Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

“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.