Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 30, No. 13, Mid-December 1985

The Key in Michael by Elsa Barker

If I had not happened to say to Dexter Drake one evening that I had often been surprised by the strain of childlike gaiety in the tragic Russian temperament, I suppose I should never have heard the remarkable story of Prince Boris Vorontsov and the Key in Michael.

My friend the detective had just finished the strenuous case of the Jade Earring, and was idling after dinner, his slim athletic length stretched out on our sitting room couch.

“Yes, Howard!” Drake looked round at me with his keen black eye. “And it was that childlike strain in the tragic Russian soul which brought me one of the oddest problems I was ever called upon to solve. Indeed, I have rarely been more puzzled than I was for those few days in Paris, Nice, and Monte Carlo. I’ll tell you about it.”

Drake swung his feet off the couch and sat up. His lethargy was gone now; his bronzed aquiline face had come suddenly alive.

“Just a moment, Howard.” He rose to his feet. “I’ll need that curious paper I found in the Paris studio, and the diagram I worked out from it; they’re in my filing cabinet.”

He turned and strode down the corridor to his study.

It was seldom that I caught the great criminal expert in a storytelling mood, seldom that he had time for storytelling. But with his immense experience in so many parts of the earth, he could have gone right on and on, I suppose, like Scheherazade, for a thousand and one nights.

In three minutes he was back in the sitting room, with a large yellow envelope in his hand. Suppose I leave out the quotation and double quotation marks, and just let you imagine Dexter Drake sitting there on the couch and telling the story to me...

It was late March [Drake said] in the second year after the Bolshevist horror began. Coming up from Constantinople, where I had been sent by the New York police to find a man who was dead when I got there, I decided to give myself a late holiday week in Paris, see my old friends of the Paris police, and make a few social calls.

For two years I had had no letter from my friend, the eighty-year-old Russian Princess Vorontsov, though I had learned in Constantinople that she had escaped, from her devastated country and was back in her Paris house, in the Boulevard Suchet. Escaped from Russia — at eighty! But that did not really surprise me. She had always been an amazing person.

Her only son, Prince Michael Vorontsov, had also, I learned, got through the net of the Red Terror and had made his way into France; but he had died three months ago, in Nice. That was all I could learn about them in Constantinople. Where was Prince Boris, the old lady’s grandson? They could not tell me. Was he alive? They did not know.

Now, I had known Boris Vorontsov since he was fifteen years old, though I had not seen him since the spring of 1914, when he was twenty. A delightful, impulsive, romantic young Russian he had been. What was he now — if he had survived?

But the first friend I saw in Paris assured me that Boris was with his grandmother. He had been in the old Russian army of the czar, and he also had made his way out — but alone, and after great hardships. Was he changed? No, not on the surface — the same gay, irresponsible, childlike young soul we had always known.

“But has the old princess any money now?” I asked.

“Nobody seems to know,” my friend said. “She keeps only three servants instead of seven, and she no longer wears jewels — not a stone. She won’t even talk about her escape — it’s all very mysterious.”

The servants, I thought, might be Russians, glad even of a roof.

“The princess,” my friend ran on, “says that the world has come to an end, but that she has to sit tidily on the ruins for eighteen years longer, and cultivate her neglected talents.”

It sounded just like her.

Many times the old princess had assured me that she was going to live to be ninety-eight. When she was a girl, and lady-in-waiting to some Russian empress whose name I have forgotten, a gypsy woman had told her that her span of life was a hundred years minus two years. Nothing could shake her belief in it. It was one of her many delightful oddities. “I shall see you a middle-aged man with gray hair, Dexter Drake,” she said to me once, years ago, when I was twenty-one and she seventy.

While the octogenarian princess was “cultivating her neglected talents,” I wondered when secret emissaries of the Reds would begin to peddle the Vorontsov jewels round the capitals of western Europe. Rumor had valued them long ago at the equivalent of a million dollars.

And Prince Michael was dead! But him I had never known well, for he was generally in Russia. I remembered a portrait of him in brilliant uniform which hung over the chimneypiece in the great semi-detached room the Vorontsovs called the studio — for the princess dabbled with paints. She also wrote verses. The house in the Boulevard Suchet had once belonged to a sculptor who had sacrificed part of his garden to build the big studio. The garage was behind it, with its back against the house. If you will remember these details, they will help you to visualize my struggles with the Vorontsov puzzle. But the excitement did not begin until after Boris went down to Nice.

In the late afternoon of that first day of my holiday week in Paris, I was ringing the bell in the gate of their high-walled garden. I saw the house door slowly open and a middle-aged manservant — a Frenchman — came to unlock the gate.

