Good Man Friday (31 page)

What the hell am I going to say when he looks under the bed?

Jus' unner here checkin' de flo', Marse Luke
…

When Bray crossed to the bed January shrank himself – as much as a man six feet three inches tall and powerfully built can shrink – into the very center of the space, arms close to his sides. Bray yanked up the counterpane, not to look under the bed but to run his hands under the mattress, cursing all the while: ‘Thinks she can put one over on me … Her and her goddam Limey nancy …'

‘Marse Luke, sir?' The butler's deep voice – a Virginia accent, like the cook and the maids. Mede had said at supper one night that he alone had come out from Kentucky with his master, had shared a boarding house room with him until he'd married and had to set up an establishment worthy of a London banker's daughter.

‘What you want?'

‘A nigger gal's here, asking to see you, sir. She say she has a message from Mede.'

Minou
. She must have seen Luke Bray ride up, invented a message that would bring him downstairs long enough for January to make his escape.

Whispering blessings on his sister's supposedly empty head, January slid from beneath the bed the moment Bray's footsteps and the servant's retreated down the stairs. He darted to the armoire long enough to slip the key back into its secret attic, shoved Mrs Trigg's sheet back into his satchel – which Bray apparently hadn't even noticed on the floor behind the desk – stepped into the hall …

He knew he should lose not a single second in retreating down the service stair.

Yet quietly in his ear he heard Mede's voice:
Is blackmail when they send letters all written in numbers?

Half a dozen strides took him around to Bray's room. He pulled open the desk drawer there, dug through jumbled drafts of Navy Department correspondence and half-finished ‘fair copies' of letters from Mr Dickerson to everyone from President Van Buren to the French ambassador … Nothing.

The other drawer contained a crumpled disorder of bills, gambling-markers, scribbled notes. Beneath this January found a sheet of foolscap, bearing what he guessed Mede had seen – strings of neatly-written numbers.

11 Ø Ø Ø9 Ø Ø Ø317 Ø Ø1837 Ø Ø24 Ø924221624 Ø25 Ø621 Ø7152022252116 Ø522241425 Ø72021 Ø1192511 Ø3252120221513 Ø317252120 Ø31410 Ø72213 Ø914 Ø12114 Ø1192224162020 Ø120 Ø71513222417 Ø31024 Ø22112 Ø51025 Ø514211221 Ø4102014 Ø6 Ø324 Ø22113 Ø5 Ø82119251418 Ø71920 Ø725211115 Ø9 Ø7 Ø21412111412 Ø22119131913 Ø5 Ø217 Ø8 Ø817 Ø124 Ø71522 Ø721 Ø72224 Ø425 Ø92421 Ø118 Ø114 Ø8202214 Ø521 Ø2 Ø31825231211 Ø913 Ø522 Ø722221420161013 Ø71518 Ø120102114212514 Ø52214142114251725 Ø911 Ø22511 Ø520 Ø322212224182215162514 Ø911

As he thrust this in his pocket he heard Bray's voice in the stairwell: ‘What the hell is it to me that he's gone? Ungrateful bastard's nothing to me! I gave him his goddam FREEDOM to play in that goddam game, and what the hell could you expect of a goddam NIGGER?'

Soundlessly, January crossed to the window, made sure no one was in the garden below, hung from his hands from the sill, and dropped.

No matter what Royall Stockard and John C. Calhoun and every other Southerner liked to say, slaves were not simply ‘property like any other' …

Whatever the hell was going on in the Bray household, Mede had seen enough of it to cost him his life.

‘But what
was
it?' Poe dropped into the chair beside January's at the great oak table in the main parlor, where January had spent the afternoon studying the ‘letter', the sheet of magic squares, and the enigmatic red notebook. The windows were now blue with evening; a few minutes ago Dominique had gone scampering up the drive to where Henri's rented carriage waited for her in the dusk, and whenever the kitchen door opened the scent of biscuits wafted through.

