The Book of Air and Shadows

18

Tap.

Crosetti stirred in his sleep and tried to return to a rather nice dream in which he was sitting around a movie set with Jodie Foster and Clark Gable, just having a comfortable conversation about the movies, and he was giving Jodie the eye because they were in on the secret about Gable not really being dead and waiting for him to explain about how he’d fooled the world but there was this rattling sound behind them and he said he’d go find out what it was…

Tap tap tap taptaptaptap

He was up, in the unfamiliar room of the Linton Lodge Hotel, on the outskirts of Oxford, a very nice room that Professor March had kindly arranged for him. It had a triple bay window giving on the garden, these windows being black with the night and also the source of the noise that had separated him from dreamland. Another rattle of pebbles hit the glass. He checked his watch: two-thirty in the morning.

Rising, he pulled on his jeans, went to the window, opened it, and got a faceful of gravel. He cursed and leaned out the window and spied a dark figure on the lawn below, stooping to retrieve another handful of pebbles from the path.

“Who the hell is that?” he demanded in the sort of loud whisper one uses when not wanting to wake a sleeping house.

The person below stood and announced in the same style, “It’s Carolyn.”

“Carolyn Rolly?”

“No, Crosetti, some other Carolyn. Get down here and let me in!”

He stared below at the white, raised, familiar face for a long moment and then shut the window, pulled on a shirt and sneakers, left the room, ran back and got his key just before the door swung shut, dashed through the short hallway, flew down the stairs and through the lounge to the garden door. He opened it, and there she was, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and jeans, soaked through, her dark hair plastered in strings on either side of her face.

She pushed past him into the lounge.

“Christ, I’m freezing,” she said, and she seemed to be: in the dim red light of the emergency exit lamp her lips looked dark blue. She glanced at the bar. “Can you get me a drink?”

“This is closed and locked up. But I have a bottle in my room.”

He did too, a fifth of Balvenie purchased in the duty-free for his mother. When they were in the room, he turned on the hot water in the bath, handed her his old plaid bathrobe, and told her to take her wet clothes off. He poured a couple of generous shots into the hotel water glasses while she changed in the bathroom, and when she emerged, in the robe with a towel around her hair, handed her one of them.

She gulped it down, coughed, and sighed, while he stared at her face. She met his eye. “What?” she said.

“What? Carolyn, it’s the second of December, no, the third now, and you’ve been missing since, I don’t know, the end of August. Bulstrode is dead, did you know that? Someone killed him. And his lawyer shot two guys in my mom’s living room and gangsters tried to kidnap me and…oh, Christ, I can’t begin to…Carolyn, where the hell have you been and what the hell have you been up to?”

“Don’t yell at me!” she said in a strained voice. “Please, can I just sit down and be quiet for a minute?”

He gestured to an armchair by the window and she sat on this and he sat on the bed facing her. She looked ridiculously small and young now, although there were smudges under her eyes and their blue seemed dulled, like tarnished metal.

She finished her whiskey in silence and held out her glass for a refill.

“No,” said Crosetti. “The story first.”

“From what point? My birth?”

“No, you can start with your marriage to H. Olerud of 161 Tower Road, Braddock, Pee-Ay.”

A sharp intake of breath and he saw those familiar bars of rose bloom on her cheekbones. Rolly had less control of the blush than he would have supposed necessary for such an accomplished liar.

“You know about that?” she asked.

“Yeah. I actually went out there, to the house. I had a nice conversation with Emmett.”

At this her eyes widened and she clutched her mouth. “Oh, God, you saw him? How is he?”

“Reasonably healthy, a little skinny maybe. He seems like a bright kid. I saw the girl too, also healthy, the bit I saw of her. Their father seems like a pretty violent guy.”

“You could say that. Harlan is fairly free with his hands.”

“I saw. How did you come to hook up with him? He seems a lot older than you.”

“He was my brother-in-law. My mom died when I was thirteen, and my sister Emily took me in. She was four years older than me and he was six years older than her.”

“What about your father?”

She uttered a short derisive laugh. “Whoever he was. Mom was a small-town waitress and barmaid and she supplemented her income by cultivating guys. Pay the rent this month and you get all the ass you can handle. She was what they call a trucker’s friend. One of them shot her and the guy she was with at the time. I guess he thought it was true romance. I came home from middle school one day and the cops were there and I called Emily and she picked me up. This was in Mechanicsburg, and I started to live with them. Do you need to hear this?”

