The Book of Air and Shadows

10

Crosetti sat in his father’s car, a black 1968 Plymouth Fury, and watched 161 Tower Road, feeling stupid. The house was a two-story frame model in need of a coat of paint, set in a weedy lawn behind a low chain-link fence. A row of brownish junipers bordering the house seemed the limits of H. Olerud’s horticulture. This name was displayed on a battered black maibox nailed to a crooked post. In the driveway sat a rust-flecked green Chevy sedan with the hood up and a scatter of tools on a tarp next to it. In the open shedlike garage that adjoined the house, he could see a red tractor and a tangle of shapes that could have been agricultural implements. The place had a tired look, as if it and the people who lived there had been knocked down and were waiting for breath to return. It was a Saturday. Crosetti had left the city at dawn and driven across the state of Pennsylvania, nearly three hundred miles on I-80 and 79, and reached Braddock a little past three. Braddock was built around a single intersection with two gas stations, a McDonald’s, a pizza joint, a VFW hall, two bars, a 7-Eleven, a coin laundry, and a collection of older brick-built commercial buildings, most of the shops in them Wal-Marted into oblivion and now occupied by junk dealers or storefront services for the distressed. Behind this strip were dozens of large homes that must have been built for the commercial and industrial aristos when the steel mills and mines had been working. Crosetti couldn’t imagine who lived in them now.

Tower Road and the sad house on it had not been hard to find with his Google map, and after arriving there he had knocked on the front door with no result. Crosetti had pushed the unlocked door open and called out, “Hello! Anyone home?” and felt the hollow sense of an empty house. Inhabited, though: messy but not filthy, toys on the floor, little cars and a plastic gun, a TV tray with an empty plate set up in front of the large-screen TV. They had satellite too-behind the house a white dish scanned the heavens. In front of the TV a La-Z-Boy lounger in brown vinyl attended a sagging chenille-covered couch. A narrow mantelpiece held photographs in frames, but Crosetti could not see them from the door and did not wish to venture within. No dogs barked, which he thought was strange. Didn’t all rural households have dogs? Another clue to he knew not what. He walked around the house. In the backyard there was a plastic playground set much faded by the sun and sized for very young children. In the center of the yard stood a clothes-drying contraption of the kind that resembles an inverted parasol. It was empty, and several of the lines had broken away and dangled, waving feebly in the light breeze. On the back porch stood an elderly cylindrical washing machine. He checked it; dry and spidery.

After his brief exploration he sat in the car and thought about all this and also how really dumb it had been to drive all this way because of a postcard he’d found in the street. He had no idea whether Carol Rolly had any connection whatever to this house. She could have picked the card up off the sidewalk or found it marking an old book. No, he thought, don’t think about that. Let’s go with the gut. This has something to do with her and that photograph of the two women and the kid. Well, there was a kid here, a boy. He took the photo and looked at it once again. He judged that it had been snapped around five or so years ago, given the apparent age of Carolyn’s face in it, and so the boy would be around eight or nine by now. Crosetti studied a bicycle tossed casually down on the driveway. That would fit a kid of that age, and the various toys scattered around the house and yard suggested the same. There were no girl toys in sight, nor was there another bike, and Crosetti wondered what had become of the baby girl in the photograph…no wait, there in a sandbox attached to the playground set, a single, weathered, naked Barbie. So that checked out too, unless Barbie had been dropped by a visitor. Or stolen.

He considered the backyard. A sunny day, a Saturday, no clothes on the dryer and it in disrepair, nor had he spotted an electric dryer exhaust, nor did the washer look much used. Which meant that probably there wasn’t a woman in residence. The guy lived here with his kid (or kids), and on Saturday he went to town and did his laundry in the Laundromat, because it was ignoble for a man to do laundry at home, and by going to town on a Saturday he got to meet women and advertise his availability, and maybe he’d go across to the VFW and have a couple of beers while the dryer spun. The kid(s) could play video games at the 7-Eleven and get a Slurpee.

Crosetti caught himself spinning this tale and wondered where it came from even while he understood that it was as true as if he had made a documentary of the life of H. Olerud. That he was the child of a legendary police detective and a well-known research librarian did not at the moment present itself as an explanation, for he had always made up stories about people, even as a kid. It was one reason why he wanted to make movies, and why he thought he’d be good at it. He took his powers of observation and inference for granted, much as natural musicians think little of causing an inert appliance to sound the secret music they hear in their heads

He hadn’t eaten since a gas stop at ten and now it was close to four and he was feeling hungry. He thought he would drive back to town and get a bite, and was about to start his car, when he saw a plume of dust coming from the direction of town, which soon resolved itself into a green pickup truck that slowed, passed him, and turned into the driveway of 161 Tower Road. He saw with some satisfaction that the cab contained a man and a boy of about nine, whose small head just showed above the dashboard. The truck was going a little too fast as it made the turn, and its off-front wheel crashed into the boy’s bike that lay in the driveway.

A bellow of rage from the driver as he slammed on his brakes and a shrill cry from a child. The driver’s door of the truck flew open and out jumped a stocky man a few years older than Crosetti, dressed in jeans and a clean white T-shirt. He had a sizable gut, and a reddish buzz cut topping a tight flat red face of the kind that always seems a little angry. He ran to the front of the truck, cursed again, kicked the bike out of the way, and jerked the passenger door open. From the cab came shrill screams, and Crosetti realized that there was another, younger passenger, and also that the man had not secured either of the children with seat belts. The man reached in and yanked the boy out by his arm. Still holding the arm he batted the boy several times across the head, heavy blows that made awful meaty noises Crosetti could hear from where he sat, all the while demanding of the boy how often he had told him not to leave the fucking bike in the fucking driveway and also whether he thought he was ever going to get a new bike or anything new ever again you little piece of shit.

