John leaned his bike against a bench in the most secluded spot he could find. He sat with arms draped over the backrest and watched one of the fountains. The biblical quote that appeared on Cellarius’s last map had been ringing in his ears all morning:
All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
The lake water roiled with goldfish that almost leaped out after crusts of bread were thrown to them. Ducks tried to sleep amid the commotion with their beaks tucked into their feathers; babies slept under mothers, each one squirming to get a warmer spot. Once in a while, a bird swooped down from the tall trees and snatched a meal from beneath the surface of the lake, then raced back up to the canopy, fighting off lazier competitors.
All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full …
Why make a treasure map, John wondered, if you’re not going to fill it with clues? Isn’t it reasonable to expect that everything you put on the map is fair game for treasure hunters? Isn’t it reasonable to demand that codes be breakable, that keys be provided? If you hide clues in places other than the map, how is anyone to find them?
Like the proverbial drunk who loses his house key walking home from a bar late at night: while backtracking, he only searches under street lamps, because if it’s anywhere else, he won’t see it in the dark.
And it just so happens the key is in his pocket the whole time.
All the rivers run into the sea …
All the rivers run into the sea!
John raced out of the park on foot, forgetting his bicycle next to the lake. He wouldn’t be returning to work that afternoon. Nor would the potential damage to his career even occur to him.
Back in Germany, Blumenfeld tried in vain to get the Köln-Düsseldorfer cruise ship to dock early and let her off. She paused only long enough to berate Gebhardt: “All those years of Latin … for nothing! Spengler wasn’t crying out for his wife. Carminea is the Latin form of Charmaine!”
In Kensington that evening, in his apartment above the Ahmadabad Theater, Barclay Zimmerman decided to take a bath. He’d been neglecting meals, hygiene, and anything not related to the lost Tavernier stones. His hair, always looking like it needed to be washed even when it was clean, needed to be washed.
He didn’t have the luxury of a shower, not in this neighborhood, not above an X-rated theater. He watched as the thin trickle of rust-laden water filled his tub.
He thought about calling Sarah. Would she talk to him? Probably not. Besides, Feinstein would answer the phone. That’s how protective he was; he didn’t allow her to answer. No, he couldn’t call, but he needed to find out what kind of progress they were making. Of all people, the one most likely to be in the lead was David Feinstein. If Feinstein won, he’d have both the girl and the Ahmadabad Diamond.
Freeman. Jesus.
He seated himself in the tub. After staring at the running water for a moment, he dashed, dripping, into the apartment’s only other room.
“A pen. Where’s a goddamn pen?”
Not finding anything to write with—he spilled the contents of his desk drawers onto the floor—he returned to the bathroom and began marking on the mirror with a bar of soap. Letter by letter, he deciphered the message in the border of Cellarius’s last map, oblivious to the water now overflowing his tub.
TWENTY-ONE
AFTER THE PRESS REVEALED the identity of the pigpen cipher, solutions failed to follow. Since only gibberish resulted from every attempted decipherment, experts concluded the pigpen elements were mere border decorations and urged people to get on with their lives.
Few paid attention. Treasure hunters unhinged by greed showed an uncanny ability to make the facts fit their own random speculations and a priori conclusions, proving all claims made by the psychological community about the rationalization powers of the human brain.
In Lausanne, Switzerland, an unemployed carpenter dismantled his vacationing neighbor’s house board by board. When the neighbor returned home to the carnage, the carpenter barely paused while jackhammering the foundation to offer him a cut of the booty.
The entire staff of the U. S. South Pole Science Station resigned en masse and requested immediate transportation to Lisbon, Portugal. And refused to say why.
A submarine commander in the north Atlantic ordered his boat to change course for the Bay of Biscay. When he revealed his theory to the crew, he earned their complete support. However, they had to strap the boat’s first officer to his bunk and spoon-feed him, such was the man’s shortsightedness.
A small crowd of strange people picketed the gates of Fort Knox, Kentucky, convinced the United States’ government had recovered the stones and was hoarding them there. A similar crowd did the same at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, seeking access to Hangar 18.
Delta Air Lines, responding to popular demand, increased the number of its nonstop flights from all major cities into the Atlanta hub after an article appeared claiming the solution was embedded in the novel Gone with the Wind. The article, written by a Delta executive, did not say how. Atlanta hotels filled with tourists who remained in their rooms with curtains drawn and doors latched.
Kommissar Gerd Pfeffer started a pot of coffee, then went to his office window and breathed the morning air. Twenty-one floors beneath him, the honking of car horns and the throaty growl of delivery trucks signaled the beginning of another day in Hamburg.
It was an odd mix of businesses that elected to hang a shingle in full view of police headquarters: the Hallesches Tor, a pub named after a subway station in Berlin. A bakery called Nirgendwo Anders, meaning Nowhere Else, as though the other dozen or so bakeries within walking distance had nothing to offer. The Indonesien, a grocery store that sold, in fact, Indonesian foods. And a pair of prosperous banks that, surprising to no one, had never been robbed.