“Yes. So there was no Uncle Lloyd.”

“No, I lied about that. There was Harlan, though. He started messing with me when I turned fourteen and Emily didn’t do anything to stop it, he had her beat down so bad. I got pregnant with Emmett when I was sixteen and with Molly four years later and what can I say about it but that was the way I thought things were. Harlan had a job at the battery plant, there was food on the table, and that’s how we lived. I had Emily and she had me and we both had the kids. You’d be surprised how many people there are in places like Braddock who live like that. Then Harlan lost his job and had to take a shit job in a Wal-Mart warehouse and Emily died and-”

“How did Emily die?”

“She got electrocuted by the washing machine. It was always kind of sparky, and Harlan was always promising to fix it but he never did, and we had to be careful around it. I sort of think she accidentally on purpose killed herself. He was beating her pretty regular by then.”

“Uh-huh. And how does the bookbinding come into this?”

Suddenly her face turned rigid. “You want to know my whole life story? Why do you? Because we had a fuck? That entitles you to the whole fucking five-CD collection of the life of Carolyn Rolly?”

“No, Carolyn,” said Crosetti. “I’m not entitled to anything. But you came to me, in the middle of the night. Why? A warm bath? A drink of scotch? A chat about old times in the bookstore?”

“No, but…look I need your help. I ran away from them. I didn’t know where else to go. And we don’t have the time to get into every detail. When they wake up and find I’m gone they’ll come here.”

“Who’s ‘they,’ Carolyn?”

“Shvanov’s people. There are four of them, in a hotel about two miles from here. They know where you are. That’s how I knew to come here.”

“And now…what? We’re on the same side again? Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Oh, God! I told you before, I don’t know how to behave with…real people like you. I lie, I get into desperate panics and I run and…Christ, can’t you give me another drink? Please?”

He did. She drank. “Okay, look we don’t have time for the long version. Bookbinding-I took the kids to a doctor one day, for shots for school, and while I was waiting in the office…I saw this book. It was part of the decorations, you know? How some people have fancy bookcases with old hardcover books in them? Well, this doctor had one of those and Emmett and Molly were playing with them, taking the books down and using them like blocks and the receptionist told them they had to stop and I replaced them on the shelf and there was one of them that was called The Bookbinder’s Art and I swiped it. It was bound in half-calf with gold tooling. I don’t know why I took it. Maybe it was, it felt so rich, the feel of the leather and the paper, it was so not Braddock, like a piece of a different world that fell there by accident, right there in my hand, like a jewel. And when I got home I hid it and read it at night, every night, for months, and the idea that people could just make books by hand and they would be beautiful things…I don’t know why but it just got under my skin. And then Emily died and he started beating on me and I knew if I didn’t get out I’d be as dead as Emily, either he’d do it or I would, or I’d kill him. So I left. The first time, he caught me and locked me in the cellar and beat me so bad I could hardly walk. The next time I waited for his payday and I took five hundred in cash while he was sleeping and walked away and hitched a ride and ended up in New York and stayed in a shelter. I got a job cleaning buildings at night. I found my loft through that job. It was illegal and toxic, like I told you, but it was dirt cheap because the owner wanted someone on the property so scavenger gangs wouldn’t rip out the copper. That was the first time I heard Shvanov’s name.”

“Why?”

“Because he owned the building, or part of it. Able Real Estate Management. Okay, so I had a place to stay and I was a cleaner for over two years, working nights, spending all my spare time in the library reading about bookbinding and about the book business and learning what I had to know to fake a résumé. Then I quit the cleaners and got a job in a midtown restaurant waiting tables because I needed to look at regular people, see how they dressed, how they talked, the gestures. I converted myself to a middle-class person. That took the better part of another year. And then I got the job with Glaser. My sad story. Now, do you want to hear about the manuscript?”

“I do.”

“I knew Bulstrode from before-I think I told you that in New York. Sidney introduced us, and I took a course he gave on manuscripts at Columbia General Studies. As soon as I saw the pages I took out of the Churchill I knew it was a big find.” She sipped at her drink and looked out the window at the black night. “And you want to know why I lied about owning the carcasses, why I pretended it was nothing much, and why I lied about being a fugitive so that you’d sell the pages to Bulstrode for spare change.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Okay, I’m a bookstore clerk who found a manuscript in what’s supposedly a back I bought for pennies from my employer. I have no resources and it’s going to take significant resources to get the thing authenticated and sold at auction and as soon as I go public with it Sidney is going to come out swinging and-”

“What do you mean, swinging?”

