“So much for keeping me out of it,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I’m a coward and he scares me. I can’t lie to him. Anyway, when Bulstrode got the news about the ciphers, he went ballistic. I had to practically sit on him to calm him down. He realized that the ciphers were the key to finding the play manuscript and if Shvanov got hold of them from you, then he wouldn’t need us anymore, which was probably not that good for our health. I said we should try to see if the fair copies of the ciphers Bracegirdle sent to Dunbarton were still in existence at the receiving end.”

“That’s why you went to Darden Hall.”

“Right. But they weren’t there, or anyway we didn’t find them. We did find a Breeches Bible, though. Do you know what that is?”

“Yeah,” said Crosetti, “a small Tudor Bible, 1560, nine by seven. We think it was the basis of the Bracegirdle cipher. But how did you know that? You didn’t have the ciphertext.”

“No, but we found a Breeches Bible with pinholes in it, in Dunbarton’s library, pinholes through random letters. Bulstrode figured out that the selected letters were the cipher key and that a grille must have been part of the cipher. He knew a hell of a lot about antique ciphers.”

“That’s why you stole the grille from that church.”

“You know about that?” This with some alarm.

“I know everything. Why didn’t you just steal the Bible?”

“Bulstrode did steal it. And then he got me to swipe the grille. Man, by that time he was so paranoid he thought there were gangs of scholars on the same search and he wanted to slow them down, if they happened to have just the ciphertext. He assumed that you’d give the ciphered pages to someone, your pal at the library for instance, and a general hunt would be on. That’s why he came back to New York. He wanted to get to you and get the cipher pages from you. He had the grille and-”

“Shvanov grabbed him up and tortured him. Why was that?”

“He thought Bulstrode was double-crossing him. Someone, I never found out who, called Shvanov and told him that Bulstrode was dealing with another group hunting for the play manuscript. Shvanov went crazy and-”

“Another group? You mean us? Mishkin?”

She considered this for a moment, chewing her lip. “No, I don’t think it’s you they meant. Someone else, some other gangsters. A guy named Harel, also Russian. They’re all Russian Jews, all related in some way, rivals or former partners. They mainly talk in Russian, so I don’t get much information…”

“And what about this Miranda Kellogg that Mishkin is always going on about? What’s her story?”

“I only met her once,” she said. “I have no idea who she really was, some kind of actress or model Shvanov hired to get the Bracegirdle original away from Mishkin. They sent the real heiress away on a freebie vacation and presented the actress as Kellogg.”

“What happened to her?”

“I think she held up Shvanov for more money after she had the thing and he got rid of her.”

“Killed her?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s dead. Gone.” She shivered. “Dead as Bulstrode. Shvanov doesn’t like people screwing him.”

“Was Bulstrode double-crossing Shvanov?”

“Oh, yeah. Not with any other gangsters, though, as far as I know. But he never had any intention of handing over the play if we found it. Are you kidding? March told me he was planning to give it to the nation, with of course the proviso that he have sole access to it and the right to do a first edition. They’d lock him and it up in the Tower and Shvanov could just go suck a frog. I mean the man was a Shakespeare scholar down to the bones. He used to talk about it, with fucking stars in his eyes, the poor jerk!”

“Well, no perforated Bible has turned up as far as I’m aware, so we have to assume that Shvanov has it. What happened to the actual grille?”

“Shvanov has that too, obviously, because Bulstrode took it with him when he left England. And when they put the boots to him Bulstrode must have told him about Mishkin having the original letter and he already knew you must have kept the originals of the ciphered letters. Didn’t anyone try to get them from you?”

“Oh, yeah, they tried,” said Crosetti, and briefly related the events lately transpired in Queens. He added, “So the basic situation is, we have only the ciphers, he has only the grille: the classic Mexican standoff. Or am I missing something again, Carolyn?”

This last was in response to a peculiar expression that swiftly crossed her face. She said, “Do you have have the ciphers here? I mean right here in this room.”

“Well, the originals are safe in a vault at the New York Public Library.

But I have a digitized version on my laptop here. Encrypted, of course. I have a Breeches Bible too. Mishkin bought two of them. And I have a digitized text of the 1560 edition I put in there back in the city before we-”

“I have the grille,” she said.

“You do? Where?”

In answer, she stood and pulled the robe aside and propped her foot up on the arm of the chair, exposing her inner thigh. “Here,” she said, pointing to a constellation of tiny blue dots on the smooth white skin. He knelt and peered, his face just inches away. The scent of rose soap and Carolyn made his knees tremble. At first the dots looked random, but then he saw the pattern: a stylized weeping willow tree, symbol of mourning. He cleared his throat, but his voice still croaked. “Carolyn, is that a jailhouse tattoo?”

“Yeah. I made it in my room at Ollie’s after I swiped the grille. I used a pin and ballpoint ink. There are eighty-nine holes.”

“Jesus Christ! Is it accurate?”

“Yeah. I transferred it to tracing paper and compared it with the Bible from Darden Hall. The holes match up.”

“But why?”

“Because I figured I might run into you someday, and you might still have the ciphers. And paper gets lost, or stolen, as we well know, not to mention the bastards searched me about fifty times. But of course the bitch who searched me wasn’t told any details about what she was looking for, only that I wasn’t supposed to have anything up my various holes. And lots of people have tattoos. Do you have any tracing paper?”

“No. But I have a fine-point marking pen. We can use the glass from that little picture frame. It’s about the right size.”

She lay on the edge of the bed, on her back, with her left thigh flat and at a right angle to her body, while Crosetti knelt on the floor between her spread legs. All the lights in the room were on. He held the glass against her skin and used the marking pen to place a red dot carefully over each blue dot on her skin. He had to keep his left hand against the warm flesh and his face quite close as he did this. It was the most erotic experience of his life, save one, and he was almost giggling with it. They didn’t speak. Rolly was as still as a corpse.

When it was done, Rolly adjusted her robe and said, “Bulstrode figured out from the pattern of the pinholes in the Darden Hall Bible that they started with the second page of Genesis and worked forward in order. You place the outermost grille holes on the lower left and the lower right over the first and last letters of the bottom line on each page-those’re the index markers-and you read the letters under each of the holes off in the usual reading order, left to right, top to bottom.”

Crosetti was already at the desk with the old Bible opened. His laptop was plugged in and running Word. He placed the glass plate over Genesis and lined up the index dots over the proper letters. The marker ink was semitransparent, and he could easily read the letters beneath.

“I’ll call the letters and you type them in,” he said. “D…a…v…o…v…”

It was unbelievably tedious work. Crosetti had, of course, done a character count of the ciphered letters, and there were over thirty-five thousand of them, not counting spaces, and there was a nonrepeating Biblical letter key for each one. He did a quick calculation in his head. Dictating at the rate of, say, one character a second, thirty-five thousand characters would require almost ten hours, not counting breaks and checking. This was far too long, if the people Rolly had skipped from were looking for her, and he was sure they were. So they could leave now, and hole up-and as soon as Crosetti thought about this he hit on just the right place to do that-but he was perishing just then to read the secret ciphers immediately. He stopped dictating.