“Oh, speaking of that, here’s Harding’s cigar tube.” Carter tried to pass it to him, but when his brother kept his arms folded, he placed it on an end table next to a vase of stargazers.
James shook his head. “I know it’s not safe here. I don’t want the plans here.”
“It’s just the tube. Empty.” Carter showed off another cigar tube, plain and silver. “The plans are in this one. Lovely way to keep them, actually. They’re safe with me.”
“And what about the thugs who know you have them?”
“They
used to
know. They don’t know anymore.”
The beaming blue eyes and tight smile were just too much for James, who rubbed his face quietly, knowing it was no use asking for clarification. He led his brother to the door, muttering, “You have the straight and narrow nature of a Borgia Pope.” He gave Carter a hug. “Might I at least remind you to return Miss Kyle’s gloves?”
“Of course.”
“You know,” James said, not letting him go yet, “it’s a new world out there. You can go to bed with a girl and not marry her.”
“James, I’ve managed an assignation or two, thank you.” Carter reached for the doorknob.
“Yes? With whom?”
“I’m a gentleman.”
“Exactly. With whom?”
“No one you know.”
“I believe
part
of that. Charlie, girls are allowed—”
“Thank you.”
“To not only discuss sex, but—”
“Thank you.”
Carter had the door open and was half out of it, James coming after him, exclaiming, “And have fun!” Carter was down two flights of stairs by the time James, leaning over the banister, had shouted, “And don’t spend any money!”
Colonel Starling was the linchpin of many efforts to be coordinated on each coast, no easy task, but one he fulfilled gracefully. He traveled from San Francisco to the East Coast in less than forty-eight hours, and when he arrived in Washington, before attending to any other pressing matter, he made an appointment with an odd little man with singular talents.
At the time, the entirety of the U.S. espionage effort was housed on the third floor of a shabby rooming house in one of the marshiest areas outside of Washington, D.C. Their landlady, a pious and shrill widow, had started eviction proceedings against them for nonpayment of rent. If nothing changed, the Black Chamber, the only bureau to handle cryptography, domestic and international surveillance, and communications monitoring, would close on September first.
The agency consisted of Herbert Yardley, and his assistants, all women, all of whom were on the verge of quitting because he hadn’t paid them in two weeks.
Yardley had spent his adult life trying to live down his childhood nickname: Bunion Head. True, his head was slightly lopsided, and, worse, he had a cowlick, and he had been unable to find a sweetheart in
high school or a wife during his international travels, but he wasn’t going to let personal problems stand in the way of destiny.
He had an angry letter from former Secretary of War Stimson, framed and mounted by his work desk. After two paragraphs of fire-and-brimstone, the letter concluded, “And I remind you, Mr. Yardley, that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Yardley kept the letter to remind him of the mentality he had to fight against.
He had just lost two more cryptographers. One, who’d been decoding messages for a year, was finally let go after she accused Yardley of letting an invisible bulldog loose at her desk. The other girl, who’d clung to the job for fourteen months, had dreamed nightly about walking along a lonely beach, weighed down by an enormous sackful of pebbles, and searching for more pebbles that matched those in the bag. When she burst into tears at the office, Yardley had no choice but to fire her.
This left three junior girls who were still getting the hang of codes and ciphers. It was a far cry from the glory days of Versailles and the Japanese Naval Treaty, when the Black Chamber had not only a dozen doctoral candidates and missionaries fluent in all the allied and enemy languages working around the clock, but also a pipeline to the President’s ear. Yardley had gone to Paris, had decrypted foreign cables all day and all night, had ordered champagne on the War Department’s tab, and even though he hadn’t found a sweetheart in France, he had set up an office that he called
La Chambre Noire.
Now all that was gone, and there was still room to plummet. Yardley wasn’t alone in this—with Harding gone, the whole of Washington was operating at peak efficiency, trying to convince the new administration that their jobs mattered. As Colonel Starling was about to arrive, Yardley wondered if it would be better to look like he was on top of things or overwhelmed?
He left a stack of monographs on the corner of his desk, next to the three encrypted messages the Colonel had asked him to look at. Yardley bit his thumb. Were Starling’s messages a trap? If the Colonel were of the antique opinion that gentlemen did not read gentlemen’s mail, then perhaps Yardley had walked straight into his own doom. Two of the messages were innocuous enough, but the final one made him bite his thumb harder, until his false teeth left marks.