“Oh, I see you don’t know Sidney. He’s going to say that I opened the covers and found this manuscript and then swindled him into selling me the books as backs. So there’s immediately a cloud on the title and no auction house will touch it. Sidney’s a big gun in that world and I’m nobody. So I needed a front man and I thought of Bulstrode. I called him while you were waiting in the street that morning, told him what we’d found, and set up what went down in his office. He said that if it was genuine he’d give me five grand for it over and above what he gave you. So then it was Bulstrode’s manuscript. Even if he’d been fooled once, he’s still a major scholar and paleographer with access to tons of manuscript sources. There wouldn’t ever have to be a connection with me or Glaser.”

“Right, but Carolyn, I still don’t get why you didn’t tell me this off the bat.”

“Oh, for God’s sake-I didn’t know you. You could have mentioned it to Glaser the next day-hey, Carolyn found a priceless Jacobean manuscript in those books you sold her for junk, ha-ha. So I had to pretend to involve you in the scam without at the same time letting you know what the manuscript really was.”

“I see. And what happened afterward, that night-that was part of the scam too?”

For almost the first time that evening she looked him right in the face. Crosetti’s father had once told him that pathological liars always looked the interrogator right in the eye and kept the stare for longer than was natural, and he was happy to see that Carolyn did not do this. Her look was tentative and, he imagined, a little ashamed.

“No,” she said, “that wasn’t part of the plan. I knew you were pissed off at me, and I’d told you that porker about Uncle Lloyd and I thought you’d just walk away, and when you didn’t and you did all those nice things…look, in my whole life I never had a single other day like that, someone taking me places, that beautiful music, and buying me things, just because they cared about me as a person and not just because they wanted to paw me…”

“I did want to paw you.”

“I meant someone I wanted to get pawed by, someone my age, someone sweet. I was never a kid, never a teenager. I never hung out at the drive-in with boys. I mean, it was like drugs.”

“So, you like me?”

“Oh, I adore you,” she said, in a tone so matter-of-fact that it was more convincing than any sighing avowal. His heart actually gave a little thump. “But so what? You’re so much too good for me that it’s ridiculous, and that doesn’t even count my kids, you really need to get saddled with that mess, and so I figured, okay, just one night of…I don’t know, what you said, one night of youth, the kind of things regular people do when they’re our age and after that it was like the end of Cinderella, except there was no glass slipper and no prince. The next day I got together with Bulstrode to plan out what to do next, and he said he had a source for the money he needed and we went to meet Shvanov. Did you ever see Osip Shvanov?”

“No. Only people who work for him.”

“Oh, he’s something rare. Very smooth, except around the eyes. He reminded me of Earl Ray Bridger.”

“I’m sorry…?”

“A felon my mom once went out with for a while, who I don’t want to talk about right now. Anyway, I spotted him for a bad guy right away, but poor Bulstrode didn’t have a clue, and for sure I wasn’t going to tip him off. He did his little pitch about the Shakespeare play to Shvanov. He said the Bracegirdle document itself was worth fifty to a hundred grand, but if we found the Shakespeare manuscript, there was no way to calculate how high the price would go. A hundred million? A hundred fifty? And Shvanov would risk nothing because even if we came up empty on that, he’d still have the Bracegirdle to sell. Anyway, Shvanov gave him twenty large and told him to take off for England immediately to research Bracegirdle and Lord Dumbarton and get on the trail of the play. Which he did. And I went with him-”

“Without a good-bye. Don’t you think that was a little harsh?”

“That was the best thing about it, knowing you weren’t ever going to be involved with that son of a bitch.”

“You were protecting me?”

“I thought I was,” she admitted, and then added defensively, “and don’t think you didn’t need it. You don’t know this guy.”

“Speaking of whom-how did a Brit scholar happen to know a thug like Shvanov anyway?”

“I have no idea. A mutual friend hooked them up. I thought it was some loan shark deal-Bulstrode was stony broke and maybe he tried to raise money on the street for this thing and it led him up the chain. God, I’m so tired! Where was I?”

“Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when you’ll be back again. And no good-byes.”

“Right. Okay, we get to England and go straight to Oxford and we stay with Ollie March. Bulstrode said I had to stay with them, which March didn’t much like, but he said it was for security. I had to get the manuscript dated, so no one would know Bulstrode was involved, and when the dating came back positive, that’s when he really got squirrelly. I wasn’t allowed to make phone calls, and the only reason I got to write that letter to Sidney was I convinced him that it would be more suspicious not to write and make up a story about the plates and send him a check. He was insanely suspicious of me, that I was, like, working for Shvanov and telling him what we were up to, our research and all.”

“But you weren’t.”

“But I was. Of course I was working for Shvanov. I’m still working for Shvanov, as far as Shvanov knows. He gave me a cell phone before I left New York and told me to keep in touch. What was I supposed to say to a man like that? No?”

Crosetti was silent under her defiant look. She snatched the towel from her head and dried her hair so violently that he winced. After a moment, he asked her, “What did Bulstrode say when you told him about the ciphered letters?”

Here she blushed again. “I didn’t tell him. Shvanov did.”

“But you told Shvanov.”

“I confirmed his suspicions,” she admitted quickly. “He knows things, Crosetti. He has people everywhere. Obviously he knew about you from Bulstrode, and he must have checked around. You don’t think he can find out what’s happening at the New York Public Library? He can find out what’s happening in the CIA, for Christ’s sake!”

“So much for keeping me out of it,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I’m a coward and he scares me. I can’t lie to him. Anyway, when Bulstrode got the news about the ciphers, he went ballistic. I had to practically sit on him to calm him down. He realized that the ciphers were the key to finding the play manuscript and if Shvanov got hold of them from you, then he wouldn’t need us anymore, which was probably not that good for our health. I said we should try to see if the fair copies of the ciphers Bracegirdle sent to Dunbarton were still in existence at the receiving end.”

“That’s why you went to Darden Hall.”

“Right. But they weren’t there, or anyway we didn’t find them. We did find a Breeches Bible, though. Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah,” said Crosetti, “a small Tudor Bible, 1560, nine by seven. We think it was the basis of the Bracegirdle cipher. But how did you know that? You didn’t have the ciphertext.”

“No, but we found a Breeches Bible with pinholes in it, in Dunbarton’s library, pinholes through random letters. Bulstrode figured out that the selected letters were the cipher key and that a grille must have been part of the cipher. He knew a hell of a lot about antique ciphers.”

“That’s why you stole the grille from that church.”

“You know about that?” This with some alarm.

“I know everything. Why didn’t you just steal the Bible?”

“Bulstrode did steal it. And then he got me to swipe the grille. Man, by that time he was so paranoid he thought there were gangs of scholars on the same search and he wanted to slow them down, if they happened to have just the ciphertext. He assumed that you’d give the ciphered pages to someone, your pal at the library for instance, and a general hunt would be on. That’s why he came back to New York. He wanted to get to you and get the cipher pages from you. He had the grille and-”

“Shvanov grabbed him up and tortured him. Why was that?”

“He thought Bulstrode was double-crossing him. Someone, I never found out who, called Shvanov and told him that Bulstrode was dealing with another group hunting for the play manuscript. Shvanov went crazy and-”

“Another group? You mean us? Mishkin?”

She considered this for a moment, chewing her lip. “No, I don’t think it’s you they meant. Someone else, some other gangsters. A guy named Harel, also Russian. They’re all Russian Jews, all related in some way, rivals or former partners. They mainly talk in Russian, so I don’t get much information…”

“And what about this Miranda Kellogg that Mishkin is always going on about? What’s her story?”

“I only met her once,” she said. “I have no idea who she really was, some kind of actress or model Shvanov hired to get the Bracegirdle original away from Mishkin. They sent the real heiress away on a freebie vacation and presented the actress as Kellogg.”

“What happened to her?”

“I think she held up Shvanov for more money after she had the thing and he got rid of her.”

“Killed her?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s dead. Gone.” She shivered. “Dead as Bulstrode. Shvanov doesn’t like people screwing him.”

“Was Bulstrode double-crossing Shvanov?”