Crosetti was wondering in a helpless sort of way whether he should take some action, when the man stopped beating the boy and reached again into the cab of the truck and pulled out a girl of about four. The child’s face was bright red and screwed up in a paroxysm of pain and fright. Some of the red was blood from a wound on her mouth. She squirmed like a lizard in the man’s grasp, her back arched. The man told the child to shut up, that she wasn’t hurt, that if she didn’t shut up this minute he’d really give her something to yell about. The screaming subsided into horrible wheezing gasps, and the man strode into the house with the little girl.

Shortly thereafter Crosetti heard the sound of a television going at considerable volume. He left his car and walked over to the boy, who lay crouched on the ground where the man had flung him. He was crying in a peculiar way, sucking in great gasps and letting them out in strangled almost noiseless sobs. Crosetti ignored the child and squatted down to examine the bicycle. Then he walked up the drive to where the sedan was under repair, selected a few wrenches and a heavy pliers from the tools scattered about, and addressed the injured bike. He removed the front wheel, straightened the handlebars, set his foot on the front fork to straighten that as well and used the pliers to bring the front wheel spokes into some semblance of their original alignment. He felt the boy’s eyes on him as he worked and heard the child’s sobbing die away to sniffles. He twisted the rim back into approximate circularity by eye, set the wheel back on its fork, and with the bike upside down, he gave it a spin. It wobbled but spun freely around its axle. Crosetti said, “Some say a wheel is just like a heart, when you bend it, you can’t mend it. You’re going to need a new wheel there, partner, but it’ll ride if you don’t go over too rough of a road. What’s your name?”

“Emmett,” said the boy after a pause, and wiped his face with the back of his hand, making an ugly smear of tears and dust. Bingo, thought Crosetti, the name on the postcard, and examined the child with interest. He was a good-looking kid, if a little too thin, with wide-spaced intelligent-looking blue eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth whose genetic provenance Crosetti thought he knew. His hair was cropped so short that it was hard to tell what color it was.

Crosetti said, “My name’s Al. Look, Emmett, would you like to help me out with something?”

The boy hesitated, then nodded. Crosetti took an enhanced printout of Carolyn Rolly’s photograph from his back pocket, and unfolded it for the boy.

“Do you know who these women are?”

The boy studied the photograph, his eyes wide. “That’s my mom and my aunt Emily. She used to live with us but she died.”

“This is your mother?” Crosetti asked with his finger on the younger Rolly.

“Uh-huh. She run off. He locked her in the cellar but she got out. She got out at night and in the morning she wasn’t there. Where did she go, mister?”

“I wish I knew, Emmett, I really do,” said Crosetti absently. His mind had been set whirling by the boy’s appearance and this confirmation of his guess, and his belly churned with tension. To his shame, what he was thinking of was the single night he had spent with Rolly and what she had done and what he imagined she had felt, and whether she had done the same for her husband, that brutal man, in the bedroom of this crummy little house. A powerful urge seized him, to get away from this place and also (although this would be more difficult) to vacate the place in his heart occupied by the person he knew as Carolyn Rolly. He was sorry for the children, stuck with this father, but there was nothing he could do about that. Another blot on Carolyn’s record.

He started to walk away and the boy called out to him, “Did you know her? My mom?”

“No,” said Crosetti, “not really.”

He got into his car and drove off. The boy ran forward a few steps, with the photograph flapping in his hands, and then stopped and was lost in the dust of the road.

Crosetti found a McDonald’s and had a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke. He finished the junk and was about to order more but checked at the counter. He ate when he was upset, he knew, and if he didn’t watch it he was going to look like Orson Welles, without that person’s early achievement to balance out the flab. He tried to calm himself, an effort hampered by the fact that he’d somehow lost his MapQuest driving directions and made a couple of wrong turns on the way back.

When he was on the right interstate at last, he composed in his head the script of the film Carolyn Rolly; not a bad title, and he could probably use it without a release because Mrs. Olerud had probably fabricated her name too. Okay: brutal childhood, use that, the girl-in-the-cellar angle, although maybe the uncle’s serial rape business was a little too X-rated. Let’s make Uncle Lloyd a religious fanatic who wanted to keep his niece from the corruption of the world. He dies or she escapes and there she is at seventeen, say, knowing nothing, having had zero contact with mass culture, a little homage to Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser there. There’s some local celebrity around the weird case, and let’s say the cop who found her falls in love with Carolyn, he falls for her purity, her innocence, and marries her, which she goes along with because she’s all alone, she knows nothing about how the world works, and they set up house. He’s a control freak, a cop after all, Crosetti knew guys like that on the cops, but she submits, and that’s the first act.

Then we show her life, she has the kids and then she starts taking them to the local library, where she meets the wise librarian and the librarian turns her on to art and culture and it lights her up, and then there’s a traveling exhibit of fine books that the librarian gets her to go to without her husband’s knowledge, maybe they go to Chicago (they would shoot it in Toronto, of course), and she realizes she wants to make books, she wants books all around her, but what can she do, she’s got two kids, she’s trapped, but she decides to apply for a bookbinding course by mail and her husband finds out and beats her up, and after that it gets worse and worse, and he locks her in the cellar just like her uncle did, and she escapes and that’s the second act. Then in the third act she goes to New York and…no, you couldn’t do that, the male lead has to come in earlier, you’d have to show the backstory in flashback, the humble clerk who maybe has a past of his own, he’s an ex-cop maybe, and they get together and fall in love and she disappears and…

