The Book of Air and Shadows (30 page)

C
rosetti had been questioned by the police hundreds of times, but never before by one who was not a close relative. He found it a good deal easier to lie to strangers, especially as they were handling him with care. They were all in the living room of the family home, Detective Murray perched on the couch, Detective Fernandez in the facing armchair with his pad out, Crosetti in the other armchair of the worn blue brocade suite, coffee things on the coffee table, coffee having been poured by Mary Peg before her discreet exit. Behind Crosetti’s head was the large oil painting, manufactured from a photo, of Lieutenant Crosetti, heroic cop, in his heavily bemedaled blues, with his young family around him.

The eyes of the two cops occasionally flicked toward this icon as they put their questions; there was no danger that they were going to get rough. In any case, aside from complicity in the conversion of Sidney Glaser’s property (the Bracegirdle manuscripts) to unauthorized use, Crosetti had not done anything wrong, and the policemen did not press
him on this point. They wanted to know about Bulstrode in a routine way, because they had found Crosetti’s name in his appointment book and they were going through the usual motions. They were mildly interested in Rolly; that she had disappeared interested them, but when Crosetti told them about the London letter, their interest vanished. Leaving the country wasn’t a crime. Crosetti knew better than to try to engage them in speculation about the murder; cops weren’t there to supply information but to obtain it. They stayed twenty minutes, some of which were given over to reminiscences of the late Lieutenant Crosetti, and left as cheerful as homicide detectives ever get.

A cop who was your
sister
was a different item, and when Patty Dolan came by forty minutes later, Crosetti was perfectly willing to get into her face. After having established that he was but a minor figure in the life of the victim, he asked, “So what do you guys think?” Meaning her fellow cops; as he said this, he glanced at his mother as well.

“Well, the guy was a Brit and gay,” said Patty. “They’re figuring it for a sex thing that went sour.”

“I doubt that,” said Crosetti.

“Why, did you have sex with him?” asked the big sister. “You explored all his little twists?”

“No, did you? The first time I saw him I thought, Gee, Patty would really go for this guy. He’s fat and sweaty and bald….”

This was a reference to Jerry Dolan, her husband. The Crosettis were the kind of family where physical imperfections were fair game among the sibs. Patty Dolan herself had come in for enough of it herself growing up. She was a blocky woman with a strong-featured face not unlike the one her dad wore in the oil painting. She had his black hair too, but with the mom’s blue eyes.

“Look who’s talking,” said the detective, and her hand darted out in a practiced move to wring the loose flab above Crosetti’s belt. He batted the hand away and said, “No, seriously. I assume you know the guy was involved in a big-money con a few years back. And he ripped me off on a valuable manuscript. That speaks to bad character.”

“Which could’ve extended into his sex life. What’s your point?”

“I don’t know if I have one,” said Crosetti. “But look at the pattern. He cheats me and disappears to England. Carolyn Rolly ditches her whole life and disappears to England too, or so she says, in a letter that I know for a fact contains nine-tenths bullshit. Then Bulstrode comes back here and gets tortured to death. Did you find that manuscript on him?”

“I don’t know. It’s not my case.”

“Well, if it’s missing, there’s your motive.”

“What was it worth?”

“Hard to say. Fanny says maybe fifty grand at auction.”

At this, Detective Dolan raised an eyebrow, protruded her lower lip. “That’s a lot of money.”

“It’s chump change compared to its real value.”

“What do you mean?”

Crosetti looked at his mother. “Should we tell her?”

“Unless you want her to beat it out of you,” said Mary Peg.

Crosetti told her what they knew and what the Bracegirdle letter suggested, after which Patty turned to her mother. “You believe all this?”

“I don’t know,” said Mary Peg. “Fanny tells us that the original sheets we have here are genuine seventeenth century, so maybe the Bracegirdle letter is legit too. There really might be an unknown manuscript play by William Shakespeare buried someplace. Maybe Bulstrode got a line on it, and maybe not. Maybe he told someone about it while he was over in England looking and maybe the word got out to the kind of people who kill people for money.”

