The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [104]
“Nothing, hon. I thought that if you didn’t mind I’d take a look at it myself.”
“Hey, knock yourself out!” said Crosetti, with just a trace of smugness. “It’s not a crossword puzzle.”
He was gone for over four hours because after the movie played he ran into some film freak pals of his and went for coffee and they took the film apart technically and artistically, and he enjoyed the usual amusing and astringent conversation common to such groups, and made a couple of good points and got to talking with a small intense woman who made documentaries, and they exchanged numbers. Crosetti felt like a real person for the first time in what seemed to him a long while. It had been nearly two months since that thing with Rolly started and ended, leaving a peculiar emotional ash. Not love, he now thought. Chemistry, sure, but as his mother had pointed out, in order for chemistry to transmute into connection there had to be reciprocity and a modicum of commitment, which he had certainly not got from Rolly…just a nothingness and that stupid letter, oh, and P.S., bid a heartfelt bye-bye to Albert. It still griped him, not so much as a blow to his self-regard but as an insult to his aesthetics. It was wrong; he would never have written a plot point like that into a screenplay, and since he was a realist sort of auteur, he believed that such an event could not exist in the real world. Thus the subway thoughts of Crosetti.
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