The Alchemist's Code aa-2

Home > Other > The Alchemist's Code aa-2 > Page 10
The Alchemist's Code aa-2 Page 10

by Dave Duncan


  “Should I wear my sword?”

  “You’re probably safer without it.”

  “Very true,” I said, “I hate inquests.” I glanced inquiringly at Giorgio and he nodded, of course. “He will be happy to oblige you, lustrissimo.” I was sorely tempted to add, “But don’t tip him too generously; he isn’t used to it.” I didn’t say that, though, and the self-restraint required must have made all the angels in Heaven cheer.

  Danese said nothing, but when gondolier and vizio departed, he went with them. I looked across the table at the amused stare of a descending line of dark eyes-Christoforo, Corrado, Archangelo, and little Piero.

  “It’s a good job I like your father,” I said. “Or I’d be praying for sharks to sink his gondola. Chris, go and bolt the front door behind them.”

  Eight eyes widened. “Why?” chorused one bass, one baritone, one tenor, and one alto.

  “You know the doge is a great book collector and the Maestro is an expert on old books? He’s examining some very rare documents for the doge, so valuable that the doge sent the vizio along to guard them.” That was as close to the truth as I could come and it satisfied the youngsters, although probably not Mama, who never missed a word of any conversation, spoken or unspoken. Hating myself for even that much deception, I beat a fast retreat with a mug of hot water and another of khave.

  I checked that both doors were bolted as well as locked.

  As soon as I had shaved, I took my tarot deck from under my pillow and tried another reading. It was no more informative than the last one and I tucked the deck away again, fearing that any more attempts to force it might desensitize it. My tarot skill had apparently become as useless as the Maestro’s clairvoyance, which confirmed what I already suspected-that whatever we were up against would not be deterred by bolted doors or Filiberto Vasco’s sword.

  When Vasco returned, he found me at my side of the big desk behind a pile of every book on cryptography in the Maestro’s library-Roger Bacon, Johannes Trithemius, Girolamo Cardano, Leon Battista Alberti, Giovani Porta, Blaise de Vigenere. Al-Kindi was there, too, but I can’t read Arabic. Needless to say, I had made small progress with those I could read.

  “No sign of the Maestro,” I said. “May I have a look at the evidence?” You cannot conceive how much it hurt me to sound humble.

  The vizio could, though, and smirked. “What for?”

  “Not the ciphertext, just Circospetto ’s notes.”

  He had the effrontery to make himself comfortable in the Maestro’s chair and beam across at me. “Why?”

  “I have an idea and I wanted to see if the Ten’s gnomes thought to check for it.”

  “What sort of idea?”

  “About nomenclators.”

  “What’s a nomenclator?”

  “This frantic impulse to exercise your brain after so many years of disuse may do serious damage.”

  He just smiled.

  “I taught you last night,” I said with saintly patience, while silently vowing epochal revenge, “that a simple Caesar alphabet cipher is too easy to break. The most popular way to improve it is to add more symbols, usually numbers. So you have, say, 32 standing for D, 14 for N, and a dozen or so different codes for a very common letter like E -and so on. Then you start adding symbols for common words, perhaps 42 for the and 51 for and. That sort of list is called a nomenclator. It makes the cipher harder to break, but not much. Carry it too far and you’re writing a whole codebook, with numbers for King of Denmark, Venice, Janissary regiment, and Lord knows what. That’s more secure, but then your spy can’t carry the cipher in his head anymore and has to lug a book around with him. If the enemy captures it, a codebook is enough evidence to hang him and reveal all your coded correspondence, past, present, and future. If a Caesar alphabet is compromised, you only have to change the key, which is a single number, whereas replacing a codebook is a huge task. But codebooks are how most states encipher their dispatches.”

  Vasco nodded as if he understood. He does have a certain low animal cunning. “Algol doesn’t use numbers.”

  “No, he uses twenty-three letters, and if he is pairing them up he has hundreds of couplets available. So the first thing the Maestro asked was if Sciara’s gnomes had checked for couplet frequency. Perhaps GX stands for A, NT for B, EO for King of France, understand? Now you pass me the notes and I’ll tell you what to look for in the ciphertext and if we’re quick about it we may have this thing broken before the Maestro comes.”

