“London,” I answered.
“Yes. London. I’ll send you his address. Maybe I can come join you in a couple of days. We’re almost done with the new release. I need to get back to it now. I have some shit code the intern wrote to debug. Six months at a coding boot camp and they think they’re software architects.”
“Thanks. Have fun. I’ll get in touch from London.”
“Don’t call me. Just text like a normal person.”
Ashna hung up. The bartender saw me put my phone down and wandered over. She placed her hands on the bar, bracing herself and leaning toward me, showing off the hard shoulders and biceps of someone who lifts beer kegs all day.
“Another for you?”
“Yes, and a menu please.”
She smiled and walked off in search of the menu. While I waited, I pulled out my phone and, for the third time in four days, began searching for plane tickets.
****
On the plane I read Cellini and slept fitfully. I had not yet come across much in Cellini’s autobiography that pointed to his supposed involvement with the occult. I did find one interesting passage where he related his alchemical skills:
“I also used to make a very fine sort of powder, in doing which I discovered secret processes, beyond any which have yet been found.”
I could only read a few pages before I had to give myself a break from Cellini. He was like one of those people who is always embroiled in something super intense and interesting and who carry the weight and chaos of their activities around, sharing a bit of it with whomever they meet. He was exhausting but also fascinating enough that I kept going back.
The flight from Philadelphia to Heathrow took seven and a half hours. I left at ten PM but arrived at nine thirty AM due to the time difference. My eyes felt gritty and my head felt hollow as I made my way through the airport.
Bathmore lived in an area of London called Hammersmith. I didn’t know London well. I had only been to the city once, many years before, and that was just passing through. My only connection with Hammersmith was the Clash song called White Man in Hammersmith Palais—not much to go on, just a song about a Reggae club. I had mapped it before I left though and since my strategy of getting a vacation rental nearby had worked well on the previous job, I tried it again. Unfortunately, I had not been able to find anything directly across the street like I had before but I was able to find a place several doors down—a garret apartment that the owners of the townhouse rented out for an exorbitant fee.
I took the connecting train from Heathrow to Hatton Cross station and then boarded the Piccadilly line for Hammersmith station. The Tube was not crowded. The other passengers were mostly bleary-eyed travelers like me who had flown into Heathrow and were now riding into the city. Some were business people, putting on game faces for their late morning meetings. Others looked like Londoners returning from trips. Not many tourists arriving in the middle of the week. The train rattled and clattered through its station stops until we reached Hammersmith. Dingy concrete and ceramic tile greeted me as I stepped off the train. The station had the utilitarian character of other places I had visited, all over the world, that many people per day passed through. I judged from the lack of fancy finishings that Hammersmith must not be a particularly touristy destination. Usually, underground stations near popular destinations or government buildings were the ones they saved the marble and polished brass and grand public art for. When I exited the station my suspicion was confirmed. Warm sun shone down on a hodgepodge of old, two and three story brick edifices intermixed with modern, steel and glass office blocks rising as high as twelve stories into the pale sky. The city air smelled of diesel exhaust and what I thought might be a fishy muddy whiff of the Thames only a few blocks away.
Following the map on my phone I walked a few blocks along major streets busy with busses and trucks, then turned down a calmer, narrower street that was lined on both sides with squat, late Victorian row houses. Flowers sprouted from window boxes and each house had a narrow, walled area in front where the garbage cans, bikes, and scooters were kept. Two small apartment buildings squatted amongst the row houses on the block, the first one I passed matched the address Ashna had given me. I scanned it as I walked by. It was fairly new construction but sought to match the houses on the street with a brick facade, paned windows, and chunky pediments. There seemed to
