“I hope not,” I said. “He seems to be the injured party. His wife employed Danese, but everyone knows that already. His son probably has uncommon tastes, so he might be vulnerable.”
My master pouted, took a sheet of paper from under his book, and passed it over. “A fair copy, quickly.” Fair means legible.
I sat down, opened my inkwell, and then froze. The writing was even worse than his usual scrabbled hand, all badly spaced capital letters, but it was the meaning that stopped me cold:
…GRAVE SCARS ITADI CORDE ETAST ENUOV EDALL IADAL MAZIA RISOL TAINE
STATE MACER COREM ATORI…
I made that: “…grave scarsita di corde et aste nuove dallia Dalmazia risolta in estate ma cerco rematori…”*
It went on to discuss powder and shot, caulking, and raw linen for sails.
I gulped. “Master, is this a report on the Arsenale?”
He was back in his book again. Still not looking up, he said, “Quite a detailed survey, it seems. The Ten will know whether or not it is accurate and how much damage such knowledge of our navy yard will do in the hands of our foes. Regrettably, that page does not identify the writer. ‘Quickly,’ I said.”
I opened my pen box and chose a quill. I so often see the old rascal work wonders that I have come to expect them of him, but if he had broken the Algol cipher from the evidence of a single sheet, after the Ten’s renowned experts had failed to crack twenty-four pages in God-alone-knew how many weeks or months, then that miracle would top them all. I passed over the fair copy.
As he read it, he held out a tiny hand for the original. “Now bring your friend in.”
His crabby tone suggested that he was pleased with himself. I went to poke my head around the door and whistle for Vasco, then went back to my chair.
The Maestro laid a ribbon at his page and closed the book. He puckered his thin cheeks in a close-lipped smile. “Ah, Vizio! I have a problem. Sciara dropped a broad hint that the spy known as Algol may have agents within the Ten. He instructed me to report progress to the chiefs, but even they must be to some degree suspect until we know otherwise, right?”
“I am not privy to such information, Doctor,” Vasco said stuffily.
“No, you wouldn’t…I have some progress to report already and no further need of those papers you guard so diligently. Which reminds me.” The Maestro opened a drawer and took out a sheet of paper. “This was on the floor in the dining room. It is yours, I think. Now, where was I?”
Vasco angrily restored the lost sheet to the others in his satchel. He did not look at my smile, which was a masterpiece worthy of extended admiration.
“When you take the documents back to the palace,” the Maestro continued, “to whom will you deliver them?”
Smelling traps now, Vasco was wary. “I shall report to Missier Grande, of course. He will probably send me to return the documents to Circospetto, but that will be his decision.”
Nostradamus nodded. “But Sciara reports to the Grand Chancellor. I must be confident that my information will not disappear in some unfortunate accident. Take a chair. No, on second thought take Alfeo’s, where I can see you more easily. My neck, you know…”
I never heard him complain of his neck before, but he was certainly up to something. Suppressing outrage at being evicted from my rightful place, I yielded it to Vasco and then stood over him to watch.
“Alfeo, give the vizio a sheet of paper and a pen. Good. Now, if you please, lustrissimo, write the alphabet along the top. Capitals are easier.”
“May I help him?” I murmured, but Vasco managed to win through on his own:
A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P Q R S T U V X Z
The Maestro had even worse torment in store for him. “Now, write B under A and the rest of the alphabet until you reach Z again, and complete the row with an A.”
I was already flipping through Giovan Batista Belaso’s La cifra del Sig to find the illustration.
“You see where you are going?” the Maestro said. “The next row would begin with C, yes? You would end by listing all Caesar alphabets possible with an alphabet of twenty-three letters. If you were to include some of the barbaric runes that northern tribes like the English and Germans use, you would have more.”
Vasco nodded uncertainly.
“Alfeo told you how easy it is to break a Caesar cipher. But if you use several Caesars by turn, then the cipher becomes unbreakable! Or so the sagacious Belaso believed and later authorities have agreed. The only thing you need to establish in advance with your correspondent is the order in which you will use the alphabets. No? Well, let us attempt an example. A little farther down the page write the sentence, ‘Sciara, who is furtive.’ In uppercase letters, if you please.”
Vasco wrote, SCIARA, CHE E CIRCOSPETTO.
“And then put it in five-letter groups, as Algol does.”
SCIAR ACHEE CIRCO SPETT O
The Maestro pressed his fingertips together, enjoying his lecture. “Now we shall apply the key, and in this case the word will be VIRTU, as that was Algol’s choice. The man has a sense of irony, if not humor. Pray write that under each of the groups.”
“Excellent. Now leave a line and write out the normal alphabet again. Good. Under it write the Caesars you will use to encipher your plaintext.” He frowned at Vasco’s blank stare-he is accustomed to dealing with my less-circumscribed intelligence. “The first row, you begin with a V… VXZAB…and end with U. The next begins IJLMN…”
It took a while and Vasco’s rows and columns were not as straight as might be desired, but he got there. The Maestro was beaming.
“Excellent! We’ll make a scribe out of you yet. Now to begin the encipherment! Under the first letter of the plaintext, S, you see the V of VIRTU, yes? So you find S in the normal alphabet, the one that begins with A, and go down to the alphabet that begins with V and what letter do you find?”
Thoroughly bewildered, Vasco did not find any, so I directed him to P, and he wrote it underneath the S, as instructed. The next letter, C, on the I alphabet, came out as B, and so on. By the time he reached the middle of the second group, he was managing by himself and I was making admiring noises.
SCIAR ACHEE CIRCO SPETT O
“This is absolutely brilliant!” I said. “How in the world did you do it?”
The Maestro made no effort to appear modest. “The pattern you noticed indicated that a letter’s position within each group was important, so I tried a frequency analysis on the initial letter of each group. It showed too many B ’s, so I hypothesized that B stood for either E or A, in which case the Caesar alphabet began with either V or B. Then I tried the second letter of each group, and so on. A rigorous analysis would require more plaintext than just one page, but I found enough clues to work out that the key must be VIRTU . It was not so difficult once I recalled the theories of Trithemius, Cardano, Porta, and so on. I’m astonished Sciara and his rabble did not see it. I admit, though,” he added, being hypocritically gracious, “that I have never heard of polyalphabetic substitution ever being used in practice.”
He had been lucky. Che is not merely a common word in itself; that combination of letters appears in many words in both Tuscan and Veneziano. Whenever it fell in the middle of a five-letter group, it had enciphered as my initials, which had caught my eye. In any other position it was represented by some other triplet, and with another key word it might always be. Then we would not have noticed the repetition. The best ciphers are broken because of human error, Nostradamus had told us, and Algol should never have left the ciphertext in five-letter groupings. That was incredible carelessness.