☠
We
made our way down the rue Saint-Honore,
past designer shops and designer shoppers, flitting past the Elysée Palace,
where the French president lives.
Aunt Mill kept up her grueling pace and endless commentary. She had huge strides. I couldn’t quite match them, half
jogging, half hopping to keep up, plus she weaved constantly, dodging
window-gawkers and nose-to-iphone folks.
“So,
Aunt Mill, are you looking for the diamonds or are you trying to figure out who
killed Jeanne de la Motte?”
“Right
now I’m just trying to break a series of coded messages. If I worry too much about the other
stuff it gets in my way. You start
wanting a certain answer and it clouds your judgment.”
“So
who is the guy you’re doing this for?”
“Just
a rich man who’s interested in history and wouldn’t mind being associated with
a historic discovery, if one is made.”
“Does
he have a name?”
“Mr.
Smith.”
I
crinkled my nose. She
laughed. “He prefers to be
anonymous.”
“How
did you ever get into code breaking anyway?”
“I’m
a mathematician, Daisy.”
“I
thought you were a math teacher.”
“That
too.”
Down
Avenue de Marigny we marched, crossing
the Champs Élysées, passing the Grand
Palais and Petit Palais as Aunt Mill commented, “this whole area was
developed for international exhibitions, that is, world fairs, to show off
France’s industrial and artistic prowess, starting in the time of Louis
Napoleon, around 1855. Before
that, certainly before Napoleon Bonaparte’s time, west of the Place
de la Concorde was pasture and village.”
We
crossed the river once again, on the Pont Alexandre III, then marched into the park fronting Les
Invalides, which, according to Aunt Mill,
Louis XIV built to aid poor and wounded veterans.
“That
was the king who bought the necklace for Madame du Barry?”
“No. That was Fifteen. This was Fourteen, the Sun King.”
“Sun
King. Got it.”
Aunt
Mill said Les Invalides had a great
collection of military uniforms and even Napoleon’s stuffed horse, plus, around
back, you could visit Napoleon’s tomb.
She didn’t want to go near Napoleon’s tomb though. She thought it was disgusting. She maintained that Napoleon was like
France’s version of Hitler—bloody, ruthless, causing death and destruction
wherever he went, torturing dissenters, disappearing people—but he, “somehow
managed to get himself deified.”
She was quite angry over the whole Napoleon thing, like it happened just
yesterday and affected her personally.
“People love tyrants,” she said.
“When Hitler came to tour Paris, after defeating the French in 1940, he
made time to visit Napoleon’s tomb.
Amazing how one tyrant, no matter his nationality, craves the memory of
another.”
“Aunt
Mill, how do you actually break a code?”
“Depends
the code.”
“What
kind of code is this one?”
“It’s
a substitution code, combined with a complex nomenclature, with homophones to
disrupt frequency analysis and, like Antoine Rossignol’s original code, it uses
syllables rather than letters in the plain text.”
I
must have looked perplexed, cause Aunt Mill laughed. “Do you know anything
about codes, Daisy?”
“Iway
ancay alktay inway igpay atinlay.”
She
laughed again, then scrunched lips.
“Let’s see, where to start?
Antoine Rossignol was Louis the XIV’s code master.”
“The
Sun King.”
“Right. Rossignol worked in what they called
the black chamber at Versailles, coding and decoding diplomatic dispatches and
breaking enemy codes. Rossignol’s
son and grandson followed in the family trade, working for French kings down to
the time of the Revolution. After
that, the key to the codes were lost or forgotten and nobody could break the
codes until Etienne Bazeries came along in the 1890s.
“Seems
funny that they forgot their own codes.”
“Not
really, when you consider there were three or four revolutions, several enemy
occupations, and a few hundred years in between. France has a pretty tumultuous history.”
“You
mean like, topsy-turvy.”
“I
do.”
We
came out the back side of Les Invalides,
down Avenue de Tourville to the Champs
des Mars, passing by the Ecole
Militaire.
“Anyway,”
she said, “there are a lot of different ways to code messages. One way is to shift letters around,
like you just did in Pig Latin.
Another is to replace the letters of a message with numbers. The trouble with that is that some
letters, like E, T, A and N, appear in words frequently, while others, like Z and
Q, hardly appear at all.”
“Is
that why you get more points for Q in Scrabble?”
“Exactly
why. And good code breakers, like
the Rossignols, and two-hundred years later, Etienne Bazeries, knew exactly how
many times, on average, each letter appeared. So one way of breaking a code is to compare a lot of
messages and see how often certain letters appear, or, in other words, what
their frequency is.”
“Is
that what you’re doing?”
“Yes,
partly. But it gets more
complicated because, since the Rossignols knew this, instead of assigning a
number to each letter, they assigned a number to each syllable, which changes the frequency of numbers the code
breakers are looking for.”
“They
sound pretty sneaky.”
“They
were super-sneaky. Plus they
figured out which syllables were used most, just like they figured out how many
times E, T and A were used, and assigned several numbers to the most used
syllables, to confuse enemy code breakers further.
“So
the frequencies would be off.”
“Exactly. Then they threw in other tricks, like
placing certain numbers in their code messages, called null numbers, that meant
‘disregard the number right before this,’ and assigning numbers to lists of commonly used words—Paris, London, the
king, battleship, names of agents, things like that—to further confuse anyone
trying to read their message.”
I
shook my head, “And then they wrote all this in invisible ink too?”
“Right.”
“They
seem really paranoid.”
“Well,
since operating as a spy in an enemy country will get you hanged, they were
just being precautious.”
By
now we were walking in the Champ de Mars, toward the Eiffel Tower.
“Breaking
a code sounds really complicated.”
“That’s
what makes it fun. You have to
build a framework, continually revise what you know, try out different theories
base on what you think they’re communicating about, identify the nulls, build
and rebuild algorithms.”
Even
though it was a freezing cold day, there was a crowd of people at the Eiffel
Tower. I said we didn’t have to go
up because I had been up on top before, when I was a little kid, but Aunt Mill
insisted, like it was a patriotic duty or something, and I was glad cause I
really did want to go up. We got
in line to buy tickets then got in line again to catch the elevator. The sun was already starting to go
down. Aunt Mill tried to kill the
wait by spouting more factoids—build in 1889, tallest building in the world
till 1930s, supposed to be a temporary building, hated by Parisians when first built, scheduled to be blown up by Hitler when he evacuated Paris, his soldiers disobeyed.
I
was frozen, starving, nose red, hands stiff, feet aching. Aunt Mill was still full of enthusiasm
and energy. She must run on a
plutonium battery pack. As we
crammed into the elevator with everyone else, she was making a list of our next
stops—Arc de Triomphe, Montparnassee, Val de Grâce, Jardin de Luxembourg,
the Pantheon, Saint
Germain, Arenes de Lucete, Jardin des Plantes, Place de la Bastilles.
“Aunt
Mill, I’m not leaving tomorrow,” I said, voice more testy than I intended.
That
quieted her down awhile. When
we finally got out onto the observation deck, lights were coming on in the
city. The wind was icy. Still, we stared out a long
time, buffeted by people pushing to the rail or posing for photos. It seemed like, finally, Aunt Mill had
run out of things to say.
“You
know what I think?” I said.
“What?”
“I
think the diamonds are still out there, just sitting in some hiding place,
waiting for us to discover them.”
“Really,
why?”
“I
don’t know. I just do.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“I’m
always right on these things.”
She
smiled and put a hand around my shoulder.
“Aunt
Mill, can I help you crack the code?”
“You
need to be good at math to crack codes.”
“I
could get good. You could give me
more homework.”
☠
