Gary Alexander - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 6. Whole No. 511, December 1985

Wingate, satisfied, wheeled about and returned to camp. There, he repeated the elliptical utterance.

What Pedro said made no sense, of course, unless you knew what Wingate was after. Pedro spoke in that way with the clear intention of keeping any significance away from any unauthorized eavesdropper. To Wingate and his colleagues, however, it was clear. The key that Pedro intended to use was a state whose boundaries were all straight lines. That meant that any state that was bounded even in part by an ocean or a river or the ridge of a mountain chain was eliminated. When a map was consulted, it was at once clear that forty-five states were thus eliminated. There were only three states all of whose boundaries were straight lines: Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Of these three states, Wyoming was the northernmost, and so they all agreed that was the key.

Eventually a message arrived from Pedro — a longer one than usual. Everyone was certain that it must contain explicit details on Villa’s whereabouts and on the best route to take in order to block his retreat and to trap him.

Pedro himself never returned, nor was his body ever found. The natural assumption was that he had trusted one Mexican too many, had been betrayed, and shot.

At the time the message arrived, however, Wingate and the others didn’t know Pedro would never return. If they had had some presentiment of this, moreover, they would have shrugged it off, human nature being what it is. Pedro had known the risks; he was running them for his country; and it was the message that was all-important and that had been delivered. A life was a regrettable but not too high price to pay for it.

That is, if the message had been of use. As you’ve probably guessed, since you know the Americans never caught Villa, it proved of no use. Wyoming had been taken as the key, but it was quickly obvious that all it delivered was gibberish.

There was enormous dismay, as you can imagine. Naturally, there was a strong suspicion that Wingate’s Spanish did not enable him to tell “northernmost” from “easternmost” or “westernmost.” Colorado was the easternmost of the three and Utah was westernmost. They were both tried and both failed. All three gave different decipherings, but they were only three varieties of gibberish.

Then some pointed out that Arizona and New Mexico were new states that had entered the Union only four years earlier. Pedro might not be quite certain of their boundaries. Both had mostly straight lines as boundaries. Arizona was bounded on the west by the Colorado River, and New Mexico, the better bet, was almost entirely straight lines except for one tiny stretch of the Rio Grande.

Both were tried. Nothing. Nevada was mostly straight lines, too, except for a bit of the Colorado in the southeast, so that was tried. Again nothing.

Wingate, feeling his career hung in the balance, was the only one who didn’t give up after that. He made up a written dictionary of the various ciphers keyed in to each letter of the alphabet. That was against the rules, but he didn’t want to lose out by making a mistake in that respect. He then tried the six states already tested and went on to try all the remaining states as well. Nothing in every case.

That was Wingate’s story that hot summer evening in 1943, and when he concluded he said, “I won’t say that ended my career, because it obviously didn’t, but it certainly slowed my advance. Someone had to be blamed and I was the obvious candidate. It took me several years to live down that blot on what proved to be an otherwise distinguished career. I did live it down and I am doing well, so I can’t really complain. Still, I wish I knew what went wrong. Could Pedro have made a mistake in the ciphering? He never had at any other time. Could the message have been intercepted and a false message substituted? Somehow I don’t see Villa possessing that subtle a sense of humor. His methods might have been effective, but they were always crude.

“But what went wrong, then? I tried every state. In fact, I felt that for the final climactic message he would choose a very unusual key, just to make sure it wouldn’t be broken if intercepted. Once that occurred to me in later years, I even tried some U.S. territories — Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, the Canal Zone. Nothing worked. I expect that until I die I’ll wake up at night still worrying about it.”

I had listened to the story attentively. I was only an apprentice in my mid-twenties and Wingate was one of the great men in the field. When he finished, I said diffidently, Do you still have the message? And the list of substitutions for each letter?”

“Oh, yes,” said Wingate bitterly. “I’ve kept it on hand as a grim reminder of the fact that disasters wait around every comer. And every once in a while I gaze at it in the hope that illumination will suddenly blaze up within me. — It never has.”

“In that case,” I said even more diffidently, “I might be able to read it for you.”

“What!” he said. “Are you mad?”

“I hope not, sir,” I said.

“Are you trying to tell me that I’ve been worrying over this for over a quarter of a century and you’ve got the answer after hearing the story once?”

“It’s possible, sir. Let me tell you something about Pedro that you haven’t told me, and if I’m right I’ll tell you what I think is the key to the message.”

“You do that, son,” he said, “and I shall take the greatest interest possible in your future advancement.”

Well, it worked out, of course. The message was a straightforward description of where Villa was and how to trap him, and he would have been trapped in a week but for a natural and unfortunate failure of communication between Wingate and Pedro. The correct translation of the message is now buried in some government pigeonhole and I doubt that it will ever be released for public consumption, but at least it meant that Wingate had his private misery lifted from his heart.

Wingate did take an interest in my advance and I moved rapidly up the ranks until my unfortunate habit of being right when my superiors were wrong, and reminding them of the fact whenever I thought it would do them good, made it more comfortable for them to see to it that I underwent early retirement.

Griswold returned to his whiskey and soda and I said, “Hold on! You did say that this man Wingate tried all forty-eight states, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“He didn’t inadvertently leave out one?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Or make a mistake in the deciphering?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Well, then, how could you work out an answer? It’s impossible.”

Jennings and Baranov made indignant sounds of agreement with me.

Griswold said, “Impossible only to inferior minds. I told you the story exactly as Wingate told it to me and Wingate said nothing of Pedro’s origin except that he was from ‘across the border.’ Combine that with the fact that he could speak perfect Mexican Spanish and it might seem that he was originally from Mexico. You three probably took it for granted he was.

“However, his real name was Mackenzie Clifford, as Wingate told me and as I told you, and that is not a name that sounds Mexican. There is another border, after all, and William Lyon Mackenzie was the nearest thing to a George Washington that Canada had. Anyone with a first name of Mackenzie is very likely to be Canadian.”

“Oh!” I said, feeling enlightenment begin to creep in on me.

“Yes, oh!” said Griswold. “Americans think of American states and then their minds close. Canadians think of American states, yes, but of Canadian provinces as well, and they can’t help giving the latter at least equal prominence. Wingate had speculated that Pedro, or Mackenzie Clifford, wanted something unusual as his key for this particular message and I imagine he did — so he automatically thought of a province.