The Cthulhu Encryption Read online

  “Johnson is unclear as to the details, but Edward England was deposed from his command by one of his subsidiary captains, John Taylor, apparently for attempting to forge a treaty of his own with the East India Company via one of its captains that the pirates had captured. Taylor marooned England on Mauritius; he is said to have escaped, but he disappeared from the historical record thereafter.

  “In collaboration with Taylor, Levasseur then made the single biggest capture ever attained by any pirate anywhere, when the two of them captured the Portuguese galleon Nossa Senhora del Cabo—Our Lady of the Cape, in English—which was carrying the Bishop and Viceroy of Goa home to Lisbon, with the respective fortunes they had made by colonial plunder. The haul was so massive than when the routine division of gold, silver and gems was made between all the members of the various pirate crews—who must have numbered more than a hundred—each man is said received a fortune worth more than a million francs in today’s money. Taylor and Levasseur, as captains, obtained an extra share, which was largely made up of goods other than metals and precious stones. Levasseur, however, took the most celebrated artefact: the so-called Flaming Cross of Goa—a church ornament made with gold plundered from the Indian continent.

  “So much is fact. You will forgive me, however, if I digress into speculation. The pirates’ only thought, at that moment, must have been to retire from their exacting profession and live in luxury on the booty they had seized—but that was not an easy thing to do. You have both read Le Comte de Monte Cristo, of course—another tale partly based on the legend of Levasseur—and were no doubt seduced by the idea of Edmond Dantès employing his discovered hoard to establish a brilliant new identity for himself, but can you imagine how difficult that would have been to accomplish in reality, especially for the common seamen in the pirate crews? Imagine a hundred uncouth mariners, who had never been anything but poor and dissolute, suddenly in possession of gold, silver and diamonds worth more than a million francs apiece—and every one of them liable to be hung if they were found in possession of such goods or ever identified as a pirate!

  “Where could they go? How could the pirates hold on to or spend their fortune without attracting the attention of the law—or, even worse, other murderous robbers! Remember that their rival Angria, based on the far side of the India Ocean, had a fleet of his own, which far outnumbered theirs. How could they not only escape that sort of predation, but establish new identities for themselves, and convert their weighty holdings into property and paper: title-deeds, bonds and share-certificates that would guarantee them a princely income? Could they rely on old friends and distant family-members, given the attendant risks? Could they negotiate on successful terms with money-changers, merchants and bankers—the legalized pirates of modern civilization, no less ruthless than the seaborne kind? How many of that hundred-and-some, do you suppose, can have lived long enough to derive the comfort and joy for which they had so long yearned from their gains? Perhaps one…or none at all.

  “The only two men who could possibly have been in a position, in terms of their knowledge, experience and social contacts, to carry through any such project were the two captains, Levasseur and Taylor—but Taylor himself was an upstart sailor, who had recently got rid of his own former commander, Edward England. Levasseur was the man who was most likely to succeed in making productive use of his amazing wealth—and I presume that most of his crewmen stayed with him, eager to follow his lead. Levasseur wanted, and certainly tried, to return to France. It is recorded that he attempted to take advantage of an amnesty offered to repentant pirates by the French state—but in exchange for the amnesty, the state wanted his booty, and he was not prepared to hand it over. He left France again, and apparently attempted to settle in the Seychelles, but he could not hide for long. He was eventually captured there, returned to Paris, and hanged in 1830. The bulk of his treasure, however, remained hidden—perhaps secreted while he was in France, or perhaps hidden in the Seychelles; at any rate, it was not recovered.

