Brutal Telling

Gamache slowly leaned back and crossed his long legs. If not stolen, then what? “What’s the other option?” he asked.

“Well, that the dead man actually owned the pieces. Or that they were looted from dead people, who couldn’t report it. In a war, for instance. Like the Amber Room.”

“Or maybe they were given to him,” suggested her husband, Jerome.

“But they’re priceless,” objected Therese. “Why would someone give them to him?”

“Services rendered?” he said.

All three were silent then, imagining what service could exact such a payment.

“Bon, Armand, I have something to show you.” Jerome rose to his full height of just five and a half feet. He was an almost perfect square but carried his bulk with ease as though his body was filled with the thoughts overflowing from his head.

He wedged himself onto the sofa beside Gamache. He had in his hands the two carvings.

“First of all, these are remarkable. They almost speak, don’t you find? My job, Therese told me, was to figure out what they’re saying. Or, more specifically, what these mean.”

He turned the carvings over to reveal the letters carved there.

MRKBVYDDO was etched under the people on the shore.

OWSVI was under the sailing ship.

“This’s a code of some sort,” explained Jerome, putting his glasses on and peering closely at the letters again. “I started with the easiest one. Qwerty. It’s the one an amateur’s most likely to use. Do you know it?”

“It’s a typewriter’s keyboard. Also a computer’s,” said Gamache. “Qwerty is the first few letters on the top line.”

“What the person using Qwerty generally does is go to the keyboard and type the letter next to the one you really mean. Very easy to decode. This isn’t it, by the way. No.” Jerome hauled himself up and Gamache almost tumbled into the void left by his body. “I went through a whole lot of ciphers and frankly I haven’t found anything. I’m sorry.”

Gamache had been hopeful this master of codes would be able to crack the Hermit’s. But like so much else with this case, it wouldn’t reveal itself easily.

“But I think I know what sort of code it is. I think it’s a Caesar’s Shift.”

“Go on.”

“Bon,” said Jerome, relishing the challenge and the audience. “Julius Caesar was a genius. He’s really the cipher fanatic’s emperor. Brilliant. He used the Greek alphabet to send secret messages to his troops in France. But later he refined his codes. He switched to the Roman alphabet, the one we use now, but he shifted the letters by three. So if the word you want to send is kill, the code in Caesar’s Shift becomes . . .” He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the alphabet.

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

Then he circled four letters.

NLOO

“See?”

Gamache and Therese leaned over his messy desk.

“So he just shifted the letters,” said Gamache. “If the code under the carvings is a Caesar’s Shift, can’t you just decode it that way? Move the letters back by three?”

He looked at the letters under the sailing ship.

“That would make this . . . L, T, P. Okay, I don’t have to go further. It makes no sense.”

“No, Caesar was smart and I think this Hermit was too. Or at least, he knew his codes. The brilliance of the Caesar’s Shift is that it’s almost impossible to break because the shift can be whatever length you want. Or, better still, you can use a key word. One you and your contact aren’t likely to forget. You write it at the beginning of the alphabet, then start the cipher. Let’s say it’s Montreal.”

He went back to his alphabet and wrote Montreal under the first eight letters, then filled in the rest of the twenty-six beginning with 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  S

M  O  N  T  R  E  A  L  A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R

“So, now if the message we want to send is kill, what’s the code?” Jerome asked Gamache.

The Chief Inspector took the pencil and circled four letters.

CADD

“Exactly,” beamed Dr. Brunel. Gamache stared, fascinated. Therese, who’d seen all this before, stood back and smiled, proud of her clever husband.

“We need the key word.” Gamache straightened up.

“That’s all,” laughed Jerome.

“Well, I think I have it.”

Jerome nodded, pulled up a chair and sat down. In a clear hand he wrote the alphabet once again.

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

His pencil hovered over the next line down.

“Charlotte,” said Gamache.

Clara and Denis Fortin lingered over their coffee. The back garden of the Santropole restaurant was almost