Notes from the Grey Tower

I questioned Arnold, astonished. “Isn’t your family name Visco?”

At the time my hands were shoved in my pockets, my back leaned against the banister as I impatiently waited for the brat to finish with his arithmetic exercises. Arnold took his cup of afternoon tea in his hands and leaned beside me. He turned his head, gaze sweeping across the long, red and lushly carpeted stairs, and finally landed on the cold gold-lacquered grandfather clock and the porcelain decor in the main hall. 

I heard him sigh. “My mother was General Bradleigh’s only daughter, and was married off to Earl Visco. General Bradleigh is my grandfather. An arranged marriage between families. It was expected for her.”

If you were to flip through the volumes of “A Military History of Britain”, you would have found that the Bradleigh family had produced one outstanding general after another. The old General Bradleigh graduated from the Royal Military College Sandhurst, furthered his studies at the Staff College of Camberly, and almost lost his life fighting in the world war twenty years ago with Ireland. Arnold told me, “When I decided I would accept Andemund’s suggestion to go to Bletchley Park, my father and grandfather locked me upstairs for a week— they wanted me in the army. You know, family relations…”

“How did you get into Bletchley Park later?”

Arnold replied. “Mr. Garcia came in person saying that the Secret Intelligence Service needed a  psychoanalyst. He talked with the old man in the hall downstairs for five minutes, then immediately afterwards they got someone to unlock my room upstairs and let me out.”

Arnold came from a rich background, but whenever he mentioned Andemund while speaking, he always referred to “Mr. Garcia” with an air of respect, as if Andemund was an entity that held some kind of authority or power that I didn’t know of. 

He briefly pointed at the study. “I’m counting on you to beat my cousin into shape. Else the old man’ll drag me back from Bletchley Park any day soon to arrange me into a marriage.”

I wanted to tell him about how the brat only got fifteen out of fifty arithmetic questions right yesterday and that he shouldn’t have his hopes up for anything.

Arnold asked me why I wanted to come here to work as a private tutor. I shrugged. “Inflation happened and I got too broke to pay rent— before I landed this job I was two weeks behind on rent. Almost got kicked out by the landlady back then.”

“Mr. Andemund didn’t pay you for the breakup? He’s so wealthy; if you had just asked for some of  his money you wouldn’t have needed to be here now.” Arnold said innocently. “I pay all the girlfriends I dump.”

My mood was stormy. “Fuck off. I’d pay to dump him.”

He spoke if he’d just remembered something.  “Oh, about the message you wanted me to bring to Mr. Garcia about you only choosing him because of his pretty face. He told me to tell you he says thanks.”

As time went on I found that Arnold often came to Cambridgeshire in his free time. He lived in the general’s mansion, far away from his general grandfather who was living in London, his father and Andemund, and spent his entire holiday indulging himself frivolously. The doctor’s schedule was as follows: He would wake up at noon, eat lunch with his grandmother (Madam Bradleigh), and maintain his refined appearance. In the afternoon he would drink in an underground bar, and maintain still his refined appearance. At night he’d have his fun with women until daybreak, go to sleep, and regain his refined appearance afterwards.

He even invited me along with him. “My dear Alan, if you’re free this afternoon, what about a drink with me at the Cherry Bar? Since you’re already over Mr. Garcia, anyway.”

At the time Lindon had already obtained the right to stay overnight at Andemund’s mansion. I naturally accepted Doctor Visco’s invitation.

It was the underground bar he brought me to last time. I sat at the bar table flirting with the handsome bartender while Arnold weaved through the crowds holding his blue margarita, squinting in search of attractive women. I placed my arms on the bar table and drank a bunch of liquor I didn’t remember the taste of, which continued until the bartender got someone to throw me out. Arnold came to find me outside, his hand wrapped around the waist of a busty woman. He was mystified. “Did you also go after Mr. Garcia this way? By clinging on and not letting go?”

I crawled up from the floor and lifted an eyebrow. “You got something against that?”

“I didn’t know Mr. Garcia was so easy.” He nodded sagely. “Alan, why don’t you try pursuing me? Though I’m betting on myself not giving in to your pursuits.”

The next day I told the brat displeasingly, if his grandmother asked him again where his older cousin went during the day, he should answer with the Cherry Bar. 

In reality, Arnold wasn’t aware of a lot of things. 

Such as how I had helped Andemund crack Code S, and took on the codes Lindon couldn’t solve. Every month Lindon would send me a sum of money from his income. I was broke as hell, but since Lindon’s bank account was monitored closely by the MI6, any regular transferrals would come under their scrutiny. Hence, the amount of money he could transfer to me without raising any suspicion was very little. 

And such as how Andemund and I could decipher a portion of Enigma-encoded telegrams without the use of equations. 

The most difficult problem when it came to deciphering the Enigma was finding the the initial positions of the three rotors preset on any day. It had a total of 1 058 691 676 442 000 possible permutations, and what we had to do was to find the one correct permutation among the 1 058 691 676 442 000 possible permutations.

It was like pinpointing one specific star system in the vast universe, or finding one suitable grain of sand in a desert spanning across three kilometres. 

