shade tree. Through an unspoken selection process, one of them took us to the ferry in Road Town, which roared across the whitecaps and swells to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We made it to the airport and boarded a plane that flew us, our bags and boxes of gear to Miami.
I spent most of the hop across the Caribbean quelling anxious thoughts about U.S. customs. My experience with international travel was thin, but even before the shooting, handing my passport to the American agents and watching them rummage through my belongings was decidedly creepy and ominous.
In the end, the female agent barely looked at us before scanning our passports, secured with stolen identities, and waving us through. The same was true at baggage search, which was literally nothing, the agents without a flicker of suspicion buying my story of being a telecommunications distributor on a selling tour of the Caribbean.
“Well, that was easy,” said Natsumi when we were well out of earshot.
“I used the force.”
I’d planned a day layover to go through everything, consolidating down to two carry-ons by stripping out excess gear, sending some of it to a storage facility I maintained in Connecticut, and a bit more to our final destination in France—the Villa Egretta Garzetta, pictured on the postcard in the safe-deposit box.
Feeling that our good fortune getting into the country reduced the odds of an easy trip out, I was moderately tense until we were aloft in the Iberia Airbus A340 heading for our connection in Madrid. Over the Atlantic, Natsumi slept while I played around with the code, with no success.
Still, I was convinced it was based on numeric substitution. Florencia was an MBA, a few courses shy of earning an actuarial degree, and her facility with numbers was nearly as good as mine. Maybe not with the more esoteric formulas, but she could usually see the significance of a complex spreadsheet at a single glance, absorbing the calculations in chunks, the way speed readers absorb whole paragraphs. It was more pattern recognition than anything, so it was likely she’d settled on some type of visual pattern, limiting the possible complexities.
It was also possible she’d designed it with me specifically in mind, a thought that caused a little twist in my heart. She may have never wanted to reveal her deeply buried secrets, but knew realistically, if something happened to her, I’d find out anyway. She knew me, knew my predilections and persistence. I’d uncover the fraud and embezzlement, trace the money and secure the safe-deposit box. And she would have been right—only she couldn’t know that the message sent beyond the grave, if it was indeed a message, would be received by a very different Arthur Cathcart.
I eventually exhausted myself, and managed to sleep the last hour of the flight to Madrid; and after a brief stay at the Madrid airport, we took the last leg of the trip to the Côte d’Azur.
THE BEST way to imagine Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is to picture a right hand, fingers together, with thumb out, jutting into the Mediterranean Sea from the southern coast of France. To the west, Nice is a fifteen-minute car ride. Monaco is about a half hour to the east.
St. Jean is the thumb to Cap Ferrat’s hand. Contained within the two peninsulas is some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in the world, a fleet of super yachts extensive enough to mount a major invasion, and wealth beyond measure (partly because a lot of it resides in banks on Grand Cayman Island).
We landed in Nice an hour before sunrise. By the time we secured our bags and checked through customs, the sun was beginning to light the sky from behind the southern reaches of the Alps. Though I usually strived for anonymity in rental cars, I’d chosen a 5-Series BMW, the roads of the Côte d’Azur notoriously serpentine, providing frequent opportunities for the ill-equipped and inexperienced to plunge down sharp embankments.
Anyway, given how common BMWs were in that part of the world, there was little danger of standing out.
Leaving the airport in Nice, we drove along the Promenade des Anglais, traveling east parallel to the crescent-shaped beach. Apparently the nightclubs in and around the old hotels lining the Promenade were disgorging the last of the night’s club-goers, bleary-eyed, but still beautiful. A black-haired young woman in a painted-on, shiny green dress and impossibly high heels stuck out her thumb. I flashed by without hesitation, though a peak in the rearview showed her teetering on the high heels, looking incredulous at the receding BMW.
“Good decision,” said Natsumi.
“Security first,” I said.
“Hm.”
We followed the swoops and curves, the rise and fall of the coastal road, through the narrow confines of densely packed urban clusters, squeezing by colossal buses and dodging suicidal motorbikes. Yet in fairly short order we arrived, intact, at the Village of St. Jean. Not a village in the conventional sense, more a settlement of luxury homes surrounding a row of shops
and restaurants set into the hillside, overlooking a harbor crammed with small watercraft, motor and sail, sheltered from the Mediterranean by a curvaceous concrete and stone breakwater.
