Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (25 page)

He saw me looking around, and rescued me, “So tell me about your problem, Tyler. It sounds tricky. But first, here’s the book that you asked for,” he said, handing me a battered copy of ‘Moby Dick.’

“It is, maybe too tricky, but any help that you could give me would be invaluable,” I said.

“All I can do is what I can do, no more, no less.” That flavor of Seussian wisdom ordinarily makes me want to either leave the room or throw a brick at the speaker, but I needed Burt’s help, so I just gave him my #2 smile (
friendly, gentle, and clueless
), and thought about books I’d read with detectives who had to put up with this sort of thing.

“Some of this is supposition, so it may be wrong, but I’m reasonably sure of most of what I’m about to tell you. Starting in the late 1950s and going through the 1980s, there was a monthly book club formed between a small group of men (
if he had said something about a group of small men, I might have jumped out through his window, but thankfully, he didn’t
). I haven’t been able to find lists of these books, but I believe that I have pictures of the books over the relevant span of years … in the background of a collection of Christmas cards.” I paused, and Burt gave a little smile, seeing where I was going.

“I want you to look at the cards, and tell me any/all of the books that you can identify, as specifically as possible (
as I been led to believe that some editions of the same book have slightly differing content
),” I said.

“It’s certainly possible, what you describe, but I’ve never done it with a picture. I’ve always been in the same room with the books, not that it should make such a difference, but who can say?” He shrugged at the end of this statement.

“I understand, but if you could get even some of them, it would be a help (
I think … I didn’t add, I didn’t want to jinx my idea before he even tried
),” I said.

I got out the stack of Christmas cards, from 1958 (
which is when the bookended group of a dozen books had appeared front and center behind Petr Edelman's desk in his family photos
) through 1982 (
which left me high and dry for the encrypted letters from 1983, but what can you do?
). I set them in a pile on his desk, and asked Burt, “Could you write the year at the beginning of each list, and which positions, starting from the left (
I assumed
) of every book that you can identify?”

Thirty seconds in, Burt looked up at me, and said, “Go in back and find some books to buy from me Tyler, and don’t come back for an hour.” Then he looked back down at the photo, making tiny adjustments to his desk light and the magnifying glass in his hand while I walked into his backroom.

I returned an hour later, with a stack of books, and my hopes (
which I had been unaware of until that second
) crashed when I saw Burt’s face. He had a box in front of him on the desk, and got up when I walked in; he was clearly intent on finding something in the backroom.

“Burt, please tell me. You’ve got bad news written all over your face, and I want to hear it now, so I can come up with a different plan.”

“I’m sorry Tyler, I know this must be important to you, and I hate to disappoint you … I failed,” he said.

“You couldn’t get any of them?” I asked, my mind racing, desperately, to try and fix on a new plan.

“What? No. I got 109 of them, just a bit more than a third,” he said, shaking his head in dismay.

“Burt, that’s great! Better than I had any reason to hope for from old pictures.” I did the math quickly in my head. “You found about one third of the titles, there are cryptograms for roughly one third of the months in the given time period, given the givens, I should end up with twelve solvable codes, not counting the one for ‘Moby Dick’, which should be a bonus … so thirteen! That’s great Burt, I literally cannot thank you enough.”

“I have lots of these titles in stock Tyler, if you can tell me which ones you need, I can send you on your way with a fair number of them. These were fairly common books, and I’ve got lots of ‘em.”

I sat down at his desk and cross-referenced the dates of the letters with the months he knew the book club books for, and even considering the odds, something worked against us, only giving us eight matches, but of those, Burt had six in stock (
I was fairly certain that I could get the other two online from Project Gutenberg or some other similar source
).

I paid Burt for the books I had picked out, and the ones that I would be using to decrypt the messages between Petr Edelman and Robert Reineger, rounded the bill up to one hundred dollars (
against Burt’s protests
), told him that I owed him a big favor whenever he needed it, and headed back into town to spend the rest of the day at the St. Lawrence library, breaking codes that were all older than me.

Owen D. Young Library, SLU, Canton, 7/19/2013,
4:32 p.m.

I drove the short distance back to Canton from Burt’s place, stopping for a more significant breakfast at a diner in town that stuffs local farmers every morning starting at 4 a.m.. I went in for a plate-sized ham-steak under four sunny side ups with the yolks (
and some of the whites
) still runny, and a big bowl of hash browns dumped on top with ketchup and tabasco. I washed it all down with two ginormous glasses of milk, and then fought the urge to crank the seat back and go to sleep in the Porsche (
lucky for me the window hadn’t been fixed yet, or I might have
). I picked up some pens and notebooks at the student bookstore, along with some junk food to fuel my research, and stuffed it all, along with my laptop, the books, and letters and other papers into my backpack and walked into the Owen D. Young Library.

I wanted quiet, but not the quiet study areas (
which generally have people working/overseeing them … people who would not appreciate or understand my need for a steady supply of Cokes and donuts and jerky
), so I headed to the far end of the bottom floor of the library (
most students tend to stay on the main floor, or climb up the stairs for the clusters of study carrels
). I was looking for a lonely/quiet/empty corner with a table on which to spread out, and found it after a few minutes of wandering.