“Oh, yeah. Not with any other gangsters, though, as far as I know. But he never had any intention of handing over the play if we found it. Are you kidding? March told me he was planning to give it to the nation, with of course the proviso that he have sole access to it and the right to do a first edition. They’d lock him and it up in the Tower and Shvanov could just go suck a frog. I mean the man was a Shakespeare scholar down to the bones. He used to talk about it, with fucking stars in his eyes, the poor jerk!”

“Well, no perforated Bible has turned up as far as I’m aware, so we have to assume that Shvanov has it. What happened to the actual grille?”

“Shvanov has that too, obviously, because Bulstrode took it with him when he left England. And when they put the boots to him Bulstrode must have told him about Mishkin having the original letter and he already knew you must have kept the originals of the ciphered letters. Didn’t anyone try to get them from you?”

“Oh, yeah, they tried,” said Crosetti, and briefly related the events lately transpired in Queens. He added, “So the basic situation is, we have only the ciphers, he has only the grille: the classic Mexican standoff. Or am I missing something again, Carolyn?”

This last was in response to a peculiar expression that swiftly crossed her face. She said, “Do you have have the ciphers here? I mean right here in this room.”

“Well, the originals are safe in a vault at the New York Public Library.

But I have a digitized version on my laptop here. Encrypted, of course. I have a Breeches Bible too. Mishkin bought two of them. And I have a digitized text of the 1560 edition I put in there back in the city before we-”

“I have the grille,” she said.

“You do? Where?”

In answer, she stood and pulled the robe aside and propped her foot up on the arm of the chair, exposing her inner thigh. “Here,” she said, pointing to a constellation of tiny blue dots on the smooth white skin. He knelt and peered, his face just inches away. The scent of rose soap and Carolyn made his knees tremble. At first the dots looked random, but then he saw the pattern: a stylized weeping willow tree, symbol of mourning. He cleared his throat, but his voice still croaked. “Carolyn, is that a jailhouse tattoo?”

“Yeah. I made it in my room at Ollie’s after I swiped the grille. I used a pin and ballpoint ink. There are eighty-nine holes.”

“Jesus Christ! Is it accurate?”

“Yeah. I transferred it to tracing paper and compared it with the Bible from Darden Hall. The holes match up.”

“But why?”

“Because I figured I might run into you someday, and you might still have the ciphers. And paper gets lost, or stolen, as we well know, not to mention the bastards searched me about fifty times. But of course the bitch who searched me wasn’t told any details about what she was looking for, only that I wasn’t supposed to have anything up my various holes. And lots of people have tattoos. Do you have any tracing paper?”

“No. But I have a fine-point marking pen. We can use the glass from that little picture frame. It’s about the right size.”

She lay on the edge of the bed, on her back, with her left thigh flat and at a right angle to her body, while Crosetti knelt on the floor between her spread legs. All the lights in the room were on. He held the glass against her skin and used the marking pen to place a red dot carefully over each blue dot on her skin. He had to keep his left hand against the warm flesh and his face quite close as he did this. It was the most erotic experience of his life, save one, and he was almost giggling with it. They didn’t speak. Rolly was as still as a corpse.

When it was done, Rolly adjusted her robe and said, “Bulstrode figured out from the pattern of the pinholes in the Darden Hall Bible that they started with the second page of Genesis and worked forward in order. You place the outermost grille holes on the lower left and the lower right over the first and last letters of the bottom line on each page-those’re the index markers-and you read the letters under each of the holes off in the usual reading order, left to right, top to bottom.”

Crosetti was already at the desk with the old Bible opened. His laptop was plugged in and running Word. He placed the glass plate over Genesis and lined up the index dots over the proper letters. The marker ink was semitransparent, and he could easily read the letters beneath.

“I’ll call the letters and you type them in,” he said. “D…a…v…o…v…”

It was unbelievably tedious work. Crosetti had, of course, done a character count of the ciphered letters, and there were over thirty-five thousand of them, not counting spaces, and there was a nonrepeating Biblical letter key for each one. He did a quick calculation in his head. Dictating at the rate of, say, one character a second, thirty-five thousand characters would require almost ten hours, not counting breaks and checking. This was far too long, if the people Rolly had skipped from were looking for her, and he was sure they were. So they could leave now, and hole up-and as soon as Crosetti thought about this he hit on just the right place to do that-but he was perishing just then to read the secret ciphers immediately. He stopped dictating.

