The single sheet was copied in typed capitals. I took a letter-card and drew the skeleton-boxing. The pale afternoon light threw water-patterns from the windows across the paper, and it seemed to be melting as I studied it.
First considerations: was this code, cipher, or an unfamiliar language? Three or four of the words indicated a cipher; two of them comprised solely the letter N and there was more than one instance of a word comprising double A. This wouldn't happen with a code, and it was unlikely that even a lost language of Asia or South America would have a double vowel as a complete word. There was a thousand-to-one risk of my spending days on this task without realising I was trying to decipher the indecipherable: a purely unknown language.
Darmha valthala-mah im jhuma, for example, is pure Rabinda-Tanath and means ‘fire-cart kills very quick’. I had put this into speech for Fabian the narcoanalyst and he imagined it to be gibberish or a foreign tongue. In writing it would still look like gibberish, or like a foreign language, or like a cipher. To propose an absurd case anyone who had never heard or seen French might take the word arbre for cipher, and if he assumed A=M, R=O, B=T, E=R, he would finish up with the word motor. Obviously he wouldn't get far because he would soon find that most of the other words were turned into gibberish by applying the same assumption. (Barre would give tmoor, which is meaningless.) But he could waste hours of time trying different assumptions (A=B, C, D, etc.) before he realised he was dealing with the indecipherable: a foreign language.
But the N and the double A ruled out the chance that Solly had written this document in a little-known tongue with which his brother was familiar.
Assumption: cipher. Stettner's cryptographers agreed with this.
All ciphers are broken by applying three tools: mathematics, the laws of frequency, and trial-and-error. The most experienced cryptographer uses these three tools and plies them with patience, the prime mover.
I was not experienced. Two months at the training school and the infrequent sight of cryptograms during a mission was all I knew of the business, and normally I would shoot this document straight over to Control for their own team of specialists to break. But there might be something in Captain Stettner's idea: my knowledge of Solly Rothstein could provide a key. (In the same terms, the original report sent in by KLJ could give me clues to his death and its circumstances, where the edited and depersonalised information could not.)
The sheet on my knees carried twenty-five lines averaging ten words to the line. First checks on frequency gave the use of the letter K one hundred and thirty times. Possible E. The number of L'S was ninety-seven. Possible T. The x's numbered sixty-one. Possible A. So on.
Check a cipher word, XELK. Gave A-TE. ANTE was the only possibility. No go. Anti would have given more hope, since it was a suffix used in most sciences, biology included (antibiotic), but even then it wouldn't stand alone. I went on to double letters in terms of frequency LL, EE, SS, so on, thinking in English and German. Tried combinations: TH, HE, AN, so on. Treble-combination frequencies: THE, ING, AND, ION, ENT, so on. Back-checked and amalgamated with singles, doubles, trebles, English and German.
One interesting point was that there was no equal grouping to avoid a single letter standing alone. This is often done to avoid leaving blatant clues: a single letter standing alone is almost certain to be A or I. Two letters standing alone would be IN, ON, AN, so on. Therefore I SHALL SEND IN A REPORT would be grouped in batches of five, using one `null' at the end of the final group as a filler: ISHAL LSEND INARE PORTW. The ciphering would follow. But the groups here were unequal, with words comprising single, double and treble letters. These could be themselves ‘nulls’ peppered at random to confuse the pattern.
Five words were composed of fifteen letters or more, but this was to be expected: they were probably the Latin names of bacilli. I left them out of my present reckoning.
Trial and error. Apply singles, doubles, trebles, try the same again: reverse and read backwards, add prefix and suffix nulls, assume all singles and doubles to be nulls…
The sleet hit the windows softly.
Solly, what is it you want so urgently to tell your brother?
ELFTE-PSKLIO-JZFDX-LWO… No go, no go.
The afternoon light was fading. Steam was thick inside the windows and I turned off the heater.
Solly, what did you put in your little glass phial? For good or for evil, and for whom?
SLK. FPQC. OS. SPRIT. Sprit! German. Alcohol. Alcohol used in biological research. Check it. ASSwz. No go… a false alarm. (But there's nothing like it to spur you on, an occasional promise of success, however false.)
When it was too dark to see the words without putting a light on I got out of the car and locked it, walking for an hour through the raw half-dark of the streets to circulate the blood and take on oxygen; then I did a further four-and-a-half hours' stint without moving the BMW, and finished where I had begun, with not one single word deciphered. But the groundwork was almost over. The document was written in one of sixteen thousand two hundred and twenty ciphers, and I still had to find out which; but it couldn't be found by going through the lot (a task of approximately twenty-one months, working eight hours per day and six days per week with no vacations) and there were ways in that must be found and taken.
At ten o'clock a schnitzel and some Moselvein and the thought of home and bed. Unattractive. Home was the place where they might come for me at any minute, but if I left the Hotel Zentral it would worry Oktober. It must be shown that I was ready to hold myself available, placing my trust in the situation of his own devising. For another day – but no longer than that – he could be allowed to think that his present plan would work. After that, I would have to change it and pursue my own.
I had chosen a restaurant of cheap aspect, where the lavatory could be expected to have a certain amount of warped woodwork somewhere instead of elegant tiling throughout. If the choice was wrong it would mean finishing the evening at a bar with an Apollinaris; as it was, there was a partition of flimsy timber here at the restaurant and the document was folded thrice and slipped between the joists where it would be safe for the night. Then I went home to the Zentral.
The BMW was run into the lock-up and the key taken upstairs. A five-minute check assured me that my room had neither been searched nor rigged with booby-traps or a mike. Half a minute to reach a brain-think decision to override the stomach-think wish to telephone the Brunnen Bar, the number of which I had written on the Kleenex for Inga. Sleep, with a swarm of typed capitals plaguing my dreams.
It was noon next day when I took out the car and checked the tag in the mirror within a kilometre of the hotel. It was different again: a metalescent Taunus 12M that dogged me through two ambers before closing up and flicking its lights on and off. I chose the same park where I had worked all through the afternoon and evening of yesterday, and stopped the car near the lodge. The Taunus pulled up behind and I got out before he did, just in case, and stood waiting for him.
17 : FERRET
We were alone in the silent park. The winter daylight fell on us as we faced each other. He stood still, letting me remember his features. A round face with mud-brown eyes unmagnified by the plain lenses of his schoolboy-type glasses. A black velour hat, that I hadn't seen on him the first time.