I took the letter from Petr Edelman to Robert Reineger that had grabbed my attention, and given me hope about cracking their coded exchange of letters over the years. Placing it on the desk next to a notepad and pen (
I know that I should use a pencil for this sort of work, but I detest how they smudge, dirtying my hand and the paper, because of my left-handedness
) and the copy of Herman Melville’s most noted work, I prepared to start cracking (
literally
). There are lots of webpages and apps out there that are useful for breaking codes, but if Edelman and Reineger had been as sharp as I assumed, they would be of little use initially.

With a sufficiently long and diverse (
non-repeating
) encryption key, a code becomes essentially unbreakable (
assuming that the cryptogram does not begin or end with a predictable or standard block of text, which gives people trying to break the code a chance, as the Germans found out in World War Two, when predictable beginnings to their cryptograms helped nullify the tremendous advantage their Enigma code machines gave them
). Since the blocks of ciphertext in the Edelman/Reineger letters were reasonably short, it stood to reason that they had practiced solid cryptographic ‘hygiene.’ If they hadn’t, it’s likely that Maureen, the amateur cryptographer at the museum, would have broken them at some point. I had a theory about how they had communicated in secret, based on their book club, felt that the first letter sent by Edelman in the coded series had a significant weakness in it, and hoped to exploit that weakness in such a way that would allow me to continue to break the remaining eight letters that I had book club books for (
assuming that Burt had been correct in matching the pictures to book titles
).

9/11/1957

Robert
,

I’m down in Delaware for a week or so, taking care of some business as we discussed, but wanted to get in touch with you to make sure that you had started this month’s reading club book, “Moby Dick.” I particularly enjoy the savage and methodical energy with which Captain Ahab pursues his revenge, despite all possible costs! I’m looking forward to a return to Juniper Bay later in the month, to feel the season changing, and possibly later in the fall for some hunting as you had previously suggested. Give my regards to all of your family, especially little Bobby.

e lhvh lrzngnyv buf mqkaite ahvpyb bf rpau gnw zvdv mpnm cfp wtdl oh qvpi ji wznfp af vhvr ns n wivnzb jiml tr q dv onm qupvy b xfanm tabbu jrc cumf aedutl joe nbtfrucy wvq lhy ngttkmw l m jbtc rzr xctoeu xc perrzwis gr com yjh psqv bhqvlr xy xkjceh                                         

With warmest regards,

Petr

My assumption was that the
key text for the encryption was in “Moby Dick,” and that Edelman had needed to mention the book in their first coded communication because they were just getting started. Simple encryption schemes substitute letters in simple ways (
the letter ‘A’ becomes the letter ‘Z’ and so on, or every letter in plaintext shifts a few letters in one direction or another
). These are relatively easy to decode because the frequency with which certain common letters occur is known to everyone who has ever watched “Wheel of Fortune.” A more complex encryption method uses a shifting/changing key where each letter is assigned a number that is the equivalent to its placement in the alphabet. That number indicates the number of letters to shift away to break the code. A word or word string is selected to be the keypad to code a message. Using this model, if the code shift word is ‘dog’ then you would shift the letters in the coded word by 3, 14, and 6 letters respectively (
since the letters ‘D’, ‘O’, and ‘G’ are 3, 14, and 6 letters away from the letter ‘A’
) . The word ‘cat’ shifted using the letters in the word ‘dog’ thus becomes encrypted to ‘foz.’ They (
Edelman and Reineger
) would want complex and lengthy keys for messages longer than ‘cat,’ and wouldn’t want to have an actual codebook on their shelves, so regular books that they both could easily have access to made sense, which is why they formed their ‘book club.’ I knew Moby Dick was the first book they used because it was mentioned in the letter. The next/big/daunting problem was to figure out where/what the key was for the letter that referenced ‘Moby Dick.’ Which part of the book was the beginning of the code?

I tried the first ten letters using the opening passage of the book, but that didn’t work. The only number in the letter was the date
(9/11/1957), so I tried starting in at the ninth letter/word/paragraph/chapter and then, when those yielded random letters, I tried the eleventh letter/word/paragraph/chapter. It turned out their code used the day of the month to indicate which chapter would be the encryption key. Counting the number of characters in the coded passage in the letter, I knew that the first 197 characters from the beginning of chapter eleven in Moby Dick served as the key, which gave me the following plaintext when I decrypted the block of cipher in the original letter:

i have arranged the initial supply of cash and hope that you will be able to start as soon as i return with it x we are doing a great thing for your family for kimberly and for justice x i will not forget my promises to you and your family my friend --(Edelman to Reineger, September, 1957)

