Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

“So try them.”

“Yes, boss. By the way, if this is a bust too, you’ll have to go and see Klim at my mom’s.”

“Because…?”

“Because he’s the only serious cryptographer I know. If it is a running key and not from a text we already know, then you’ll need to do a much more sophisticated analysis. Not impossible, not with the kind of computer power that he can put together, but not trivial either, maybe a keyspace of two to the fortieth or so. But I can’t do it, and he can. And you’d have my mom there too.”

“And she’s also a cryptographer?”

“No, just a real smart woman who does the Sunday Times crossword in twenty minutes or so. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”

So then up to LaGuardia by plane, alerting Omar en route. He met me and was devastated when I told him about the children, real tears sprung from his eyes, the match of which the dad had not himself shed. Even my servants conspire to abash me, was my ignoble thought as we drove out on the ever-clogged Van Wyck. It was a short drive from the airport, perhaps the only advantage of a residence in Queens. At the little house I immediately saw that all was not as it should be. There was a filthy pickup truck parked in front with one wheel up on the curb, and the front door of the house hung open, although it was a chilly day. I told Omar to drive up the street a bit and to stay in our car with his cell phone at the ready while I took a look around the house. Omar objected, saying that we should both go and him armed, but I refused the offer. I didn’t say it, but it occurred to me that I had risked his life several times in this miserable affair and could not bear to risk it again, if risk there was. If risk there was, I reasoned, it were better that the lesser man should bear it, nor would I have minded the worst happening. And I rather looked forward to the opportunity of handing out some pain.

Thus I crept down the alley at the side of the house, keeping low and peering into each window in turn. In the living room, nothing. The bathroom window was obscure glass. Ahead lay the tiny backyard, two fig trees wrapped in burlap, a little patch of brown lawn, a dormant flower bed with a concrete statue of the Blessed Virgin in its center. From this yard I could see into the kitchen: and here was a tableau. Mrs. Crosetti and Klim were sitting in chairs at the table and their mouths were covered with tape. There was a large, crop-haired man in the room with them with his back to the window. He seemed to be haranguing them, and in his hand was a large nickel-plated revolver.

Without thinking I plucked the statue from the earth-it weighed perhaps fifty pounds-raised it over my head and took a little run at the house. The man must have heard something, or perhaps it was Mrs. Crosetti’s eyes widening in shock, because he turned and faced the window and so took the full force of the flying Mary (plus glass fragments) right in the kisser.

After that the familiar ritual of the police and the slow extraction of information. Mrs. Crosetti was gracious under the circumstances, although she did question my propensity for doing violence in her home, which I thought a little unfair. The man was not dead, I was happy to learn, but would certainly miss the senior prom. His name was Harlan P. Olerud, and he was a security guard from somewhere in Pennsylvania and he was under the impression that Albert Crosetti had absconded with his wife, Carolyn, and he wanted her back. Apparently he had been led to the Queens dwelling via a computer map that young Crosetti had carelessly left on the road near his home while searching for the mysterious Carolyn Rolly. The police found the map in Olerud’s pickup truck, which also held two frightened children. In the ordinary course of events, these would have been handed over to the bureaucracy that cares for parentless kids in New York, but since Mary Peg was involved, events took a different course. She wanted to take care of the tykes until we all figured out what was what with the mysterious C.R., and also I think because of an empty-nest syndrome the size of Montana. I believe I made up a little for my use of force in her home by getting dear Father Paul on the line from London. There is nothing Paul does not know about the child-care bureaucracy in New York; he made some calls, vouched for Mary Peg, made noises-unusual circumstances, police investigation, potential danger, best interests of the child, etc.-and the thing was done, at least temporarily. Board games emerged from the attic, pizza was generated out of basic ingredients, a jolly time was had by all, except that Klim beat me by fifty points at Scrabble, which I thought was a bit much, English being my first language.

Mary Peg came into the living room from putting the children to bed looking remarkably happy (here a pang at memories of Amalie in the same situation, my lost home…) and sat down next to Klim on her sofa. With all the police and kid business this was actually the first time we had been able to manage a quiet talk. I brought them up to date on what I had been doing and showed them the Bible and the Bracegirdle range finder I had purchased in Maryland. Not a word about the whole thing being a scam, of course. I also distributed printouts of the deciphered letters, and while they were reading through them I woke up Crosetti in Zurich and asked him if there were any developments. He said that Paul had told him yesterday that someone had e-mailed Amalie a picture of the kids holding that day’s copy of the New York Times . They were both smiling and seemed perfectly all right, no threatening guys in black masks. I said that seemed odd, and he agreed. “It’s like they’re on a class trip. That doesn’t sound like the Shvanov we know.”

I admitted it was peculiar, but good news at any rate. Then I told him about Harlan P. Olerud and the two children. He said he’d let Rolly know and I said I’d arrange for a call from the kids and that I’d let him know if we had any luck with the new cipher. He wanted to speak to his mother, and so I turned the phone over to her.

Klim was fooling with the range finder. “An ingenious device, quite ahead of its time. It will require a new little mirror-here-and then I believe it will work as designed. May I see the cipher from the Bible?”

I gave it to him and he examined it for a while and then said he would enter the ciphertext into Crosetti’s desktop PC and see what could be made of it. “All Shakespeare’s works are available in digital form, of course, so if the key is from his known work we should get a good hit.”

“Unless he used lines from the lost play,” said Mary Peg. “That would be a Bracegirdlian thing to do.”

“In that case,” said Klim, “we will have to use more strenuous methods.” He hefted the Bible, smiled, and walked off.

Mary Peg bid her son good-bye and said, “That’s awful about your kids. Your wife must be in agony. Shouldn’t you be over there with her?”

“I should, but she doesn’t want me. She blames me for the whole affair and she’s right. And I have a sense that the kidnapping is not what it seems.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d rather not say just yet. But I’ve been putting some things together and I don’t think that they’re in any immediate danger. In the future, who knows, but not now, provided we can locate this thing.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly clear where it is.”

I expressed astonishment. “Yes,” she said, “they tossed it down that well he mentioned, you know the one where Bracegirdle followed Shakespeare and his goon into the forest and they saw the recusant service. That ruined priory…” She shuffled through the printouts and found the page: “Saint Bosa’s Well. Where else would it be? He says they went up to Stratford and the well is just half a day’s ride away.”