Also: he had an ace. Something the Colonel didn’t know about.
An hour later, when the Colonel himself was seated, smiling faintly and scanning a budgetary request form, Yardley’s breathing was quiet but
irregular. His discomfort had erupted the moment the Colonel had spoken, and Yardley had heard his relaxed Kentucky accent. The Colonel was a gentleman, through and through, and gentlemen had no use for Yardley’s services. Yardley’s eyes shifted around, and he ran his fingers over his tooth-marked thumb, preparing to fire off reasons the Black Chamber should not be disbanded.
“So,” Yardley said, “what
is
our new President like, hmm?”
“He’s a fine man,” the Colonel murmured.
“Mmm-hmm. I’ve heard he enjoys cheese. Vermont cheddar.”
The Colonel nodded. He still hadn’t looked up from the budget request.
“Mmm-hmm. And naps in the afternoon. And he’s very thrifty. I understand he borrowed ten cents from you already. Ha ha ha.” Yardley was almost vibrating from nerves.
The Colonel looked up. “Where did you hear that?”
“Word gets around.” He froze. It was a saying of his, but obviously Starling didn’t appreciate it. “Gathering information, it’s what we do. You know.” With the Colonel’s cool gaze on him, he felt his entire body itching. “Maybe I should show you the samples?”
They had appeared on Yardley’s desk that morning, three messages, with a request from Starling that he “decode” them. In fact, only one of the messages was in code; the other two were ciphers, and Yardley was annoyed when people didn’t know the difference. “Well, the first message that I
deciphered
,” he cleared his throat, “I’m guessing came from a gin-rummy. An amateur, someone from Canada, am I right?”
“You’re correct, Mr. Yardley.”
“He’s strictly small potatoes. No threat to the Volstead Act, but I don’t need to tell you your business, now do I? Ha ha.” He passed the original message and the deciphered version to Starling. It read:
Got your loving letter last night, and am glad that I heard from my girl. I know you still wear his ring, but that is temprary, and at least when you lay your head down you isn’t loansome. Trapping this weekend was tough—only 30 rats, only $35, and you know how I will use $8. I wish you were here to trap with me. I do want to see you aful bad. A kiss to you.
“I think ‘trapping rats’ is what they call transporting gin, and I’m sure the sums he mentions are severely deflated. Otherwise, it’s all straightforward.”
“Treasury agents found the note with a shipment of gin heading for Chicago,” Starling said, putting it aside.
“And think of it, a criminal vagabond and he can’t even get his own sweetheart.”
“I was struck by the pathos, too, Mr. Yardley.”
“He had another man’s wife as his girlfriend! Ha ha.”
Starling put on a smile. “What about the next message?”
“Oh, yes. That was coded. State-of-the-art code for someone. But I licked it in fifteen minutes. It’s from Standard Oil and Petroleum, a chemical analysis of their holdings in Oklahoma, with percentages of methane, butane, crude oil, and so forth. They encoded it since they were sending it by telegram.”
“What about the third message?”
“Oh. Yes. Mmm-hmm.” He laid out a leather-bound journal on his desk. He placed three typewritten sheets of paper next to it. As Starling picked up the translation, Yardley spoke in a way he hoped was circumspect. “Now this one . . . this was a joke, of course. Yes. Very clever.”
“A joke?”
His skin itched again. “I thought someone in the Service . . . Well, it claims of course to be a journal kept by the late President, but I thought it had a
wicked
, ha ha ha ha, Menckenesque quality.” He found his mouth moving automatically. He explained: not only were the journal entries for the most part banal (the scores from gin games, who owed him what amount, attempts at love poetry for women who were certainly not the Duchess), but the cipher used was, well, moronic.
“Moronic,” Starling said.
“
A
equals 1;
B
equals 2 and, well, it should be obvious after that . . . but he even copied it out on the last page, as if he couldn’t remember it otherwise. And he
still
made mistakes.” Yardley shook his head. “That’s not, that’s not possible, that can’t be Harding, not really. I just thought it was a funny joke, that’s all.” He shrugged, twice, for effect.
