I drew a long breath. I sat back in my chair.
“Is it going to be difficult, Dexter?”
“I’m afraid so. Your wonderful grandmother seems to have created a masterpiece of cryptography.”
Boris gave me his affectionate smile.
“But you think she composed it herself?”
I nodded.
“But why, why?”
“How can I possibly tell, until I have read it?”
“But what can that be at the bottom,” he asked. “In 1739?”
“Being the clearest thing, on the surface,” I said, “it is probably not what it seems.”
Then I told him about the man on the garage roof.
“But your description,” he cried, “makes me think of Sergey Kovalchuk. He came from one of our Russian estates and he was our Paris gardener until 1914. Three months ago he came to see Grandmamma. He was quite ragged. She gave him food, gave him money, clothes, and she got him a job somewhere. With whom? Oh, I don’t remember!”
I lost no time in telegraphing my old friend Inspector Lagrange to look for one Sergey Kovalchuk, and ascertain if his legs were uninjured. It is generally easy to find a foreigner in Paris.
The funeral of the Princess Vorontsov, in one of the Russian churches of Nice, was very impressive. What richness of temperament there is in those Slavs!
But in the late afternoon I left Boris with his Russian friends and went away by myself. I wanted to think, and all day I had not had a moment alone. I strolled up to the station, and took the first train for Monte Carlo. You know it is only ten miles from Nice to the gamblers’ mecca, and that view of the Mediterranean always frees something in me.
The princess — an original soul she was — would have preferred that I mourn her that night in my own way.
I dined alone on the terrace and thought of her. In the days of her wealth she had told me gaily many a story of winning and losing at Monte Carlo. She had always insisted that some day a clever brain would “dig out the fault” in the roulette wheel and milk the casino cow as dry as a rock. Prince Michael, too, I remembered, had a weakness for watching the spin of the ivory ball. And he also had died down here.
After dinner I strolled into the casino.
Oh, I had not abandoned the problem of the cipher! Having failed to make head or tail of it, I was giving my mind that refreshment which acts on our thought as a bath acts on the body. I went into one of the gaming rooms — not to play, but to watch.
As I stood near one table, right before me were two middle-aged American women, a fat one and a thin one. The fat one, as I judged from their comments, was new to the Riviera. She wanted to play; but the thin one was trying to dissuade her with the warning that in the end the casino bank always wins and the players lose, because of the zero at the head of the wheel — the bank’s rake-off.
As I listened, slightly amused, an idea came to me. Could the Princess Vorontsov have been winning at the gaming tables the money to keep herself going? The idea was not nearly so wild as it sounds. As everyone knows, many old ladies seem to make some sort of living at the tables, playing those little conservative systems of theirs.
Late that night, on my return to Nice, I went to Boris’s room and asked him if his grandmother had been playing.
“Winning, you mean? But I really don’t know.”
He then showed me her Paris bankbook, which he had just found. Five months ago the princess had deposited fifteen thousand francs, three months ago twenty thousand francs. Those figures were something to think about.
But neither of us wanted to question the casino people, nor anyone else. It would have seemed disrespectful of the dead woman.
Again Boris talked of the little he knew about her escape, how she had lain in the forest at night, had been shot at, had been half drowned.
“My father, you know, was not with her,” he said. “They found each other in France. All her courage and gaiety — oh, she was just trying to keep me in good spirits! But of course I can’t study medicine now. How many years does it take? I shall have to give up the lease of the dear house, sell the furniture — just to exist, until I get some kind of work to do.”
The next day we returned to Paris, and I telephoned Inspector Lagrange at the Sûreté. Yes, the police had got Sergey Kovalchuk. At first he was half hysterical, babbling about some letter from his mother in Russia. When asked why he tried to enter the house in the Boulevard Suchet, he had muttered, “Looking for something.” Then he became stubbornly silent.
“We had better see Sergey tomorrow,” I said to Boris, “and try to make him confess just what he was looking for.”
“Oh, Dexter! It might have something to do with our puzzle!”
I intended to shut myself up, in that quiet house behind the garden, and wrestle with the “key in Michael.” Whether it solved my friend’s problem, or got him into deeper trouble, we had to know what it meant. There is something hypnotic about a mystery.
After Boris went to bed that night, in the Louis XIV room which had been Prince Michael’s, I spent two full hours figuring out combinations of those numbers. Yes, the frequencies were all wrong. After “e” the natural succession runs roughly, t, a, o, i, n, s, h; “r” and “u” are well down on the list. But that knowledge was getting me nowhere.
Then I tried more recondite systems. I had already tried reading it backward, even tried French, — German, Italian, with the same negative result. Suppose it were written in Russian, after all?
Of course, “27 B” might have nothing to do with a house on the Left Bank. Perhaps 27 was the letter “b.” But there are eight letters, vowels and consonants, which can follow “b” in our language, and probably five thousand words which begin with “b.”
Piqued and exasperated, I finally went to bed.
You know how, as we doze off to sleep, any casual words we have heard in the last twenty-four hours or so may go floating through the mind. I heard again that thin American woman in the gaming room telling the fat one, “In the long run the bank always wins.” In my half-sleeping mind, bank got mixed up with “Left Bank” and “27 B.” Then one half of my brain was reminding the other half that 26, not 27, was at the left of the bank’s zero on the roulette wheel.
My heart began pounding. I sat up in bed — broad awake.
“Left Bank, 27 B, 26—”
Now what did follow 26, at the left of the wheel? Surely not 27, for the numbers in the circle are all placed irregularly. I had not played roulette for years.
“But it might be! It might be the key!” I cried aloud.
I leaped out of bed. In my bare feet I rushed down the hall and threw open the door of my friend’s room, switched on the light.
“Boris! Boris, wake up! Have you got a roulette book?”
“W-wh-what?” he answered drowsily.
“Have you got a roulette book?” I repeated rather impatiently.
“A — a what?”
I plumped down on the side of the bed.
“Any book on roulette. You must have something of the kind in the house. Everybody who knows the Riviera — Wake up!”
“B-but I am awake. There must be one” — a deep sigh — “somewhere in the house. I’ll look — in the morning.”
“No, no! I must have it now. It’s about the cipher.”
That woke him all right.
“I’m not sure,” I explained, as he threw on his dressing gown and slippers. “I just had a sudden idea — I half dreamed it. But that’s what acumen is, nine times out of ten — a quick grab at some floating subconscious perception.”