Why does she disappear? Crosetti didn’t know, and he found he could not generate a fictional reason that would hold water either. Was she kidnapped? No, too melodramatic. Did she see an opportunity to get enough money so that she could get the kids away from the bad dad? That made more sense. She’d run off with Bulstrode in pursuit of the Shakespeare manuscript. There was a clue in the Bracegirdle letter, Bulstrode had found it, and they were off to England to where X marked the spot. Hundreds of millions, Fanny had said. That had to be it, and the next thing was for the hero to work out the clue himself and find where they’d gone and confront them there in England, you could fake that in Canada too, right, and there’d have to be a subplot, someone else looking for it, and the cruel dad cop also in there somewhere and they’d all come together in the old castle, in the dark, grabbing the briefcase with the manuscript in it away from one another, with plenty of business about false briefcases, a little reference to the Maltese Falcon, of course, and the only last-act problem would be the hero and Rolly, would he save her, would she save him, would they get out with the treasure, or would it be lost? Or maybe the cruel dad would get killed and she’d give up the treasure to be with the hero and the kids…

He didn’t know how he’d end it, but the more he thought about it, about the intersection between fiction and the real, the more he thought that he had to get some advantage over Bulstrode, the Shakespeare expert, and the best way to do that was to crack the cipher, because with all his expertise, that was one thing Bulstrode did not have. So besides having to learn a lot more about Shakespeare, he had to decipher and read Bracegirdle’s spy letters. Such were Crosetti’s thoughts during the long drive back to the city, peppered by the usual fantasies: he confronts the angry husband, they fight, Crosetti wins; he finds Carolyn again, he acts wry, cool, sophisticated, he has understood all her plottings and forgives; he earns a fortune via the manuscript and explodes upon the cinematic world with a film that owes nothing to commercial demands yet touches the hearts of audiences everywhere, obviating the necessity for a long apprenticeship, cheap student films, playing gofer to some Hollywood asshole…

He arrived back in Queens at around eight on Saturday evening, fell immediately into bed, slept for twelve hours straight, and awoke vibrating with more energy than he’d felt in a long time and frustrated because it was Sunday and he would have to wait before getting started. He went to mass with his mother therefore, which pleased her a good deal, and afterward she made him a colossal breakfast, which he consumed with gratitude, thinking of the scrawny kids in that house and being frankly grateful for his family, although he knew it was totally uncool to have such thoughts. While he ate he told his mother something of what he had learned.

“So it was all lies,” she observed.

“Not necessarily,” said Crosetti, who was still a little entranced with the fictional version he had concocted. “She was obviously on the lam from a bad situation. Parts of it could have been true. She changed the location and some of the details, but this guy actually locked her in a cellar, according to the kid. She could have been abused as a child and fallen into an abusive situation.”

“But she’s married, which she didn’t bother to mention, and she ran out on her kids. I’m sorry, Allie, but that doesn’t speak well for her. She could have gone to the authorities.”

Crosetti abruptly rose from the table and brought his plate and cup to the sink, and washed them with the clattering movement of the angry. He said, “Yeah, but we weren’t there. Not everybody has a happy family like we do, and the authorities sometimes screw up. We have no idea of what she went through.”

“Okay, Albert,” said Mary Peg, “you don’t have to break the dishes to make a point. You’re right, we don’t know what she went through. I’m just a little worried about your emotional involvement with a married woman you hardly knew. It seems like an obsession.”

Crosetti turned off the faucet and faced his mother. “It is an obsession, Mom. I want to find her and I want to help her if I can. And to do that I have to decipher those letters.” He paused. “And I’d like your help.”

“Not a problem, dear,” said his mother, smiling now. “It beats playing Scrabble in the long, long evenings.”

The next day Mary Peg began rounding up cryptography resources from the Web and through her wide range of contacts in libraries around the world, via telephone and e-mail. Crosetti called Fanny Doubrowicz at the library and was heartened to learn that she had puzzled out Bracegirdle’s Jacobean handwriting and entered the text of his last letter into her computer. She had also made a transcript of the ciphertext of the spy letters and sent a sample of the paper and ink from those originals to the laboratory for analysis. It was, as far as the lab could determine, a seventeenth-century document.

“This Bracegirdle tells quite a story, by the way,” she said. “It will make a revolution in scholarship, unless it is a pack of lies. If only you had not been so foolish as to sell the original!”

“I know, but I can’t do anything about that now,” said Crosetti, expending some effort at keeping his voice pleasant. “If I can find Carolyn I might be able to get it back. Meanwhile, has anything surfaced on the library grapevine? Blockbuster manuscript found?”

“Not even a peep, and I have called around in manuscript circles. If Professor Bulstrode is authenticating it, he is being very quiet about his doings.”

“Isn’t that strange? I figured he’d be calling press conferences.”

“Yes, but this is a man who has been badly burned. He would not want to go public with this until he had made absolutely sure. However, there are only a few people in the world whose word on such a manuscript would be probative, and I have spoken to all of them. They laugh when they hear Bulstrode’s name and none have heard from him recently.”

“Yeah, well, maybe he’s holed up in his secret castle, just gloating. Look, can you zap those documents over by e-mail? I want to get to work on that cipher.”

“Yes, I will zap now. And I will also send the number of my friend, Klim. I think you will need help. I have looked a little and it does not seem to be a simple thing, this cipher.”

When he had the e-mail, Crosetti made himself print out Fannie’s transcription of the Bracegirdle letter instead of reading it immediately on the screen. Then he read it several times, especially the last part, about the spying mission, and tried not to be too hard on himself for letting the original go. He almost sympathized with Bulstrode, the bastard-the discovery was so huge that he could well appreciate what was going through the guy’s mind when he saw it. He did not allow himself to think about the other, larger prize, as Bulstrode had obviously and immediately done, nor did he keep Carolyn and how she was connected to all this uppermost in his thoughts. Crosetti was an indifferent student most days, but he was capable of intense focus when he was interested in something, like the history of movies, a subject on which he was encyclopedic. Now he turned this focus onto the Bracegirdle cipher and on the tall stack of cryptography books his mother had brought home from various libraries that evening.

