When he got home, he found Mary Peg in her living room, drinking vodka with a strange man. Crosetti stood in the doorway and stared at his mother, who coolly (rather excessive, suspicious, coolness, Crosetti thought) introduced the man as Radeslaw Klim. This person rose to a considerable height, perhaps six inches more than Crosetti’s, and shook hands with a stiff little bow. The man had an intelligent aquiline face, a foreign face, although Crosetti could not have pinned down why it was not an American one. Washed blue eyes looked out through round wire-rimmed glasses, under a great shock of stiff silver hair, which stuck up above his broad forehead like the crest on a centurion’s helmet. He was about the same age as Mary Peg, or a little older, and he was wearing a baggy rust-colored suit with a dark shirt under it, no tie, the suit a cheap one that hung badly on his long slender frame. Despite this, the man had a nearly military bearing, as if he had temporarily misplaced his beautifully tailored uniform.

Crosetti sat in an armchair and his mother supplied him with a glass of iced vodka, a substance for which he found an unfamiliar but urgent need. After he’d drunk a slug he looked challengingly at Mary Peg, who said blandly, “Mr. Klim is Fanny’s friend. I asked him to come by and take a look at your cipher. Since you were stuck.”

“Uh-huh,” said the son.

“Yes,” said Klim. “I have looked, examined it somewhat. As you have guessed, it is a polyalphabetic substitution cipher and also is true that it is not a simple Vigenère. That is of course elementary.” He had a slight accent that reminded Crosetti of Fanny’s; his mien was gentle and scholarly enough to at least partially assuage Crosetti’s nascent resentment.

“So what is it?” Crosetti asked sharply.

“I believe it is a running key,” said Klim. “From a book of some kind. You understand how these work? The key is of very long extent compared to the plaintext, so the Kasiski-Kerckhoff Method is of no use.”

“Like a book code?”

“No, this is not the same thing. A book code is a code. The codetext is, let us say, 14, 7, 6, and that means you go to World Almanac or some such and look at page 14, line 7, word 6. Or you can use letters if you like, the fourth letter, the tenth letter. A running key uses a book, the same, but uses the book text as a continuous key. These are not so secure as people think, however.”

“Why not? It’s similar to a onetime pad.”

Klim shook his head. “Not so. Onetime pad has very high entropy, because the letters are randomly generated. That is, given one letter of your key you have no idea which of the other twenty-six will follow. Whereas, in a running key based on any English text, let us say, if you see Q, what is next letter for sure?”

“U.”

“Exactly. Low entropy, as I say. How we break these is we run probable plaintext alongside ciphertext until we see something intelligible.”

“What do you mean by ‘probable plaintext’?”

“Oh, words always appearing in English text. The, and, this, and so on and so forth. We run against ciphertext and suppose we find once that the gives us ing or shi when we work back through the tableau? We use such clues to discover more English words in key. Eventually we recognize actual source of running key, I mean, the book it comes from, in which case we have completely broken cipher. It is not very complex, but we would need a computer, or else large squads of intelligent ladies.” Here he smiled, showing small stained teeth, and his glasses glinted. Crosetti got the impression that Klim had at one time supervised such squads.

“Would mine do?” asked Crosetti. “My PC, not my squads of ladies.”

“Yes, if networked to others, which can be done. There are numbers of people in the world who like cracking ciphers for amusement and they will let one borrow computer cycles they are not using, late at night for example, and is always late at night somewheres. I can set this up if you like. Also, we are fortunate this is cipher from the year 1610.”

“Why so?”

“Because there are many less, many fewer, printed texts that could be used as running key source. In fact, taking what your mother has informed me of the character of these people, I would venture that the text is almost certainly the English Bible. So, shall we begin?”

“Now?”

“Yes. Is there objection?”

“Well, it’s kind of late,” said Crosetti.

“Does not matter. I sleep very little.”

Mary Peg said, “I’ve offered Radeslaw Patty’s old room.”

Crosetti finished his vodka and suppressed the usual shudder. He stood up and said, “Well, you seem to have arranged everything, Mom. I guess I’ll just go to bed.”

In the morning, Crosetti woke not to the buzz of his alarm but to the brisk knock and then the vigorous shoulder shaking of his mother. He blinked at her. “What?”

“You have to read this.” She rustled the New York Times at him, opened at the pages devoted to local crime, corruption, and celebrity.

English Professor Found Murdered in Columbia Faculty Housing

This headline brought him up to full wakefulness. He rubbed the blur from his eyes and read the article, then read it again. It was a short one, the police being their usual closemouthed selves, but the reporter had used the word torture, and that was enough to start Crosetti’s belly fluttering.

“Call Patty,” he said.

“I already did,” said Mary Peg, “but I got voice mail. She’ll call back. What do you think?”

“It doesn’t look great. He disappears right after I sell him the manuscript, he’s probably in England for a couple of months, maybe with Carolyn, maybe not, and then he comes back here and someone tortures him to death. Maybe the play manuscript really exists and he found out where it was and someone found out he knew and tortured him to get him to give it up.”

“Albert, that’s a movie. Things like that don’t happen to English professors in real life.”

“Then why was he tortured and killed? Not for his ATM password.”

“Maybe the mother of another silly boy he cheated took her revenge. From what we know about his character, he may have been mixed up in any number of sleazy deals.”

“Mom, believe me, movie or not, that’s what went down. I need to get up.”

This was the signal for his mother to leave, and she did. Crosetti in the shower found his thoughts floating back to Rolly and the plot of his movie and the possibility that she could actually be the villainess of the piece, Brigid O’Shaughnessy as played by Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. His mother was wrong. Not only was life like a movie, movies were why life was like it was. Movies taught people how to behave, how to be a man, how to be a woman, what was funny and what was horrid. The people who made them had no idea of this, they were just trying to make money, but it was so.

And here they were in the Falcon, his next favorite after Chinatown, which was essentially a reimagining of the same movie, updated for the ’70s, and why did he like movies about bad girls? Bonnie and Clyde, naturally, and La Femme Nikita and dozens more. He wondered what part he was playing, the dead Miles Archer, or the dead sea captain in the backstory, or Sam Spade. You killed Miles and you’re going over for it. And, I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I’m gonna send you over. He had nearly the whole script by heart and now he said those lines to the showerhead with the Bogart hissing lisp and wondered whether, if it ever came to it, he could send Carolyn Rolly over, if she’d really helped kill Bulstrode. Or maybe he would be her sap. The mere imagination of it made his heart race. He turned the temperature of the water down a notch and let it run onto his heated face.