No, the princess was not at home; she had been in Nice for the last month. But Prince Boris was there; he was alone in the studio.

“Then don’t announce me,” I said, and I turned down the little gravel walk to the right, and knocked on the well-remembered oaken door.

The door opened — there was a breathless moment...

“Why, Dexter! Dexter Drake! I don’t believe it — I don’t believe it — I don’t—”

Grasping my hand, Boris drew me into the studio.

He was wearing a brown velvet house coat, and there was a gold-tipped cigarette between his slim fingers.

My friend had been right. The terrible years had but slightly changed Boris Vorontsov. The slight graceful figure was half an inch taller, maybe, and he had acquired a little yellow mustache. But the old spontaneous gaiety was there still, the laughter on the lips and in the tawny eyes.

Ensconcing me in the largest easy-chair, he gave me tea from the samovar, gave me sweets, cigarettes.

Where was I staying? But I must have my things sent right over. Of course I must stay with them. Grandmamma would be so delighted. He was just starting for Nice, that night, to fetch her home. I must remain here while he was gone — a couple of days only. François would make me comfortable — he and the Russian cook. Of course I remembered his own old room at the head of the stairs? That was for me. He now occupied the Louis XIV room — the one which had been his father’s. (Prince Michael, you know.) I had no engagement that evening? No? Oh, that was perfect! Then we could dine here together, early; I could see him off at the Gare de Lyon, then fetch my things from the hotel.

The lapse of years seemed unreal. This had always been their family living room; the French drawing room in the main building was used only on formal occasions.

A few minor changes I noticed. A fine tapestry portrait of Louis XIV, with the sun disk over his head, which used to hang in Prince Michael’s bedroom upstairs, was now in the studio — hung flat on the door of a large closet at the back of the room. And in the deep alcove, which with the closet divided that end of the studio, a new and magnificent lionskin covered the couch, in place of the old Kis Kilim.

“Isn’t he a fine beast?” Boris smiled, when I noticed the lion. “Grandmamma found him six weeks ago in a shop in the Rue Chateaudun.”

I did not say, but I thought that he must have been rather expensive.

It is better not to talk to Russians now about Russia — unless they mention it first. After a time Boris mentioned it, told me how he got out. It was a hair-raising tale, and it added a man’s respect to my old affection for him. A man’s and an adventurer’s respect. I have.been in some dangerous corners myself.

“Grandmamma says I must work now,” he told me, “develop my brains, earn money. I am going to study medicine. She says life has now done the worst it can do. So we must look forward — be gay of heart.”

Yes. Sitting “tidily” on the ruins.

Boris was silent for a moment. Then suddenly he looked round at me with his frank boyish eyes.

“I really don’t know what we’re living on,” he declared. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, Dexter! But she got out of Russia with nothing — disguised in a peasant’s rags. I believe there is something else. She helps the others — those who also have lost everything. Oh, she is deep — deep! Her playfulness doesn’t deceive me. She has always complained of my indiscretion, but before she went down to Nice — she joined an old friend there at three hours’ notice — she said that on her return she had something for me to do — a difficult task. Though she smiled — you know her odd little twisted smile. I wonder—”

When it was time for Boris to go to the station, the French manservant, François, got us the taxicab. The big motorcar of other days was gone now. The garage behind the studio was empty.

As I left my friend in a wagon-lit of the Riviera express, he said, with a little flush of apology:

“If you come home late, Dexter, after François has gone to bed, you’ll be sure that the gate is locked, won’t you? Grandmamma never used to be nervous, but she charged me specially about the gate.”

I assured him that I would even verify François’s care of it. But it was not like the princess to be fidgety.

After getting my bags from the hotel, I returned to the house. Until a late hour I sat smoking and reading in the studio, alone with the portrait of the dead Prince Michael. The fate of that whole group — stark tragedy. And the way they face life now, those who survive, is very fine.

The next day I spent most of my time with a group of old friends in the Latin Quarter. My favorite section of Paris has always been the romantic Left Bank.

It was midnight when I returned to the Vorontsov house. I found the studio lighted, and on the table a telegram for me. It was from Boris, at Nice:

I was profoundly shocked — shocked and grieved to the heart. Dead — that amazing old lady! “Something very strange.” Whatever did the boy mean?

If I had not known that there were many Russians in Nice, I would have taken the first train for the south. But I decided to telegraph first, then wait for his promised letter.

The next day the Paris newspapers reported the death of the princess, at Nice, reported the presence of her grandson in Nice, gave an account of the Vorontsov family’s long and romantic history.

When Boris’s letter came, I knew for certain that I had a mystery to unravel — though what it was all about, what the princess wanted me to do for her, I had not the remotest conjecture.

