After that the familiar ritual of the police and the slow extraction of information. Mrs. Crosetti was gracious under the circumstances, although she did question my propensity for doing violence in her home, which I thought a little unfair. The man was not dead, I was happy to learn, but would certainly miss the senior prom. His name was Harlan P. Olerud, and he was a security guard from somewhere in Pennsylvania and he was under the impression that Albert Crosetti had absconded with his wife, Carolyn, and he wanted her back. Apparently he had been led to the Queens dwelling via a computer map that young Crosetti had carelessly left on the road near his home while searching for the mysterious Carolyn Rolly. The police found the map in Olerud’s pickup truck, which also held two frightened children. In the ordinary course of events, these would have been handed over to the bureaucracy that cares for parentless kids in New York, but since Mary Peg was involved, events took a different course. She wanted to take care of the tykes until we all figured out what was what with the mysterious C.R., and also I think because of an empty-nest syndrome the size of Montana. I believe I made up a little for my use of force in her home by getting dear Father Paul on the line from London. There is nothing Paul does not know about the child-care bureaucracy in New York; he made some calls, vouched for Mary Peg, made noises-unusual circumstances, police investigation, potential danger, best interests of the child, etc.-and the thing was done, at least temporarily. Board games emerged from the attic, pizza was generated out of basic ingredients, a jolly time was had by all, except that Klim beat me by fifty points at Scrabble, which I thought was a bit much, English being my first language.

Mary Peg came into the living room from putting the children to bed looking remarkably happy (here a pang at memories of Amalie in the same situation, my lost home…) and sat down next to Klim on her sofa. With all the police and kid business this was actually the first time we had been able to manage a quiet talk. I brought them up to date on what I had been doing and showed them the Bible and the Bracegirdle range finder I had purchased in Maryland. Not a word about the whole thing being a scam, of course. I also distributed printouts of the deciphered letters, and while they were reading through them I woke up Crosetti in Zurich and asked him if there were any developments. He said that Paul had told him yesterday that someone had e-mailed Amalie a picture of the kids holding that day’s copy of the New York Times. They were both smiling and seemed perfectly all right, no threatening guys in black masks. I said that seemed odd, and he agreed. “It’s like they’re on a class trip. That doesn’t sound like the Shvanov we know.”

I admitted it was peculiar, but good news at any rate. Then I told him about Harlan P. Olerud and the two children. He said he’d let Rolly know and I said I’d arrange for a call from the kids and that I’d let him know if we had any luck with the new cipher. He wanted to speak to his mother, and so I turned the phone over to her.

Klim was fooling with the range finder. “An ingenious device, quite ahead of its time. It will require a new little mirror-here-and then I believe it will work as designed. May I see the cipher from the Bible?”

I gave it to him and he examined it for a while and then said he would enter the ciphertext into Crosetti’s desktop PC and see what could be made of it. “All Shakespeare’s works are available in digital form, of course, so if the key is from his known work we should get a good hit.”

“Unless he used lines from the lost play,” said Mary Peg. “That would be a Bracegirdlian thing to do.”

“In that case,” said Klim, “we will have to use more strenuous methods.” He hefted the Bible, smiled, and walked off.

Mary Peg bid her son good-bye and said, “That’s awful about your kids. Your wife must be in agony. Shouldn’t you be over there with her?”

“I should, but she doesn’t want me. She blames me for the whole affair and she’s right. And I have a sense that the kidnapping is not what it seems.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d rather not say just yet. But I’ve been putting some things together and I don’t think that they’re in any immediate danger. In the future, who knows, but not now, provided we can locate this thing.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly clear where it is.”

I expressed astonishment. “Yes,” she said, “they tossed it down that well he mentioned, you know the one where Bracegirdle followed Shakespeare and his goon into the forest and they saw the recusant service. That ruined priory…” She shuffled through the printouts and found the page: “Saint Bosa’s Well. Where else would it be? He says they went up to Stratford and the well is just half a day’s ride away.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but where is the well? Bracegirdle said it was a secret even in Shakespeare’s time. It could be under a factory or a housing development.”

“True. And in that case we’ll have to announce it publicly and turn the whole mess over to the authorities. Which I sometimes think we should have done from day one. But”-here an uncharacteristically wolfish expression appeared on the Map of Ireland-“I sure would like to find that play. So we can only hope that the well is still bubbling away, forgotten for centuries.”

After that she made more coffee and we drank it with Jameson whiskey in it. We talked about family, I recall, and children, and their joys and discontents. I rather regretted not liking her son and decided that it was an aspect of my craziness and resolved to be more agreeable to him in future. After some time had passed in this desultory fashion, Klim emerged with a glum look.

“I am sad to say that this ciphertext does not generate plaintext from any writing of William Shakespeare that is recorded by history. This is not deadly for us, because as I believe I have said earlier, we can run guessed probable plaintexts along the ciphertext and see if we get something intelligible and this I have started to do, but I desired to have some of your Irish coffee at this time.”

This was provided, and I asked him if he had found something intelligible yet.

“Yes, of course, we start with the commonest words in English and see if the ciphertext gives us, let us say, a the in either direction using a standard tabula recta. Of course Bracegirdle could have used a nonstandard tabula, but he has not before this, so let us suppose he is hurried and wished to stay simple. So we use the computer to query if any three letters of the ciphertext will generate a t-h-e trigram as part of our key, and you see here that we do: both TKM and WLK give us the, and when we run that key back against this ciphertext it gives us ADI and DEG, which fortunately are both trigrams common in English. Similarly running and gives us one hit and the plaintext FAD, which is also a good English trigram. Running be gives two hits, and we get ENDF for the plaintext and also a little bonus, because the first be comes right before that the we have already discovered, and so we know that be the is part of the key text. And so we go on from here. Each little advance gives us more of the plaintext and more of the key text and the two decipherings reinforce each other, which is why the running key based on a book is so weak. For this reason the KGB only used almanacs and trade reports with many tables of numbers, so the entropy is higher. Now the next word we try should be is or of, I believe…”

“No,” said Mary Peg, “try Jesus.”

“This is religious advice, my dear?”

“No, the word. You said you ran the key against the complete works and come up empty?”

“Yes. Aside from some purely random runs of pseudosense.”