‘What did he learn? I don't suppose Mrs Bray is going to tell the police …'

‘Mrs Bray,' returned January wearily, ‘isn't even going to
see
the police. Officially, Ganymede Tyler isn't dead. He's simply “disappeared”. And if we inform the police that he's dead and that we know who did it, do you really think they'll arrest a white woman in preference to every person in this house?'

Poe's lips tightened, his face suddenly pale with anger.

‘The bloodied clothing may not even be there by the time the police search,
if
they search. And who is the witness to finding them there? A black man? A member of the same ball team, who might have money on the game?' January turned in his fingers the chalk he'd borrowed – along with Mrs Trigg's kitchen slate – to scribble numbers and calculations that went nowhere. ‘From what I've seen of the woman, I'm guessing she'll accuse me of planting the garments there in order to incriminate her. The police will be more than happy to shut me up, “to prevent scandal”, as they say. It's not something I can afford to risk. And I hope,' he added, watching the other man's face steadily, ‘that it's not something you'll feel moved to report because you're sure that the police couldn't be
that
corrupt.'

‘No.' Poe's dark eyes smouldered. ‘I have little love for the police – I think they're damned fools, for one thing – and I've spent a few too many nights in the cells myself to believe they're the guardians of anything except each other and their own pocketbooks.'

January had heard Poe's dragging steps almost pass the parlor door and had recalled he'd been meeting with an Indiana congressman about the possibility of a postmaster's job. But at the sight of January he'd come in, and as he'd listened to the précis of the afternoon's events he'd seemed to come alive again.

‘But what
can
we do, then? Surely this wretched woman can't be allowed to get away with it—'

‘Not if I can help it.' January pushed across to him the papers he'd been studying since he and Dominique had returned, late and footsore, from Georgetown that afternoon. ‘Personally, I don't care what we get her on, so long as it's damning.'

The Reverend Perkins came into the parlor, hung up hat and coat and kissed his wife, who came hurrying downstairs with a proud account of their daughter's progress at reading. A moment later Trigg came in with Seth Berger, worriedly discussing the events of ball practice, which had evidently included further interference from the Irish. At a glance from Poe, January collected the litter of papers and slate, and the two men crossed the hall to the smaller ‘white folks' parlor'. A fire had already been kindled against the nip of the evening, and the lamp lit.

Poe shut the door against the noise. ‘What have you so far?'

‘Not a great deal.' January spread the papers on the marquetry table. ‘I thought the magic squares might be a cipher key. The alphabet can be written into a square of five, if you count I and J as a single letter, and you can see there's a distinction made between an open zero and one that's crossed. The message starts with the number eleven and then two crossed zeros, and if you'll notice there are no crossed zeros – no independent zeros at all, in fact – in any of the magic squares.'

‘I'd assume the crossed zeros are placeholders.' Poe studied the thin sheet of notepaper close to the lamplight. ‘Or dividers. How would you know if ten-one-two means a thousand and twelve, or a hundred and one and then two? But if you mark off a single-digit number – one through nine – with a crossed zero before it, there's no confusion. Two crossed zeros together would act as a space.'

January studied the paper. ‘So the message begins with eleven, followed by three crossed zeroes – marking the number out as something important. Eleven is the top left-hand number in one of the five squares. Bray must have found these squares in his wife's desk and copied them, suspecting something but not knowing what they were. It would make sense to tell the recipient which key to use at the outset … Only, I've attempted to transpose letters with numbers with all five of the squares and have gotten only gibberish.'

‘No, it isn't a simple transposition.' Poe picked up the fine notepaper – from Mrs Bray's desk, the same as that found inside Bray's watch. ‘Not a regular transposition, anyway. I'm assuming the original message was written in English – although there's no reason Mrs Bray wouldn't code her letters into Latin first, or French or German or Tahitian for that matter. It would certainly thwart any attempt from her husband to decode it. Simple transposition is always given away by recurring letters and patterns. In English the most commonly used letter is E, followed by T, A and O – this applies to any substitution, whether you've got numbers in your five-by-five block or something else. A five-by-five block works just as well with letters of the Greek alphabet, or astrological symbols, or whatever you can think of. You're still fairly safe in assuming – if your sender is an English-speaking amateur – that the most common symbol is going to turn out to be an E.'

