“But he wrote one thing that’s not in his published works. His epitaph.”

She ran to a shelf and pulled out Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, and there it was on the first page:

Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones And cursed be he that moves my bones.

“On second thought,” she said, “it should be with the archaic spelling. I think it’s in Wood’s book.”

It was. Klim entered the old spelling into the Vigenère solver and it worked, giving us:

fromguystowrheadingeduesout

hseteightysevendegreeseachsyd

esheliethfourfadomsandfoot

belowcopyngeintheeastwall

“This seems plain enough. One stands upon a place called Guy’s Tower and sets Bracegirdle’s instrument so that the zero point in the center is pointing due south by the compass set in it. Then the arms are placed at eighty-seven degrees, and then I suppose one must have a man with a flag walk out, and one looks in the eyepiece until the two images of the flag join and there is your distance and direction. Then when you find this well, one lowers oneself down on a rope with a candle stuck to one’s head with hot grease and there at a depth of…what is a fadom?”

“A fathom,” said Mary Peg. “Six feet.”

“Yes,” said Klim, “so at a depth of let us say seven point six meters in the east wall of this supposed well we shall find your play. Or an empty hole. If we knew where this ‘Guys Towr’ was.”

“It has to be Warwick Castle,” she said confidently. “Bracegirdle wrote that you could see the castle from the ruins of St. Bosa.”

A moment on the Internet confirmed that there was indeed a Guy’s Tower on Warwick Castle, and on the south side too. I said, “That’ll be an interesting experience. Trying to sight off the top of a major tourist attraction while a man with a flag walks through the suburbs.”

But Klim’s fingers were already flying on the keys, and in a few minutes the screen showed a view from above the tower battlements of a castle. It appeared to have been taken from about twenty feet up.

“Very impressive,” I said. “This is a commercial satellite picture?”

“No, it is U.S. military. I have accessed it through an anonymous link but still we cannot stay on it very long.”

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“He’s a spy,” said Mary Peg with something like pride.

“I am a retired Polish spy, perfectly harmless. But I retain some knowledge of this sort of thing. America has the worst security of any nation, it is well known in those circles, a kind of joke in fact. Now we shall use some tools to drop a smart bomb on Mr. Shakespeare’s play.” More clicking and a red grid appeared over the picture and a palette of drawing tools sprang up along one edge of the screen. He said to Mary Peg, “My dear, if you could just measure that device?”

“Three feet exactly,” she replied after some manipulation of a tape measure.

“So…let us see, ninety-one point forty-four centimeters, which we center on the north-south diameter of this tower…so…and we then draw a line from either end at eighty-seven degrees from that base and we generate two lines which intersect…so. As you say, X marks the spot. We need not go up on the tower and bother the tourists. Thank you, United States Air Force satellite-based tactical program.” He pressed a key and the printer growled. I looked at the printout. Due south of the castle and veering off to the west was what looked like a plowed field bordered by copses of trees. The red lines from the tower converged in one of the dark little woods.

“How accurate do you think this is?” I asked Klim.

He shrugged. “As accurate as it was in 1611 at any rate. There does not seem to be a car park and lemonade kiosk there, so perhaps your well is still lost.”

I called Crosetti again and told him what I wanted him to do. It took quite a while. What a lot of cleverness and effort expended on a fraud, how many nice people would be disappointed! A perfect symbol of my life.

20

Carolyn Rolly wept for what seemed like a long time after Crosetti told her what had happened to her kids and to Harlan P. Olerud at Crosetti’s mother’s house in Queens, and then she insisted on calling there to talk to them until Crosetti managed to convince her that it was late at night in New York instead of the early morning it was in Zurich. Then his cell phone delivered a call from a man from Osborne Security Services who said that a plane was waiting at a local airport and they said good-bye to Amalie, with whom Carolyn had struck up a surprisingly warm relationship, surprising given the differences in their backgrounds and general approach to life. Perhaps, he thought, it was the commonality of motherhood and the peculiar situation of both sets of children bearing a similar horrible stress. With his usual curious eye, Crosetti watched the two women exchanging embraces. They did not really resemble each other physically, but both presented to the world the same air of solid particularity. He couldn’t imagine anything really changing either of them: Carolyn and Amalie, what you saw was what you got, although Amalie was honesty incarnate and Carolyn lied like a snake. Had Carolyn been blond, he concluded, they might have been two sisters, the good one and the bad.

A short flight on a tiny powerful Learjet, the pilot uncommunicative, efficient, moving his craft through angles eschewed by mild commercial aviators. Midflight, Rolly got through to her children, or so Crosetti imagined: she did not share but sat damp-eyed, staring out at bright whiteness. But she let him take her hand.

Landing at some Midlands airport whose name Crosetti never caught, they were met by Mr. Brown of Osborne, dressed in yellow coveralls and work boots. Mr. Brown conducted them to a white Land Rover painted with the insignia of the Severn Trent Water Board. On the motorway he explained the plan: go right in, bold as brass, find the thing, if it were there to find, drive off. Another plane waited near London to take them back to New York. Crosetti asked him if he knew what they were after.

“Not me,” said Brown, “no need to know, I’m just the help. There’s a rental van behind us with all the equipment and a couple of lads to run it, ground-penetrating radar, resistivity gear, the lot. If there’s a well there they’ll find it. We’ll all do the digging, I expect.”

“This is pretty expensive, all this,” Crosetti observed.

“Oh, yes. Money no object.”

“And you’re not curious?”

“If I was the curious type, sir, I’d be long dead,” said Brown. “That’ll be Warwick up ahead. We’ll be able to see the castle in a bit.”

It rose white above a line of trees, hung there for a while, and then vanished when the road dipped, like a vision in a fairy story. After some driving through anonymous suburbs it appeared again on their left, huge, looming over the river.

“Not like Disneyland, is it?”

“No, that’s the real thing,” said Brown, “although Tussaud’s have tarted it up like mad. Still, there’s real blood soaked into the stones. A horrible time, of course, when that was the last word in military technology, but still…”

“You would’ve liked to live back then?”

“On occasion. A simpler time: someone got on your nerves, say, you put on your tin suit and chopped away at ’em. Half a sec, I think we’re just on our mark.” He pulled over to the side of the narrow road they were on and consulted a large-scale ordinance survey map, then folded it and turned the Land Rover into the ditch on the right and down a track through a grove of oak and beech.

“There’s gear for you in the van,” he said as he got out. “It’s important to look authentic and official.”