  “At this point in the story, legend takes over. What legend says is that Levasseur wore a locket of some sort around his neck, in which there was a piece of paper, on which a cryptogram was inscribed. On his way to be hanged, Levasseur is reported to have thrown that locket into the crowd, saying that his fortune would belong to anyone who could solve its mystery. The locket was never seen again, although pieces of paper turn up from time to time, bearing what is claimed to be the original or a copy of the cryptogram contained therein. It is the principal Parisian equivalent of the maps hawked to credulous individuals in the Americas, supposedly showing the location of Blackbeard’s loot or Captain Kidd’s. At any rate, legend holds that there is a vast hoard of gold, silver and gems still buried somewhere, in France, the Seychelles, or some other island in the Indian Ocean.”

  “But you doubt it?” I queried.

  “I do. We do not know how much of his fortune Levasseur might have lost to theft, or traded away, while he was still alive, and we would not necessarily know if anyone had found it after his death, if they were wise enough to conduct themselves discreetly. Gold can vanish with surprising alacrity, when the voracious scent it. Levasseur was nicknamed La Buse—the buzzard—but the moment he became rich, he was competing with eagles. Levesseur lived for more than eight years after the capture of the Portuguese treasure-ship, and he must have spent or lost a considerable fraction of his wealth. In all likelihood, he and his crewmen did bury some of it, probably in more than one location—but a further hundred and twenty years has passed since then. Any surviving crewmen surely returned to the sites they knew, and might well have given information to others in a less melodramatic fashion than Levasseur is reputed to have done. The chances of any such treasure meaning where it was buried to this day are, to my mind, very slim. On the other hand…it is not merely the Flaming Cross of Goa and the gold coins that have not been seen again.”

  “What else?” asked Chapelain, who was clearly fascinated by the story. I was enraptured myself, but I got up to close the window nevertheless, having found that the cold draught of night air was becoming irritating.

  “The versions of the legend repeated in the cabarets of the Marais and the theaters of the Boulevard du Temple,” Dupin continued, “naturally make no mention of anything but gold, silver and precious stones—but when their counterparts are whispered by the bouquinistes of the Seine, or among the stacks of Père France’s shop, they take on a slightly different complexion. Money is only money, after all—a game of numbers—but the Bishop of Goa’s book collection is another matter.”

  “Ah!” I said, realizing that we were now getting to the heart of the problem, in Dupin’s view. If, one day, he were ever to stumble upon an iron-bound sea-chest full of gold, silver diamonds and rubies, in some forsaken cranny of the Parisian carrières—it was impossible to imagine him on a desert island in the Seychelles—he would very likely sigh over the inconvenience and distraction that its disposal would cause him; but if, at the bottom of the chest, there were some Medieval manuscript illegibly scribbled in an arcane script….that would make his eyes shine.

  “The bishop was a churchman and a scholar of sorts, as well as a merciless plunderer,” Dupin continued. “He is reputed to have amassed a collection of Sanskrit manuscripts second to none while he was supposedly in charge of the spiritual welfare of the subcontinent’s Catholic converts—and he is also reputed to have had a substantial quantity of Latin and Greek texts, some of them stolen from the British East India Company, whose burgeoning commercial empire surrounds and threatens Goa. British ships sometimes fall victim to Spanish and Portuguese pirates, of course as well as vice versa—but the most interesting fragment of the rumors attached to the Bishop’s priceless collection concern books stolen from the very heart of England, by a very ingenious Portuguese sneak-thief: from the library of John Dee himself, which was supposedly lost when a mob stormed his house in Mortlake and supposedly burned the bulk of it.”

  “Dee the w
izard?” I queried. “The man who was duped by a confidence-trickster who claimed to be able to talk to angels by means of a black stone?”

  “Such is his posthumous reputation,” Dupin confirmed. “In the same way that every great scientist prior to the Age of Enlightenment attracted suspicions of wizardry by virtue of his abstruse intelligence and arcane interests—but with an extra and more vital factor, in Dee’s case.”

  “Which was?” asked Chapelain. He was extremely tired, and seemed hardly to be able to keep his eyes open, now that the brandy and tobacco he had consumed were taking effect, but he was utterly fascinated, and determined to pursue Dupin’s study to the end.