For the next six days he did nothing else but go to work, study cryptography, and work on the cipher. On Sunday he again went to church and found himself praying with unaccustomed fervor for a solution. Returning home he made for his room, ready to begin once more, when his mother stopped him.

“Take a break, Allie, it’s Sunday.”

“No, I thought of something else I want to try.”

“Honey, you’re exhausted. Your mind is mush and you’re not going to do yourself any good spinning around like a hamster. Sit down, I’ll make a bunch of sandwiches, you’ll have a beer, you’ll tell me what you’ve been doing. This will help, believe me.”

So he forced himself to sit and ate grilled-cheese sandwiches with bacon and drank a Bud, and found that his mother had been right, he did feel a little more human. When the meal was over, Mary Peg asked, “So what have you got so far? Anything?”

“In a negative sense. Do you know much about ciphers?”

“At the Sunday paper game-page level.”

“Yeah, well that’s a start. Okay, the most common kind of secret writing in the early seventeenth century was what they called a nomenclator, which is a kind of enciphered code. You have a short vocabulary of coded words, box for army, pins for ships, whatever, and these words and the connecting words of the message would be enciphered, using a simple substitution, with maybe a few fancy complications. What we got here isn’t a nomenclator. In fact, I think it’s the cipher Bracegirdle talks about in his letter, the one he invented for Lord Dunbarton. It’s not a simple substitution either. I think it’s a true polyalphabetic cipher.”

“Which means what?”

“It’s a little complicated. Let me show you some stuff.” He left and came back with a messy handful of papers. “Okay, the simplest cipher substitutes one letter for another, usually by shifting the alphabet a certain number of spaces, so that A becomes D and C becomes G and so on. It’s called a Caesar shift because Julius Caesar supposedly invented it, but obviously you can crack it in a few minutes if you know the normal frequencies of the letters in the language it’s written in.”

“ETAOIN SHRDLU.”

“You got it. Well, obviously, spies knew this, so they developed ciphering methods to disguise the frequency of letters by using a different alphabet to pick every substitution in the ciphertext.”

“You mean a literally different alphabet, like Greek?”

“No, no, I mean like this.” He pulled a paper out of the sheaf and smoothed it on the table. “In the sixteenth century the architect Alberti invented a substitution cipher that used multiple alphabets arranged on brass disks, and a little later in France a mathematician named Blaise Vigenère supposedly invented what they call a polyalphabetic substitution cipher using twenty-six Caesar-shifted alphabets, and I figured it or something like it would be known to Bracegirdle if he was studying the cipher arts at that time. This here is what they call a tabula recta or a Vigenère tableau. It’s twenty-six alphabets, one on top of the other, starting with a regular A through Z alphabet and then each successive one starts one letter to the right, from B through Z plus A, then C through Z plus A and B and so on, and there are regular alphabets along the left side and the top to serve as indexes.”

“So how do you use it to disguise frequencies?”

“You use a key. You pick a particular word and run it across the top of the tableau, lining each letter of the key up with each column and repeating it until you reach the end of the alphabet. For example, let’s pick Mary Peg as a key. It’s seven letters with no repeats, so it’s a good pick.” He wrote it out several times in pencil and said, “Now we need a plaintext to encipher.”

“Flee, all is discovered,” suggested Mary Peg.

“Always timely. So we write the plaintext over the key, like so…

F L E E A L L I S D I S C O V E R E D

M A R Y P E G M A R Y P E G M A R Y P

“And then to encipher, we take the first letter of the plaintext, which is F, and the first letter of the key, which is M, and then we go to the tableau, down from the F column to the row and we write the letter we find at the intersection, which just happens to be R. The next combination is L from flee and A from Mary, so L stays L, and the next is E and R, which gives V. And now see how this works: the next E is over the letter Y in our ‘Mary Peg’ key which gives C. The two Es in flee have different ciphertext equivalents, which is why frequency analysis fails. Let me knock this out real quick so you can see…”

Crosetti rapidly filled in the ciphertext and produced

F L E E A L L I S D I S C O V E R E D

R L V C P P R U S U G H G U H E I C S

“And notice how the double L in all is disguised too,” he said. “Now you have something that can’t be broken by simple frequency analysis, and for three hundred years no one could break a cipher like that without learning the key word. That’s mainly what they tortured spies for.”

“How do you break it?”

“By finding the length of the key word, and you do that by analyzing repeating patterns in the ciphertext. It’s called the Kasiski-Kerckhoff Method. In a long enough message or set of messages, FL is going to line up with MA again, and give you RL again, and there’ll be other two-and three-letter patterns, and then you count the distance between repeats and figure out any common numerical factors. In our example, with a seven-letter key you might get repeats at seven, fourteen, and twenty-one significantly more than would be the case by chance. Obviously, nowadays you use statistical tools and computers. Then when you know our key has seven letters, it’s a piece of cake, because what you have then is seven simple substitution alphabets derived from the Vigenère tableau, and you can break those by ordinary frequency analysis to decrypt the ciphertext or reconstruct the key word. There are downloadable decrypting programs that can do it in seconds on a PC.”

“So why haven’t you cracked it?”

He ran his hand through his hair and groaned. “If I knew that, I’d know how to crack it. This thing’s not a simple Vigenère.”

“Maybe it is, but it has a really long key. From what you said, the longer the key, the harder it would be to factor out the repeating groups.”

