The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  “The document,” I said. “The Ralegh letter. Where is it?”

  Alonzo’s eyes went absolutely still for a few seconds. Then, kneeling on the floor, he rapped on a piece of moldy wainscoting, until it puffed away from the wall. He drew out the FedEx envelope, pressed his eye against the opening.

  “Thank God,” he breathed.

  “Yeah, except Amory’s still missing,” I said. “What about his friends? Is there anyone he might have paid a visit to?”

  “There’s Mrs. Poole. Older than God. Lives in Whalebone, a few miles down the road. Raises chinchillas. Amory’s been spooling her along for years with May Sarton first editions, waiting for her to…” He paused. “He’s been cultivating her.”

  “Maybe Amory went to see her?”

  “No, no, she always sends a car.”

  “Any other friends?”

  “God, I don’t know. How can I think when it’s this cold?”

  I was the one who moved to close the oceanside window. But it was Clarissa who glanced past my arm and saw what was lying just outside.

  “Jesus.”

  I was the second to see it, and what struck me most was its surreal normality. Amory Swale’s backyard was already a graveyard of butts and bottles and cans and string. To discover a hand protruding from the sand … well, that was just another found object, wasn’t it?

  From behind me, I heard the sludgy low-fi sound of Alonzo’s voice.

  “Henry. There are a couple of shovels in the back.”

  27

  THE SAND, FRESHLY loosened, flew off in spadefuls. The hand gave way to an arm, spindly and larval. The arm gave way to a shoulder. A neck. And at last came the face, shellacked with grit, weirdly young without its eyeglasses.

  We were the only witnesses. For we were standing in a great bowl of sand, screened on every side by dunes and shrubs and sea oats—and by that sad, sad house, which would be even more vacant now than I ever thought possible. Even now, in broad daylight, a hundred people could walk by us—more than a dozen already had, I guessed, in the last twenty minutes—no wiser as to what had gone on here.

  I stood up slowly. I slapped the sand from my hands.

  “What are you doing?” snapped Alonzo.

  “I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  “And just what are you planning to tell them?”

  “I hadn’t, you know, rehearsed it. Something like there’s this guy. Who was alive and now is not.”

  “And hence is beyond our help.”

  The hair on my skin actually shrank.

  “Guess you’re mourning in your own way, huh, Alonzo?”

  “I’m very sorry, but right now, mourning is an indulgence.”

  “I’ll make the call,” said Clarissa. “Alonzo won’t need to be a part of this.”

  “Oh, and how could I not be?” he snapped, rounding on her. “Amory was my friend, wasn’t he? And you came here on my account, did you not?”

  “We can’t leave him here,” I said.

  To which Alonzo said nothing—or, rather, his silence said as much as speech. In that instant, two things became abundantly clear. Leaving Amory was something that could be done. Leaving Amory was exactly what he intended to do.

  The same conclusions must have dawned on Clarissa, for I saw her blanch, even as her irises blackened.

  “We can not. Leave this man here.”

  “Did I say anything about forever?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Did you hear me say forever?”

  “He was your friend.”

  “A couple of lousy days!” shouted Alonzo.

  His own vehemence stunned him briefly into silence. He cast his eyes down and, in a more appeasing tone, added:

  “Forty-eight hours. That’s all I’m asking. Just to crack things open.”

  Clarissa opened her mouth, but he had already put out a hand to stop her.

  “By my reckoning, we have exactly two choices. We finish what we started, or it will be finished for us. Just ask Amory.”

  An agitation in Alonzo’s throat … a nod in the direction of the body.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to choose my final resting place, not Bernard Styles.”

  “Alonzo,” I said. “If you’re right about who did this—”

  “If I’m right?”

  “Then, among other things, we’re letting a murderer walk these beaches.”

  “Don’t be penny dreadful. The field of potential victims is quite shockingly small. In fact, you’re looking at all of them. Shall we examine the facts? Amory Swale was murdered. Why? For Harriot’s map, of course. If Amory had actually known where it was, they would have it in their hands right now. Believe me, he’d have given it up in a heartbeat. He’d have given me up if I’d been here.”

  Only Alonzo wasn’t here, I thought. He was bivouacked in my motel room, drinking himself half blind. An attack of nerves, that’s how we’d diagnosed it. Today, it looked like a fit of prescience.

  “Okay,” I said. “If Amory didn’t know anything, why would they kill him?”

  “Because they wanted to send a message.”

  “And what exactly is this message? Please translate.”

  Alonzo waited a few seconds.

  “Bernard Styles wants us to know that he knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “Everything we’re up to. Styles knows about Harriot’s treasure and he wants it every bit as much as we do. And, as we’ve now seen, he’s willing to go to any length to find it. Believe me, Amory wouldn’t have lasted five minutes without spilling.”

  As if in confirmation, my phone began to ring.

  UNKNOWN.

  I flipped open the lid.

  “Mr. Cavendish!” came the familiar reedy voice. “I fear I have become the proverbial squeaky wheel, but I’m most curious to hear about your progress.”

  I stared at that pale torso, granulating before my eyes.

  “May we first talk about Amory Swale?”

  “Swale,” said Bernard Styles. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “See, I believe you have.”

  “Well, then, you must refresh my memory. Who exactly is he?”

  I waited for the surge of heat in my skull to pass. But it wouldn’t.

  “I saw Halldor this morning,” I said.

  “What a lovely surprise that must have been. He’s been pining for salt air, and we were told the beaches in North Carolina were rather nicer than the ones in Delaware.”

  “So his turning up here would be on the order of coincidence.”

  “Well, yes, it would. Because, of course, you never told us where you were, Mr. Cavendish. Or with whom.”

  “I know what you’re doing,” I said.

  “That makes two of us, Mr. Cavendish. Nevertheless, I continue to repose the greatest confidence in your abilities, and I remain hopeful that we may conclude our business on the happiest of terms.”

  And then he delivered his postscript.

  “The best of luck to you and your companions. And please send my regards to Alonzo.”

  28

  “NOW,” SAID ALONZO. “Now do you believe me?”

  We were sitting, the three of us, legs akimbo, in Amory’s great ashtray of a yard. The wind had picked up, and a fine layer of sand-silt was stinging our eyes, and a squadron of no-see-ums was sucking the sweat from our necks.

  “He didn’t confess,” said Clarissa. “Exactly.”

  “Why would he confess?” said Alonzo. “Would you?”

  She drove a twig into the sand.

  “So to save ourselves from Styles, we need to find Styles’s treasure.”

  “Excuse me. The treasure does not belong to Styles, it never has. It’s Harriot’s.”

  “Styles doesn’t seem to think so,” I pointed out.

  “Which is why I prefer to regard the whole affair as an Elizabethan comedy. The happy outcome being just one or two acts away.”

  A comed
y, I thought, staring at the Ozymandias head of Amory Swale, disappearing under the blowing sand.

  “We should call the police,” I said.

  “May I once more ask why?”

  “So we can be safe,” said Clarissa.

  He regarded us singly first, then in tandem.

  “And what do you want to be safe from? I can assure you—given the fact that I’m not even approximately dead—once you call the police, I will be arrested in short order for fraud. You—and I am using the plural pronoun—will be arrested as my accomplices. And, by the way, does the phrase ‘suspicion of murder’ carry any resonance for you?”

  As theatrical effects go, it was more Victorian than Elizabethan. Which is to say, greasily effective.

  “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

  “GET 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 riv
al 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