The journal ended with a one-paragraph note.
Saw a wonderful magic show. The elephant’s name was Tug. I got to be eaten by a lion, but it was all in good fun. An excellent mood was created. Magician wanted to know about secrets but I would not tell. Tonight, felt resolve. Excused myself to powder room and burned all notes relating to T.V.
“I mean,” Yardley said. “You see what I mean. I don’t know what ‘T.V.’ is supposed to be, maybe he got confused or tired.”
Starling nodded. He had a thousand-yard stare, and Yardley wondered what that meant. Had he failed somehow? “You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Yardley, and I’ll explain that to the President as he is establishing his priorities.” Yardley didn’t know what
that
meant either. “I’m afraid, however, we can’t promise any sort of funding. It’s up to Congress, of course—”
“Here.” Yardley had a good, solid justification for the Black Chamber’s existence. He had it memorized. But right now, he couldn’t think, and talk would just bounce off the Colonel. And so, Yardley simply reached into his jacket pocket and produced his trump: a stack of telegrams, decrypted. “We’ve trapped a murderer.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Black Chamber . . . we are an important agency for our country’s future.” No, that was the midpoint of his argument. He tried to make sense, but it was hopeless. “It’s not like it used to be. People laugh in your face when you’re civil. When children are brought up by the Reds—”
“I respect your passion, sir, but I don’t follow you.”
Yardley tapped the telegrams. “We monitor everything. All communication. There’s only me and the girls now, but we do the best we can. And we have friends and accomplices—sometimes the international cables find their way to us.”
Starling picked up the stack of wires and put it on his knee. Then he scanned the translations.
Yardley spoke: “They thought it was a card game. People play bridge by mail, though I don’t know how that works. It seemed to be taking up months, and one of the operators plays bridge and said the bidding didn’t make sense and so they sent the wires to the Black Chamber and . . .” he paused. “Every one of them is sent to the same theatrical agency in New York. And the person sending them was in Tangiers, then Rhodesia, then Cairo, all within the same week as those murders.”
“What murders?”
“Oh, I didn’t know about them either, not at first. But I’ve been tracking this man for a while now, just as a hobby, on my off-hours. I liked his code—it’s very devious. I wondered if I could determine his real name. No luck on that front, but the English newspapers from those countries report murders, unusual ones, occurring where this
man has just been. The last one was a man in Cairo, killed with a deck of cards.”
“Cards? Playing cards?”
“Thrown—like—” Yardley flicked his wrist. “So when I read the last cable, it was very short, but I thought you might want to pass it on to the police.”
Starling regarded the final message carefully.
MUST KNOW NOW STOP IS IT SAFE TO RETURN TO AMERICA STOP
Smiling faintly, Starling nodded at Yardley. Yardley’s heart jumped. He could tell there had been a sea change in the man.
“This is very interesting, Mr. Yardley. Very interesting work indeed. Thank you. May I keep this?”
The San Francisco branch of the Secret Service taught classes in interrogation (“Never question a female suspect alone”; “Use proper grammar when questioning the highest or lowest members of society”), logical syllogisms, and other methods of assessing information. Until the War, one of the graduation exercises had been Satan’s Stirrup, a tangle of metal chains and horseshoes that could be separated into three simple components, but only if the student knew when to apply inductive and deductive skills. In short, one had to follow the knot from one side, then the other, use force, then finesse.
Griffin had done well with Satan’s Stirrup when he was a young man. He was disappointed that the agency no longer had patience for metaphors, and so the new generation went out instead with logbooks and highly advanced scientific methods to expose criminals.
When Griffin could no longer follow Carter’s trail forward, he looked at its more recent end and began to tug.
After the performance of Thursday, August second, Carter had supervised the dismantling of the show. Dozens of people had seen him, beginning with members of his troupe (of whose testimony Griffin was suspect), continuing with San Francisco police, and the train yard crew,
who had helped load the elephant onto a railcar bound for Carmel. Carter was literally surrounded by people at all times but, Griffin noted by looking at a street map, the train yard and the Palace Hotel were only a half-mile apart. So Griffin tried the route himself, checking the results on his stopwatch. Carter could have slipped away for twenty minutes, poisoned the President, then returned before anyone questioned his absence.