“That’s a lot of maybes, Ma. What I don’t like is that Allie is mixed up in a chain of events that lead to a really nasty killing. And that he was involved with this woman who disappeared.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Crosetti.

“Just that looking at it from the cop point of view, if we assume for a minute that this murder isn’t just a sex thing like the guys on the case think, it’s much more likely that it was a scam, just like the one that got Bulstrode into trouble in the first place. Someone slips a phony clue into an old book so that it gets discovered by someone—this Rolly woman—who’s bound to send it to Bulstrode…you’re shaking your head.”

Crosetti had been, and now he said, with some ascerbity, “No, the find was genuine. I was there, Patty. It was pure accident that those volumes were burned and sent to be broken up.”

“True, but she could’ve had those sheets prepared and just pretended to find them in those books.”

“And somehow slipped them into all the volumes hoping for a fire? That’s nuts. I saw them come out of those covers with my own eyes.”

“Oh, there’s good evidence! Any con man can do that kind of switch. I’m sorry, but when I hear about the secret treasure and the mysterious manuscript, I grab hold of my wallet.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Crosetti, his voice rising. “This is a real manuscript, by a real guy, and the cipher is a real cipher. Ask Fanny if you don’t believe me. Or Klim.”

“Klim?”

“Yeah, our new houseguest. He’s in your old room.”

Patty gave her mother a look. Who said, “Don’t give me that cop stare, Patricia. He’s a perfectly respectable Polish gentleman who’s helping us with deciphering these letters. And I have to say that you’re being unduly suspicious and even unfair to your brother.”

“Fine,” said Dolan, suppressing a sigh. Getting between Mary Peg and her baby was ever a losing proposition. “But if a smooth-talking character shows up with a package he says is the Shakespeare manuscript and wants ten grand good faith money…”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” said mother and son almost simultaneously, which was funny enough to discharge the tensions. The family detective said she’d keep track of the Bulstrode case to the extent her duties and department protocol allowed and keep them abreast of any relevant findings.

As soon as she left, Mary Peg said, “I’m going to see if Radi wants any coffee. I think he’s been up all night.”

“Radi?”

“Oh, mind your own business!” said Mary Peg and walked out of the kitchen, leaving Crosetti to ponder the hitherto unrelated categories of Mom and Romance. He went to work, where he had to dissemble about
his special knowledge of Bulstrode and his recent doings while Sidney Glaser went on about how shocking it was when someone one knew was actually murdered, and how this was yet another indication of the collapse of the city and of Western civ. On his return home that evening he entered a house full of the rich smell of cooking stew. He found his mother and Radeslaw Klim in the kitchen, drinking sherry and laughing. She was not sitting on his lap, but Crosetti would not have been surprised to see it, given the atmosphere in the room: not all the steam was coming from the pot on the stove.

“Hello, darling,” said Mary Peg gaily, “have some sherry.” Crosetti had not before this been so greeted upon entering his home. He looked at his mother and observed that she seemed ten years younger. Two bright bars of pink stood on her cheeks, but there was a touch of nervousness in her eyes, as if she were a girl again, entertaining a boy on a porch swing with her dad nosing around. Klim stood and extended his hand, and they shook formally. Crosetti felt that he was in a movie, not one he ever would have directed or even wanted to see, one of those family farces where the single mom falls for the unsuitable man and the kids conspire to break it up, only to find…

But before he could organize his discomfort into an attitude, Mary Peg said, in her hostess voice, an uncharacteristic chirp, “I was just telling Radi about your interest in Polish movies. He knows a lot about them.”

“Really,” said Crosetti politely. He went to the jug of red wine that stood (as one like it had always stood) in a corner of the kitchen counter and poured a juice glass full.

“Not at all,” said Klim. “I am a fan only. Of course I do not need the little words under the screen to enjoy.”

“Uh-huh. What Polish films in particular?”

“Oh, recently I have liked
´Zycie jako ´smiertelna choroba
of Zanussi. Very beautiful, although the Catholic…what do you say? Preaching?”

“Proselytizing.”

