Wrapped up in these thoughts, I wheeled up to my favorite grocery in San Francisco: the Rainbow Co-op. It was deep hippie territory—ten-thousand square feet of bulk, fair-trade quinoa, spelt bread, valerian root supplements, and the freshest, most delicious produce in the city. I snaked slowly around a fancy lady in a luxury SUV and a square jawed guy in an Audi wagon, both waiting to enter the tiny garage but held back by the parking attendant who couldn’t let them in until someone else left. A common sight now, there was never a line of people in expensive cars waiting to park at Rainbow in the old days. Just one more reminder of the changing face of the city—hippies, artists, freaks, gutter punks, bodhisattvas all moving out and tech money people moving in. I parked my bike at the rack just inside the garage and headed for the entrance to the store.
Inside, I made my way through the crowd of blissed out yoga people, patchouli scented gurus, and three percent body fat Lululemon ladies, shopping as efficiently as possible given the no hurry vibe. I picked up a variety of vegetables and some firm tofu. Rainbow didn’t carry any meat but Ashna had gone back to vegetarian so it wasn’t a problem. I had known her to switch back and forth between vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore multiple times in a single year.
Back home, I relaxed for a little while, catching up on email and social media, then started dinner. Ashna arrived just as I was pulling pans of roasted carrots, tofu, brussels sprouts, and fingerling potatoes from the oven. The air outside was warm and still, wind and fog held back temporarily, so we ate on the roof, looking out over the bay. We had just passed the summer solstice, retreating from the longest day of the year, and the sun was taking its time dipping down behind Potrero Hill. We sat there in the golden light and long shadows, listening to the faint sounds of a baseball game at Oracle Park, while I told her the story of my trip to LA.
“So, Valerie killed two birds with one Justin?” She said when I was finished.
“I guess you could look at it that way.”
“Tell me more about this Julian Wolhardt.”
I told her everything Wolhardt had told me, closing my eyes and throwing myself back into the prismatic weirdness of Wolhardt’s world.
“So somebody broke in and stole his notes? But not the real notes?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that they hung around for a few days before? Watching him. Tipping him off that they were watching him. Creeping around and scaring his kitty. Then finally breaking in and taking the notes he left on the desk without doing a thorough search and finding the safe?”
“Not really weird if you assume it was an amateur or maybe amateurs. Going through the whole sequence the way Wolhardt laid it out makes me think it must have been another Enigma fanatic who broke in and stole his notes, somebody who didn’t really know what they were doing.”
“So our first stop would be the message board where he made his announcement. Find out who would have seen it and research them.”
“Yeah. But is it worth it?”
“Hmmm.” Ashna was thinking, eyes narrowed.
“Is it interesting? Worth pursuing? We should make sure we’re on the same page before we get started, if we get started.”
“The cryptography part is cool. I’m not going to lie, I’m a crypto nerd. I wonder if anyone who really knows their shit has ever tried to break this? He said there’s a hidden, unplayed theme or counterpoint that matches harmonically? It’s got to be some fairly well-known piece of music written some time before he composed the variations. So, why not put all the pieces of music Elgar would have known about into a database then use a routine to loop over them all and analyze them using music theory logic to determine whether or not they would create a pleasant harmony if played together? I don’t know that much about music theory but it can’t be that difficult.”
“Good question. I don’t know. You’d probably have to ask Wolhardt.”
“Yeah. I will. But first let’s take a look at the message board. It’s probably some PHP script from ten years ago we can hack in two minutes.”
“Some light hacking for our digestif?”
“I’ll take an actual digestif too if you have anything that’s not crap.”
Back inside, seated at my kitchen table, I watched while Ashna did her thing. I had found one of Wolhardt’s film scores and streamed it while Ashna worked. The music was slow, elegiac, and poignant—from a movie about the wreckage and disintegration of a family. Ashna had her laptop open and was slouched in her chair, body still and eyes intent while her fingers moved rapidly on the keyboard. The URL was enigmavariations.net and it was an old school bulletin board system where people could register for accounts, choose anonymous screen names, and post questions and comments about some area of obsessive interest.