“Good point. The problem with long keys is that they’re easy to forget and hard to transmit if you want to change them. For instance, if these guys wanted to change the key every month to make absolutely sure that no spy had discovered it, they’d want something an agent could receive with a whisper in the dark or in a totally innocent message. What they do nowadays is that the agent gets what they call a onetime pad, which is a set of preprinted segments of an infinitely long, totally random key. The agent enciphers one message and then burns the sheet. It’s totally unbreakable even by advanced computers. But that kind of method wasn’t invented in 1610.”

“So what else?”

“It could be a grille, in which case we’re screwed.” Seeing her puzzled look, he added, “A Cartan Grille, a literal piece of stiff paper with holes punched in it that reveals the message when you place it over the page. That would mean it’s not a cipher at all. For example, assume the ciphertext I wrote is just random noise, but if you slide a grille over it you can get RUG or USE or RUSE…”

“But surely, if they were using a grille, the ciphered message would look like a normal letter. ‘Dear Mom, having a great time in London, bought a new doublet, baited some bears, wish you were here, love, Dick.’ And the grille would reveal the plaintext: ‘flee, all is discovered.’ I mean the point would be to allow the concealed message to pass as innocent, no?”

Crosetti tapped his head in the what-a-jerk gesture. “Of course. Obviously, I’m losing it. Anyway, I’m stumped-I have no idea where to go from here.”

“I rest my case. Like I said, you need a break.”

“You’re right.” He rubbed his face with both hands and then asked, “What day is this?”

“October 14. Why?”

“There’s a Caribbean film festival at BAM, and I wanted to catch Of Men and Gods. Maybe if I lose myself in gay Haitian voodoo, I’ll come back to it fresh.”

“That’s a good plan, dear,” said Mary Peg.

Something about her tone and the expression on her face made him pause. He regarded her narrowly: “What?”

“Nothing, hon. I thought that if you didn’t mind I’d take a look at it myself.”

“Hey, knock yourself out!” said Crosetti, with just a trace of smugness. “It’s not a crossword puzzle.”

He was gone for over four hours because after the movie played he ran into some film freak pals of his and went for coffee and they took the film apart technically and artistically, and he enjoyed the usual amusing and astringent conversation common to such groups, and made a couple of good points and got to talking with a small intense woman who made documentaries, and they exchanged numbers. Crosetti felt like a real person for the first time in what seemed to him a long while. It had been nearly two months since that thing with Rolly started and ended, leaving a peculiar emotional ash. Not love, he now thought. Chemistry, sure, but as his mother had pointed out, in order for chemistry to transmute into connection there had to be reciprocity and a modicum of commitment, which he had certainly not got from Rolly…just a nothingness and that stupid letter, oh, and P.S., bid a heartfelt bye-bye to Albert. It still griped him, not so much as a blow to his self-regard but as an insult to his aesthetics. It was wrong; he would never have written a plot point like that into a screenplay, and since he was a realist sort of auteur, he believed that such an event could not exist in the real world. Thus the subway thoughts of Crosetti.

When he got home, he found Mary Peg in her living room, drinking vodka with a strange man. Crosetti stood in the doorway and stared at his mother, who coolly (rather excessive, suspicious, coolness, Crosetti thought) introduced the man as Radeslaw Klim. This person rose to a considerable height, perhaps six inches more than Crosetti’s, and shook hands with a stiff little bow. The man had an intelligent aquiline face, a foreign face, although Crosetti could not have pinned down why it was not an American one. Washed blue eyes looked out through round wire-rimmed glasses, under a great shock of stiff silver hair, which stuck up above his broad forehead like the crest on a centurion’s helmet. He was about the same age as Mary Peg, or a little older, and he was wearing a baggy rust-colored suit with a dark shirt under it, no tie, the suit a cheap one that hung badly on his long slender frame. Despite this, the man had a nearly military bearing, as if he had temporarily misplaced his beautifully tailored uniform.

Crosetti sat in an armchair and his mother supplied him with a glass of iced vodka, a substance for which he found an unfamiliar but urgent need. After he’d drunk a slug he looked challengingly at Mary Peg, who said blandly, “Mr. Klim is Fanny’s friend. I asked him to come by and take a look at your cipher. Since you were stuck.”

“Uh-huh,” said the son.

“Yes,” said Klim. “I have looked, examined it somewhat. As you have guessed, it is a polyalphabetic substitution cipher and also is true that it is not a simple Vigenère. That is of course elementary.” He had a slight accent that reminded Crosetti of Fanny’s; his mien was gentle and scholarly enough to at least partially assuage Crosetti’s nascent resentment.

“So what is it?” Crosetti asked sharply.

“I believe it is a running key,” said Klim. “From a book of some kind. You understand how these work? The key is of very long extent compared to the plaintext, so the Kasiski-Kerckhoff Method is of no use.”

“Like a book code?”

“No, this is not the same thing. A book code is a code. The codetext is, let us say, 14, 7, 6, and that means you go to World Almanac or some such and look at page 14, line 7, word 6. Or you can use letters if you like, the fourth letter, the tenth letter. A running key uses a book, the same, but uses the book text as a continuous key. These are not so secure as people think, however.”

“Why not? It’s similar to a onetime pad.”

Klim shook his head. “Not so. Onetime pad has very high entropy, because the letters are randomly generated. That is, given one letter of your key you have no idea which of the other twenty-six will follow. Whereas, in a running key based on any English text, let us say, if you see Q, what is next letter for sure?”

“U.”

“Exactly. Low entropy, as I say. How we break these is we run probable plaintext alongside ciphertext until we see something intelligible.”

“What do you mean by ‘probable plaintext’?”