  “Dee and his initial collaborator, Leonard Digges, were the finest mathematicians in England in their day,” Dupin continued, “and were also passionately interested in astronomy and optical science—the keys to successful navigation. Nowadays, of course, we take the instrumentations of navigation—charts, sextants, octants, compasses, telescopes and marine chronometers—entirely for granted, but most of those aids were uninvented in the sixteenth century, and those that were known could not be fully exploited. We do not know to this day how many of them Digges and Dee devised, because all the discoveries they made were secrets of great value, carefully hoarded in order go preserve England’s naval advantages for as long as humanly possible. Digges had the misfortune to meddle too intrusively in politics, and was ruined, but that only made Dee all the more precious, not merely to the Royal Navy but, perhaps more importantly, to the Guild of Merchant Adventurers and the founders of the joint-stock company that became the British East India Company. He provided their manuals of navigation and their training programs, and played a vital role in allowing the British East India Company to overtake and eventually obliterate the rival Dutch East India Company and the Portuguese commercial concerns operating out of Goa. There was no one more vital than John Dee to the maintenance of Britain’s empire of the waves—and England’s enemies knew that, even though most of his own countrymen were ignorant of the fact, and many were stupid enough to fear and loathe him for his education and enterprise.

  “There is no doubt that a mob did attack Dee’s house during his absence, that they overcame the guards posted to look after it, and that they attempted to burn it to the ground—but who commissioned that mob, and what became of those manuscripts that did not perish in the fire, we do not know. Dee was visiting the continent at the time, and immediately went to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, probably because he thought the Emperor might be able to help him to discover what had become of the manuscripts, and perhaps to recover some of the most precious ones. He lingered in Prague for some time, but his hopes appear to have been dashed; he returned to England empty-handed, having abandoned any further questing to his associate Edward Kelley—the skryer who supposedly talked to angels. Dee could not possibly go to Lisbon, of course, although Elizabeth doubtless made what use she could of her spies in that enemy capital on his behalf. The books that remained in England eventually ended up in the British Museum, but the ones that did not were probably the most precious of all.”

  “And what were they?” Chapelain asked.

  “They included the core of Roger Bacon’s manuscript collection, which Dee had acquired. That would have included two of the three lost books of Sanchuniathon. numerous alchemical and magical texts, including at least two versions of the Clavicule Salomonis. There was also said to be a copy of a text known as the Necronomicon, which Dee had attempted to translate from Latin into English, although the Latin translation had been made from a Greek translation of a text allegedly first written in Arabic, and was doubtless hopelessly corrupt. In addition to the Bacon inheritance, the lost texts undoubtedly included some of Dee’s own manuscripts, including the originals of his navigational manuals, and the only known copy of one of his own collections of cryptograms, the so-called Claves Demonicae. A copy of its counterpart, the Claves Angelicae, survived, although it is probably a reconstruction, and very likely defective. I have seen a copy of the copy, and have studied the cryptograms it contains, which are in the same seven-by-seven format as the one I have here, but use markedly different symbols, probably devised by Dee or Kelley, and are opaque as to their meaning.”

  He had not given the piece of paper that Chapelain had shown him back to the mesmerist, and now seemed inclined to hang on to it, but he raised it indicatively as he spoke the final sentence. Chapelain peered at it again, in a bleary-eyed fashion implying that he could no longer bring it properly into focus.

  Trying to connect up the pieces of the puzzle, I said: “So you think that the cryptogram in Levasseur’s possession, which he threw into the crowd when he was hanged, might have come from one of Dee’s books, which ended up in Goa via Lisbon, after being stolen from London? And you think that the cryptogram tattooed on Chapelain’s dying whore might be the same one?”

  “As to those matters, I still have a scrupulously open mind,” Dupin said, in his usual infuriating manner, “but with regard to the question of whether there might be some connection, I am certainly prepared to take an interest—enough interest, at least, to make it worth my while to visit Bicêtre first thing in the morning, if that can be arranged.”