Here is the poor boy’s perplexing letter:

“The key — in Michael.” I glanced up at that portrait over the chimneypiece. Yes, what else could she mean? I would take the picture down, after the servants had gone to bed. A key — to what? Yet, why “Left Bank” and “27 B,” with no street name? But perhaps the mind of the dying woman was already wandering. Or there might really be some mystery about her way of living.

The future looked dark for my young friend. Without years of professional training, what career would be open to him in France? In America? We had not jobs enough, then, for our own ex-soldiers.

You know I had just come up from Constantinople, where penniless Russian nobles were starving in droves — literally, I mean.

It was after midnight when I locked the door between the studio and the main building, drew the heavy curtains close over the windows, and set to work. From a chair I climbed onto the broad mantelpiece, got the portrait of Prince Michael off its hook, and then to the floor, where I laid it face down on a rug. Inch by inch I went around the picture back, between the canvas and the stretcher. I was feeling for a thin key — feeling with the tip of my pocket nail file and listening for the click of metal against metal.

I had gone halfway round when the file met an obstruction — something soft, though, not hard.

Carefully, with the file and my thumbnail, I got it out — a tightly folded piece of thin gray paper. Was that what she had meant?

It had been at the bottom, near the right-hand corner. She could have got it in there without taking the picture down!

My heart must have been going ninety-five to the minute, as I unfolded the sheet of gray paper. Here is what I read:

There is something about a cipher which sets the imagination spinning — anybody’s imagination.

Though I went back to the picture on the rug and continued my search, I found nothing more. The cipher was the “key.”

So I rehung the portrait of Prince Michael.

Now, I have made it my business to know a good deal about ciphers, and there were peculiarities about this one which told me at a glance that it would be difficult to read.

But my first question was this: Had the dying princess mentioned my name just because I had always been associated in her mind with mysteries and enigmas of all sorts? This message in my hand might be written in a family code, which her grandson knew how to read. It seemed more delicate, more discreet, to show it to him before trying to read it myself. Many old families have hereditary secrets, which even the youngest of them would prefer not to share with any outsider. I might stumble on almost any romance — yes, any state secret — by fumbling with this “key” in Prince Michael Vorontsov.

There floated before my mind’s eye a vivid picture of the princess, at the moment of our last parting several years before, at the garden door of this very room: A vigorous little old lady, not more than five feet two inches tall, in a richly embroidered black velvet robe with creamy lace round the neck. Very black eyes — eyes incredibly young — smiling out of that splendid old face with its network of tiny wrinkles.

In parting she had kissed me on both cheeks and told me to be wise — “sois sage!” as the French mother says to her child.

It is always some little memory which tugs at our heart when a friend is newly dead.

Before going to bed that night I hid the mysterious sheet of gray paper in a belt which I wear next my skin when traveling. And I locked the door of my bedroom. There was more than a chance that I might be the guardian of something extremely important, which I had better not meddle with until I had consulted with Boris.

But you know there is nothing which fascinates me like a mystery. Though I might try to keep my mind off the puzzle, the mind spins its own web on the borders of sleep. That short line at the end of the figures, “In 1739,” with the first words, “Left Bank,” drew around themselves all sorts of memories about the left bank of the Seine in the thirties of the eighteenth century. I thought of the Hotel Biron, finished in 1730; but its street number is not 27B. Then in 1735 was built that little hunting lodge in the Ruelle des Gobelins. The year “1739” had a gruesome association, for that was the birth year of Charles Henri Sanson, the executioner under the Terror — though he belonged to another quarter of Paris...

But my falling asleep did not end the events of that night. The window ledge of my room was not more than three feet from the flat roof of the garage. It was still dark when I was awakened by a slight sound outside my window.

I always know where my revolver is. In three seconds I was sending a shot — aiming low, for the legs — at a huge figure which had just risen to its feet at the far end of that roof. The man had climbed up from the garden wall — an athletic feat.

With a smothered cry he disappeared. I heard him drop on the other side of the wall; then after a moment I heard uneven running footsteps in the quiet street beyond. Hit, but not badly wounded!

Midnight marauders are no novelty in my life, but I wondered if there was some link between this one and the Vorontsov puzzle.

I rushed downstairs to the telephone, called up the police, the Sûreté, made myself known to them, and reported the case.

“There’s a street lamp on the corner,” I said, “and I saw the broad face of a man, his huge bulk, the dark cap he wore. He made off limping in the direction of the railway track. If you catch him tonight, telephone me” (I gave the number) “and I will come down and identify him. Otherwise it will have to wait two or three days, until I come back from Nice. Please give my regards to Inspector Lagrange and the chief.”