  “And if we’re really lucky, angels may appear to transport you to Paradise.”

  I thought that was the end and the pleasure of refusing me had overridden his duty, but then he shrugged and opened the satchel. He held out the work notes, making me stand up to reach them.

  “So what do I look for?” he asked.

  “My initials. LAZ, for Luca Alfeo Zeno. How many times can you see those letters together? I know they appear more often than they should.” I set to work reading what Sciara’s team had tried, ignoring more scoffing from Vasco.

  Sciara’s notes were thorough and detailed. I learned that the ciphertext comprised four Algol dispatches, varying in length from three pages to nine, twenty-four pages in all. The Ten’s cryptologists had tested for letter frequency and couplet frequency and even “word” frequency, although the five-letter groups could not be real words. Their conclusion was that the distribution of letters was not truly random, but not skewed enough for a substitution cipher, such as a Caesar, or a transposition cipher, which is a gigantic anagram. They suspected that all four dispatches had been written using the same code, so very likely it was a nomenclator.

  They had not tested for triplets, though. Of course my own initials in a page of meaningless text will always jump out at me, and the previous evening I had seen them twice on one page when I was looking over the Maestro’s shoulder. After a few minutes of angry muttering, Vasco announced that he had found my initials seven times, and at least once in each of the four dispatches. We had grasped a thread in the labyrinth! That ought to lead somewhere.

  But where? There were thousands of other three-letter combinations to look for, and the only sensible next move I could think of was to hand the problem back to Sciara and tell him to put his legions to work on triplet frequencies. I suggested we each try to find another repeating triplet.

  Eventually the thump of the Maestro’s staff on the terrazzo outside announced his approach and Vasco hastily vacated his chair. The old man came hobbling in, looking murderous.

  “Make any sense of it?” he growled at me, with a wave at the slate table.

  “Nine words,” I said. “That’s all.”

  He grunted, meaning that he had reached the same conclusion.

  “And my tarot doesn’t work either.”

  He seemed unsurprised. “Why do you think he’s called Algol? Vizio , who named the unknown that and why?”

  “I have no idea, Doctor.”

  More grunt.

  I doubted that Algol would turn out to be a true ghoul, a monster that haunts graveyards and eats corpses, but he might well be a demonologist, and the laws of demonology dictate that anyone who employs demons will soon find that the shoe is on the other hoof and the demons are employing him.

  Vasco was looking puzzled. I thought it kinder to leave him that way.

  “Can you break a nomenclator in an unknown language?” I asked.

  The Maestro’s scowl darkened. “Given time and enough text to work on, yes. But there are far more good ciphers than good people using them. When a cipher is broken, it is almost always because the operator was careless. Human error damns us all! If we look hard enough and long enough, we will find that he has made a mistake somewhere.”

  That was my cue. “He likes my initials. He used them seven times.”

  The effect on the Maestro was dramatic. He sat up straight and his eyes blazed with excitement. “Where? Show me!”

  Two minutes later he snapped, “Bring me the pastels!”


  I fetched our box of pastels.

  We marked every LAZ in red. After another ten minutes or so we had located and highlighted four more triplets that were repeated at least once. Nostradamus told me to round up the three oldest Angeli children currently available. Reading and writing are uncommon skills among the citizen class, but I taught Mama and she teaches all her children.

  Archangelo was on a ladder, dusting the tops of high pictures in the salone, and so was happy to be recruited. Corrado and Christoforo happened to come running up the stairs as I emerged from the atelier and were not, but they brightened when I chivied them into the dining room and they saw the pile of shiny soldi in front of the Maestro. Most of the time he is as tight as a coffin lid where money is concerned, but he has little idea of how much it means to adolescents and often tips them extravagantly.

  He handed out a pastel crayon and four or five pages of ciphertext to each of us. He explained the rules. The boys received a soldo for each new repetition they found. Vasco and I did not. The vizio was clearly torn between the excitement of the chase and regarding this labor as far beneath the dignity of a major officer of the Republic-which he is not, but likes to think he is.