“What’s the matter?” Rolly asked.

“This sucks, is what. There has to be an easier way. We’re not Jacobean spies. Shit! I’m looking at a computer and it never occurred to me…”

“What’re you babbling about, Crosetti?”

“This. Look at the grille. The first letter of the key is the third letter of the first line, then the fifteenth letter, then the twenty-second. Next line: letter two, then seven, then fourteen. The grille generates the same pattern for every page they used. They didn’t use title pages, did they?”

“No, the only pages marked were ones with solid text. And of course every other page so they wouldn’t confuse the pinholes that came through the paper.”

“Of course. They’d only use the right-hand nontitle pages. So all we have to do is bring up the digitized version of the 1560, strip out the chapter title pages, and the left-hand pages, and then write a simple search to count and list just the characters the grille indicates. We can generate the key automatically. I have a Vigenère solver in there too. If this works, we could be reading Bracegirdle’s secrets by morning.”

“Could I take a nap while you do that?”

“Be my guest,” he said and turned back to the desk.

As with all projects involving computers, it took a lot longer than expected. The first of the dawn had appeared in the bay windows by the time Crosetti mashed the Return key and sent the long string of letters comprising what he hoped was the key into the virtual maw of the Vigenère solver, which had already been charged with the entire string of characters from the Bracegirdle ciphers. The program screen showed “SOLVING…” and in a long blank slit below that word a string of little rectangles appeared one after another like a line of boxcars on a track. Crosetti had been drinking the hotel’s do-it-yourself coffee all night and he was dry-mouthed and twitching with it.

“Crosetti…Christ, what time is it?”

This in a mumble from under the quilt.

“Almost seven. I think I’m done. Want to see?”

“I smell coffee.”

“There’s some left, but it’s awful. Come and see this. This could be the solution.”

She rolled out of bed and stood next to him, smelling of bed. The last little rectangle appeared and was replaced by a screen showing a single file title:

Bracegirdle cipher plaintext.txt

Crosetti placed the cursor on it and said, “You should have the honor. Hit the Return key.”

She did. The screen changed to a solid block of single-spaced text, the first line of which read:

mylfrdithdsnowpascedtwowereksandsomedaitssincgilefmyouphowsa

“Oh, no!” she cried, “it didn’t work.”

“Yes, it did. Remember they were working out of two different Bibles, Bracegirdle’s and Dunbarton’s, and the average print quality was pretty bad, especially with a mass market item like the Breeches Bible, so no two copies were exactly alike. And they must have had the same problem back in the day. The grille on Bracegirdle’s copy would give a slightly different key letter set than Dunbarton’s but it’s close enough. Here, let me copy this to a new document-so-and put in spacing and punctuation and correct the obvious errors-so-and…here’s the first line.”

My Lord: It has now passed two weekes and some daies since I left your howse

“Oh, God! Crosetti, you’re amazing.”

There was a smile of delight on her face, the same that had penetrated his dream life for these many months, and he felt a similar grin break out upon his own face. “Not really,” he said. “It was obvious to any really transcendent genius. Are you going to kiss me now?”

She did. Soon afterward, he was naked under the quilt and so was she. Crosetti pulled away from her and looked into her eyes.

He said, “I guess we’re not going to read the ciphers right now.”

She kissed him again. “They’ve kept four hundred years. Another hour won’t hurt. And you’re probably too tired.”

“Tired of looking at text on a screen, yeah, not too tired for this.” Some more of this followed and then he pulled away from her abruptly and met her eyes.

“You’re going to stay now, right?” he said. “I mean you’re going to be here tomorrow and the next day…”

“I think I can commit to those particular days.”

“But not additional days? Or is this going to be a continuing daily negotiation?”

“Crosetti, please don’t…”

“Ah, Carolyn, you’re going to kill me.” He sighed. “I’m going to be a dead person if you keep this up.”

And he would have gone on longer in this vein, but she stopped his mouth with her tongue and pressed Richard Bracegirdle’s long-lost cipher grille against his groin.

“That was fast,” he said.

“It was. It was fast and furious.”

“I like the way your eyes pop open when you get your rocks off.”

“An unfailing sign,” she agreed, “so I’ll remember who.”

“Wise. Now, although I would like to extend this more or less indefinitely…”

“You want to read the ciphers. Oh, so do I but I didn’t want to say.”