‘You sound like a man who's studied this.'

The poet looked a little self-conscious, like a schoolgirl who's been given a compliment. ‘Well, one of the mathematics masters at West Point also taught cryptography, to the very few of my classmates who had the turn of mind for anything beyond the simple logistics of murdering our nation's foes. I've always been fascinated with codes – my friends and I came up with dozens as boys. He said – Professor Larson, that is – that the way to defeat this business of letter frequency is either to treat whole words as single units – which is what one does in a book code – or to keep changing the transposition.'

‘I've seen transpositional tables,' said January thoughtfully, ‘that alternated which letter was substituted depending on which line of the document one was reading. Sugar planters use them to communicate with their agents.'

‘Who have the keys. And the use of random numbers has the advantage that most people don't remember long sequences of numbers. It looks like Mrs Bray – and whoever she's sending messages to, I assume Mr Oldmixton at the Ministry – uses these five-line squares, probably alternating them.'

‘Indicating that they are neither amateurs,' said January, ‘nor do they expect to be dealing with amateurs. Luke Bray works in the Department of the Navy.'

‘Ah,' said Poe, and there was a moment of silence.

‘And his wife is the daughter of a banker. She must have grown up around people who used commercial ciphers all the time. There are daughters of bankers,' he added, ‘who are content to know nothing more of the matter, beyond that dearest Papa pays for their wardrobes. But I think you and I have seen proof that Rowena Bray is not such a woman. I'm wondering if she simply got the idea of using a five-line magic square as a cipher key from Selwyn Singletary, or if it's something Singletary invented, that's routinely used in the bank.'

‘Either way,' said Poe, ‘it has to be something that's fairly simple to learn, once both parties have the key. Professor Larson used a method – he called it “tumbling blocks” – as a means of constantly altering your cipher without changing your key.' He drew the slate toward him.

‘As I said, it's simple if you have the key – and nearly incomprehensible if you don't. You say one of those squares has eleven in the first position?'

January laid it before him.

‘Then we'll mark the alphabet into the twenty-five squares of our Number Eleven grid. I'm assuming that first sequence is the date – since there is no number thirty-seven in a grid on the order of five …'

‘So that 1837 really is 1837.'

‘I believe so. The way “tumbling blocks” works is that you divide your message up into two-letter couplets, usually inserting an X or a Q between doubled letters in words like “meet” and “butter”. You find their corresponding numbers on the grid, which will give you smaller squares within the grid. You see how three – or zero-three – and seventeen correspond to E and L? Make them two corners of a square, and their opposite corners are—'

‘A and P,' said January. ‘April?'

‘Ninth of April of last year.'

‘Bray must have found a half-written message on his wife's desk last spring. He was suspicious enough to copy it—'

‘But couldn't make heads or tails of it, not even when he found – and copied – the keys.' Poe's chalk flicked over the slate as he spoke, transcribing and transposing. ‘Since, as the lovely Madame Viellard says, Mrs Bray is not herself a mathematician, I should guess that Oldmixton – who also knew Singletary – was the one who realized that magic-squares on the order of five could be used for code-keys. They simply look like puzzles, should anyone find them, and most peoples' minds, as I said, simply turn blank when they see … Good lord.'

He sat back, black forelock hanging in his eyes, and stared at the scribbled slate before him.

‘I think that word is
President. 9 April 1837 – Emergency meeting President's cabinet …
'

There was silence as Poe finished transcribing the lines.

1
1Ø ØØ Ap 9, 1837 Emergency meeting Presidents cabinet x Papinau Resolution rejected x Preparations for military action discussed in event of British show of force x Send regiments to Detroit, Buffalo, Presque Isle x Station Iroqouis, Inflexible at Presque Isle.

‘Papineau was one of the leaders of the Canadian revolt last year, wasn't he?' asked January, after a few minutes' study of the decryption. ‘I heard there was talk of the British invading Canada to crush the rebellion, but I didn't know we'd gone so far as to station regiments at the border.'

‘Neither did I – nor anyone, I expect.'

‘Where and what is Presque Isle?'