  The pile of coins shrank rapidly. We found ten different triplets that were repeated. None of the others repeated as often as my initials did, and most only once. My initials were always in the middle of the five-letter groupings, and the others usually had their own places also, with a couple of exceptions that could easily be due to chance. Archangelo found a four-letter repeat and was rewarded with two soldi.

  Whatever we were discovering was a clue to analyzing the cipher and might even lead us to breaking it, so I grew quite excited. The Maestro became crabbier and crabbier until he slapped his hand on the table and said, “Stop!”

  Surprised, we all stopped.

  “This is a waste of time. Off you go, boys, thank you. Vizio, please gather up the papers. Alfeo, has that freeloading friend of yours removed his belongings yet?”

  “He was never a friend of mine,” I protested. “He had no baggage with him when he left this morning.”

  “Then pack up his things and take them to Ca’ Sanudo and tell him to find someone else to sponge off!”

  It was almost noon. I had hoped to call on Violetta, but I was lacking several hours’ sleep and might well have settled for a siesta instead.

  “After dinner?”

  “No, now! The vizio is our guest and that simpering pretty boy is not. I want him out of here.”

  “I don’t mind sleeping on the couch,” Vasco said, with the martyrdom of a triptych saint. “I can guard the house better there.”

  The Maestro ignored him. “You heard me,” he snapped.

  I sighed. “Your wish is my command, Oh Most Illustrious Master!”

  Although Nostradamus has uncommonly small hands, they have always packed a lot of sleight, and when Vasco tucked his papers back in his satchel, he didn’t think to count them.

  11

  I laid Danese’s admirable, expensive leather portmanteau on the spare room bed and began to pack it with Danese’s admirable, expensive silken garments. Eva had been generous to her hired lover. He owned luxuries I had never seen before-scented soap and a pearl-handled razor. He had no less than three spare pairs of shoes. One shoe was perceptibly heavier than the other five, though, a phenomenon I soon tracked down to a roll of gold coins tucked in the toe. Faced with a large sum of money and only my own honesty to defend me against later charges of pilfering, I decided to count it, and made it 60 sequins, equal to 165 silver ducats. That is a lot of money. Either Eva had been insanely generous to her hired lover or Danese had been working something on the side. Even I, in my boyish innocence, could think of several possibilities. I put the coins back in the shoe and the shoe in the case.

  I let Bruno carry it downstairs for me, because he would have been hurt had I not. Giorgio rowed me to Ca’ Sanudo and did not offer to lift the case ashore because he knew I would refuse if he did. I wielded the big brass anchor and the summons was answered by Fabricio, the footman. This time he was dressed as a gondolier.

  I was dressed as an apprentice and carried luggage, but he knew me and knew I was recorded in the Golden Book, so he bowed. I inquired after Danese and was assured that he would be informed directly of the honor of my visit if I would be so gracious as to wait in the androne

  …

  There were fewer crates and fewer empty shelves than before, but a forest had sprouted on the floor, trees of books both high and low, indicating that the huge collection was still being sorted. Let loose in such a feast, the Maestro would starve to death before he remembered to eat. Lucky, perhaps, that he was no longer mobile enough to indulge himself in such bibliophilic orgies.

  Fabricio returned, scooped up the portmanteau, and led me upstairs. Since my last visit the landing at the mezzanine level had been furnished with three marble busts and the fair madonna Grazia, she of the divine eyes and devilish nose. Her gown was a glittering mist of silver taffeta and pearls, her hair had been set in a much less childish style than before, and only time would ever make her look like an adult.

  She beamed, extending both hands to me. “ Dear sier Alfeo! I am so ashamed of my cruel words to you on Sunday! Such ingratitude for all your help! Can you ever forgive me?”

  Forgiveness, it is well known, requires repentance. I kissed her knuckles. “Think nothing of it, madonna! You were understandably upset. Your frowns are forgotten and your smiles compensate a thousand times for any trifling service I may have been privileged to offer.”