Pfeffer wondered whether the merchants chose Beim Strohhause because the twenty-two-story Polizeipräsidium was across the street or despite the fact. There was something at once comforting and unsettling about being in the shadow of authority; you either loved it or hated it, and you were never sure which to do at any moment.
The coffee was ready. He sat down at his desk with a pencil and notepad.
First he had to confirm the pigpen cipher was correctly deciphered, and this he spent a few minutes doing. He assumed, like everyone else, the message started in the upper left-hand corner of the map, although for the purposes of code breaking it didn’t matter.
He noticed the cipher could be rendered more difficult in ways that capitalized on its symmetry—by rotating individual elements 180 degrees, for instance. Pfeffer didn’t suspect any such tricks, however. Cellarius hadn’t tried to conceal the existence of his message; it was there for all to see. And he hadn’t gone to great pains to conceal the fact—as the media tacitly assumed—that his Palatinate map was a treasure map. Because he lived in the seventeenth century, a time of simple cryptologic methods, the transpositions and substitutions he employed would probably be straightforward. Or so Pfeffer’s sources had advised him.
The first layer of the puzzle was obviously a variation on the pigpen. Pfeffer hoped and expected there would be only one more layer, and he figured his sources were right: the Vigenère was the most likely candidate.
One of the magazines following the story provided a sharp, close-up photograph of where the original Cellarius map had been torn across its upper right corner. Pfeffer examined the tear carefully with a magnifying glass, trying to determine whether the length of the replacement string—repeated from the beginning of the text—matched the length of the missing string.
Judging from the literature, the existence of the repeating characters was widely known. He wondered, though, whether it would occur to other treasure hunters to lay out their Vigenère keyword accordingly, that is, to start over with the keyword when the repeated string ended. If the number of repeat characters did not exactly equal th
e number of characters missing from the original text, the material following the repetition could be trickier to decipher than the material preceding it.
He carefully wrote out the entire code on his notepad, separating and placing parentheses around the repeated string:
Then he wrote out the sliding alphabetic table that powered the Vigenère cipher. The lowercase letters in the body of the table were the cipher letters. The uppercase letters in the column next to the left side were the key letters. And the bold letters in the row along the top generated the plaintext.
Pfeffer poured himself another cup of coffee. It was time to unearth the keyword. If he could discover its length, he could get the word itself.
In modern times, the keyword could have been millions of characters long, but in Cellarius’s day, simple words and common expressions served. Probably it was something that had personal meaning to Cellarius or was related somehow to the Palatinate map.
Pfeffer inspected the ciphertext again, after crossing out the duplicate string. He was looking for repeating sequences of cipher letters. He found six sequences of length three—nxi, ioh, tew, rrd, kmx, and tje—and quite a few of length two. He underlined the former in his notebook:
He decided to ignore two-letter repeats for the moment, because they were often caused by coincidence rather than a repeat of character strings in the plaintext. The two nxi’s were seven spaces apart, measured from the end of the first to the end of the second. Since seven was a prime number—divisible only by one and itself—Pfeffer immediately suspected he had found the length of his keyword. The rrd’s were 112 spaces apart, and seven was a factor of 112. Other factors included 2, 4, 8, 14, and 16, however.
It was the kmx’s and tje’s that threw curve balls: they were 32 and 16 spaces apart, respectively, suggesting a keyword length of 2, 4, 8, or 16.
Very short keywords were unlikely, because encipherers avoided them. They generated more repeated sequences of letters—more than were evident in the Cellarius ciphertext—and were therefore easier to discover. Pfeffer guessed the keyword was at least six letters long and probably no longer than sixteen, but he was keeping his mind open on the matter.
The two appearances of ioh were 80 spaces apart, throwing more doubt on seven as a choice; the only three factors in the range of consideration were 8, 10, and 16. The tew’s were 128 spaces apart, also favoring 8 and 16.
He now suspected eight, rather than seven, was the length of the keyword, and he sought to confirm it. If he turned out to be wrong, he would try sixteen next, since it also appeared as a factor in five of the six strings.
Turning to a fresh page in his notebook, he arranged the ciphertext in stacks eight characters wide:
Then he did a frequency analysis of the first column:a: /
b:
c: /
d:
e:
f: /
g: ///////
h: /////
i: ///
j: ////
k: /
l:
m:
n:
o:
p: /
q: ///
r: /
s:
t: //
u:
v: //
w:
x:
y:
z:
And he knew at a glance the hard part was over. The distribution was just clumpy enough to be an ordinary plaintext in an ordinary Western European language, disguised by having been slid across the alphabet in an increment equal to the modular value of the first key letter.
