It is possible to solve a substitution cipher by trial and error, even without a key, but Tit’s message wasn’t long enough to gauge the frequency of commonly occurring letters like “E” or
“T,” which is how you usually begin. Plus, if I was right, he had broken his ordinary coded sentences into fourteen-character clumps, so you couldn’t even guess at common words like
“the” or “of,” though some of the double letters might have provided a clue. There was only one way to decipher it, practically speaking, and that was to discover the key. If it had been based on something they had memorized, like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was no hope of recovering it. For reasons I’ll get to in a second, however, I didn’t think it had been memorized.
In any case, there would likely have been some indication for the recipient of how the key should be applied, along the lines 139
of the SSB-F8-L23 notation I mentioned. My assumption was that it would be somewhere on the note itself.
At first I thought it might be in the body of the message, which was uncoded, but cryptic, and which indeed made almost as little sense as the cipher. But then I looked at the date. There are only thirty days in June, so the date 6/31
doesn’t exist. The original date, 5/31, does exist, of course.
Why had Tit scribbled out the five and written a six over it, changing a real date to an imaginary one?
Here was my idea on that:
What if my dad had underlined the passage in Catcher, CEH 1960, not because of his deep interest in back rubs, but as a decoding key? It would explain why only one seemingly random passage had been underlined. And if so, there would probably be something on the note that would indicate how the substitution worked, and the date seemed likely. Of course, even if the back rub passage had been a decoding key, it wouldn’t necessarily have been the one that had been used for this particular message. That was a long shot. Nevertheless, with the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher in mind, I got out the Catcher and started counting words, just to see. I tried a few possibilities, using 5 or 6 and 31, but they yielded only more gibberish.
Then I noticed something: counting letters instead of words, the fifth letter of the passage was “T” and so was the thirty-first. That wouldn’t have been any use for a substitution cipher, since the in and out letters would all have been the same. What if Tit had written “5/31” and then changed the five to a six when he realized the 5/31 combination wouldn’t work as a key? Sixth letter from the beginning was
“H,” and the thirty-first was “T. . . .”
Damn. It still didn’t work, not in any of the configurations I tried. Yet it seemed too much of a coincidence that Tit 140
would have happened to cross out a date that would not have worked as a key and replace it with one that would, if he hadn’t been working from that particular passage. And it explained why there was only one underlined passage, and perhaps also why there were all sorts of other mysterious pairs of numbers scribbled all over the Catcher. It was the perfect theory in all but one respect: it didn’t work. What was I missing?
TH E G I FTE D AN D TH E TALE NTE D
Meanwhile, though it seemed a bit much with everything else that was going on, I continued to attend my inane, pointless classes.
In Humanities we were still doing The Turbulent Sixties, working on the Peace Collage. There was this big pasteboard
“wall” on which you were supposed to glue things cut out from magazines that had to do with the sixties, or peace, or civil rights, or the women’s movement, or, well, just about anything at all, really. There was a lot of potential mischief afoot with all that glue, but I managed to avoid getting glued to anything for once.
In part, I believe, this had to do with the Paul Krebs Brighton Rock incident. I had been worried about the consequences of the episode, but only a little. Technically, I suppose I had beaten him up, though that had been entirely due to luck and randomness. I still thought of it like he had attacked and persecuted me as usual, even though I “won.”
One of the reasons it had been possible to knock him down, and probably the main reason he had given up so easily and resigned himself to whimpering in his own blood, was that he had not expected me to fight back. I never did. I never had. He wasn’t on his guard because he had assumed there 141
was no reason to be. He had been shocked out of his normal aggressive mode, and his mind had stalled trying to process the unfamiliar information and finally locked. Plus, I had smashed his head into the gravel very hard and it had to hurt.
I guess it was the combination of shock and gravel. And loss of blood.
I had been as surprised by my reaction as he had, but I’m not going to say I don’t know what came over me. What had come over me was that in six solid years of being harassed, abused, beaten, ridiculed, humiliated, dehumanized, and tortured by Paul Krebs and his fun-loving buddies, they hadn’t ever attacked something I really cared about till they poured Coke on my dad’s Brighton Rock. There was no way Paul Krebs could have known, but he had picked the wrong fucking book to pour Coke on. I flipped out. I went berserk. I wasn’t in control of myself, and he wasn’t ready for an attack by a flipped-out, berserk King Dork inflamed by the rage that only grief and (devil-head) filial piety can summon.
If the walkway had been concrete, or even asphalt, the blow to the head would have injured him seriously, maybe even killed him. Then I would have been in trouble. But I doubted it was that serious. The gravel would have absorbed and distributed the impact evenly. As I knew quite well from years of experience, head and scalp injuries bleed a lot and hurt like hell, but they always look worse than they are. The worst you usually have is a concussion, some messy clothes, and a lot of explaining to do. They are easily attributed to accidents. In fact, I have a solid, largely inaccurate, reputation as an absentminded, accident-prone klutz at the Henderson-Tucci HQ , owing to all the times I’ve said I’ve fallen off ledges or walked into walls or run into poles.
And I was pretty sure that that was what Paul Krebs would do, as well. I will always think of him as the guy I ac-142
cidentally beat up, but he would be rather eager to prevent the world at large from knowing him that way. It would hardly have been the first time he had come home from school all bloody, though the fact that this time it was his own blood would have been something of a novelty. But he would keep that part to himself. And he would hate me more than he ever had before, even if neither he nor I had believed such a thing to be possible. I knew I had to brace myself for some kind of retaliation from him and potentially from the other Matt Lynch minions as well, but I was sure it wouldn’t become a legal matter. That’s what I’m saying.
Anyway, despite that, word did get out around school a bit, somehow. No one said anything to me, but people were looking at me from a distance with a kind of awe. I mean, I was in shock about it myself. These things don’t happen, not usually. I imagine most people discounted it as a grossly implausible rumor. Sam Hellerman didn’t doubt me, but he said, and I knew he was right, that I would have to watch my back from now on. I was totally used to watching that, though.
It was a measure of just how sick Hillmont High School society is that smashing someone’s head to pulp in the gravel by the baseball diamond was such an unequivocal reputation enhancer. But so it was. It had worked for years for Matt Lynch and Paul Krebs and the other normals in their demi-human goon squad. Now, weirdly and in a way that wasn’t entirely welcome, it was temporarily working for me. (I had no illusions: the vital element of surprise was only destined to work the one time. But it had worked.)