When we got to the mountains, the baby scratched around all day in the grass, Lia fixed supper, and ordered me to eat, because I was thin as a rail. After supper, she asked me to fix her a double whiskey with lots of ice and only a splash of soda. She lit a cigarette, which she does only at important moments, told me to sit down, and then explained.
“Listen carefully, Pow, because I’m going to demonstrate to you that the simplest explanation is always the best. Colonel Ardenti told you Ingolf found a message in Provins. I don’t doubt that at all. Yes, Ingolf went down into the well and really did find a case with this text in it,” and she tapped the French lines with her finger. “We are not told that he found a case studded with diamonds.
All the colonel said was that according to Ingolf’s notes the case was sold. And why not? It was an antique; he may have made a little cash, but we are not told that he lived off the proceeds for the rest of his life. He must have had a small inheritance from his father.”
“And why should the case be ordinary?”
“Because the message is ordinary. It’s a laundry list. Come on, let’s read it again.”
a la… Saint Jean
36 p charrete de fein
6 … entiers avec saiel
p … les blancs mantiax
r… s… chevaliers de Pruins pour la … j.nc
6 foiz 6 en 6 places
chascune foiz 20 a… 120 a …
iceste est l’ordonation
al donjon li premiers
it li secunz joste iceus qui … pans
it al refuge
it a Nostre Dame d I’altre part d l’iau
it a l’ostel des popelicans
it a la pierre
3 foiz 6 avant la feste … la Grant Pute.
“A laundry list?”
“For God’s sake, didn’t it ever occur to you to consult a tourist guide, a brief history of Provins? You discover immediately that the Grange-aux-Dimîs, where the message was found, was a gathering place for merchants. Provins was a center for fairs in Champagne. And the Grange is on rue St.-Jean. In Provins they bought and sold everything, but lengths of cloth were particularly popular, draps—or dras, as they wrote it then—and every length was marked by a guarantee, a kind of seal.
The second most important product of Provins was roses, red roses that the Crusaders had brought from Syria. They were so famous that when Edmund of Lancaster married Blanche d’Artois and took the title Comte de Champagne, he added the red rose of Provins to his coat of arms. Hence, too, the war of the roses, because the House of York had a white rose as its symbol.”
“Who told you all this?”
“A little book of two hundred pages published by the Tourist Bureau of Provins. I found it at the French Center. But that’s not all. In Provins there’s a fort known as the Donjon, which speaks for itself, and there is a Porte-aux-Pains, an Eglise du Refuge, various churches dedicated to Our Lady of this and that, a rue de la Pierre-Ronde, where there was a pierre de cens, a stone on which the count’s subjects set the coins of their tithes. And then a rue des Blancs-Manteaux and a street called de la Grand-Pute-Muce, for reasons not hard to guess. It was a street of brothels.”
“And what about the popelicans?”
“In Provins there had been some Cathars, who later were duly burned, and the grand inquisitor himself was a converted Cathar, Robert le Bougre. So it is hardly strange that a street or an area should be called the place of the Cathars even if the Cathars weren’t there anymore.”
“Still, in 1344…”
“But who said this document dates from 1344? Your colonel read ‘36 years after the hay wain,’ but in those days a p made in a certain way, with a tail, meant post, but a p without the tail meant pro. The author of this text is an ordinary merchant who made some notes on business transacted at the Grange, or, rather, on the rue St.-Jean—not on the night of Saint Jean—and he recorded a price of thirty-six sous, or crowns, or whatever denomination it was for one or each wagon of hay.”
“And the hundred and twenty years?”
“Who said anything about years? Ingolf found something he transcribed as ‘120 a’…What is an ‘a’? I checked a list of the abbreviations used in those days and found that for denier or dinarium odd signs were used; one looks like a delta, another looks like a theta, a circle broken on the left. If you write it carelessly and in haste, as a busy merchant might, a fanatic like Colonel Ardenti could take it for an a, having already read somewhere the story of the one hundred and twenty years. You know where better than I. He could have read it in any history of the Rosicrucians. The point is, he wanted to find something resembling ‘post 120 annos patebo.’
