The School of Night (22 page)

“That's ridiculous,” said Clarissa. “Henry saw Halldor. He
saw
him—”

“
Strolling
. Along a beach. Half a mile from here. Not exactly a smoking gun, is it? That's Styles's one true gift, he doesn't leave fingerprints. Or footprints. If the local constables act in the way they usually do, they're going to round up the life forms that are closest to hand. And God help us when they do.”

“
We
had no motive to kill Amory,” I said.

“Oh, motive.” His head described a circle of mockery. “You really think that's going to stop them? Give me half a minute, I'll come up with a motive. Falling out among thieves … lover's quarrel … too many Twizzlers … all they're going to fasten on,
believe
me, is the three people who've been in Amory Swale's immediate neighborhood the past few days and nights. The rest goes to hell.

“And once we're in their gun sights, how
safe
do you think you'll be? Any misdemeanors in your back history, Clarissa? That car of yours, Henry. The police might want to see the registration. The title, too. If you really think your lives will stand up to that kind of scrutiny—if you think you can pull yourself off any cross they want to nail you to—well, then, by all means, take out your cell phones. Do it now.”

I confess. My mind was already fastening around Detective August Acree. As for what was going on in Clarissa's head, I couldn't tell you, but I think it's fair to say that in that moment she and I understood our impotence. Between Bernard Styles and Alonzo Wax, we were no longer masters of ourselves.

“I'll give you twenty-four hours,” I said, keeping my eyes on her. “That's all I'll agree to. And then we call the police.”

“I believe we have a deal,” said Alonzo.

And now he was looking at Clarissa, too. Waiting for a sign. But her final redoubt of dignity was to walk into the house.

Less than a minute later, she returned with a pillow: one of the hunting tableaux from Amory Swale's couch. She knelt down and placed it under the dead man's head. She looked at him for another minute. And then she said:

“He must have family somewhere.”

“None.”

Even Alonzo was struck, I think, by the baldness of his reply, for he bowed his head an inch.

“Tell me when this ends,” said Clarissa, turning her gaze toward him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there was Lily. And now there's Amory.”

“It ends when
we
say it ends,” answered Alonzo. “No one else.”

And then he seized the nearest shovel and said:

“Shall we get on with it?”

I did what I was told; I made that body vanish into its hangar of sand. Went about my work so blindly that Alonzo at last had to tap me on the shoulder and say:

“Enough.”

By now, not even a finger was protruding from the surface.

I started walking—up the side of the bowl, down the path—pausing at the first sight of ocean, where I hoisted myself onto a bench, the base of which had been laid bare by years of erosion. For some time I sat there, not thinking about anything in particular. The water was emerald in its valleys, brown in its peaks, royal purple at the horizon. The whitecaps looked like porpoises.

Alonzo was exactly where I'd left him. Gummed with sweat and grit. Still wearing his blue kimono.

We trudged back inside … just as Clarissa came barreling through the front door, a grocery bag cradled in each of her lean white arms.

“You must be hungry,” she said.

*   *   *

It was, in many respects, the most inhuman breakfast I've ever taken part in. And the most human. Especially when Clarissa turned to Alonzo and asked:

“When did you first meet Amory?”

“If you must know, I insulted him.”

The two men met on a Shakespeare Society panel titled “
Who
Wrote the Plays?” Alonzo took the radical position that it was Shakespeare; Amory, sitting just to his left, was in the Earl of Oxford's camp. This in itself could scarcely be borne, but when Amory announced he wanted to disinter the earl's coffin to see which plays had been buried with him, Alonzo's patience crumbled like chalk.

“I said, ‘Pardon me, Mr. Swale, but you are the most eye-popping fool I've ever had the misfortune to meet. In just a few years,' I said, ‘the Earl of Oxford theory will go right in the ashcan with the Earl of Rutland theory.
And
the Earl of Derby theory.
And
the Christopher Marlowe theory, not to
mention
the Francis Bacon theory.'

