The Alchemist's Code

9

V asco took his absurd mission seriously and proceeded to demonstrate how efficient he was, requisitioning a couple of night guards to escort us out to the Molo and see us safely aboard the gondola. He was the last to board and the first off at Ca’ Barbolano, where he would not let the rest of us disembark until Luigi had opened the door and confirmed that all was well within. Nor would he let Bruno carry the Maestro upstairs before Giorgio and I had finished bringing in the oar and cushions for overnight storage in the androne and the door had been locked and bolted. Then he shepherded us up the stairs, made sure the apartment was properly secured after we entered, and ordered Giorgio to inspect his family’s quarters in the attic and report any intruders. I smirked and he sneered.

The Maestro had endured this exhibition with astonishing self-control. Now back on his own feet, he wanted to get to work. “The bag, please.”

“Not until I am finished securing the house, Doctor.”

“If you are looking for ghouls, Filiberto,” I said, “then you should begin over here. This is our only guest room, so you must either share the bed with the resident ghoul or sleep out here on a couch.”

The vizio bared his teeth like a dog. “Who’s in there?”

“ Sier Danese Dolfin, about to become son-in-law to messer Counselor Sanudo. Evict him if you wish. We have had very little success.”

Vasco faced a tricky decision, whether or not to intrude on a nobleman and near relation to a ducal counselor in a nobleman’s house, but he rose to the challenge. After a brief glance at the Maestro, who remained studiously blank, he took up a lamp and marched into the spare room. Unfortunately I did not witness the expression on our guest’s face when the dreaded Missier Grande ’s deputy appeared like an apocalyptic nightmare and demanded to know who he was and what he was doing there. Vasco was smirking a little when he came out. He locked the door behind him and I would really have enjoyed seeing Danese’s reaction to that, too.

The vizio inspected the bedrooms with special care-mine, the Maestro’s, Bruno’s-peering in wardrobes and under beds. He went over the kitchen, the dining room, and started in on the salone, confirming that no assassins or demons crouched behind the statues. By then the Maestro and I were in the atelier, I lighting lamps for an all-night session, and he at his desk with a great leather-bound manuscript of Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia.

He looked up angrily as Vasco entered and began snooping around, peering at everything: terrestrial globe, celestial globe, armillary sphere, alchemy bench, reagent shelves, wall of books. The alcove in the center of the books contains a huge oval mirror framed by overweight cherubs. Vasco studied it for a moment, took another moment to locate the hidden catch, then slid the bolt and pushed on the frame. The whole back of the alcove turned on its pivot. There was enough light on the far side for him to recognize the dining room he had seen earlier. He nodded as if satisfied, closed the door again, and bolted it.

Only then did he deign to deliver the precious satchel to the Maestro, who opened it without a word and began going through its contents like a child at Christmas. Vasco settled himself in one of the green chairs, where he could watch. I took the red one facing him, confident I would not be left in peace for long.

“You really think those papers are of any true value?” I inquired. I knew that the entire Turkish army could march through the room without distracting the Maestro from whatever he was doing.

Vasco glanced at him, came to the same conclusion, and answered, “Worth killing for, easily.”

I shook my head. “ Circospetto would never have parted with them without keeping a copy. What he would love to do, of course, is catch Algol and then use his cipher to send false information to Constantinople.”

“How do you know that Algol is spying for the Porte?”

“I don’t,” I admitted. “He could be working for the Vatican, the Louvre, the Escorial, or even Whitehall. All states play the same sort of game. I just happen to have a grudge against the Turks. Perhaps the reason Venice can’t break the cipher is that its man in the Porte has been taken or turned and the writing on those papers is pure canal mud, meant to tantalize the Ten into insanity.”

Vasco shrugged. “You’ll go mad thinking that way.”

“Or Circospetto made it all up by himself to bait his trap for Algol.”

“I wouldn’t put that past him. You’re an expert in code breaking as well as everything else, I suppose?”

“Not everything else.”

He scowled at the fireplace for a moment, then asked in a bored tone, “So what’s a Caesar, that you mentioned earlier?”

“The cipher Julius used. You shift every letter a known number of places along the alphabet. Instead of A you write, say, C, and instead of D you write F. It’s easy to break, because in any language some letters are used much more often than others. In Veneziano, for instance, E and A are about the busiest and they’re close together in the alphabet, so if your ciphertext shows a lot of, say, M ’s and Q ’s, you assume those are A and E. Also R, S, and T are used a lot and fall next to each other, so they’ll stand out as a group. It would be easier if everybody spelled words the same way, and it depends a little on whether your spy has ignored accents or not, but that’s the principle. Once you have pinned down a few letters, the rest follow automatically, as was shown by Leon Battista Alberti of Florence in-”

“But shown much earlier,” said the Maestro, “by Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Is-haq ibn as-Sabbah ibn ’omran ibn Ismail al-Kindi. Ninth century, in fact. Come over here and make yourself useful. You, too, Vizio.”

We rose and went like good little schoolboys.

“Every one of the sheets,” the Maestro said, “has ten five-letter words in a row, and no more than thirty-two rows on a page. This may be steganography, where the text is hidden in full view. You may have to take the first letter of the fourth word and the third of the one below and so on, or it may even require a Cardan grille to identify the meaningful letters. Let us hope that the original was copied exactly. But it wouldn’t be, of course. The spacing between lines varies, see? And we can’t tell whether it did in the original or not. I want you each to take a pen and a sheet of paper and invent a page just like these, 320 nonsense words in 10 columns. Go to it.”

Vasco was frowning, but I suppose it seemed a better alternative than total boredom, so he accepted a pen and an inkwell, and went over to work on the slate-topped table with the crystal ball. I sat at my side of the desk and rapidly discovered that the job was not as easy as it seemed. When we turned in our assignments, the Maestro studied them while we peered over his shoulders.

Then he chuckled. “You have disproved your own hypothesis, Alfeo! You see where you both went wrong?”

Fortunately I did. “We weren’t repeating ourselves,” I said. “I never wrote a double letter, but the originals have lots of them. There’s even three K ’s in a row there. I never began a word with the same letter I’d used to start the one before. And we never wrote a real word. Algol has a MOLO and even PASTA if you ignore the space in the middle.”

“And so on,” the Maestro said sourly, annoyed that I had spoiled his revelation. “You were too random! Your lack of order is a sort of order in itself. That means that these originals were not made by someone just writing random letters. There is meaning in them. Now all we have to do is pull it out.”

“How can you do that if you don’t know what language it is?” Vasco demanded.

“Not many languages are likely-Tuscan, Latin, Spanish, Veneziano, Arabic, Turkish, French. They use Old Persian in the Porte sometimes. I can read most of those and recognize the rest. But perhaps I can find another way. Take this trash away, Vizio.” The old man heaved himself to his feet, I handed him his staff, and he hobbled over to the crystal. “You can both get some sleep. I’ll lock up, Alfeo.”

I doused the other lamps and shooed Vasco out of the atelier ahead of me.

I did not offer to share my bed with him, but I did find him a blanket and a pillow. He stretched out on a couch in the salone.

The last thing I did before going to bed was to consult my tarot. It gave me an assortment of the minor arcana, all low numbers without a single court card or trump. I had not seen such a disgusting heap since before I was toilet trained. Deciding I must be overtired, I fell into bed.