“We’ll try the bookshelves in the studio first,” Boris said.
I stopped in my room to snatch a few garments, then followed him downstairs.
In the studio we switched on all the lights and set to work, hunting along the shelves.
One of the first books I saw bore the title Cryptography. So the princess had studied the subject!
It was Boris who found the roulette book.
“Look!” he cried. “It has the design of the wheel as a frontispiece!”
I grabbed it — examined it hurriedly.
To the left of the zero, “the Bank,” the numbers ran 26, 3, 35, and so forth. The 27 was way around to the right, on the lower arc.
“But wait!” I cried. And I counted rapidly backward from 27... “Why, Boris! There’s just the right number of letters, twenty-six, going round to the left from 27 to 26, which is next to the zero, ‘the Bank.’ So 26 could be a.”
“Dexter! You don’t mean it!” He clutched my arm excitedly.
“If it begins at the left of the Bank, the zero,” I said, “and if 26 should be a and 27 be b, then — don’t you see? — the order of letters must jump hack and forth between them. Then 3, next to 26 a, would be c, and 13, next to 27 b, would be d, and so on.”
I began to write down the letters beside the numbers on the wheel diagram. Of course I might be chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, but suppose it should be the solution! Oh, it would have been clever — infernally clever of her to have thought out such a thing!
Here is the scale I made. The black and red of the roulette wheel do not show, but the colors played no part in the Key in Michael.
My money belt was still around my waist. In three seconds I had the gray sheet of paper in my hands, and was jotting down the numbers on another sheet, with the tentative letters beneath them. After the first four letters, I shouted:
“It works! Man alive, it works! I have got a word already — the word is rear.”
Then I ran right on to the end without stopping.
Here is what I had!
It was the work of a moment to separate the words:
“Rear of your sun,
Two cubits high,
By a comet’s lair,
Near Regulus,
My stars are shining.”
“How she piled up the r’s,” I cried, “by using ‘rear,’ ‘near’ and ‘lair’ and the us by ‘cubits’ and Regulus’! Look at the s’s, too! How she kept down the number of e’s, did not once use the word ‘the,’ and threw out all the usual frequencies! A technical masterpiece!”
“But Dexter! What does it mean? Would she have appealed to you with her dying breath, just to decipher a poem in free verse?”
“Of course not. Can’t you see — can’t you read between the lines? What do you fancy she means when she says her stars are shining?”
“Stars?” His tawny eyes widened with wonder.
“Yes, what would she hide in a difficult code, and doubly hide again in these cryptic lines?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Something on the Left Bank — but how stupid of me! Of course ‘Left Bank’ and the ‘27 B’ were only the key to the cipher itself.”
His face fell. He looked around for a cigarette, lighted one.
“It seems to me, Dexter, that we’re just where we were before.”
“Does it? Does it?” I strode up and down the studio.
Boris, who had dropped down in a chair, looked round at me suddenly, and there was a look of awe on his face:
“It’s just as if she were speaking to us from another dimension of space — ‘by a comets lair, near Regulus, behind the sun!’ ”
Then I took from the shelf that book I had found, Cryptography, and showed it to him.
“I know now — know for sure,” I said, “that this cipher was written for you. Had she lived, on her return from the south she intended to give you the Key in Michael, give you this book on cryptography, and then watch your struggles with them. The secret concealed in those figures will change your whole life. There is no other possible inference now. And how like her it was to make a great game of it! ‘Perhaps Dexter will help you,’ she said, when she knew I was in the house. Gay of heart, you know. Courage and gaiety. The echo of tragedy under the childlike laughter.”
If you could have seen that boy’s face!
“Now you ought to know what she meant by ‘your sun’ — yours,” I said. “Something concrete — some object, when she says ‘rear of.’ Something known to yourself and your grandmother. Think, Boris, think!”
“Why — she gave me a sunset picture; it’s hanging in my room.”
We rushed upstairs again.
Yes, there was the sunset hung high, at least five feet from the floor, and it was only a small canvas.
“But she says ‘two cubits high,’ Boris, and two English cubits are only three feet — not five or six. And look — only a blank wall behind it.”
I sounded the wall — no sign of a secret hiding place.
Then I tried another tack. “What did your grandmother ever say about a comet? I want the comet’s lair.”
“Why — why, they used to call her motorcar the Comet. It went so fast, you know, and it had a vapory tail. But she gave it to the French government in the early days of the war.”
“The garage!” I cried. “The Comet’s lair! But she says ‘by’ a comet’s lair — not in it. The studio is ‘by’ the lair.” And I rushed downstairs again.
As I passed through the studio door, my eye lighted on something which brought me up with a start.
“I’m just going to think this out now,” I said. “Will you lie down over there, on the couch in the alcove, and be very quiet?”
Boris stretched himself out on the lionskin from the Rue Châteaudun. I went and sat down in the far corner of the room.
“How kind you are, Dexter, to take all this trouble for me!”
“Kind? But I wouldn’t have missed this for worlds! It’s a case of the sort which your grandmother used to delight in. I have everything now, but one link in the chain.”
We were both utterly still for a minute or two.
“Your sun!” I leaped to my feet. “I’ve got it.”
He came running from the alcove — breathless with excitement.
I pointed to that Louis XIV tapestry which hung, as I have told you, on the door of the closet, which with the alcove divided that end of the studio.
“When did she bring that tapestry down from your father’s room — your room now?”