  “My husband and I are so grateful to you. If the foolish man had just told me that you were a nobile homo I should not have spoken so ungraciously. Sier Danese says you are his oldest friend and he will ask you to be his witness at the formal wedding ceremony.” And so on. Her life had been transformed thanks to me, et cetera.

  I was more than happy, et more cetera. If I was Danese’s best friend, that said a lot about Danese.

  “Fabricio!” the sylph commanded. “Go down and tell sier Alfeo’s gondolier that he can go. Sier Alfeo will dine with us today.”

  There were two doors opening off that landing and Fabricio, interestingly, was just closing the one on the garden side-wrestling with it, for Venice is built on wooden piles sunk in the mud and sand of the lagoon; doors develop minds of their own as they age. I knew that must be Grazia’s chamber. Fabricio no longer carried Danese’s portmanteau. Had Grazia ordered this arrangement and did her parents know of it? That was no business of mine.

  As a matter of form, I had to protest the dinner invitation, but the idea appealed to my gastrointestinal apparatus, which had been complaining noisily all the way from Ca’ Barbolano. Quite apart from the prospect of food, I always enjoy snooping in the homes of the rich, especially if I can win a chance to admire their paintings. With my customary grace I let myself be persuaded.

  I offered the lady my arm to steady her on her platform soles as we proceeded up the second flight, while she continued to chatter. Awaiting us in the salone were Danese, clad in a smug golden glow, and madonna Eva with a smile of welcome carefully chiseled in place. She was decked out in a dark blue gown to set off her golden hair and a treasure of golden ornaments speckled with diamonds. The wonderfully feminine roundness of her chin and bosom were offset by the sapphire hardness of her blue eyes, two jewels on velvet.

  “ Sier Alfeo! What a pleasant surprise! You are most welcome. You must join us for dinner.”

  I accepted again.

  She forced the smile a notch or two wider. “ Sier Zuanbattista and I never properly thanked you for all you did. Truly you were the white knight to the rescue! So romantic! So poetic!” So nice that you hit my son-in-law with a sword.

  “Come!” Grazia snapped, unwilling to be upstaged. She detached me and dragged me in the direction of the salotto I had visited on Sunday. Mother and daughter were still on speaking terms, but only barely. I could not believe that
women would seriously quarrel over Danese Dolfin himself, but they were playing for points that men could not appreciate.

  Great-aunt Fortunata had not been tidied away during my absence, perhaps not even moved for dusting. Crabbed, wizened, lipless, toothless, and malevolent, forked tongued and hairy chinned, she appraised me with two bleary eyes like agate chips in milk and then, to my astonishment, spoke. “The Good Lord told us to judge the tree by the fruit it bears!” I had forgotten how discordant her voice was, the sound of a granite lid being pushed off a crypt.

  “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  “Father Varutti says that even your use of demonic forces to rescue Grazia may not have damned you to Hell because it was in a good cause.”

  “I hope so and believe so,” I agreed, “trusting in the salvation that-”

  “But he is sure that you are damned anyway.”

  If contemplation of homicide was cause enough, then I certainly was. I did not bother to explain that I had used no demonic forces and that clairvoyance is no more a black art than astrology is. Even the Pope employs astrologers.

  A strikingly pretty maidservant brought us wine. I overheard her being addressed as Noelia, so she was the ladies’ maid who had discovered the empty coop. She could not be a day older than twelve.

  Trying to edge closer to the Palma Vecchio portrait, I got cornered by the leering Danese, who thanked me for returning his baggage. The cause of his good cheer was too good to keep secret. “You saved me a journey, old friend,” he whispered triumphantly. “Grazia has finally made her mother see reason. We are man and wife in the eyes of the church. There can be no sin in admitting it.” Or admitting him, in other words. Bedtime, all.

  “Congratulations.”

  So it went. We were obviously waiting for someone, and my next attempt to stalk a painting brought me within range of madonna Eva again.

  “I am so happy that you can stay to dine, sier Alfeo” she declaimed. “I know my husband will be devastated at having missed this opportunity to thank you again, but he will be unable to join us.”

 

‹ Prev