I spent the rest of the night on the lionskin couch in the studio, to be near the telephone. The servants had awakened at the sound of the shot, but I reassured them and sent them back to bed.

The police did not report a capture that night, but the next morning François and I found bloodstains on the garden wall. I told the butler that some thief had probably read in the newspaper of the family’s absence in the south, and was after the silver.

I was not sure of it myself. Until I knew what the cryptograph meant, I was keeping an open mind. The face I had seen in the light of the street lamp was decidedly Russian...

My meeting with Boris in Nice was affecting. He had been deeply attached to his grandmother.

When I showed him the “key,” his face went white.

“But I know nothing about it — nothing,” he gasped.

We were sitting in my bedroom in the hotel.

“And the princess never taught you a cipher,” I asked, “never talked about one? Neither she nor your father?”

“Never anything definite. But she was always interested in mysteries — after she met you. Five or six years ago, when you told us about the Rigaud case and the secret writing, you remember how keen she was. This paper is in her handwriting. Of course it may be a copy, but if so, who has the original? And how did it come to be hidden in my father’s portrait?”

I got up and walked the floor, thinking. Boris was watching me, and there was a glint of excitement behind the grief in his eyes.

I stopped beside his chair, and looked down at him,

“Some secret of great importance may be hidden here,” I said. “That is probably what she intended to tell you, on her return to Paris. Perhaps she had come to question the gypsy’s prophecy that she would live to be ninety-eight.”

The quick tears filled his eyes — spilled over.

“But I never could read it, Dexter — never in a thousand years.”

“I’m sure that you couldn’t. And I’m sure now that she meant me to help you with this, when she said, ‘Tell Dexter Drake.’ If she had time, if she could have controlled her speech, she would doubtless have told you all the details of whatever secret is hidden here. I feel that she laid a charge upon me, with her dying breath.”

The dear boy asked me to read the cipher — as if it had been a sheet of music! He had always believed I could do anything.

I sat down again, and took the paper from his hand. Then for the first time I examined it closely.

The highest number, 36, and the lowest, 3, proved that the letter significators do not go straight from 1 to 26, the number of letters in the English alphabet. There was a definite system of skipping, therefore. “Left Bank — in 1739” pointed clearly enough to the English language.

“As you see,” I said, “there is no division between the words. That makes it immensely more difficult to read.”

And if this was a secret writing which the princess had made herself, she was clever enough to avoid the obvious. She would never copy a ready-made cryptogram. I believed from the first that the very ingenious creation was hers.

There were sixty-seven numbers in all. I made a little table which showed that there were eighteen different numbers used.

Boris had been watching me in silence, nervously pulling at his little golden mustache. Suddenly he leaned forward:

“Dexter! Do you think — you know my father was very close to the czar. Though this paper is in Grandmamma’s writing, I wonder—”

The same question had occurred to me. But I told myself that when I had read the paper, when I knew what the princess wanted me to do, I could judge for myself whether I would go on with it.

Let me tell you briefly — for the reading of ciphers is a fine art — how I confidently started on my labors. I made another table, which showed the number of times each symbol was used.

You know, of course, that the letter “e” and the word “the” appear oftener than any others, in English. As the figure “5” appeared oftenest, eight times, was it “e”? Of the seven three-number combinations ending in 5, two were alike — 35-26-5. Ah! Had I found the word “the”? Once also, 5 was doubled as “e” is constantly doubled, in such words as “free,” and “street.” But when I glanced at the first five numbers, 5-35-26-5-18 — oh, if 35-26-5 was “the,” then the writing began with “Ethe—,” which was only possible if the opening word was “ether” or some of its derivatives and if 18 was “r.” It took me some time to prove that 18 could not be “r,” and also that 5 did not behave elsewhere like “e.” Neither did 9, which appeared seven times, nor 26, which appeared six times.

“Well, well!” I exclaimed.

After an hour I had convinced myself that the word “the” did not appear in that writing at all, and that even the letter “e” must be well down on the list.

Then I knew — I knew that infinite care and labor had been expended upon this cipher, that the very words composing the message had been deliberately chosen by one who knew how to avoid the obvious frequencies of the letters.

I drew a long breath. I sat back in my chair.

“Is it going to be difficult, Dexter?”

“I’m afraid so. Your wonderful grandmother seems to have created a masterpiece of cryptography.”

Boris gave me his affectionate smile.

“But you think she composed it herself?”

I nodded.

“But why, why?”

“How can I possibly tell, until I have read it?”

“But what can that be at the bottom,” he asked. “In 1739?”

“Being the clearest thing, on the surface,” I said, “it is probably not what it seems.”

