****
“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. Anyway, 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