“Oh, words always appearing in English text. The, and, this, and so on and so forth. We run against ciphertext and suppose we find once that the gives us ing or shi when we work back through the tableau? We use such clues to discover more English words in key. Eventually we recognize actual source of running key, I mean, the book it comes from, in which case we have completely broken cipher. It is not very complex, but we would need a computer, or else large squads of intelligent ladies.” Here he smiled, showing small stained teeth, and his glasses glinted. Crosetti got the impression that Klim had at one time supervised such squads.

“Would mine do?” asked Crosetti. “My PC, not my squads of ladies.”

“Yes, if networked to others, which can be done. There are numbers of people in the world who like cracking ciphers for amusement and they will let one borrow computer cycles they are not using, late at night for example, and is always late at night somewheres. I can set this up if you like. Also, we are fortunate this is cipher from the year 1610.”

“Why so?”

“Because there are many less, many fewer, printed texts that could be used as running key source. In fact, taking what your mother has informed me of the character of these people, I would venture that the text is almost certainly the English Bible. So, shall we begin?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Is there objection?”

“Well, it’s kind of late,” said Crosetti.

“Does not matter. I sleep very little.”

Mary Peg said, “I’ve offered Radeslaw Patty’s old room.”

Crosetti finished his vodka and suppressed the usual shudder. He stood up and said, “Well, you seem to have arranged everything, Mom. I guess I’ll just go to bed.”

In the morning, Crosetti woke not to the buzz of his alarm but to the brisk knock and then the vigorous shoulder shaking of his mother. He blinked at her. “What?”

“You have to read this.” She rustled the New York Times at him, opened at the pages devoted to local crime, corruption, and celebrity.

English Professor Found Murdered in Columbia Faculty Housing

This headline brought him up to full wakefulness. He rubbed the blur from his eyes and read the article, then read it again. It was a short one, the police being their usual closemouthed selves, but the reporter had used the word torture, and that was enough to start Crosetti’s belly fluttering.

“Call Patty,” he said.

“I already did,” said Mary Peg, “but I got voice mail. She’ll call back. What do you think?”

“It doesn’t look great. He disappears right after I sell him the manuscript, he’s probably in England for a couple of months, maybe with Carolyn, maybe not, and then he comes back here and someone tortures him to death. Maybe the play manuscript really exists and he found out where it was and someone found out he knew and tortured him to get him to give it up.”

“Albert, that’s a movie. Things like that don’t happen to English professors in real life.”

“Then why was he tortured and killed? Not for his ATM password.”

“Maybe the mother of another silly boy he cheated took her revenge. From what we know about his character, he may have been mixed up in any number of sleazy deals.”

“Mom, believe me, movie or not, that’s what went down. I need to get up.”

This was the signal for his mother to leave, and she did. Crosetti in the shower found his thoughts floating back to Rolly and the plot of his movie and the possibility that she could actually be the villainess of the piece, Brigid O’Shaughnessy as played by Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. His mother was wrong. Not only was life like a movie, movies were why life was like it was. Movies taught people how to behave, how to be a man, how to be a woman, what was funny and what was horrid. The people who made them had no idea of this, they were just trying to make money, but it was so.

And here they were in the Falcon, his next favorite after Chinatown, which was essentially a reimagining of the same movie, updated for the ’70s, and why did he like movies about bad girls? Bonnie and Clyde, naturally, and La Femme Nikita and dozens more. He wondered what part he was playing, the dead Miles Archer, or the dead sea captain in the backstory, or Sam Spade. You killed Miles and you’re going over for it. And, I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I’m gonna send you over. He had nearly the whole script by heart and now he said those lines to the showerhead with the Bogart hissing lisp and wondered whether, if it ever came to it, he could send Carolyn Rolly over, if she’d really helped kill Bulstrode. Or maybe he would be her sap. The mere imagination of it made his heart race. He turned the temperature of the water down a notch and let it run onto his heated face.

THE FIRST CIPHERED LETTER

My Lord It has now passed two weekes and some daies since I left your howse and have had passing success as I heere shal tell. Upon a Friday I left my lodging at the Vine in Bishopsgate in company with Mr Wales, who hath lain with mee all this tyme & a sore tryall hath it been, he beyng a verey coxcombe cracking sot & oft hazarded the safetie of oure enterpryse with hys hintes & vauntes in tap-room. Oft have I had to carrie hym to oure chamber with a buffett & threat; but when sober is craven & doth then as hee is bid under menace. Whilst not in cuppes, he hath instructed me divers popish tricks and sayinges as they doe in theyre masses & superstitious shewes, so that at need I may pass for one of theyre number.

Of the lodgeres heere the greater parte be drovers & some plaiers; of these last, half of them demi-papists & the rest plain damned atheists, scarce a Christian man among them. Soe we stride down Bishopsgate, hym pale & asweat from drinke & wants to stop heere & about for more sacke, but I doe prevent hym saying mind on oure business Mr Wales & I see feare well-marked in his face. Soe we arrive at the Swan in Leadenhalle Street where he saies W.S. frequently lieth. Mr Wales saies his fancie is to take roomes here and about, when he is not being tabled at some greate house. Formerly he dwelt near Silver Street but no longer & formerly he went every day to the Globe or Black-Friers play-howse but now he withdraweth som from those stewes as he hath grown rich off it, the bawd. A low company at the Swan, players punks decoy-gamesters & other rogues & Waley inquiring of the tapster is told Mr W.S. is up-stayres in a leased chamber, his habit seemingly to lay there the morning at his papers. So Waley do send a wench up to say there is a kinsman of his to see hym: which wase mee. Soon comes he in the room a man scannt-bearded a middling height bald-pated a little fat in a good doublet dead-spaniard coloured & hath the looke of a mercer. Mr Waley doth make us acquainted, Will Shakespur here is your cosen of Warwick, Dick Bracegirdle.