Then I told him about the man on the garage roof.

“But your description,” he cried, “makes me think of Sergey Kovalchuk. He came from one of our Russian estates and he was our Paris gardener until 1914. Three months ago he came to see Grandmamma. He was quite ragged. She gave him food, gave him money, clothes, and she got him a job somewhere. With whom? Oh, I don’t remember!”

I lost no time in telegraphing my old friend Inspector Lagrange to look for one Sergey Kovalchuk, and ascertain if his legs were uninjured. It is generally easy to find a foreigner in Paris.

The funeral of the Princess Vorontsov, in one of the Russian churches of Nice, was very impressive. What richness of temperament there is in those Slavs!

But in the late afternoon I left Boris with his Russian friends and went away by myself. I wanted to think, and all day I had not had a moment alone. I strolled up to the station, and took the first train for Monte Carlo. You know it is only ten miles from Nice to the gamblers’ mecca, and that view of the Mediterranean always frees something in me.

The princess — an original soul she was — would have preferred that I mourn her that night in my own way.

I dined alone on the terrace and thought of her. In the days of her wealth she had told me gaily many a story of winning and losing at Monte Carlo. She had always insisted that some day a clever brain would “dig out the fault” in the roulette wheel and milk the casino cow as dry as a rock. Prince Michael, too, I remembered, had a weakness for watching the spin of the ivory ball. And he also had died down here.

After dinner I strolled into the casino.

Oh, I had not abandoned the problem of the cipher! Having failed to make head or tail of it, I was giving my mind that refreshment which acts on our thought as a bath acts on the body. I went into one of the gaming rooms — not to play, but to watch.

As I stood near one table, right before me were two middle-aged American women, a fat one and a thin one. The fat one, as I judged from their comments, was new to the Riviera. She wanted to play; but the thin one was trying to dissuade her with the warning that in the end the casino bank always wins and the players lose, because of the zero at the head of the wheel — the bank’s rake-off.

As I listened, slightly amused, an idea came to me. Could the Princess Vorontsov have been winning at the gaming tables the money to keep herself going? The idea was not nearly so wild as it sounds. As everyone knows, many old ladies seem to make some sort of living at the tables, playing those little conservative systems of theirs.

Late that night, on my return to Nice, I went to Boris’s room and asked him if his grandmother had been playing.

“Winning, you mean? But I really don’t know.”

He then showed me her Paris bankbook, which he had just found. Five months ago the princess had deposited fifteen thousand francs, three months ago twenty thousand francs. Those figures were something to think about.

But neither of us wanted to question the casino people, nor anyone else. It would have seemed disrespectful of the dead woman.

Again Boris talked of the little he knew about her escape, how she had lain in the forest at night, had been shot at, had been half drowned.

“My father, you know, was not with her,” he said. “They found each other in France. All her courage and gaiety — oh, she was just trying to keep me in good spirits! But of course I can’t study medicine now. How many years does it take? I shall have to give up the lease of the dear house, sell the furniture — just to exist, until I get some kind of work to do.”

The next day we returned to Paris, and I telephoned Inspector Lagrange at the Sûreté. Yes, the police had got Sergey Kovalchuk. At first he was half hysterical, babbling about some letter from his mother in Russia. When asked why he tried to enter the house in the Boulevard Suchet, he had muttered, “Looking for something.” Then he became stubbornly silent.

“We had better see Sergey tomorrow,” I said to Boris, “and try to make him confess just what he was looking for.”

“Oh, Dexter! It might have something to do with our puzzle!”

I intended to shut myself up, in that quiet house behind the garden, and wrestle with the “key in Michael.” Whether it solved my friend’s problem, or got him into deeper trouble, we had to know what it meant. There is something hypnotic about a mystery.

After Boris went to bed that night, in the Louis XIV room which had been Prince Michael’s, I spent two full hours figuring out combinations of those numbers. Yes, the frequencies were all wrong. After “e” the natural succession runs roughly, t, a, o, i, n, s, h; “r” and “u” are well down on the list. But that knowledge was getting me nowhere.

Then I tried more recondite systems. I had already tried reading it backward, even tried French, — German, Italian, with the same negative result. Suppose it were written in Russian, after all?

Of course, “27 B” might have nothing to do with a house on the Left Bank. Perhaps 27 was the letter “b.” But there are eight letters, vowels and consonants, which can follow “b” in our language, and probably five thousand words which begin with “b.”

Piqued and exasperated, I finally went to bed.

You know how, as we doze off to sleep, any casual words we have heard in the last twenty-four hours or so may go floating through the mind. I heard again that thin American woman in the gaming room telling the fat one, “In the long run the bank always wins.” In my half-sleeping mind, bank got mixed up with “Left Bank” and “27 B.” Then one half of my brain was reminding the other half that 26, not 27, was at the left of the bank’s zero on the roulette wheel.

