L Romano Alexandra Lovett
L Romano archaeology
Ad infinitum, for all the other combinations of names and words that might be relevant to find what we need. I imagine West, in classic tech wizard fashion, is casting a spell to open a portal that leads to a different internet than the mortal world uses, one where answers come immediately with the right series of keystrokes and a secret handshake with the devil.
Needless to say, zero out of two of us are surprised when he’s the first to say, “I think I found him.”
“What?”I spring to my feet and practically body-slam him as I jump onto the couch where he reclines. I grab for his laptop.
“Whoa, okay, hang on,ow—” he mutters as my elbow lands somewhere around his lap where an elbow probably shouldn’t be. “Holy—Give me a second, will you?”
“Sorry,” I say half-heartedly as he holds the device out of reach and, still wincing from my unintentional low blow, gingerly shifts himself so we can sit side by side. “What’d you find? I’m dying here.”
West angles his screen my way, showing a LinkedIn profile for one Luca Goedhart.
“No profile picture—red flag,” I blurt out, already chewing on my thumbnail. I’m not even a nail biter. My nerves are finding whatever outlet they can, I guess.
“Okay, slow your roll—it’s very reasonable to limit the pictures of yourself you put online. Lots of people who work in tech don’t even use social me—”
“Right, right, snap judgment retracted,” I interrupt. “Let’s get to what you know, please, thank you, love you, et cetera.”
West lets out a dramatic sigh. “Anyway, Dr. Goedhart here was going to be my last guess, to be honest, because…I mean, it’s the least Italian-looking name of them all. But I gave him a shot, and as soon as the wordsprofessor of archaeologyhit my screen, he had my full attention. From there, I got the following—most of which, for the record, came from his LinkedIn alone, and who knew anyone still used that site these days, right? But I digress—
“He was studying at the same university in Naples as Dr. Alex at the same time she was, but he appears to have transferred to some school in the UK around—you guessedit—twenty years ago. Finished his doctorate, has had a globetrotting career taking him from digs in Turkey and Greece to a university professorship in Thailand, until just this year, when he returned to his roots as an archaeologist by working on an excavation project”—West’s eyes lock on mine, his brows lifting for emphasis—“at the Pompeii Archaeological Park.”
I don’t think I’ve taken a breath since “professor of archaeology.” Don’t know if there’s still air in my lungs, actually. All of this information coming together, and so quickly, it’s painting a picture that feels entirely too obvious, too in our faces, to be real. Thismustbe him.
Though I don’t need any more convincing, and I doubt he does, either, West goes on. “A few other bits of supporting evidence, if we need it—he’s connected to my dad on LinkedIn, and not to be a broken record, but who knew my dad used LinkedIn? Dr. Goedhart’s dad is Dutch, thus the name, but his mom is Italian, thus the family flat, where, yes, according to doorbell labels, he is once again in residence. And finally, this is my own conjecture, but Goedhart,Lovett, my heart, your heart, wordplay that is both romantic and cheesy as hell. Now, then”—he pauses to exhale a heavy breath, then reaches over to lace his fingers with mine—“thoughts?”
It’s all I can do to give him a dazed, awestruck smile. “You really are a wizard.”
He scoffs. “Okay, this is truly not that difficult, and if you had been the one to search ‘L Goedhart archaeologist,’ you’d have laid out these same findings for me, your thoroughly dazzled audience.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “But you wouldn’t be dazzled, because you’d be all ‘oh neat, I could’ve found all that, too.’ ”
“Is that really what I sound like to you?”
“Regardless of how much or little effort it took,” I go on, “my mind is pretty blown. So, should we, like…send him a message on LinkedIn or something?”
West’s lip curls with distaste. “What are we going to do, make a catfish account for a fictional Gen Xer? Give him a name like ‘Chuck Chapman,’ a vague job title like ‘consultant’?”
“You came up with all of that way too easily for a guy whoisn’tdying to catfish someone on a professional networking site.”
The compromise we land on, in the end, is West using his real identity to email Luca Goedhart. I write the message, using the connection of Dr. Danny to fabricate a story about a project for school and looking to reach some of his dad’s contacts and blah, blah, blah. I/West request that they/we meet up sometime, promise to cause minimal inconvenience, and even offer to come to him at Pompeii. West gets to edit the message to his satisfaction, then sends it off.
It’s a delicate balance of lies, truths, and things in between, but I can tell it still makes West uneasy, being the one to go out on a limb like this. Especially for the meetup that feels like the most promising yet.
Or the one with the most potential for disaster, but I don’t say that part out loud.
