“That’s easy,” Austin said. “I’m going to make a dinner date with a beautiful woman.”
Chapter 13
THE ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN IN the archives division of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia was a slightly built young woman named Angela Worth. Day after day spent hoisting cases filled with documents and files had given her strength that would have been the envy of a professional arm wrestler.
With little apparent effort Angela slid a heavy plastic container off a shelf and placed it on a cart. She wheeled the cart out of the manuscript vault into a reading room. A man in his midthirties sat at a long library table, his fingers tapping at a laptop computer. The table was piled high with files, papers, and documents.
She set the file box on the table. “Bet you didn’t know there was so much historical material about artichokes.”
“Fine with me,” said the man, a writer whose name was Norman Stocker. “My contract calls for a fifty- thousand-word manuscript.”
“I don’t know much about the publishing business, but would
“My
“Sexy artichokes?”
Stocker opened a file folder containing copies of old manuscripts. “Sixteenth-century Europe. Only men are allowed to eat artichokes, which are considered to enhance sexual power.” He opened another folder and slipped out a photograph of a pretty young blond woman wearing a bathing suit. “Marilyn Monroe. 1947. California’s first Artichoke Queen.”
Angela lifted the box off the cart and deposited it on the table. She blew a strand of long blond hair off her face. “Can’t wait to see
“I’ll get you a ticket to the Hollywood premiere.”
Angela smiled and told Stocker to let her know when he wanted to get rid of the files. Stocker opened the box and dug into the contents.
Writing books on commodities wouldn’t have been his first choice, but the pay wasn’t bad, the travel could be interesting, and the books gave him visibility. As long as he wrote, he didn’t have to teach to pay his bills. He rationalized that as a subject, artichokes were better than kumquats.
Stocker had come to the American Philosophical Society to look for the type of obscure anecdotes that could spice up an otherwise dry topic. The Georgian-style building that housed the society’s library around the corner from Independence Hall in Philadelphia was one of the nation’s major repositories of manuscripts on many scientific disciplines from the 1500s to the present.
The organization had been founded in 1745 by an amateur scientist named Benjamin Franklin. Franklin and his friends wanted to make the United States independent in the fields of manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture. The society’s early members included doctors, lawyers, clergy, and artisans, as well as presidents Jefferson and Washington.
Stocker was riffling through the carton when his fingers touched a hard surface. He pulled out an envelope that contained a box bound in maroon-and-gold animal skin. Inside the box was a thick packet of crackly paper tied with a black ribbon that had been sealed at some point. The wax seal had since been broken. He untied the ribbon and peeled off the blank cover sheet to reveal words written in a tight longhand that identified the contents as a treatise on the cultivation of artichokes.
The material was an unexciting recitation of growing seasons, fertilizer and harvest times, with a few recipes scattered among the pages. One sheet of parchment was marked with Xs and wavy lines and several words of script in an unknown language. On the bottom of the packet was a thick cardboard sheet perforated with dozens of small rectangular holes.
The assistant librarian was passing by the writer’s table with a load of books. He waved her over.
“Find something of interest in that last box?” she said.
“I don’t know how interesting it is, but it’s certainly old.”
Angela examined the hidebound box, and then she went through the pages from top to bottom. The handwriting looked familiar. She went to the stacks and came back with a book on the American Revolution. She opened the volume to a photo of the Declaration of Independence and held one of the papers next to the page. The similarity of the flowing, tightly written script on both samples was remarkable.
“Notice anything?” Angela said.
“The handwriting is practically identical,” Stocker said.
“It
“Jefferson? It
“Why not? Jefferson was a gentleman farmer, a scientist, and a meticulous keeper of records. Look here, in the corner of the title page. Those tiny letters are TJ.”
“This is great! There isn’t much here that would interest the average reader, but the fact that a Jefferson document on artichokes ended up with all this other stuff is worth at least a couple of paragraphs.”
Angela wrinkled her brow. “It must have landed here by mistake.”
“How could someone misfile original Jeffersonian material?”
“The society has an incredible filing system. But we’ve got eight million manuscripts and more than three hundred thousand volumes and bound periodicals. My guess is that someone saw the title, didn’t notice who had written the treatise, and tossed it in with the other agricultural material.”
He handed over the diagram. “This was in the file. It looks like a garden that was laid out by a drunk.”
The assistant librarian glanced at the diagram, then picked up the perforated cardboard and held it to the light. An idea occurred to her. “Let me know when you’re through. I’ll want to make sure that it goes back in with the other Jefferson material.”
She returned to her desk. As she worked, she glanced impatiently from time to time at the writer’s table. It was near closing when he stood and stretched and slid the laptop into its bag. She hurried over.
“Sorry for the mess,” he said.
“Not a problem. I’ll take care of everything,” she said.
She waited for the other patrons to leave and took the Jefferson file over to her desk. Under the light of her desk lamp, she placed the cardboard on top of the first page of writing. Individual letters showed through the small rectangles.
Angela was a crossword buff and had read a number of books on codes and ciphers. She was sure that what she held in her hand was a cipher grille. The grille would be placed over a blank sheet of paper. The message would be written in the holes by letter. Innocent-looking sentences would be built around the letters. The person on the receiving end would place an identical grille over the message and the words would pop out.
She tried the grille on a number of pages, but all she got was gibberish. She suspected that there was another level of encryption that was far beyond her amateur skill to decipher. She turned her attention to the parchment with the wavy lines and Xs. She stared at the words accompanying the strange markings and then called up a lexicon site on her computer. She sometimes went to the research site as a cheat to find obscure words that were used in the crossword puzzles.
Angela typed the words from the parchment onto the site’s search function and hit the ENTER key. There was no immediate translation, but the site referred her to its ancient-language section. She requested a translation once more and this time the program responded with an answer that both startled and puzzled her.
She ran off a printout and copied it, along with the Jefferson material. Leaving the copies in her drawer, she gathered up the original files and walked down the hallway to her supervisor’s office.
Angela’s boss was a middle-aged professional named Helen Woolsey. She looked up from her desk and smiled when she saw her younger protegee.
“Working late?” she said.
“Not exactly. I came across something unusual and thought you might be interested.” She handed the packet over.