Saith he then it must be through your mother we are cosens for never was there such a name in Warwickshire & I say yes my mother was Arden born. At that he smyles & clapps me upon my backe & carries me to the table & calls for my pleasoure & the pot-boy bringeth us ale, but Mr Waley calls for canary though he wast not asked & calls some varlets he knows & a trull over & proffers them from his jack of wine. Now W.S. speakes me direct but I can not make out a word in three that he sayes, so strange are his accentes; seeing this he makes a halt saying thou wast not Warwick-bred & I say nay but born in London and passed my youth in Titchfield & he says he hast been oft at Titchfield a-visiting my lord of Southhampton & this he says in as plain a Hampshire voice as could have ben mine uncle Matthew, which amaz’d me much. But after I bethought me, he hath ben a playere, ’tis his arte to ape the speache of anie man.

Next we spake of our families and found that his dam was bred ancientlie from Sir Walter Arden of Park Hall as soe wase mine but his hath descent through Thomas that gentlemans eldest son not Richard as mine was & this contenteth hym much & I tell howe my grand-sire wase hanged for papistrie but they sayde traisoun & hee looketh grave sayinge aye mine nuncle was served soe in the olde quenes tyme. Soe wee further converse, hym demanding of me my storie & I tell hym it pretty much in truth, of my lyfe as a boy and prentice in the foundrie, & of the grete gonnes & the Dutch warres; nor have I ne’er met a man so content to heare another man out in fulle; for men chiefly love to tell of them selves & paint them selves out in finer colours than wast in lyfe; but hym not. Herein I spake but the trewth for Mr Piggott saith if wouldst tell a grete lye, guard it close with a thousand trew tales, so that it shalbe passed amongst theyre number. Bye now Mr Wales hath drunk a pint & more of beste canary & wase drunk withal & commenced to rail at W.S. sayinge he hath not employment these manie weekes with players less skilled than he uzed in his roome & W.S. saith nay, hath not Mr Burbadge manie tymes warned thee? If thou attend the play-house as full o’canary as yon butt so you stumble and misremember your lines thou shalt lose thy place; and thou hast soe done; and thou hast indeed lost place, as wase promised; & I can do naught for thee, but here’s an angelet for thee thou wast a goode Portia once. Yet Mr Wales spurns the coin; saith he, thou vain scut Ile see thee hangd & broke & e’en nowe are the snares set for thee that will & then I kick him in his ankle-bone & he cry out & draw or tries to & I serve hym a blow on’s heade with a stone-jack & down goes he in blodd. Now those friends he lately wined make to start affray with me & I stand to draw but W.S. calls sacke & safron cakes for the table & speakes so sweetlie & jestinglie to these low fellowes that they are assuaged & he has a wench & pot-boy to carry off Mr Wales to a settle & payeth alle & then he carries me out of that place saying let us goe to a more quiet howse for I wishe to speake further with thee.

Soe down Bishopsgate we walke, then on Cornhill & West Cheap toward Paul’s & again he quaeres mee upon my lyfe & I doe as best I am able, recalling manie thinges I have forgot & when I tell how I wase late a smuckler he halts & hath me saye agen that worde which he sware he never before heard & writes it that moment with a wad penselle in a littel booke he carries & seems as well-pleazed as if he found a shillinge in the myre of the waye. Arrive at the sign of the Mer-mayde on Friday Street hard bye Paul’s & were manie there that knew W.S. & greeted hym with affectioun & after greeting alle moste courteouslie he brought me to a corner bye the fyre that was I thinke his accustomed place: for the pot-boy brought hym smalle beere without the asking & a jack for mee as well & he presses mee agen to speake of my lyfe especially that at sea: & when he heard I wase on the Sea Adventurer & was wracked upon Bermoothes Isle he was much excited & plaisure shon on his face & takes up his little booke again & wrote much in it as I spake. He desired to know of the Carribans, theyre character & customes & did they eat the fleshe of men, & I sware hym I never met a Carriban in my lyfe, there are none in the Bermoothes: but I spake much of how we builded boates and scaped oure prison of that Isle & sayled to Virginia safe & of the Indians which the Englishe there living saye doe eat mens fleshe & are verie fierce salvages. He sayde he had reade accountes of this before now; but it were best to heere it from lips of one who was there & again questioned me upon the ship-wracke, viz: how the mariners comported & how the passengares of quality, did they waile & crie oute in feare of the present perils & I tell hym how oure boatswaine cursed Governour Thom. Gates when he ventured upon the deck in the midst of the storm & chased hym down a hatch-waye with a rope’s ende; for which the Admiral cried he should be whipped but was not for the ship strook upon the rock soon after.

Now as I tolde this tayle, W.S. calls to some who came in or were there alreadie: come & heere this tayle, this is my cosen who hath been to the New World & hath ben ship-wracked &c. Soon had we a goode company about us, sitting & standing. Some did not beleeve me thinking my tale a mere fardel of lyes such as mariners tell; yet W.S. spake up to these sayeing nay the man speakes fayre for there are no dragons nor monsters, nor yet water-spoutes, nor anie fantastique thinge, but onlie such perrils as shippes meet in theyre voyages; further saith he, I have read an accounte of the verie wrack of which he speakes & agrees in all particulares.