“But here was the thing with Amory: The more you insulted him, the better he liked you. Which made for an exhausting codependency, I don't mind saying. All the same, we found ourselves in accord on most points, and he had a
scoutmasterly
quality that, in the right light, was endearing. He was particularly helpful tracking down a Robert Cecil letter. It had gone to ground somewhere in Islamorada, but Amory knew a widow—he was
always
knowing widows—sorry, Henry, are you quite all right?”

I was staring directly out the window, with such conviction that both Alonzo and Clarissa turned their heads to see what was there.

“
I know
,” I said.

Alonzo reared up on the couch.

“
What
do you know?”

“Harriot's code. I know which code he used.”

29

“G
ET ME TO
a computer,” I said.

We made our way back to the Pelican Arms, where I took Clarissa's laptop into my arms and carried it with foundling care to my room.

“Leave the map here,” I said. “And come back in an hour.”

The hour winged past, and when I opened the door and ushered the other two into the room, the synapses in my brain were still carbonating.

“You say
I'm
a drama queen,” said Alonzo, dropping negligently into the armchair. “By the way, your room smells of old ladies.”

“It does now. Can everyone see the laptop screen? Yes?”

“Yes yes yes.”

“Well, then, before we begin,” I said, “may I tender a salaam to Alonzo? Truly, I have him to thank.”

“For so many things.”

“This in particular. You're the one who mentioned Francis Bacon.”

“Who was…?” asked Clarissa.

“Scientist. Statesman. Lawyer. Corrupt judge. And, as it happens, one of the great philosophers of the Middle Ages. And, more to our purposes, a premier cryptologist. Alonzo, when those silly people wanted to prove Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, what did they do? They combed through every line of verse, looking for—”

“Embedded ciphers,” said Alonzo, nodding impatiently. “But here's the difference, Henry. They were fools; Harriot was not. And maybe you've forgotten, Bacon didn't publish his ciphers until 1623, two years after Harriot's death.”

“Maybe
you've
forgotten. Bacon came up with his most famous cipher when he was in Paris, working for the English ambassador. Sometime between 1576 and 1579.”

“And what are the chances he shared it with Harriot?” Clarissa asked.

“Well, that's where I stalled. See, I figured they
had
to know each other. That they knew
of
each other was incontestable. They were almost exact contemporaries. Bacon actually
mentions
Harriot in
Commentarius Solutus
. The problem was they were locked in rival camps. Bacon was on Essex's side, Harriot was with Ralegh. It was only when Essex mounted his sorta-maybe coup against Elizabeth that Bacon took one sniff of the wind and jumped. I'd say there's a better than even chance that, at some point in their life spans, England's two famous intellectuals sat down for some shop talk. And what better subject than ciphers? Harriot was no mean codesmith himself.”

“But what exactly
is
Bacon's cipher?” asked Clarissa.

“You remember me telling you to treat all those characters like computer language? I had no idea what a genius I was—I mean, seriously, I'm a genius because Bacon's code was one of civilization's first great binary systems. For every letter of plain text, he substituted some combination of A and B. A was AAAAA, B was AAAAB, C was AAABA, and so on. All the way up to Z: BABBB.”

Clarissa's brows drew down over her eyes.

“I get it,” she said. “It's tougher to break than a substitution cipher because you can't tweeze out the most commonly used letters. All those
e
's and
t
's and
a
's, they're buried in binary code. That's why letter frequency analysis won't work. Any piece of text will have roughly the same number of A's and B's.”

“Oh, come on,” said Alonzo. “Bacon developed his cipher more than four centuries ago. You're telling me a modern decryption program couldn't crack it open?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “See, it's not a true cipher. Technically—okay, I'm sorry to do this—it's
steganography.
From the Greek
stegein
, to cover. It's a way of writing code without letting anyone know you're writing code. The cipher is embedded in what looks like normal text.”

“Security through obscurity,” said Clarissa. “Only the sender and the recipient know what's going on.”

“Exactly.”

“But wait. The legend on Harriot's map … that's not normal text. Call it up, Henry.”

