“Or maybe they were given to him,” suggested her husband, Jérôme.
“But they’re priceless,” objected Thérèse. “Why would someone give them to him?”
“Services rendered?” he said.
All three were silent then, imagining what service could exact such a payment.
“Bon, Armand, I have something to show you.” Jérôme rose to his full height of just five and a half feet. He was an almost perfect square but carried his bulk with ease as though his body was filled with the thoughts overflowing from his head.
He wedged himself onto the sofa beside Gamache. He had in his hands the two carvings.
“First of all, these are remarkable. They almost speak, don’t you find? My job, Thérèse told me, was to figure out what they’re saying. Or, more specifically, what these mean.”
He turned the carvings over to reveal the letters carved there.
MRKBVYDDO was etched under the people on the shore.
OWSVI was under the sailing ship.
“This’s a code of some sort,” explained Jérôme, putting his glasses on and peering closely at the letters again. “I started with the easiest one. Qwerty. It’s the one an amateur’s most likely to use. Do you know it?”
“It’s a typewriter’s keyboard. Also a computer’s,” said Gamache. “Qwerty is the first few letters on the top line.”
“What the person using Qwerty generally does is go to the keyboard and type the letter next to the one you really mean. Very easy to decode. This isn’t it, by the way. No.” Jérôme hauled himself up and Gamache almost tumbled into the void left by his body. “I went through a whole lot of ciphers and frankly I haven’t found anything. I’m sorry.”
Gamache had been hopeful this master of codes would be able to crack the Hermit’s. But like so much else with this case, it wouldn’t reveal itself easily.
“But I think I know what sort of code it is. I think it’s a Caesar’s Shift.”
“Go on.”
“Bon,” said Jérôme, relishing the challenge and the audience. “Julius Caesar was a genius. He’s really the cipher fanatic’s emperor. Brilliant. He used the Greek alphabet to send secret messages to his troops in France. But later he refined his codes. He switched to the Roman alphabet, the one we use now, but he shifted the letters by three. So if the word you want to send is kill, the code in Caesar’s Shift becomes . . .” He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the alphabet.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Then he circled four letters.
NLOO
“See?”
Gamache and Thérèse leaned over his messy desk.
“So he just shifted the letters,” said Gamache. “If the code under the carvings is a Caesar’s Shift, can’t you just decode it that way? Move the letters back by three?”
He looked at the letters under the sailing ship.
“That would make this . . . L, T, P. Okay, I don’t have to go further. It makes no sense.”
“No, Caesar was smart and I think this Hermit was too. Or at least, he knew his codes. The brilliance of the Caesar’s Shift is that it’s almost impossible to break because the shift can be whatever length you want. Or, better still, you can use a key word. One you and your contact aren’t likely to forget. You write it at the beginning of the alphabet, then start the cipher. Let’s say it’s Montreal.”
He went back to his alphabet and wrote Montreal under the first eight letters, then filled in the rest of the twenty-six beginning with A.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y S
M O N T R E A L A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
“So, now if the message we want to send is kill, what’s the code?” Jérôme asked Gamache.
The Chief Inspector took the pencil and circled four letters.
CADD
“Exactly,” beamed Dr. Brunel. Gamache stared, fascinated. Thérèse, who’d seen all this before, stood back and smiled, proud of her clever husband.
“We need the key word.” Gamache straightened up.
“That’s all,” laughed Jérôme.
“Well, I think I have it.”
Jérôme nodded, pulled up a chair and sat down. In a clear hand he wrote the alphabet once again.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
His pencil hovered over the next line down.
“Charlotte,” said Gamache.
Clara and Denis Fortin lingered over their coffee. The back garden of the Santropole restaurant was almost empty. The rush of the lunch crowd, mostly bohemian young people from the Plateau Mont Royal quartier, had disappeared.
The bill had just arrived and Clara knew it was now or never.
“There is one other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
“The carvings? Did you bring them?” Fortin leaned forward.
“No, the Chief Inspector still has them, but I told him about your offer. I think part of the problem is they’re evidence in the murder case.”
“Of course. There’s no rush, though I suspect this buyer might not be interested for long. It really is most extraordinary that anyone would want them.”
Clara nodded and thought maybe they could just leave. She could go back to Three Pines, make up a guest list for the vernissage and forget about it. Already Fortin’s comment about Gabri was fading. Surely it wasn’t that serious.
“So, what did you want to talk about? Whether you should buy a home in Provence or Tuscany? How about a yacht?”
Clara wasn’t sure if he was kidding, but she did know he wasn’t making this easy.
“It’s just a tiny thing, really. I must have heard wrong, but it seemed to me when you came down to Three Pines yesterday you said something about Gabri.”
Fortin looked interested, concerned, puzzled.
“He was our waiter,” Clara explained. “He brought us our drinks.”
Fortin was still staring. She could feel her brain evaporate. Suddenly, after practicing most of the morning what she’d say, she couldn’t even remember her own name. “Well, I just thought, you know . . .”
Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t do it. This must be a sign, she thought, a sign from God that she wasn’t supposed to say anything. That she was making something out of nothing.
“Doesn’t matter,” she smiled. “I just thought I’d tell you his name.”
Fortunately she figured Fortin was used to dealing with artists who were drunk, deranged, stoned. Clara appeared to be all three. She must, in his eyes, be a brilliant artist to be so unhinged.
Fortin signed for the bill and left, Clara noticed, a very large tip.
“I remember him.” Fortin led her back through the restaurant with its dark wood and scent of tisane. “He was the fag.”
VDTK?? MMF/X
They stared at the letters. The more they stared the less sense they made, which was saying something.
“Any other suggestions?” Jérôme looked up from his desk.
Gamache was flabbergasted. He was sure they had it, that “Charlotte” was the key to break the cipher. He thought for a moment, scanning the case.
“Woo,” he said. They tried that.
Nothing.
“Walden.” But he knew he was grasping. And sure enough, nothing.