My heart began pounding. I sat up in bed — broad awake.

“Left Bank, 27 B, 26—”

Now what did follow 26, at the left of the wheel? Surely not 27, for the numbers in the circle are all placed irregularly. I had not played roulette for years.

“But it might be! It might be the key!” I cried aloud.

I leaped out of bed. In my bare feet I rushed down the hall and threw open the door of my friend’s room, switched on the light.

“Boris! Boris, wake up! Have you got a roulette book?”

“W-wh-what?” he answered drowsily.

“Have you got a roulette book?” I repeated rather impatiently.

“A — a what?”

I plumped down on the side of the bed.

“Any book on roulette. You must have something of the kind in the house. Everybody who knows the Riviera — Wake up!”

“B-but I am awake. There must be one” — a deep sigh — “somewhere in the house. I’ll look — in the morning.”

“No, no! I must have it now. It’s about the cipher.”

That woke him all right.

“I’m not sure,” I explained, as he threw on his dressing gown and slippers. “I just had a sudden idea — I half dreamed it. But that’s what acumen is, nine times out of ten — a quick grab at some floating subconscious perception.”

“We’ll try the bookshelves in the studio first,” Boris said.

I stopped in my room to snatch a few garments, then followed him downstairs.

In the studio we switched on all the lights and set to work, hunting along the shelves.

One of the first books I saw bore the title Cryptography. So the princess had studied the subject!

It was Boris who found the roulette book.

“Look!” he cried. “It has the design of the wheel as a frontispiece!”

I grabbed it — examined it hurriedly.

To the left of the zero, “the Bank,” the numbers ran 26, 3, 35, and so forth. The 27 was way around to the right, on the lower arc.

“But wait!” I cried. And I counted rapidly backward from 27... “Why, Boris! There’s just the right number of letters, twenty-six, going round to the left from 27 to 26, which is next to the zero, ‘the Bank.’ So 26 could be a.”

“Dexter! You don’t mean it!” He clutched my arm excitedly.

“If it begins at the left of the Bank, the zero,” I said, “and if 26 should be a and 27 be b, then — don’t you see? — the order of letters must jump hack and forth between them. Then 3, next to 26 a, would be c, and 13, next to 27 b, would be d, and so on.”

I began to write down the letters beside the numbers on the wheel diagram. Of course I might be chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, but suppose it should be the solution! Oh, it would have been clever — infernally clever of her to have thought out such a thing!

Here is the scale I made. The black and red of the roulette wheel do not show, but the colors played no part in the Key in Michael.

My money belt was still around my waist. In three seconds I had the gray sheet of paper in my hands, and was jotting down the numbers on another sheet, with the tentative letters beneath them. After the first four letters, I shouted:

“It works! Man alive, it works! I have got a word already — the word is rear.”

Then I ran right on to the end without stopping.

Here is what I had!

It was the work of a moment to separate the words:

“How she piled up the r’s,” I cried, “by using ‘rear,’ ‘near’ and ‘lair’ and the us by ‘cubits’ and Regulus’! Look at the s’s, too! How she kept down the number of e’s, did not once use the word ‘the,’ and threw out all the usual frequencies! A technical masterpiece!”

“But Dexter! What does it mean? Would she have appealed to you with her dying breath, just to decipher a poem in free verse?”

“Of course not. Can’t you see — can’t you read between the lines? What do you fancy she means when she says her stars are shining?”

“Stars?” His tawny eyes widened with wonder.

“Yes, what would she hide in a difficult code, and doubly hide again in these cryptic lines?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Something on the Left Bank — but how stupid of me! Of course ‘Left Bank’ and the ‘27 B’ were only the key to the cipher itself.”

His face fell. He looked around for a cigarette, lighted one.

“It seems to me, Dexter, that we’re just where we were before.”

“Does it? Does it?” I strode up and down the studio.

Boris, who had dropped down in a chair, looked round at me suddenly, and there was a look of awe on his face:

“It’s just as if she were speaking to us from another dimension of space — ‘by a comets lair, near Regulus, behind the sun!’ ”

Then I took from the shelf that book I had found, Cryptography, and showed it to him.

“I know now — know for sure,” I said, “that this cipher was written for you. Had she lived, on her return from the south she intended to give you the Key in Michael, give you this book on cryptography, and then watch your struggles with them. The secret concealed in those figures will change your whole life. There is no other possible inference now. And how like her it was to make a great game of it! ‘Perhaps Dexter will help you,’ she said, when she knew I was in the house. Gay of heart, you know. Courage and gaiety. The echo of tragedy under the childlike laughter.”

