"I'm sure I wouldn't know," she said. She leaned over him, took the brandy bottle from the nightstand and held it toward him.
"I'm fine," Benjamin said. "I had a lot of wine with dinner, and…"
Gudrun set the bottle and her own glass on the nightstand. She turned back to Benjamin, reached forward, and took his hand.
"You're really quite handsome, Ben. Are you used to hearing that from women?" She put her right arm around his neck and began caressing the back of his hair with her fingertips. When he just sat, staring at her, saying nothing, she leaned forward and kissed him.
The taste of the brandy was like an aphrodisiac. Benjamin felt his head reeling. Gudrun kept her mouth against his, her lips slightly parted. Benjamin was surprised at how tender the kiss seemed, how sincere. He was intensely aware of her perfume-something both sharp and musky-and the sound of her dress pressing against his shirt, her fingers on the back of his neck…
She moved her head back a few inches.
"Let's dispense with this jacket, shall we?" she said.
Almost instinctively, Benjamin started to shrug off his jacket, then realized he would have to set his drink down first. He leaned awkwardly over to the nightstand. As he did so, the glass bumped the side of the yellow sheet of folded paper he'd set there. It fell to the floor, where it lay almost beneath the bed, half open. Even as Gudrun was helping him out of his jacket, he couldn't help glancing down at it.
When after a moment she realized he wasn't helping her, she stopped.
"Cold feet?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.
Benjamin looked at her. His first thought was that she was indeed a very beautiful woman: her blond hair, dark eyebrows, bright red lipstick… like something out of a 1950s movie. And he was about to turn her out.
"No, no," he said. He ran his hand through his hair, then stood up so that his shoe was covering the yellow paper. "I think I've had too much to drink after all," he said. "That damned scotch of Samuel's." And then he gave her a look he hoped was both guileless and slightly drunk.
If she was insulted, she hid it well. She stood as well, put her hand on his chest.
"Well, there's still time to… get to know each other. I think you'll be around for a while." Before he could ask what she meant by that, she gave him a very kind peck on the cheek, said, "Do you mind?" and took the brandy. Then she left, closing the door softly behind her.
It was only after she was gone that Benjamin wondered why he was hiding the paper from her. From what little he'd seen of what was written there, he didn't have a clue what it meant.
Benjamin crouched down and took the yellow paper gently by one corner. When it had fallen partially open, he'd seen only the word "TEACUP" written across the top in neat, block letters. Now that he saw the entire half-page, he knew he had to show it to Wolfe, regardless of the late hour.
He went into the bathroom, splashed cold water over his face and hair, and ran a towel over his head. Then he went back into the bedroom, grabbed the yellow paper, and hurried out of the room and down the hall.
CHAPTER 14
"I'll be damned." Wolfe was holding the small yellow paper Benjamin had brought him. "What on earth does it mean?"
Benjamin had found Wolfe still awake and reading in bed, some sort of scholarly journal, and listening to a radio; somehow he'd found a station with oldies from the 1930s, the kind of music that he thought suited Wolfe perfectly. He also had the ubiquitous tumbler of scotch on his bedside table.
The half sheet of notepad paper had small figures on it, and a single word:
"Tell me again, slowly, where did you find this?"
"On my nightstand." Benjamin said, then corrected himself. "I mean, that's where I'd put it. But it must have fallen out of the Ginsburg book, the one about Harlan Bainbridge."
Wolfe stood up. He studied the paper in silence for a moment, turned to Benjamin.
"Care for a drink?" he asked, as if nothing extraordinary had happened.
Benjamin frowned in frustration. "Drink? No, thank you, I've had quite enough for one night. And I have a feeling I'm going to need a clear head-that we're going to need clear heads-if we're going to figure this out."
Wolfe gave him that infuriating smile. "Quite the nanny, aren't you?"
"Samuel." He stopped, controlled his frustration, began again. "Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on here? This is most likely some sort of note Jeremy placed in that book. But why would he go to all the trouble of putting it in code? Why all the passwords on his computer? Why this cloak-and-dagger about who he spoke with? I just practically chased Gudrun… Dr. Soderbergh out of my room because I didn't want her to see this. And I'm not even sure why, except that your paranoia is contagious."
Wolfe raised an eyebrow. "Gudrun? You're on a first-name basis?" Benjamin started to protest, but Wolfe waved him silent. "It doesn't matter. It may even be of benefit. Anyway, you did the right thing by not letting her see this. You were acting on instinct."
"Then they're instincts I didn't know I had," said Benjamin, sitting on the bed. "And you haven't answered my other questions."
Wolfe waved the yellow paper at him.
"I think this may answer your questions. And I have a feeling you do know what it means, or it wouldn't have been in the Ginsburg book, a book Fletcher knew you would want to examine."
"But why not simply tell me when I arrived? Why put it in code?"
"Perhaps he had a premonition he might not be able to tell you in person," Wolfe said heavily. "Here, take another look at it."
Benjamin took the paper and studied it again.
"Well," he began tentatively, "offhand I'd say it looks like Franklin's pyramid code. Perhaps it's a coincidence…"
"To hell with coincidence," insisted Wolfe, "just tell me what you're thinking."
"You know what a pigpen code is?"
"Yes," said Wolfe. "As does every Boy Scout. It's the code the Masons used for some of their documents." Wolfe shuffled through papers on his nightstand, found something to write on and a pen, spoke as he drew on the paper. "You make two simple tic-tac-toe grids and two Xs, then distribute the letters of the alphabet across them, and then use symbols that represent the position of the letter in its grid. Like this, correct?" He showed Benjamin the sketch he'd made.
"So for instance 'Samuel' would be rendered as…" Again he drew on the paper. "This."
"Yes," said Benjamin, "that's the basic code."
"But," Wolfe objected, "I don't see any of those kinds of symbols there. It's all these little pyramids."
"Well," said Benjamin, "the pigpen code actually predates the Masons. There's even a record of a seventeenth-century gravestone in England, in Cheshire-one Thomas Brierley-with that code carved into it. Franklin felt the code was compromised by its very popularity. He thought he could do better. And he was a printer, after all, used to playing with letters and texts. He'd been experimenting with simple Caesar substitution codes for years; you know, where you simply shift letters so many places to the right or left?" Wolfe nodded. "But then that interest collided with one of his other manias, which was for pyramids. The Masons were quite mad about pyramids. They thought their 'perfect symmetry' held some ancient wisdom."
Benjamin lifted up the paper again. "So Franklin decided to combine the two codes, to construct a tabula recta -you know, Blaise de Vigenere's alphabet grids?" Wolfe nodded impatiently, and Benjamin hurried on. "But with pyramids rather than grids. Here."
Benjamin took the notepad from Wolfe and made his own sketch.
"So. If you construct a pyramid of small triangles, you get something like this."
Wolfe looked down at the sketch. "But there's only twenty-five triangles, no room in it for Z," he protested.
"Wait, I'll get to that. Of course, if the code is always the same, with the same letters in each triangle, then it isn't a very good code, is it. So there's a first key that tells the recipient which letter to put in the top triangle. Then, once you have the letters distributed in this pyramid of triangles, you assign a two-digit number to each letter. The first digit is the row, the second digit is the triangle within the row. So in this pyramid the A becomes 11, B becomes 21, C becomes 22, and so on. And whatever the missing letter is, like Z in this instance, becomes-"