archive file,” he said, “one that you can’t access without a password.” My spirits plunged. “Probably in the library. That’s where we put the archives.”
“But if you can’t access it-”
His hands emerged from the beard and waved me off. “No, no, no. You can’t access it. From outside. I can access anything.” He led me through the hallway toward the computer room. “I have to be able to read it all,” he said. “Do you know who the bulletin-board cops are? The fucking Secret Service, that’s who. You’d think they’d have their hands full protecting the president, but no, they’ve got lots of time to sneak around on boards. All the time in the world. First they lurk-”
“Lurk?” We were in the bedroom.
“That’s what we call people who just read the stuff and don’t post anything, lurkers. There are lots of them, shy geeks afraid to write anything. So the computer cops lurk a while until they stub their toes on the adult part of the board and then they like to try a little entrapment. Some of the filthiest, most lurid stuff I’ve ever read was posted by the Secret Service, just seeing who’ll answer. Wetware at its worst. They love gay boards.”
He rolled his chair to the big desk, hit the keyboard three or four times, and watched the screen. “Oh, well, it keeps them off the streets,” he said. “Shame we can’t run over a couple of them with a local bus. Computer joke.”
“Local bus,” I said, mystified.
He made a disapproving clucking noise and shook his head at the clutter on the display. “The whole world is online today. This always happens before Halloween. Something about Halloween just brings them out of the woodwork. Let’s just disconnect a couple of lines, speed things up, or we’ll be here all day.” He reached up and turned off five modems, killing their little red lights and stranding people all over the information highway.
“Can you put something online for me?” I asked, watching him. “An invitation to a wake for Max?”
“No problem. All levels?”
“What’s that mean?”
He gave me a look that said are you kidding! and decided I wasn’t. “All levels means anyone who logs on can read it. If you don’t want that, we can restrict it to certain levels of membership.”
“All levels,” I said. “Wakes shouldn’t be restrictive.”
“Library,” he announced, peering at the screen. “Let’s go down a subdirectory, to the archives.”
“Let’s.” I’d rarely felt so useless.
“Why, the little dickens,” Jack said. “Look here.”
I looked there. The screen held a list of subdirectories, and Jack’s finger underlined one in a swift cutting motion. The type said
MAXPVT.
“PVT?”
“Private. Not very subtle, is it?” I withheld comment. It had been subtle enough for me.
Jack brought up the contents of the MAXPVT subdirectory. It read:
LETTER. ONE
LETTER. TWO
LETTER. THR
“Three,” I guessed.
He turned to me, his beard brushing the keyboard. “You sure you haven’t done this before?”
“I’m okay with applications,” I said defensively. “It’s computers I don’t understand. Can you bring the documents up?”
“I think I can manage that. Which one do you want to start with?”
“Three. It’ll be the most recent.”
“Three it is.” He smacked the keyboard, sure-fingered as Arthur Rubinstein, and we were looking at this:
“Um,” I said.
“He was being a very bad boy.” Jack was back to ripping knots from his beard. “Just not like Max at all.”
“Are they all like that?”
Ten keystrokes later we had an answer. They were. Max had apparently been corresponding with a geometrical figure.
“I’ll fool around with these,” Jack said. “It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Can you give me a copy? On disk?”
He slid a diskette into a slot. “Trade you,” he said, “for the info on Max’s wake.”
My computer at home ate the disk.
It accepted it eagerly, like a drunk popping an aspirin, sent it whirling, and then burped. I pulled the diskette out, turned off the computer, slapped it on the side a couple of times, and reinserted the diskette. Same result. Pushing the envelope of my technological expertise, I pulled out the diskette again, slapped it a couple of times, and fed it to the computer again. Three was the charm; the machine accepted the diskette without gastric distress and sat there, waiting for me to do something with it.
Do what? I keyed in type a: letter. thr and hit the ENTER key. Greek, literally Greek, spooled by, followed by a self-satisfied little beep. I brought up WordPerfect and asked it to retrieve the document. After some grumbling about the letter being in the wrong format, the program put its shoulder to the wheel and delivered the same geometric scramble I’d seen at Jack’s. Progress.
I knew how to use the phone, so I called Schultz at home. Without bothering to sound patient, he told me that he’d done all he could on a Sunday; he’d used his personal federal crime-busting connections to get the military working on the dog tags, but I knew how the military was. Some of them might like to take Sundays off. They might regard defending the country as a higher priority. We failed to identify the enemy against whom they might be defending it.
“Not that that will hamper them,” Schultz said.
“We have met the enemy,” I suggested, “and he is missing.”
“A call to the police might speed them up.”
“From me? I thought you were the one with clout.”
“Get married,” he advised soothingly. “Settle down.”
“Norbert,” I said, “have you been talking to my mother?”
He turned shrink on me. “Should I?”
Eleanor wasn’t home yet, so she and Christy and Alan were presumably still at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s station. My mother would be out in the courtyard of her apartment house, having cocktails with her cronies, a group of women she calls the cacklers. My father regards the telephone as a small and noisy piece of furniture and generally refuses to answer it. When my mother comes in, he usually says, “Phone rang,” as if that were helpful information.
That left the computer.
From the layout of the document, it was a letter. That confirmed what its name, letter. thr, might have led even a nonprofessional to suspect. The four short lines at the top suggested that Max might be the kind of old- fashioned correspondent who put an internal address even in private correspondence, and wouldn’t that be nice?
Detective fiction just crawls with skilled cryptographers who can take one look at a slate of characters in Mayan knot writing or Linear B, snort once or twice in a superior fashion, and read it aloud. I suppose such people exist in real life, too, but they don’t seem to get out much. Still, a code is a code. Max’s letters had to be based on the alphabet, and the alphabet has its own rules of internal consistency. The one everyone always seizes on is the fact that E is the letter that gets the most use. Unless, of course, the writer of the code is intentionally avoiding words with an E in them, or is allergic to the letter E, or belongs to a religion that regards the letter E as the devil’s work, or has a keyboard with a broken E key, or is writing in a language in which E is the least common letter, or can’t spell and doesn’t know about the silent E, or…
The phone broke in on this productive train of thought, although “broke in” might be putting it a trifle strongly. So might “thought.” I practically flew across the room to answer it.
“Your Sergeant Spurrier is a piece of work,” Eleanor said without preface. “Never again will I wonder where