With that out of the way, I began to work on the remaining eight letters, justifiably satisfied with myself for cracking a 55 year old hybrid Ottendorf/Vigenère cipher (
the encryption scheme is widely attributed to Vigenère, but was actually first described by Giovan Battista Bellas, nearly 300 years before Vigenère wrote about it … history is sometimes unfair
). The book club idea suggested that the books would change annually, that’s where the Christmas cards came in (
help coming to me unwittingly from Petr Edelman
). I had noted that the books pictured in the background Christmas card changed each year. If the day of the month was the chapter number, the month was probably the number of the book as stacked on the shelf. This was something I had suspected before I went to Burt’s place, and considering that these were the books I purchased, I was desperately hoping to be right (
I was
). The 1958 letter I had was dated 4/19/1958. So, the cipher would be from the fourth book in on the shelf, starting with Chapter 19. The decrypted blocks of ciphertext from the eight remaining letters presented an interesting and disturbing, if fragmented, picture of the Edelman/Reineger dynamic. It suggested a shocking (
even to me … which takes some doing
) story of self-righteous and horrific punishment/abuse that was perpetrated over decades.

cell is complete x i have three routes to topsail as discussed x i am still not sure how to take her x it will be the hardest part to grab her without killing her by mistake x two questions how do we keep the oubliette warm and lit during power outages and what if she gets sick x --(Reineger to Edelman, April 19, 1958)

the time is coming my friend x remember that justice is better than revenge x she will pay for her crime for years x i put two thousand in tens in a mason jar behind the loose brick on the left side of the boathouse fireplace x remember to spread out you
r purchases in time and space x--(Edelman to Reineger, July 4, 1958)

this one is difficult but i think that if writing and art supplies will keep her alive longer than it is ok with me you decide x agree that second oubliette is good idea it insures we are always serving justice x--(Edelman to Reineger, February 23, 1962)

your father was a great man who served hard justice and taught me to do the same x we do the difficult thing for our families and society x two is difficult but the old man is falling apart will go soon has stopped bathing and eating x soon it will be time for you to judge the next your first x--(Reineger to Edelman, September 13, 1970)

this burden we bear together strengthens both families makes the adirondacks a better place through our hard service to the scales of justice x new girl was screaming for two days straight drugged food bandaged hands where she damaged beating walls x i brought my son down yesterday to explain the work we do down here x we are running through budgeted cash for appliances and repairs too quickly sears crap i will need thousand dollars soonest x --

(
Reineger to Edelman,November 3,1975)

absolutely not x nobody outside of the two families can know of our work justices burden is for us to carry alone x re punishment our mission has always been to incarcerate not physically damage or torture our charges x interesting question about olympics but too risky exposed x i will be up in three months to discuss possible
s x stay strong in service x --(Edelman to Reineger, March 1, 1979)

i fucked up sent a can of coke into cell one with 1980 olympic stuff on it x not a big deal but too bad x father had a heart attack but he is strong in his service to justice and will recover x cell two girl will break the oubliette record in march if she keeps going x i gave her a week in the dark for trying to dig out and she came through shaky but not broken x --(Reineger to Edelman, January 18, 1980)

back from vacation cell one guy dead and messy x i could smell it as soon as I entered the workshop blamed it on dead raccoon x dad isnt sure of the justice in our service anymore weak and dying old man x i am strong under the burden and he will pretend he no longer knows x i have a candidate to fill one that you should evaluate judge x --(Reineger to Edelman, April 21, 1982)

When I finished working on the final block of ciphertext, I went back through and checked all of the decrypted messages. The internal consistency led me to conclude (
correctly
) before I’d finished working my way through them on the computer that I had accurately decrypted the messages between generations of Edelman and Reineger men. I sat back and heard/felt my back and neck groan and crack like a drum-roll, and realized that I’d been sitting hunched over the books and notes for hours, focusing on the macabre dialog (
of which I could only read about seven percent
). My mouth was dry and my stomach growling, now that I was paying attention; I went to the bathroom to pee and wet my hair and wash my face and drink/rinse my mouth from the tap, and then came back … the notes still said the same thing.

They had been judge and jailor for more than 50 years, to who knows how many people. I drank my last Coke and ate the last of the donuts and jerky, thinking about a life (
many lives
) interrupted but not cut short … transplanted instead, but kept/contained/limited beyond all reason, and for the rest of each of those lives. I had to think, to move, to act, to react, but I felt a ponderous weight settling on me as the gravity of what I now knew filled my head, seemingly from side to side and bottom to top, crowding everything else out.

They had kidnapped Deirdre Crocker in 1958, and kept her in an oubliette, a French term for a prison in which to forget/lose someone, adding another cell a
nd more prisoners as each died either sick or crazy but always alone. She was certainly dead, but there might be one or two prisoners caged in the cells under Juniper Bay. I had to do something … had to act, but I had no clear idea of what I could/should/would do. In this situation, I fell back on my training with SmartPig over the last few years, and let instinct take over … I left the library with all of my things, intent on eating a few pounds of mediocre Chinese food before falling into my hammock for a few hours to let the custodians in the back of my skull slam the mess that my brain was, back into shape, and hopefully wake up knowing the best course of action to take.