“Lest it be misinterpreted. I understand. So since we’re agreed, let us visit the bathroom in turn and then make it happen.”

She kissed him briefly and slid out of the bed and he thought, There can’t be many things more lovely than watching a woman you’ve just made love to walk across the room, that way her back and her ass look in the dawn’s early light, and he was thinking about how to make that shot on film look like what it actually looked like in real life when Carolyn gave a yelp and dropped to the floor.

“What?”

“They’re here!”

Carolyn’s face had the fox-in-the-headlights look he recalled from New York, the animal fear in her eyes. In an instant it broke his heart all over again. “Who?” Although it was an easy guess.

“One of them’s standing in the garden, Semya. The others must be in the front. Oh, Christ, what’re we going to do!”

“Get dressed! And keep away from the window!” She slid into the bathroom like a lizard and Crosetti got up and went to the window naked, stretching and scratching his belly like a man who’d just slept the sleep of the just and had nothing to fear. There was indeed a man in the garden, a broad-shouldered fellow in a knee-length black leather coat and a knitted cap. He looked up, saw Crosetti, stared briefly, and then turned his attention elsewhere. So even if they knew his location, and that Carolyn might come to him, they still didn’t know him. Which was strange, because they had spotted him easily enough on the street in Queens. Unless that was a different group of people entirely. Carolyn had mentioned two rival organizations…

But he couldn’t think about that now. He pulled clothes on, yanked the phone cord out of the wall, plugged in a phone adapter for U.K. systems, connected it to his computer, compressed and encrypted the Bracegirdle material and dialed up his Earthlink mailbox. He hadn’t used a dial-up connection to the Internet in years, but it still worked of course. It seemed to take eons for the thing to go through-perhaps five minutes-and after that was done he used a disk-scrubbing program to strip the cipher, the key, the Bible, and the plaintext version from his hard drive. He looked up and saw Carolyn in the bathroom doorway.

“What are you doing?” she stage-whispered.

“Protecting our secrets. It’s funny, I’ve seen so many movies about this situation that it’s like I’m following a script. The guy and the girl have to escape from the bad guys…”

“Oh, fuck you, Crosetti, this isn’t a fucking movie! If they catch us they’ll torture us until we fucking give them the secrets. They use blowtorches…”

“That’s not in the script, Carolyn. Put it out of your mind.”

He sat at the computer again, worked for another few minutes, then switched off the machine and packed it in its case. “Now we have to pack you,” he said and dumped the contents of his duffel bag onto the floor. “I hope you’re limber enough to do this.”

She was, but barely. When this trick is done in movie land, Crosetti knew, the hero doesn’t really carry the girl in the bag, but a styrofoam simulacrum. In real life, he now found, hauling a 125-pound woman down a flight of stairs in a duffel bag was a lot harder than he had imagined. He was sweating heavily and breathing hard when he reached the lobby.

There were two of them standing there as he checked out. He was careful not to examine them, but he absorbed peripherally an impression of leather, largeness, and quiet determination. At the front desk, he handed the clerk the note he had prepared:

Please don’t say my name out loud. I am trying to avoid the people who asked for me. Thank you.

There was a twenty-pound banknote folded into this message. The clerk, a young Asian, met his eye, nodded, and did the checking-out process in silence, with a simple “Good-bye, sir, hurry back,” at the end.

Crosetti now opened the duffel bag and removed the rain jacket, muffler, and hat he had squashed down on top of Rolly and put them on in full view of the thugs, who regarded him without interest, their eyes on the main stairway and the emergency stairwell at the lobby’s other end. He picked up the duffel and walked right by them out to the street. The E-class Mercedes he had arranged over the Internet was waiting, as was a Daimler V8 just behind it, with yet another leather thug leaning against the fender, smoking. The limo driver, a Sikh with a white turban, helped him load the duffel bag into the trunk, and when he was seated, he told the driver to take him to the nearest department store. The man suggested Templar Square, which was fine with Crosetti. He thought the place looked like any small-town American mall, with less energy; it made him obscurely sad.

Back at the car with his purchases, he had the driver pop the trunk. Rolly crawled out, groaning, and he helped her into the backseat. She smelled of dampness, canvas, and unwashed clothing. With the car again under way, he handed her a shopping bag. She looked through the clothing it contained.