He guessed e, the most common letter in Western languages, was represented in the first column by g, two places away on the alphabet. That would make the first letter in the keyword c. He erased the first column in his stack and replaced it with the presumed plaintext letters; g went back two places to e, a went back two places to y, and so on:
Only one-eighth of the text was deciphered, but most of the work was done. Pfeffer looked at his watch; he needed to go to the bathroom but elected instead to stay on the job; the higher the pressure built in his bladder, the faster he would work toward a solution.
He had no time to waste. People had been searching for the lost Tavernier stones for three weeks. And some of those people, he knew from his long career as a homicide detective, were brilliant.
He started a fresh pot of coffee and stretched, waiting for the water to percolate. Then he returned to his desk, sharpened his pencil, and went back to work.
The second column was interesting, because frequency analysis suggested the modular value of the second key letter was zero—that is, the letter was a.
a: //
b:
c:
d: /
e: ////////
f: /
g:
h: //
i: /
j:
k:
l: ////
m: /
n: ///
o: /////
p:
q:
r: /
s:
t: //
u:
v:
w:
x: /
y:
z:
This was obvious because only e could be acting as e. In other words, in the second column there was no transposition, no disguise. The keyword therefore began with the letters ca. He updated his cipher stack:
So far, no two-letter combinations had appeared that were impossible in a Western language, especially considering that the first letter could represent the end of a word and the second the beginning of another. The combinations felt sound to Pfeffer, as though they were leading him in the right direction.
He had always warmed up that way to a case. Somewhere lurking behind all the curtains were clues to the truth. In this case, the curtains were substitutions and transpositions concealing a message. The cryptology was merely a disguise, layers of shade drawn over the message, and the job of the cryptologist was to bring the message to light. No matter how frustrating things got, no matter how distant a possible solution seemed, the plaintext message was always there, always giving away hints, always flirting with the analyst.
Pfeffer was sure the modular value of the third keyword was seventeen, and the word therefore began with car. He was intrigued when the appeared at the beginning of the second row, but knew better than to bank on it; he still had no idea what language Cellarius used in the plaintext. Even the yl in the last group, which had grown to yle, had possibilities.
The anticipated problem following the repeated string had not occurred: the modular integrity of the text had been preserved when the string was removed. This obviously meant the number of letters used in the replacement string exactly equaled the number of letters missing from the original. He wasn’t surprised: the number of cells fitted into a remodeled prison might well turn out to be the same number the prison had to begin with.
He swallowed the rest of his coffee and picked up the pace. If the job took too much longer, he was going to pee in his pants. After four columns—the halfway point—the plaintext began to shine through:
A substitution of s for f made sense of several of the quads. The sudden appearance of from added to the intrigue the had previously caused. Pfeffer now suspected the plaintext was written in English. But wouldn’t that prove the cipher was a hoax?
Chasing clues and solving puzzles had ruled Pfeffer’s passions all his life, passions that had served him well during a twenty-five year career as a detective. He had often pulled all-nighters, working himself into exhaustion to solve a problem.
All that changed when he found out his wife was having an affair.
He still hadn’t decided what to do about it. The frequency of his wife’s meetings with “Mr. Dick” had escalated to three times a week, each rendezvous resulting in yet another bottle of wine missing from his cellar. Apparently the two had become secure in their presumed invisibility. Mr. Dick was even parking his Saab in front of the hous
e.
Pfeffer had finally given in to the urge to track down the man’s license plate number. Turned out he was an old classmate of his wife’s; he had graduated from their Gymnasium one year ahead of her. Pfeffer put a private detective on the case and learned how the two became reacquainted all these years later.
It was touching, he thought, and good grist for the movies, but damn them for drinking his wine. Once he came up with a plan to punish them, one that wouldn’t implicate him, he’d implement it with no remorse at all. Damn her for her dishonesty, for her disloyalty, and for causing so much distraction in his life.
Like now.
After six columns, the stack began to speak:
It was English after all. There was no mistaking words like extend and light. Even strings like pofiti made sense after Latin back-substitutions were made; indeed, “position” was a useful word to encounter when deciphering the presumed instructions to a treasure map.
But was it a hoax? Probably no one would know until the shovels went to work, and either they hit something or they didn’t. The solution had been easy, even for amateurs. Pfeffer figured many people had already passed this point and were closing in on the target. That the newspapers hadn’t gotten there—or weren’t saying—didn’t necessarily mean anything; journalists might have preferred to cash in on treasure rather than payment for an article about treasure.
Cellarius’s instructions, once deciphered, didn’t make much sense at first glance. But Pfeffer would worry about that later. Right now, he needed to take a piss.
TWENTY-TWO
JOHN PEERED OUT HIS front window and watched Sarah arrive for a visit after what must have been, for her, a harrowing drive through the country. She parked David’s VW Beetle in the only remaining place it would fit on Nouveau Street. Then she stepped daintily out of the car, as if merely brushing against the air of the neighborhood would soil her. Her apprehension about leaving Philadelphia for “the sticks” was obvious.
The Tavernier Stones: A Novel Page 15