Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

While Oliver rummages through a stack of papers, I power up the PC. The switch flips over with a loud thwack and the computer rumbles to life. It sounds like an airplane taking off; there’s a loud roar, then a screech, then a staccato sequence of beeps. Oliver jerks around.

“What are you doing?” he whispers.

“Looking for clues, same as you.” I don’t know why he’s whispering.

“But what if there’s weird stuff on there?” he says, still whispering. “Like porn.”

The computer musters a command-line prompt. This is okay; I can figure this out. When you work on websites, you interact with far-off servers in ways that have not really changed much since 1987, so I think back to NewBagel and tap in a few exploratory instructions.

“Oliver,” I say absently, “have you done any digital archaeology?”

“No,” he says, doubled over a set of drawers. “I don’t really mess with anything newer than the twelfth century.”

The PC’s tiny disk is full of text files, inscrutably named. When I inspect one, it’s a jumble of characters. So that either means it’s raw data, or it’s encrypted, or … yes. This is one of the books from the Waybacklist, one of the books that Lapin called a codex vitae. I think Penumbra transcribed it into his PC.

There’s a program called EULERMETHOD. I key it in, take a deep breath, press return … and the PC beeps in protest. In bright green text, it tells me there are errors in the code—lots of them. The program won’t run. Maybe it never ran.

“Look at this,” Oliver says from across the room.

He’s leaning over a thick book on top of a filing cabinet. The cover is leather, embossed just like the logbooks, and it says PECUNIA. Maybe it’s a private logbook for all the really juicy details of the book business. But no: when Oliver flips it open, the book’s purpose is revealed. It’s a ledger, each page cut into two wide columns and dozens of narrow rows, each row carrying an entry in Penumbra’s spidery script:

FESTINA LENTE CO.$10,847.00

FESTINA LENTE CO. $10,853.00

FESTINA LENTE CO. $10,859.00

Oliver flips through the pages of the ledger. The entries go month by month, and they go back decades. So there’s our patron: the Festina Lente Company must connect to Corvina somehow.

Oliver Grone is a trained excavator. While I was playing hacker, he’s been finding something useful. I follow his lead, moving around the room step-by-step, looking for clues.

There’s another low cabinet. On top: a dictionary, a thesaurus, a wrinkled Publishers Weekly from 1993, a Burmese take-out menu. Inside: paper, pencils, rubber bands, a stapler.

There’s a coatrack, empty except for a thin gray scarf. I’ve seen Penumbra wear it before.

There are photos in black frames on the far wall, next to the stairs that lead down. One shows the store itself, but it must be decades old: it’s black-and-white, and the street looks different. Instead of Booty’s next door, there’s a restaurant called Arigoni’s, with candles and checkered tablecloths. Another photo, this one in Kodachrome color, shows a pretty middle-aged woman with bobbed blond hair hugging a redwood tree, one heel kicked up, beaming at the camera.

The last photo shows three men posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. One is older, with the look of a professor: a sharp hook of a nose and a wry, winning grin. The other two are much younger. One is broad-chested and thick-armed, like an old-school bodybuilder. He has a black mustache and a steeply receding hairline, and with one arm he’s giving the camera a thumbs-up. His other arm is draped around the shoulders of the third man, who’s tall and skinny, with— Wait. The third man is Penumbra. Yes, he is long-ago Penumbra, with a halo of brown hair and flesh on his cheeks. He’s smiling. He looks so young.

I crack open the frame and pull out the photo. On the back, in Penumbra’s script, there’s a caption:

Two novices & a great teacher

Penumbra, Corvina, Al-Asmari

Amazing. The older man must be Al-Asmari, and that makes the one with the mustache Corvina, who is now Penumbra’s boss, CEO of Weird Bookstores Worldwide, which might be the Festina Lente Company. It’s got to be this Corvina who summoned Penumbra back to the library to be punished or fired or burned or worse. He’s hale and hearty in this photo, but he must be as old as Penumbra now. He must be a cruel skeleton.

“Look at this!” Oliver calls again from across the room. He is definitely better at detective work than I am. First the ledger, and now this: he holds up an Amtrak timetable, freshly printed. He spreads it out on the desk, and there it is, boxed by four sharp strokes—our employer’s destination.

Penn Station.

Penumbra is going to New York City.

EMPIRES

THE SCENARIO as I see it goes like this: