I looked at the box of books first. An old Douay Bible, crumbling leather, inside it a family tree going back to Margaret Bracegirdle, the original emigrant. Margaret had obviously married in America, and her sons and daughters had married, and the name was lost to the record books but not to memory, for there were numerous among the family tree who bore the ancestral name: Richard Bracegirdle Clement, Anne Bracegirdle Kerr…
Putting the old Bible aside I dug deeper in the carton.
It was a quarto, of course, its red full-calf binding leather nearly black with age and the covers and the endpapers foxed and swollen with damp, but the pages were all there, the binding was intact, and the name on the flyleaf in faded sepia ink was “Richard Bracegirdle” in the familiar hand. An edition of 1598, I noted, as I flipped through the front matter. Genesis was marked with tiny pinholes. On the back flyleaf were inscribed in that same hand a string of letters in fourteen uneven rows.
I closed the book with a snap. Mrs. McCorkle looked up from her sorting and asked if I had found something I liked.
“Yes, I have. Do you know what this is?”
“A Bible, it looks like.”
“It is. It’s a Geneva Bible, from 1598. It belonged to Richard Bracegirdle, an ancestor of your friend.”
“Really? Is it valuable?”
“Well, yes. I suppose that it might fetch twenty-five hundred dollars at retail, because of the damage. It’s not a perfect copy, and, of course, this particular translation was used by practically every literate person in England for eighty or so years, so there are a lot of them.”
“Lord! Twenty-five hundred dollars! This is like Antiques Road Show.”
“Almost. I’m prepared to write you a check for twenty-five hundred right now, which is a good deal more than you’d get from a dealer.”
“That’s very generous of you, Mr. Mishkin. Could I interest you in some nice Fiesta ware?” We were all smiles now.
“Not really, but there is another item I’m looking for, mentioned in some old family papers, a kind of old surveying instrument, made of brass…?”
“Surveying instrument? No, I don’t think so. You mean one of those things with a tripod and a little telescope?”
“Not necessarily. This would have been portable, maybe a yard or so long, and a few inches across, like a big ruler…”
“You don’t mean that?” She pointed. Dick Bracegirdle’s invention was hanging above the mantelpiece, softly gleaming, kept and polished by generations of his female descendants, ready for use.
Or a concoction of the scam artists, I should say. Once again, I was impressed with the intricacy of the plot. Had Miss Evans been involved in some way? Had they actually found a real descendant of Richard Bracegirdle, or had they begun with this old lady and built up the whole fraud around this antique instrument and an old Bible, and invented an ancestor to suit? Even a master of the involved lie such as myself could not help admiring the clockwork detail.
At Baltimore-Washington Airport, I went into one of those lounges they reserve for the prosperous traveler and called Crosetti in Zurich. I told him what I had just bought and then I used the computer facilities to scan and send off to him via e-mail the cipher from the flyleaf of Bracegirdle’s Bible. He said he would run it through his solution program and get back to me. I had a coffee and some snacks and killed an hour or so, and then he called me back, and not with good news either. The cipher did not solve with the Bible and grille key that had been used for the letters.
“Why would he have done that?” I asked Crosetti. “He had an unbreakable cipher. Why the change?”
“I don’t know. Paranoia, maybe? He was dealing with two hostile parties, Dunbarton and Rochester, and both wanted something he had, and both of them had the Bible cipher. Maybe he wanted to hold something back, or maybe he wasn’t thinking too clearly by then.”
Oh, yes, I sympathized there. “So it’s another grille?”
“Not necessarily. I think it’s a regular book cipher. I mean it’s a running key based on a text.”
“What text? The Bible?”
“I don’t think so. Do you recall all that business in the last ciphered letter when he’s talking with Shakespeare about where to hide the play and he explains how a key works and he says something to the effect that Shakespeare said to use his own words to hide his play?”
I did, but vaguely. I said, “So we’d have to run through all of Shakespeare’s work to find it? That’ll take forever.”
“Not really. Remember that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t published in a complete edition until 1623. Bracegirdle wouldn’t have wanted to use a play that might be out in different editions, some of them corrupt. I mean he was in the business-he knew that.”
“So what then?”
“Well, fourteen rows of ciphertext. Maybe it’s a sonnet. The sonnets were published in 1609.”
“So try them.”
“Yes, boss. By the way, if this is a bust too, you’ll have to go and see Klim at my mom’s.”
“Because…?”
“Because he’s the only serious cryptographer I know. If it is a running key and not from a text we already know, then you’ll need to do a much more sophisticated analysis. Not impossible, not with the kind of computer power that he can put together, but not trivial either, maybe a keyspace of two to the fortieth or so. But I can’t do it, and he can. And you’d have my mom there too.”
“And she’s also a cryptographer?”
“No, just a real smart woman who does the Sunday Times crossword in twenty minutes or so. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”
So then up to LaGuardia by plane, alerting Omar en route. He met me and was devastated when I told him about the children, real tears sprung from his eyes, the match of which the dad had not himself shed. Even my servants conspire to abash me, was my ignoble thought as we drove out on the ever-clogged Van Wyck. It was a short drive from the airport, perhaps the only advantage of a residence in Queens. At the little house I immediately saw that all was not as it should be. There was a filthy pickup truck parked in front with one wheel up on the curb, and the front door of the house hung open, although it was a chilly day. I told Omar to drive up the street a bit and to stay in our car with his cell phone at the ready while I took a look around the house. Omar objected, saying that we should both go and him armed, but I refused the offer. I didn’t say it, but it occurred to me that I had risked his life several times in this miserable affair and could not bear to risk it again, if risk there was. If risk there was, I reasoned, it were better that the lesser man should bear it, nor would I have minded the worst happening. And I rather looked forward to the opportunity of handing out some pain.
Thus I crept down the alley at the side of the house, keeping low and peering into each window in turn. In the living room, nothing. The bathroom window was obscure glass. Ahead lay the tiny backyard, two fig trees wrapped in burlap, a little patch of brown lawn, a dormant flower bed with a concrete statue of the Blessed Virgin in its center. From this yard I could see into the kitchen: and here was a tableau. Mrs. Crosetti and Klim were sitting in chairs at the table and their mouths were covered with tape. There was a large, crop-haired man in the room with them with his back to the window. He seemed to be haranguing them, and in his hand was a large nickel-plated revolver.