How I discovered this way of deciphering the Enigma was, in fact, entirely by coincidence. I was sitting at the front of the library with nothing better to do, watching the rare women of Cambridge pass by when I thought of how the Enigma machine utilised a keyboard for input. The machine we found was a commercial encoding machine, which differed just slightly from the military machines used to encode the Enigma. 

Andemund told me, as decipherers, we always had to look at things from the cipherers’ point of view. In order to better conceal the contents of their communications, the cipherers would think about what the other party would do. 

I thought that perhaps the keyboard of the Enigma machine didn’t use the keyboard adopted by the conventional typewriter, which had the letters ‘QWERTY’ sequenced from the topmost left row. Perhaps they had anticipated our deciphering of the Enigma based on the QWERTY keyboard, and changed their own keyboards to be sequenced starting from ‘ABCDEF’.

I’d told this to Lindon as a joke, and Lindon had jokingly passed it on to Andemund. So Andemund, the mad bastard, went and tested it out. He tested this on almost a thousand samples encoded in the Enigma, then told Lindon that the keyboard sequence of the Enigma machine indeed started with ‘ABCDE’. with letters arranged according to the alphabet and split into four rows and six columns. 

The sequence which the keyboard was arranged in was important since the plaintext was entered through the keyboard of the Enigma machine, then encoded through its rotors and reflector. If we knew how the keyboard was arranged, we could use this information to decipher weaker encrypted texts from the other party. 

The Enigma started its messages with a key of three letters, which determined the original position of the rotors. The ciphering party would cipher the key twice and place it at the start of the ciphertext. For example, if the key of a particular ciphertext were ‘abc’, the first encryption of the key were ‘SCT’, and the second encryption of the key were ‘PIY’, then the ciphertext would start with ‘SCTPIY”. We would have no way of knowing ‘SCTPIY’ had originally been ‘abc’. 

But there was an exception to this. 

Some operators would sometimes slack off and encrypt messages with the first three letters of the keyboard every day, that was, encrypt ‘abc’ twice at the start of their messages. After Andemund figured out the arrangement of the Enigma machine’s keyboard, he perversely managed to decipher a portion of messages encrypted in the Enigma. The talents under his command were extremely sensitive to Morse code and had been able to figure out the different habits of German operators. Andemund had then instructed them to make records of operators that used keys consisting of the first three horizontal letters, diagonal three letters and vertical three letters of the Enigma machine keyboard. 

With the three-letter keys in hand, Andemund and I were able to decipher some messages encrypted with the Enigma.

I spread myself on the large oaken table disbelievingly. “I can’t believe Andemund actually went and tested it out… he went through a thousand ciphertexts just for this…”

Lindon drank his coffee next to me. He wore an alpaca fleece coat, and his mood was pleasant. “If it’s my suggestion, Mr. Garcia usually takes it seriously.”

“My suggestion,” I corrected him. 

Lindon’s expression suddenly went sullen. After a long while, he replied. “I know.”

“If my suggestion turned out to be wrong after testing thousands of ciphertexts, wouldn’t he be fuming right now?”

Lindon shrugged. “He won’t. The last equation you proposed had to be tested on over a thousand ciphertexts and Mr. Garcia didn’t say anything about it. He even treated me to dinner and asked if I was tired from the effort.”

Andemund was always so gentle to people he could use. 

I thought of my mother, Jane Caster. When she was still useful, the MI6 had been gentle to her, too. Our house in London was spacious, and my parents lived on their savings earned before their retirement to study higher mathematics. They hadn’t needed to go out and work at all. At the time my father and her had still been trusted by the Secret Intelligence Service, and they had been doing the work Andemund and I were doing now. She had written in her notes equations that solved the previous iterations of the Enigma. I didn’t know what happened in between, but I knew that my mother, although soft-spoken and frail, had been determined. I wanted to keep her legacy of decrypting codes with equations alive through myself. 

Whether the decryption method was attributed to Lindon or I wasn’t important. As long as it functioned as my mother’s work did and pushed England towards victory in the war on cryptography, I didn’t care if I would become just a name buried in history. 

When Lindon stayed too long at Cambridge, Andemund would make his lieutenant Peter drive him back to Bletchley Park. One day I chanced upon him leaning on a black sedan waiting for someone outside a hotel. He still wore his uniform neatly, the medals on his uniform gleaming. There was no emotion in his expression. 

At the time a biting wind was blowing through the streets. I passed by him and he hailed me to a stop. 

Unexpectedly, he initiated conversation with me. “Alan, you’ve been wearing the same coat the two times I came to Cambridge.”

“Blame inflation.” I said. “I’m still a student. No source of income for me.”

“Mr. Garcia told me to bring this message to you: tell him if you’re low on cash.”

Afterwards, when I went to the bank for a withdrawal a week later, I found a huge sum of money under my name that had seemingly appeared out of thin air. The accountant carefully explained to me that it had come from the Secret Intelligent Service, and that I couldn’t return the money back to its owner. 

It wasn’t the first time Andemund had abused his authority. 

I complained to Arnold about this. “Andemund sent me a god forsaken breakup fee! What the fuck did he take me for?”

Arnold was using my student, the young master Bradleigh, to experiment with hypnosis. “That’s great, isn’t it? Now there’s finally nothing between you and him.”