He arrived at his second floor landing and made his way down the old, poorly lit hall. The first door on his right opened, and the nosy old superintendent, Mrs. Salarno, fixed him with a disapproving gaze.
“I heard your voice on the stairs. I hope everything’s all right, si? Nothing too valuable is missing?” she said, hands on her hips.
“Mrs. Salarno. How lovely to see you. I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage. What are you talking about?” Steven asked politely, puzzled by her statement.
“I called the police when I heard the commotion in your flat. This morning, right after you left. I thought maybe you were having problems, so I knocked on the door, but then the noise stopped and nobody came to the door, and I thought, ‘that’s not right’. I called the cops right away. They were here for a few hours. I told them where your office was. Didn’t the lazy jerks come by?”
Steven tried to absorb her rapid-fire account. “Police? Here? And what noise?” Steven looked down the hall towards his front door.
“I let them into your flat. I hope you don’t mind. And I stayed with them to make sure they didn’t make off with anything,” Mrs. Salarno assured him.
Steven gently pushed past the woman and made his way to his door, which had a notice affixed to it from the local police along with a business card inserted into the door jamb. He withdrew the card and pocketed it, glanced at the notification, and then unlocked the handle. Nothing could have prepared him for the vision that greeted him.
The flat looked like it had been torn apart by vandals. Papers were strewn everywhere, drawers hung half opened with a few upended on the floor, and a flower vase was broken on the coffee table. Steven sensed a presence behind him and turned to face Mrs. Salarno.
“I stood here and made sure they didn’t touch anything. I figured you’d rather clean up yourself than have the police rummaging through all your things,” she said.
“This was the way they found it?”
“Exactly the way it was. Like I said, I heard a commotion, and I suspected the worst because you’re always so quiet. There are some broken items in the kitchen, too, which is probably what made the noise. Either that or the drawers.” She paused, taking in the shambles. “It’s a shame that even in this area we’re having robberies. When I was a girl, it was safe enough to leave your front door open. Not now.”
Steven ignored her, eyes roaming over the shambles of his living room while madly processing the implications. Maybe Natalie wasn’t so crazy after all?
Or maybe Natalie’s associates had done this?
What did he know about her, anyway? She’d appeared as if out of a dream, with a wild story and outlandish claims, and convinced him in no time to literally run away with her. She’d mischaracterized the two cops as goons intent on doing him harm, perhaps innocently, or possibly as part of some scheme he wasn’t aware of.
He didn’t get the sense that she was deliberately trying to mislead him, but that was hardly dispositive. The bottom line was that Natalie was a question mark, and he’d have to keep his guard up until he understood more — sparkling violet eyes or no.
Steven skirted the worst of the debris and moved to his computer station. The laptop was gone. That was a big problem. Not only because all of his personal files were on it, but also because it housed the decryption software.
Steven surveyed the clutter, shaking his head. What a mess. He supposed he’d best call the cops and file a report listing the stolen items, which would mean doing a full inventory. Maybe later. For now, he needed to grab some clothes and go to his storage locker downstairs.
He threw together a duffle bag with a week’s worth of clothes and a shaving kit and then moved to the front door, where Mrs. Salarno was in residence.
“Mrs. Salarno, thank you so much for sounding the alarm on this. Who knows how much worse it would have been if it wasn’t for you.” Steven complimented, hoping to be rid of her. She seemed unwilling to leave, so he gently guided her by the arm into the hall.
“If you need anything, you knock, eh? It’s a disgrace this can happen in this neighborhood,” she complained.
Steven nodded in agreement and thanked her again, and then, when he heard her door squeak shut, closed his flat and descended the stairs to the ground floor, where he walked to the back of the long vestibule and unlocked a scratched wooden door. Dank, musty air hit him in the face as he swung it open, and he brushed a cobweb out of the way to turn on the light switch. Two low voltage fluorescent bulbs dimly lit the area, which held five locked storage stalls.
He approached the nearest and unlocked the padlock, swinging the hinged piece of dusty plywood and propping it open with a garbage bag of indeterminate junk he’d been storing for years. He rummaged around among the boxes until his hand felt the distinctive edge of a desktop computer, which he grabbed and lifted free of the cartons. When he’d stored it he’d had the presence of mind to tape the keyboard and mouse to it, along with the power cord, so he was good to go. Steven could use the monitor still sitting on his computer station; all that remained was to hope the old CPU would fire up.
He closed the storage stall and returned to his flat, where he dusted off and then set up the PC. While he waited for it to boot, he went to the bedroom and got a blank CD-ROM from a box in the closet. Upon his return, the screen was proudly displaying a set of icons he’d last seen when he’d moved into the flat. He quickly searched through them until he located the file he was looking for and then began downloading the contents. He hadn’t bothered to save the decryption results for the parchment with the crest and silently kicked himself for his sloppiness. Now he’d need to perform the whole analysis over again, which would be a chore, given that it was processing-intensive. The last time, he remembered, it had taken days.
That gave him an idea. Maybe he could use the company computers to run the program overnight. He invested in the very latest technology for the programmers, changing out the systems every year for cutting-edge advents. One of the office computers could crunch the data in a third of the time Natalie’s little laptop could. He picked up the phone on his computer desk and pressed a speed dial number. Gwen’s voice answered.
“Hey. Is Sophie still there?” Steven asked.
“She sure is.”
“Perfect. I need her to clear the decks on one of the new systems and run a decryption table for me. I can e-mail you the program in a compressed folder and send a separate file with a scan of the document. Can you get Sophie to do that for me?”
“I’ll let her know. You ever find out what the coppers wanted to talk to you about?” Gwen asked.
“There’s been a breakin at my place. I imagine they wanted me to identify what was stolen.”
“Breakin? Did they get anything?”
“Far as I can tell, just my laptop. Not much else worth stealing, unless you want to try to stuff a big screen TV or monitor under your arm. But they messed up the flat pretty badly. Looks like a couple of mountain lions were mating in here,” Steven shared.
“Was there anything critical on your system?”
“Not really. It’s all password protected, but anyone with some time and knowledge could get through that. Mostly just BS. Still, it’s annoying,” Steven groused.
“I’ll bet.”
“I’m going to send the program over and the document a little later. I don’t have internet access at my house. The bastards tore the jack out of the wall and stole the modem. God knows why. Anyway, call me when it’s done. Thanks, Gwen.”
The CD door popped open, signaling that it was finished. Steven logged off the computer and, surveying the damage to the flat once more, he decided there wasn’t a lot more he could do other than clean up. He powered down, pocketed the CD, and lifted the duffel over his shoulder. Glancing around a final time, he shook his head in disapproval at the mess. He would need at least a full day to get everything sorted and put back in place. What a pain in the ass.