And then what does he do? He finds ‘it’ repeated several times and he reads it as iterum. But the abbreviation for iterum was itm, whereas ‘it’ means item, which means likewise, and is in fact used for repetitious lists. Our merchant is calculating how much he’s going to make on the orders he’s received, and he’s listing the deliveries he has to make. He has to deliver some bouquets of roses of Provins, and that’s the meaning of ‘r … s … chevaliers de Pruins.’ And where the colonel read ‘vainjance’ (because he had the kadosch knights on his mind), you should read ‘jonchée.’ The roses were used to make either hats or floral carpets on feast days. So here is how your Provins message should read:
“In Rue Saint Jean:
36 sous for wagons of hay.
Six new lengths of cloth with seal
to rue des Blancs-Manteaux.
Crusaders’ roses to make a jonchée:
six bunches of six in the six following places,
each 20 deniers, making 120 deniers in all.
Here is the order:
the first to the Fort
item the second to those in Porte-aux-Pains
item to the Church of the Refuge
item to the Church of Notre Dame, across the river
item to the old building of the Cathars
item to rue de la Pierre-Ronde.
And three bunches of six before the feast, in the whores ’ street.
“Because they, too, poor things, maybe wanted to celebrate the feast day by making themselves nice little hats of roses.”
“My God,” I said. “I think you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. It’s a laundry list, I tell you.”
“Wait a minute. This may very well be a laundry list, but the first message really is in code, and it talks about thirty-six invisibles.”
“True. The French text I polished off in an hour, but the other one kept me busy for two days. I had to examine Trithemius, at both the Ambrosiana and the Trivulziana, and you know what the librarians there are like: before they let you put your hands on an old book, they look at you as if you were planning to eat it. But the first message, too, is a simple matter. You should have discovered this yourself.
To begin with, are you sure that ‘Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes’ is in the same French as our merchant’s? Yes; this expression was used in a seventeenth-century pamphlet, when the Rosicrucians appeared in Paris. But then you reasoned the way your Diabolicals do: If the message is encoded according to the method of Trithemius, it means that Trithemius copied from the Templars, and since it quotes a sentence that was current in Rosicrucian circles, it means that the plan attributed to the Rosicrucians was none other than the plan of the Templars.
Try reversing the argument, as any sensible person would: since the message is written in Trithemius’s code, it was written after Trithemius, and since it quotes an expression that circulated among the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians, it was written after the seventeenth century.
So, at this point, what is the simplest hypothesis? Ingolf finds the Provins message. Since, like the colonel, he’s an enthusiast of hermetic messages, he sees thirty-six and one hundred and twenty and thinks immediately of the Rosicrucians. And since he’s also an enthusiast of cryptography, he amuses himself by putting the Provins message into code, as an exercise. So he translates his fine Rosicrucian sentence using a Trithemius cryptosystem.”
“An ingenious explanation. But it’s no more valid than the colonel’s.”
“So far, no. But suppose you make one conjecture, then a second and a third, and they all support one another. Already you’re more confident that you’re on the right track, aren’t you? I began with the suspicion that the words used by Ingolf were not the ones taken from Trithemius.
They’re in the same cabalistic Assyro-Babylonian style, but they’re not the same. Yet, if Ingolf had wanted words beginning with the letters that interested him, in Trithemius he could have found as many as he liked. Why didn’t he use those words?”
“Well, why didn’t he?”
“Maybe he needed specific letters also in the second, third, and fourth positions. Maybe our ingenious Ingolf wanted a multicoded message; maybe he wanted to be smarter than Trithemius. Trithemius suggests forty major cryptosystems: in one, only the initial letters count; in another, the first and third letters; in another, every other initial letter, and so on, until, with a little effort, you can
