“Yeah, yeah.” He smiled sourly. “It’s like that old shampoo commercial, don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful? I will not despise you because you’re intellectually gifted.”
He punched the steering wheel with the heel of a big hand. “The Brain has met his match!”
“Aw shucks.”
Barking laughter, he swerved and parked, said, “Gimme that,” and inspected the list. “Twenty-fourth-floor penthouse. Trust-fund bastard!”
CHAPTER
43
Back at his office, he chewed on an unlit cigar and dove into Academo’s business records, sifting through layers of corporate camouflage.
High-Level, Inc., was a corporation duly registered in the state of Delaware.
Milo said, “Consider the wisecrack uttered.”
Click; save; print. Soon a four-inch paper stack sat next to his screen. He read each sheet and passed it along.
Proposals, prospectuses, other business filings.
The kind of small-print, preposition-clogged legalese that inevitably crosses my eyes and numbs my brain. Party of the first, party of the second; the Marx Brothers collaborating with a desk-jockey churning out municipal regulations.
The gist was that High-Level, Inc., functioned as the maintenance arm of Columb-Tech, Inc., the parent company of five other corporations, including Academo, Inc.
Goodsprings, Inc., owned and operated drug rehab centers in five states.
Vista-Ventures, Inc., owned and operated industrial parks and office complexes in seven states.
Holly-Havenhurst, Inc., owned and operated senior-care facilities in nine states.
Hemi-Spherical, Inc., owned and operated residential complexes in eleven states.
At the helm of each, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President Anthony Nobach and Chief Operating Officer Marden Nobach.
Below the brothers’ names, each company sported an impressive roster of legal counselors and board members. I’d barely unfogged my cerebral cortex when one name caught my eye.
Chief exploratory officer at High-Level, Inc.: Thurston Nobach, M.A.
A title I’d never heard of. Exploring what?
Then I realized if you compressed it to initials, you ended up with another version of CEO.
Exactly the kind of pretense I’d imagined for a psychopathic poseur.
I googled Thurston Nobach and scored on the first hit.
Full-color web page teeming with vertigo-inducing movement as holographic meshes furled, unfurled, and floated around the screen.
Then: utter blackness, followed by the oozing materialization of a red Enter button and an invitation to Traverse My World.
Accepting the offer brought me to a high-def, close-up photo of a good-looking fox-faced man in his thirties sporting wavy, black, shoulder-length hair, a flap of which obscured one eye.
The visible iris was gray and piercing. Below Thurston Nobach’s cleft chin, the silk collar of a peacock-blue shirt was visible, as was a silver chain around a bronze neck. A dyed-blond triangular soul patch shifted to the left by an off-kilter, thin-lipped smile and a left ear graced by a two-carat emerald stud filled out the picture.
Intense and not afraid to be noticed.
A Continue button led me to Ideations, Strivings, Journeys.
Thurston Anthony Nobach, M.A., ABD, thirty-seven years old, listed himself as an alumnus of Old Dominion Day School and The Pedagogic Preparatory Academy, both in Columbus, Ohio. Next came Brown University, where he’d earned a B.A., cum laude, in American studies, followed by Columbia University, where he’d earned a master’s degree in linguistics.
Next screen: bright-red italics on a gray, faux-granite background:
Following all that formal—and formalized—education, I found myself assiduously assessing the relative benefits of intense auto-didacticism versus classroom versus tutorial modes of transmission, e.g. the classic scholarly conundrum and, surprisingly, came to no facile conclusion. Here I must confess to a bit of timidity. Given no clear path, I opted to hazard a new journey, albeit one rife with tendrils that coiled around the conventionality of ancient avatars: e.g. pursuing doctoral studies at Columbia in the hopes of probing ephemerally-transitory and quasi-random patterns of post-cultural grammatology, metaphysical presupposition, and figurative semiology. In the end, I terminated my journey with an ABD that inspired laudatory serenity.
Those initials I recognized: “All But Dissertation.”
Cosmetic shorthand for Ph.D. students who’d either changed their minds or flunked their orals.
After almost-graduation, Thurston Nobach’s intellectual curiosity had “propelled me to seek distant harbors.” First was Maui, Hawaii, where “I autonomously researched the Multi-Ethnic Vox, e.g. the sometimes tenuous, sometimes tense, sometimes tensile kinship/autonomy/orthogonal flat-line between Collective Concept and Voice.”
Next: Auckland, New Zealand, “seeking an antipodal awakening as I continued to decompress after descending the depths of exploratory curiosity in the bathysphere of the crushingly rodent-like marathon masquerading as formal education.”
I.e., doing nothing.
For two years in Florence, “I honed my visual observational skills and eventually reached a place where I could rationally contemplate a carefree swan-dive into the reflecting pool of visual arts. My Da Vinci dream phase, if you will.”
That was memorialized by thumbnails of four pen-and-ink drawings. Broken lines, awkward composition, unclear subject matter.
“I traveled away from that world due to a near-Aortic constriction brought upon by a revelation regarding the ultimately futile process of rendering.”
I.e., I don’t know how to draw.
Nobach’s last recorded overseas trip had taken place eight years ago.
“After finding myself immersed in the Bob Cratchett?/?Uriah Heep tanning vat of the so-called business world, I discovered that my axons and dendrites were atrophying and returned to the world of ideas.”
I.e., an “endowed” year in Warsaw, Poland.
No university mentioned.
Financing courtesy a Holly-Havenhurst Liberal Arts Scholar’s Award.
I googled the fellowship. No mention of anyone else ever receiving it.
The subsidiary that ran old-age homes.
I.e., siphoning money from Daddy.
I pictured Thurston Nobach drifting the streets of Warsaw buttressed by a fat allowance. All that leisure time leading him to come upon the monster who’d given his life new focus.
Milo was ahead of me, breathing hard, frantically flipping pages of the murder book. He stopped, wide-eyed, slapped a page, reversed the binder, and showed it to me.
The Polish newspaper article Basia Lopatinski had given us.
Ignacy Skiwski pretending to play guitar. Surrounded by a small group of young people. Milo jabbed a face. He didn’t need to.
A figure sitting to Skiwski’s left. Long legs suggested height. Sitting low suggested a high waist.
Over eight years, the changes in Thurston Nobach weren’t radical. Back then his face had been a bit softer around the edges, the black hair even longer, bound by a leather headband. No yellow soul patch, diamond earring instead of an emerald, shabby-looking beige tunic in place of the bright-blue shirt.
John Lennon glasses perched atop a beak-like nose as he observed Ignacy Skiwski.
Just another Euro-hippie digging the street vibe.
Until you checked out the smile: razor-lipped, impatient. As if chafing for the opportunity to utter something clever.
And the eyes: hard, judgmental, challenging the camera. The only one of Skiwski’s acolytes to look away from the guitar and face the camera.
Jackal among the sheep.
I said so.
Milo grunted and returned to the documents, working faster, shoulders bunched. I moved on to the final page of Nobach’s website. My Manifesto.
KIND READER, PERMIT ME THE INDULGENCE OF SELECTIVE SELF-EXPRESSION. OR PERHAPS SHOULD WE SET UP A SYNOD, A CONCLAVE, A TED TALK—insert scoffing laughter—AND JOINTLY COME TO THE REASONABLE CONCLUSION THAT MY DARING TO OPINE IS NOTHING MORE THAN A BIT OF COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE FLOTSAM MY POOR BENIGHTED CONSCIOUSNESS NEEDS TO FLING AWAY????
I.e., See? I’m a modest guy.