With the harbor on our left, we drove halfway up the peninsula to where the red dot on my GPS pegged the location of the Villa Egretta Garzetta. I’d come to appreciate that the people of the Côte d’Azur had learned to live on the vertical, the hotel being a fine demonstration. You parked your car on the shoulder across the street, then climbed a steep masonry stairway to an iron gate, beyond which you continued the upward hike through thick, aromatic foliage over large, circular ceramic tiles.
The main entrance was to the far right of the building. To the left was a patio that extended the length of the hotel, covered by a pergola supporting a hundred years of wisteria growth. Hotel guests, the early risers, sat at round tables with starched white tablecloths, pouring themselves café noir from china pots and spreading jelly on croissants and baguettes.
Above the pergola were three stories of rooms, each with a small balcony where sprays of bougainvillea climbed across canary yellow stucco walls.
The lobby was windowless and about the size of a utility closet. A small chandelier cast a dull, yellow light from above, and a brass lamp did what it could to illuminate the front desk. Behind it stood a very tall, slender bald-headed man in his late sixties or early seventies. He gave a little bow.
Natsumi had the better French, so I let her navigate the greeting and check-in process. Monsieur Lheureux either had no English or chose not to use it, though his demeanor was very warm and engaged. This was likely aided by my choice of rooms—actually a full penthouse suite, their best, perched on the top of the hotel. In fact, they called it Le Petite Villa Perché. As with the BMW, it was an unfamiliar extravagance, but the only thing available on such short notice.
The manually operated elevator had room enough for one person and one bag, so we took turns. Monsieur Lheureux hoofed it up the stairs and gave us a tour of the penthouse, which had full views in every direction, with tangled gardens to the west and the mountainous Mediterranean coastline to the east, where at night we’d be able to see the lights of Monte Carlo. Before he left, a round, white-haired woman he introduced as Madame Lheureux showed up with a tray loaded with coffee, pastries, fruit and a copy of The International Herald Tribune.
When they left, we took it all out to the balcony overlooking the wisteria-laden pergola, the front gardens of the hotel, and at water’s edge the red tile roofs of an estate invisible from the street behind a twelve-foot, pink plastered wall.
I remember having a single cup of coffee, and maybe half a croissant, when the weight of jet lag and sleep deprivation suddenly crashed down, driving us back inside and into the overstuffed antique bed and the welcome embrace of absolute unconsciousness.
“WHAT DO you know of Florencia’s childhood?” Natsumi asked me four hours later, back on the balcony with a fresh pot of coffee.
“That she wouldn’t talk about it.”
“And that was okay?”
“You never met Florencia. Never has a person’s privacy been so exuberantly preserved. ‘No, Arturo, eez such a beautiful day and I’m sooo tired. Let’s bring fresh fruit and sausage to the park and drink some wine.’ ”
“You just sounded exactly like a Spanish woman.”
“Heard it enough. And technically, she wasn’t Spanish. She was Basque. Florencia Etxarte. Her parents, whom I never met, were born in the Basque region, but then moved to Chile where she was born. They were academics, and wanted her to have an American education, so they shipped her up to Philadelphia where she went to Swarthmore for undergrad, and the Wharton School at Penn after that. My postgrad was in mathematics, but Wharton let us in on their statistics courses. That’s where I met her. That year, she got a letter saying her parents had both died. She cried nearly inconsolably for about a week, but we never went to a funeral, and she never went back to Chile. That’s all I know.”
“That’s it?”
“I tried to learn more after she died, but according to every available database, there was no Florencia Etxarte, or couples named Etxarte who died in 1996, or any other year that would fit their age range. Her birth certificate and Chilean passport in that name notwithstanding.”
“We have birth certificates and passports for people who don’t exist,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“You never ask me about my childhood.”
“You told me you were adopted by an American sailor named Fitzgerald who brought you and your mother to the U.S., who died when you were eighteen. Your mother moved back to Japan and you stayed. If you want to tell me more, that’s up to you.”
“So that’s how that happened. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“Basically.”