  “But I still don’t see what connection there can possibly be between my patient and Olivier Levasseur,” Chapelain objected, wearily.

  “Nor can I,” said Dupin, “but Levasseur was caught and hanged. John Taylor was never found. Captain Johnson wrote his book too soon to make any comment on his eventual fate, but other sources report, vaguely, that he settled in India. If that is true, he must have had help. If his friends belonged to the East India Company—which seems the likeliest possibility—they surely demanded a large tribute in gold and diamonds in return for their help, and certainly had the institutional means to redistribute such produce without attraction undue attention. At any rate, there was no evidential trace of him for a long time, and so far as I know, no one has the slightest idea of the circumstances in which he lived or died—but now, unless I am linking the information you have gleaned about your patient to Père France’s enquiry in an overly fanciful manner, there is a provincial bibliophile who possesses some indication that the name Taylor assumed when it become impolitic to be John Taylor any longer, might have been….”

  “Leonys,” I put in swiftly, eager to claim what little credit I could for deductive acumen. “Hence the bibliotaph’s speculative linkage of the two names.”

  “Exactly,” Dupin confirmed.

  “You think my patient might be this John Taylor’s descendant, four or five generations removed?” Chapelain queried. “Or do you think she might have acquired the name by marriage to one of the pirate’s descendants?

  “I am in no position to judge, as yet—but the possibility seems to be worth investigating.”

  “A pity, in either case,” Chapelain went on, “that it’s the wrong pirate—the one who never came to France—although I suppose that they might both have had a copy of the cryptogram, and might each have tried to preserve it in his own way. If she had the key to a fortune in gold and gems inscribed on her back, though, she’d hardly have ended up as a streetwalker in the gutters of Paris. It’s all too tenuous, in any case—probably the merest of coincidences.”

  “But you said before that she might not even have known that the inscription was there,” I reminded him, “and if she had, she surely would not have had the key to the cipher.”

  “As I remarked previously,” Dupin observed, patiently, “fortunes can disappear with remarkable rapidity, when one does not have the wherewithal to husband them and help them grow. In the course of the five generations the separate us from the seizure of Our Lady of the Cape, even a million francs might evaporate.”

  “And manuscripts might rot, especially in the torrid climes of India,” I put in, causing him to wince.

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “Speech and script are only a little less transient than dreams, a
las…unless one takes great care to preserve them. Even signs and symbols hewn in stone eventually fade away before the forces of erosion…but with the aid of copyists, some things do survive, only gradually corrupted over hundred, or even thousands of years…and even dreams sometimes recur.”

  “So you really think this woman might have been…let’s call it tattooed, until I can figure out exactly what was done…in the interests of preserving this…magic spell…for want of a more reliable kind of copying?” Chapelain was clearly finding that hard to swallow.

  “I have an open mind,” Dupin repeated, “and no particular expectations, but you know how hard it is for me to resist a puzzle, and this”—again he held up the copy of the cryptogram—“is now a very intriguing puzzle, even if it has only become so by virtue of my fanciful elaborations. Will you take me to Bicêtre in the morning, in order that I might investigate the matter further?”

  I frowned slightly at that, because he had said I, not us.

  “I have a consultation at nine, and another at ten,” Chapelain replied. “I might be free by noon, though. I doubt that Leuret will object to my turning up without an appointment, in spite of our little spat. At the end of the day, he needs my help desperately if he is to impose any order at all on the chaos of his crowded wards. Shall I meet you here, or at your apartment?”

  “Here,” Dupin said—and my frown cleared. He had, after all, no intention of excluding me from what promised to be an intriguing adventure.

  “If all three of us are going, we’ll have to take a fiacre,” Chapelain observed. “My fly can only carry two.”

  Dupin did not even hesitate. “We will take a fiacre,” he said.