“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