“Yes, just so. This is too crude, too—what you say—
obvious
, to me. Of course, Kiéslowski did the same more subtler. He often would say, we don’t hit on the head with the church, is as bad as hitting on the head
with the communism. It is enough we have a moral cinema without seeming to. As for example in
Trois couleurs
and of course in
Dekalog
.”

“Wait a minute, you
knew
Kiéslowski?”

“Oh, yes. It is a very small country and we were from the same neighborhood in Warsaw and I am only a few years older. Kicking balls on the street and so on. Later I was able to be of some service to him.”

“You mean on the films?”

“Indirectly. I was assigned to spy on him, since I had an acquaintance with him already. I see you are shocked. Well, it is true. Everyone was spied on and everyone spied. Lech Walesa himself was an agent for a time. The best you could hope for was a spy who would be sympathetic and report only what one wished to have the authorities know, and so I was for Krzysztof.”

After this, for some twenty minutes the two men talked about Polish movies, one of Crosetti’s abiding loves, and he learned at last how to actually pronounce the names of directors and films he had worshipped for years. The conversation circled back to the great Kiéslowski, and Klim happened to remark, “I was in one of his films, you know.”

“No kidding!”

“Not at all kidding.
Robotnicy
in 1971. I was one of young police in background, crushers of workers’ movement. A quite insane time, which I think is very much similar to the time of your man Bracegirdle. I should say also I have made progress of a sort on your cipher.”

“You cracked it already?”

“Alas, no. But I have identified its type. Extremely interesting for a classical cipher, I believe, even unique. Shall I show? Or wait for after this excellent supper of your mother?”

Mary Peg said, “Oh, please show us. I have to make a salad and we can eat the stew anytime.”

With his usual diffident little bow, Klim left the room. Crosetti immediately caught his mother’s eye and rolled his own.

“What?” she challenged.

“Nothing. It’s just this is all pretty fast. We’re living here all by ourselves for years and all of a sudden we’re in a Polish movie.”

Mary Peg made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, come on! He’s a dear man, and he’s really suffered—his wife died, he was in jail—Fanny’s been after me to meet him for years. You like him, right?”

“Well, yeah. Obviously, not
quite
as much as you do. So…are you two…?” He rubbed his palms together, as if smoothing cream between them. She snatched up a wooden spoon and cracked him smartly on the crown of his skull. “You be careful, buster. I can still wash your mouth out with soap.” And they both laughed out loud.

Klim came in on their laughter holding a thick sheaf of printer paper densely packed with lines of text and a legal pad covered with neat European pencilings. Klim sat down next to Crosetti and smiled politely. “We are having fun? Good. This also may be fun. So. You can see from my red eyes, I have been up most of this night with colleagues across the world and many have commented on this most fascinating cryptogram. So first of course we work Friedman’s superimposition. This is elementary, yes? We must distinguish the many different alphabets used in polyalphabetic cipher so we may do Kerckhoff ’s solution by frequency analysis; and we do this by superimposition of one string of ciphertext upon another to find coincidences; and if we have done this correctly, number of coincident letters will approach value kappa sub p or seven percent approximately. This is clear, yes?”

“No. Maybe you could just skip to the bottom line.”

Klim looked puzzled and began to riffle through the pages. “The bottom line? But the bottom line is enciphered like these others….”

“No, it’s a figure of speech. I mean, please summarize your findings without all the technical jargon.”

“Ah, yes. The bottom line. This bottom line is that we cannot do superimposition upon this cipher because the key does not repeat at all within the number of ciphertext characters we have available, which is 42, 466. Also, we find that the key has high entropy, much higher than expected for a running key from a book, so we cannot do simple analysis using common English words. So, either your man is not using an ordinary tabula recta, which I think highly unlikely, or he has discovered onetime system three hundred years earlier than Mauborgne did, in ap
proximately 1918. Which also I cannot believe. There is no record of such a discovery. In fact, even the Vigenère cipher was not widely used. Most European intelligence services were satisfied with simple nomenclators until telegraphy came, and even afterward. There is no need for such very high security. It is a great flounder.”

“You mean a fluke,” said Crosetti. “So if it isn’t a onetime system, what is it?”