PsjAYStrooxeidDVegaLOkuxTmLikcyCUsSxGAzyrnrmuOrrLBAkchrltRdgarnoom

ONOssfrtvQhiHeRbdallZolgeanitzPeFpfhlogionLlLqaBwnbAdauncsleckQooTiat

GlgKIkiWfleatHEstRqiabaOtzKCdMCpnfeffkuv

“No one's going to look at
that
,” said Clarissa, “and mistake it for a letter to Mom. I mean, it practically screams code.”

“But not in the way we think it does,” I answered. “Harriot's a smart guy, right? He knows how people's brains work. We look at a string of letters, we start reading it as
text
. That's how we
want
to read it. We have to step away from the
content
and look only at how it's laid out on the page. And now, with that in mind, what do you see?”

Alonzo screwed up his eye.

“Letters,” he growled.

“But what distinguishes some of them from others?”

“At the risk of sounding obvious,” said Clarissa, “some are capital and some aren't.”

“And that's exactly why we miss it. Because it's so damn obvious.”

Alonzo took one long step back from the screen.

“Jesus,” he gasped. “It's case-sensitive. Oh, I'm an imbecile, I assumed it was—”

“The usual Elizabethan randomness, I know. Me, too. But not this time. So let's just see what we've got on our hands, shall we? Assign B to all the upper-case letters … assign A to all the lower-case letters … presto chango switcheroony…”

I paged down to the next screen.

BAABBBAAAAAAAABBAAABBAAABABAAAABBABABBAAAAAAABAABBBAAA
AAABAAAAAAAABBBAAAAAABAABABAAAAABAAAAAAAAABABAAAAAAAAA
BABAABAAABAAAAAAAAAABAABAAABAABBAABAAAAABBAABAAAAABAAB
BABBAAAAAAAAA

“Bacon's cipher,” murmured Alonzo.

“In all its binary glory. And if you break it off after every fifth letter, you can figure out the exact letter equivalents. Build it up, piece by piece, and pretty soon you'll know just what Harriot was trying to tell us.”

No parades for me. No statues. Alonzo just thrust out his hands and, in the highest dudgeon, cried:

“Well, Christ! Decode it.”

“Already have,” I said, paging down to the next screen.

U/V R B S S I/J O N A U/V R E A P A T R I/J A L A C T E A C I/J U/V E D E C O R A

“Are you having fun with us?” Clarissa asked. “This doesn't make any more sense than the cipher.”

“Because you never learned Latin,” Alonzo snapped. “Out of my way.”

Bending over the keyboard, he used the space bar to break the letters into chunks of text.

U/V R B S S I/J O N A U/V R E A P A T R I/J A L A C T E A C I/J U/V E D E C O R A

“
Urbs Sion aurea
,” he chanted. “
Patria lactea, cive decora.…
” His face spilled open with wonder. “Bernard of Cluny,” he murmured.

“Who
is
—” said Clarissa.

“A Benedictine monk,” I told her. “English, probably, living in the first half of the early twelfth century. He was a poet and a fierce critic of the medieval church. He wrote a satire called
De Contemptu Mundi
, which attacked the whole Catholic hierarchy, starting with the priests and nuns and going all the way up to the Vatican. It was reprinted countless times. The early Protestant reformers made it one of their urtexts, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries any literate Protestant would have known it, possibly by heart.”

“And for the School of Night,” added Alonzo, “it would have been an ideal textbook. A critique of Catholicism that was, by extension, a critique of all religion.”

Clarissa's arm rose toward the ceiling.

“Excuse me. The business major who never took Latin wants to get back to Harriot's map. Can someone please translate these lines into English?”

“Roughly speaking,” said Alonzo, “it's
Golden city of Zion, land of milk and
—well, there's no mention of honey—
land of milk, adorned with citizens.
I admit it sounds better in Latin.”

“So Harriot's trying to tell us something about Jerusalem?”

“Not Jerusalem,” I said pointedly. “
Sion.
”

Even now, looking back on this moment, I can't tease apart all the emotions that played across Alonzo's face, in part because they negated one another. Pride fell before humility, which gave way to shock. The death of one theory had inaugurated the birth of another.