Thus was I justified before that assemblie. After mye tale was done, they sit about & talk, & this talk such as I nevere before heard & it is hard to recall for it is the jesting sorte that sticks not to the minde. Or not my minde. It was verie bawdy, all prickes & cuntes, but disguized in othere & innocente speeche, & they said not a worde but another would twist that word into one lyke it & yet again & again, so that I never knew what they meant. This they account Witt: & one of these Mr Johnson can shew Witt in Latin & Greek & did so but few there comprehended his meaninges: yet laughed all the same & rated hym for a dull pedant. He is an other maker of wicked plaies thought greate by these wretches & seconde onlie to W.S.: except in his owne reckoninges first. A prowd conceited man & I thinke an arrant papiste & rayles much gainst the reformed faith & preacheres. W.S. now boastes of me that I wase in Flanderes fighting Don Spainiard & Mr Johnson saies he too was & quaeres me close what battels & seiges was I in & under what commander & when. Soe I answer hym; but when he findeth I was with the gonnes, he says pish that is not soldiers woork but mere cartage & dunnage & tells how he trayled his pyke before Flushinge & Zutfen & it was clare it ben a tale they all had hearde before & they mocketh hym & make witt of his pyke & sayde he had pricked more Flanders maydes than Spainiards with it; by which I thinke they meant his privy member. W.S. listeneth mainlie but when he speaketh all give hym attencioun. Thus, Mr Johnson vaunting his witte largelie with many Latin tagges & drinking largelie too & hadde a meate pye & bye & bye he lifts haunch & letts a great blaste of winde & W.S. upon the instant saies, so speakes a Batchelor of Artes, list well & learne; and all laugh, even Mr Johnson. But I did not understand the jest.

Houres so passed I think til it grew neare darke without & W.S. saith to me Dick I have business at Black-Fryares playe-howse wilt come with me for I wish to speake privilie to you more. So I go with him & he asks of me what I will now for my trade, shal I goe back to sea? Quoth I nay I am done with it having been wracked soe & done with my travells nor have I taste anie more for warre, but to have some place whereat I could be sure of my meate & my bed a-nights & a goode fyre & make my fortune; for I had it in mynde to wed one daie. He saies what canst doe to earne thy bread Dick, besydes warre & smuckling & making of cannones? I sayde I wase clever with numbers & mought fynde worke as surveyoure of landes an I could fynde me a maistre. But here we come to the playe-howse after the play has done & the audience still comes forth, many rich-dressed in furs and brocades but also the common sorte & we must press through a croude of litters carriers horses servants groomes &c. who await. So through the greate room all ablaze with candels but one is snuffing them all ready & we pass to a smale room behinde the stage where are some men, one all in black velvet verie fine with paint still on’s face; and two otheres apparent marchants & one little scriveninge sorte; & two stout fellowes armed with hangers & of these one hath no eares & t’other but one eie. By name, as I learned, the first, Dick Burbage, playere; John Hemmynge, a sharer in the Playeres company; Henry Watkins, a sharer in the Housekeeping company; Nicholas Pusey, who kept the purse of the King’s Men Company & the accompte booke. Spade & Wyatt are the two men-at-armes, Spade hath the one eye. Save the laste pair, all these stood quarrelling calling each-other rogues cheateres &c.

W.S., comeing amongst them all, saith what betides gentlemen, why this affray? And soe the tale: of the monies payd each night. Players sharers must have such portion, Housekeeper sharers yet another & further fees out of the nightes purse variously figured. Mr Pusey hath a booke in which all monies are wrote down, yet I o’erlookinge it see it is done poorlie in the olde fashioun as it were some pettie fishmonger & not a greate enterpryse such as this theatre: for wickednesse yieldeth up much proffit. W.S. saith good Mr Pusey fetch thee thy board and jetones & we will see the figuring done before oure eies, are we not alle honest fellowes who can cut a figure with the beste; and made them smyle with this witte & off Mr Pusey goes. Now I inquire of W.S. what are the shares of each & how figured & I studie the accomptes booke laid open & look close at the scratchinges men maketh when they use compters & board to keep theyre talleyes & I see the faulte of castynge-off he hath made. Mr Pusey not retourning, Mr Burbage shouts for Spade to fetch him & whilst he is off I take my wad penselle and doe the needefull sums & divisiouns into partes. Soe returneth Spade with Mr Pusey in tow carrying his board with the compters dropping out of his sleaves; he hath been at drinke & now too fuddled to make sence of his papiers: which no man could any way make sence of even if sober. I spake up then upon the matter & shew them my reckoninges & discourse upon my methodes. Which were a wonder to them & I see W.S. smyling upon me: for he doates upon clevernesse in anie thinge. Further I saye gentlemen it is vain to quarrell upon who warrantes what sum, for with this accomptinge there be no waye under heaven you can saie what gaine you hath. Further, though I saye naught gainst this gentleman, who anie waye I knowe not, yet as thinges stand anie man could rob you all at will nor would you ever knowe of it. It is as if you walked blind-folde down Shoreditch at mid-night with full purses held in youre fingeres & expect not to have ’ em snatched. Soe some further talke & twas agreed that I should be hyred to re-caste the accompte bookes in the Italian style with double-entreys & have charge of the divisioun of the shares: here W.S. saith he will stand bond for me as I am hys cosen.

After this W.S. carreys me to supper at the Mer-mayde & verie merrey with hys friendes as I have sayde before & later to bed in chamberes neare hys owne in a howse he leases neare to Black-Fryres & whilst theyre I laughed oute lowde & he quares why & I saye you intended Batchelour of Fartes, for hee hath broke winde then. He smileth, sayeing wee will make a witt of you Dick, one daye wilt thou catch the jest at the instant & not further in the weeke. To bed thereafter & methinkes I have done well enow for I am in the verie bosome of these wicked villeynes, which I think doth advance greatlie oure venture. With alle honour & my humble duty to yr. Lordship & may God protect you & blesse oure enterprizes, from London this Friday the 10^th Januarye 1610 Richard Bracegirdle