THERE’S A well-supported theory that the mind works better when thrust into unfamiliar surroundings. I spent the next few days testing that theory on Florencia’s code, while Natsumi explored the exquisitely beautiful surroundings of the French Riviera both on foot and by BMW. It was a satisfying division of labor, made more so by the keen attentions of the Lheuruexs, whose kitchen provided a steady stream of delicious food served everywhere but inside.
They also let me use their printer to make a few dozen hard copies of the code, better to study in bright daylight and to keep track of possible patterns with pen and pencil. On the tech side, I exported the Word document into Excel to cut down on the manual counting. This is how I made the basic determination that the letter ‘a,’ the most commonly used letter in Spanish, appeared twenty percent less frequently than it should have. Likewise, the most common Spanish consonants, ‘d,’ ‘l’ and ‘q,’ were grossly underrepresented. I did the same analysis against frequent English letters with the same disappointing results.
Knowing there were code breakers in the world using software that could crack this thing in minutes didn’t help. It wasn’t just feelings of inadequacy. Florencia had hidden the information for a reason, and until I knew what it was, I dared not share the secret with anyone else.
“So what’s the big problem?” Natsumi asked me, after I showed her my progress.
“Not all letters have the same number all the time. After you get past nine, they have to start doubling up. And even if I knew which numbers corresponded with which letter, the order is jumbled—it could read backwards, forwards, diagonally, or a combination thereof—and there’s no word spacing. And my Spanish could be better, though I think it’s good enough if I could get the numbers right.”
“So the code has a code.”
“Something like that. A key that lives somewhere else.”
“That lives here,” she said. “At the Villa Egretta Garzetta. If, in fact, that’s why the flash drive was taped to the postcard.”
“Agreed. Florencia was a purposeful woman. There has to be a connection.”
As far as I knew, she’d never been to St. Jean, but then again, what did I know? The hotel had been run by the Lheureux family continuously since the thirties. Do I dare ask if their register listed a girl named Florencia? And if so, what would that tell me?
“Go ahead, ask them,” said Natsumi, after I gave voice to the thought. “Why not?”
“Seems like a security breach. Even if it was possible to do.”
She used two fingers to stick me in the shoulder.
“The bank thing has you twitchy. Rationally, this is low risk, high potential reward. Like you say, the probabilities are on our side.”
As is often the case, Natsumi had a really good point. Further proof that two brains were always better than one.
“Okay, you do the asking,” I said. “French is impossible.”
“Naturellement.”
And so we asked Monsieur Lheureux at breakfast the next morning if it was remotely possible to see if a girl named Florencia Etxarte had checked into the Egretta Garzetta at any time in the last four decades.
“She’s a friend
of the family, and though we love her, we doubt this claim,” said Natsumi in French. “She’s such a fibber.” Monsieur Lheureux looked untroubled.
“Of course,” he said, “we have all the hotel’s records on a computer file beginning at the beginning. It is the work of our son. Traditional and modern. It is the way of the Egretta Garzetta.”
Natsumi was culturally incapable of a good gloat, but the look she gave me as she translated was pretty close.
Before we finished the last plate of prosciutto and sliced cantaloupe he returned to our table. His expression didn’t bode well.
“We have a Florencia in the registry, August 3rd, 1988. Though regrettably, her name is Florencia Zarandona, not Etxarte. She was registered with a Miguel and Sylvia Zarandona. My pardons.”
We thanked him, and when he left, Natsumi bowed in contrition.
“Sorry,” she said. “I raised your hopes.”
“Never apologize for a smart move.”
She looked up at me. “Why do you look so happy?”
She didn’t press me when I led her back upstairs to the Petite Perché and booted up the computer. I brought up my research logs and clicked on a file titled “Zarandona.”
“The name must have come up at least twice, for some reason, in my original research. You want to have at least three corroborating data points,” I said, “but two is worth saving, in case number three pops up later on. Happens all the time.”
“What now?” she asked.
“Down the rabbit hole.”
THE NEXT time we spoke, it was nearly dinner time. She’d gone off on a journey into the foothills of the Alps and I’d traveled through trackless census and immigration data, news sources in English and Spanish, plumbing every legally available source of information on the Internet covering the prior half century.