If you could have seen that boy’s face!

“Now you ought to know what she meant by ‘your sun’ — yours,” I said. “Something concrete — some object, when she says ‘rear of.’ Something known to yourself and your grandmother. Think, Boris, think!”

“Why — she gave me a sunset picture; it’s hanging in my room.”

We rushed upstairs again.

Yes, there was the sunset hung high, at least five feet from the floor, and it was only a small canvas.

“But she says ‘two cubits high,’ Boris, and two English cubits are only three feet — not five or six. And look — only a blank wall behind it.”

I sounded the wall — no sign of a secret hiding place.

Then I tried another tack. “What did your grandmother ever say about a comet? I want the comet’s lair.”

“Why — why, they used to call her motorcar the Comet. It went so fast, you know, and it had a vapory tail. But she gave it to the French government in the early days of the war.”

“The garage!” I cried. “The Comet’s lair! But she says ‘by’ a comet’s lair — not in it. The studio is ‘by’ the lair.” And I rushed downstairs again.

As I passed through the studio door, my eye lighted on something which brought me up with a start.

“I’m just going to think this out now,” I said. “Will you lie down over there, on the couch in the alcove, and be very quiet?”

Boris stretched himself out on the lionskin from the Rue Châteaudun. I went and sat down in the far corner of the room.

“How kind you are, Dexter, to take all this trouble for me!”

“Kind? But I wouldn’t have missed this for worlds! It’s a case of the sort which your grandmother used to delight in. I have everything now, but one link in the chain.”

We were both utterly still for a minute or two.

“Your sun!” I leaped to my feet. “I’ve got it.”

He came running from the alcove — breathless with excitement.

I pointed to that Louis XIV tapestry which hung, as I have told you, on the door of the closet, which with the alcove divided that end of the studio.

“When did she bring that tapestry down from your father’s room — your room now?”

“Let me see — yes, the very same day she brought home the lion.”

“Of course, of course! As every high school child has learned, Louis XIV was the sun king, the Roi Soleil; the sun disk was his emblem. It’s all over the royal buildings of his time, and look at it — there at the top of the tapestry. Your Louis XIV room, your tapestry, your sun, therefore. ‘Rear of your sun,’ in that closet.”

“But she says, ‘near Regulus.’ ”

“Of course it’s near Regulus. Don’t you know the star Regulus is in the sign Leo, the Lion? Your grandmother bought that lionskin for the alcove six weeks ago, you told me. So that was the time when she found the word Regulus, which had u’s enough in it to help make that cipher obscure. Then she ran down to Nice — postponing the revelation until her return. I’ve not seen the inside of that closet, but closet and alcove are backed by the comet’s lair, and behind your sun-king tapestry, two cubits high, three feet, we shall find—”

He leaped at the door, threw it open, switched on the electric light which hung on a cord from the ceiling. On the closet floor were some cardboard boxes containing paint tubes, a palette, paint rags; and on the back wall was hung an old linen curtain, soiled and discolored.

The closet was shallower than the alcove, by fully two feet.

I drew the curtain aside — revealing a wall of paneled wood. The top of the lower panel was about three feet from the floor.

“Two cubits high,” I said. And I began running my fingers along the top of the panel, feeling, pressing here and there for a concealed spring. That is one of my little detective specialties, you know.

Suddenly, noiselessly, so delicate was the mechanism, the panel tipped over from the top on its oiled hinges.

The smoke-gray steel of a small safe caught the light from the overhead lamp.

“Oh — oh! I never knew it was there!” Boris cried. “But the combination! We haven’t the combination!”

“Yes, we have. Look at the dial. It’s a double-combination lock, with a double radiating disk. It requires both letters and numbers to get into this hiding place of your wonderful grandmother’s. Suppose we try, ‘In 1739?’ I kept that for the last. I thought it was not what it seemed.”

I dropped on one knee beside the safe. On the outer ring of the disk I picked out the letters “i-n,” then on the inner ring I picked out “1-7-3-9,” and gave a twirl.

But nothing happened — nothing. For a second I was nonplussed.

“Of course, of course!” I cried. “We have to reverse it, in the code, turn the letters into numbers, the numbers into letters. But wasn’t it witty of her, to use ‘in’ to get into a safe!”

It took only a moment. In the code, “i-n” became “2823” and “1-7-3-9” (as you will see by a glance at my diagram of the roulette wheel) became the letters “z-k-c-s,” a “word” which no safe breaker ever would think of.

I picked at the double-disk again, and my heart was going fast.

Another twirl — the safe door swung open.