“You’re always buying me clothes, Crosetti. Should I be worried about that? Undies too. That must’ve been a thrill.”

“Just being tidy. It’s a vice of mine. How do you like them?”

“I hate them. I’m going to look like a starlet or an amateur whore. And what’s with the Dolly Parton wig? I thought the point was to avoid notice.”

“That’s how you avoid notice, if you’re someone who always dresses in black and has brown hair. You should put them on.”

She grumbled but did as he asked, donning a lilac sweater, tight yellow jeans, an oversize white parka with a fake fur collar, and fleece-lined boots.

“This all fits,” she said. “I’m amazed. What’ve you got there?”

“Makeup. Turn this way and hold still.”

As the car sped down the motorway, he painted on foundation, blusher, a heavy plum-colored eye treatment, and dark scarlet lip gloss. He showed her what she looked like in the little mirror of the compact he’d bought.

“Hey, sailor, lookin’ for some action?” she asked the mirror. “Crosetti, how the hell did you learn to do this?”

“I have three older sisters and I worked on lots of very, very low-budget movies,” said Crosetti. “And don’t thank me. Mishkin gave me an American Express card before we left.”

“And where are we going on Mishkin’s American Express card?”

Crosetti’s eyes flicked to the driver.

“Casablanca. We’re going to Casablanca-for the waters. I have a standing invitation. We should be safe there until things settle down. We can study the Bracegirdle ciphers and figure out where they lead us, if anywhere.”

“What if they have people at the airport?”

“That’s extremely unlikely. We’re not running from the government or Goldfinger. This is a bunch of local gangsters. Right now they’re probably breaking into our room, noticing the pile of clothes and books and realizing how they were scammed. They’ll know we’re going to the airport because they saw me get into an airport limo. They’ll chase us, but we should be okay.”

She exhaled and leaned back on the soft leather, closing her eyes. He took her hand, which was warm and damp, like a child’s, and he too closed his eyes as they drove south.

THE SIXTH CIPHERED LETTER (FRAGMENT 4)

drawes out from his presse the fayre copy, saying you shal burn this & I goe to do it drawing neare the flames but at last could not, I know not why, it was to me neare to killing a babe; for I loved him & saw he loved it much. But this I had not in my harte to say in wordes; instead I sayde upon second thought perhaps we should keep it safe as evidence of this vile plot. Now he looketh longe at the fyre, in scilence, drinkinge: then saies he, there is a thought my Dick, a happy thought. We will not burn her, nore uze her to stop draughts or start fyres, but she shal drowne; as who knowes what may rise from water in a comeing tyme when men may see these thynges with a new eie. Then he laughs & saies I trow that this poor unheard play will be all of Will that’s heard of an age from nowe & that a mere mocke. Nay, saies I, for the mob doth flock to thy plaies & it is oute of question thou’rt best for comedies. At this he doth pull a face as if he bit upon a rotten fish & he saies, Codso, how thou dost prattle, Dick. What’s a play! New a’ Tuesday & sennight later they cry have you not some-thynge else, we have hearde this before. Tis a penny-tuppence businesse withal, emplaced curiouslie betwixt the bawds and the bears, of no consequence a thynge of ayre and shadowes. Nay, if a man would live after his bones are in the earth he must make weightier stuff out of his braines, epic poesie or histories, or from his loines make sonnes. I have no histories & of epics onlie two, and those slight ones. Had I landes & wealth or learning I might have been another Sydney, a better Spenser, but from my youth I must earne, earne, & a pen can draw readie money only out of yon wooden O. And my son is dead.

We spake no more to our purpose that night. Later, wee left for Warwickeshire & a hard going we hadde, it being winter & all myres, but arrived in Stratford 18^th Febry & took us to a certayne place & hid safe the booke of that playe. Where it is have I writ down in a cypher knowne but to me and Mr W.S. It is not this cipher my lord, but a new one I have devized with Mr W.S. for he sayde hide what I have writ with my writing and wrote me out the key on the instant & this direction is kept by me all ways, and anie man who hath it & hath the key & hath the scille to uze my distance rule may find that place where it resteth.

My Lord, if you have need of this playe of Mary of Scotland but send word, as I aime to submit to youre desyres in everie thynge. I am yr. Lordship’s most humble & obdt. servt.

Richard Bracegirdle

London, 22^nd Februarie 1611