The Book of Air and Shadows (45 page)

“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 care
fully 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:

“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.”

“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?”