“But Dexter! It’s only — why, it’s only a pile of old rags!”

A chill ran up my spine. I spoke under my breath:

“You take them out — you — they are sacred — those rags—”

He made a little purring noise in his throat.

Leaning forward, with trembling hands he drew out something and held it up — a nondescript woolen garment, half dress, half cloak.

“Wait a moment,” I gasped; “there are other things here.”

I drew forth a small, worn leather bag, with a strap to go around the neck. Behind it on the floor of the safe were a small revolver and a folded paper.

Then together we left the closet. Sitting down on the floor of the studio, facing each other, we reverently spread out the things between us.

“The revolver” — I touched it with awe — “that was, of course, for herself — if she should be taken by the Red soldiers.”

The tears were running down Boris’s face. My own eyes were wet.

I opened that worn leather bag, took out the contents: a little packet of tea, another of salt, a comb, a cheap knife, fork, and spoon. A small brandy flask — empty.

Then I unfolded that paper — gave it to Boris, without a word.

It was a Russian passport. You know Russians have to have “papers,” to go from one village to another in safety.

But this was the passport of one “Anna Kovalchuk, seamstress.” Kovalchuk! The name of that man on the garage roof.

Boris shook his head — he knew nothing about this.

I reached over and touched his hand. “Look—”

I was pointing to a round hole under one of the arms of that woolen garment — dull stains there were, too.

“A bullet hole,” I whispered. “The bullet passed through and out — see the other side of that seam.”

He tried to speak — choked. He had seen those dull stains.

I was feeling the inside of that rough woolen garment, and now I took Boris’s hand, flexed the fingers, and pressed them against the coarse lining around the waist of it.

“Dexter!”

I thought he was going to faint.

“Steady,” I breathed, “steady, dear boy. Bring the scissors — that’s her little sewing basket there on the table.”

It pulled him together, having something to do.

He got me the scissors, then just dropped down on the floor again, facing me.

In two seconds I held out my hand, palm upward — a great gleaming emerald!

The Vorontsov jewels! A million dollars’ worth! Eighty years old, she had got out of Russia with them — torn from their settings, and sewn in the lining of that garment of the peasant seamstress.

For herself, she could never have done it. But for him—

After half an hour of cutting and ripping I had a large bowl full of priceless great stones — diamonds, rubies, pearls, emeralds, sapphires. And there were a few smaller stones, like those two which she must have sold for the fifteen and twenty thousand francs.

Why hadn’t she told her grandson? Because she wanted him to work, not idle away his young life. But when she had the bad spell early in February, she must have realized that it was no longer safe to withhold the knowledge from him. He should work for it, though — labor and think and develop his brains. A great game she would make of it. Can’t you imagine the shine of those brilliant old eyes of hers — eyes so incredibly young in that splendid old wrinkled face of hers — as she laughingly helped him with hints now and then to decipher the cryptograph? And when at last they had opened the safe — when he saw what she had done for him!

“Sois sage! Study and work, my child, for we Russians have learned how uncertain wealth is.”

Sergey Kovalchuk confessed to Boris and me the next day. In that letter from his mother, Anna Kovalchuk, she wrote him about selling the passport and dress to the princess, who had paid her for them with a diamond. When Sergey learned that the princess was dead, and that her grandson was absent from home, he had thought there might be other diamonds in the house.

That wildly grateful young Boris wanted to share the Vorontsov jewels with me! It took me the rest of my holiday week in Paris to persuade him that I had just had the time of my life in finding them for him, that they were his lawful inheritance, like any other estate, but that they ought to be sold now and the money wisely invested. Of course I accepted one stone — oh, it was a big one! — as a souvenir of the princess. It is still in a safe deposit vault in Paris. When I’m tired of this business of criminal hunting, I’ll sell it and buy a nice house — somewhere on the Left Bank.

So Dexter Drake ended his story of the Key in Michael, sitting there on the couch in our living room in New York, many years afterwards.

“Of course, Howard,” he added, after a moment of musing, “the jewels were in no danger, so long as nobody knew that she had escaped with them. The safe had probably been in that closet for years; she had only to have the combination changed. Who would look for a secret writing between the canvas and stretcher of a portrait over the mantelpiece? And even on the unimaginable chance that the paper was found and deciphered, who would fancy that a few lines of vers libre about sun, stars, and comets, had anything do to with the Vorontsov jewels?”

“Who,” I replied, “except you, would have fancied it!”

“Ah!” The great detective gave me his quick bright-eyed smile. “But you are forgetting the strange message to me from the dying woman. And even I, you remember, did not find it so easy to read that ingenious, that unique cipher, worked out on the numbers of the roulette wheel!”