Notes from the Grey Tower

His smiled, eyes forming pleased crescents, and suddenly got off the car to circle around to where I stood. Before I could react, he had already pushed me onto the window of his sedan. 

“Button up your shirt.” He ordered.

I had left the first two buttons of my shirt open to let off the heat. I blinked, offended. “I’m sacrificing my body for the eyes of passing ladies here.”

He smiled again, said nothing, and abruptly pinned me down with his left hand while forcibly buttoning up my shirt with his other. The whole process took only a few moments and I couldn’t move during at all. 

Later, when I asked how he managed to do that, he casually replied. “The MI6 is a spy agency, after all. Combat skills are a necessity.”

He let go of me, musing. “Perhaps we could try seeing each other for a while.”

“Alan, you’ve been spacing out too much these days.” Edgar pointed out. “You look like you could be grinning at a lamppost for an entire hour.”

I dreamily told him about how I went to Andemund to change my grades, and how he had promised to try romancing with me. Of course, I’d excluded the part about Bletchley Park.

“He picks me up in his car and we have a date in London twice each month. He said he’s not opposed to men. He told me, how would he know if we weren’t suitable for each other without trying?”

At the time, Edgar was painting as I modeled for him. The man on the canvas was lithe, expression bright, and he sat beneath a tree, reading, as a slight breeze swept past where he sat.

“My hair is chestnut brown, not blonde. The breeze can’t possibly make my hair look this good. Plus, my eyes aren’t this deep of a shade of blue. They’re blue-grey.” I complained. “You haven’t captured my flirtatious likeness at all.”

Edgar said. “There’s something off about this. Alan, you better draw some distance between yourself and Andemund.”

“Homosexuality is outlawed,” he reminded me. 

Andemund kept firmly to his word. He came to Cambridgeshire twice a month for me. We would weave through the busy streets of London, dine at a restaurant, and go to the movies after it was all over. Andemund would always pick the restaurants we went to, and I would try dishes from all over France, Germany and Italy, in that order. I wolfed everything down as he gazed at me, intrigued. “You aren’t opposed to kissing me.”

Nonsense. I desperately wanted to kiss him, and very badly too.

“And if I wanted to bed you?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Darling, would you like to try?”

Andemund appeared to seriously consider it for a moment and shook his head. The silver demitasse spoon he was holding swirled lightly in his cup of coffee, tinkling softly as it went. “Alan, you’re still too young for this.”

He would occasionally talk about the times. About how Hitler was spreading his idea of racial supremacy all over Germany, how he was oppressing the Jews in his country, and about the increasingly radical members of the Nazi Party. The Soviet Union had set its eyes on Poland, and Italy was just starting to devolve into a dictatorship. The world was going to go to war, Andemund told me. 

He would tilt his head to the side as he spoke, as if he was staring out into a distance far beyond the restaurant. I followed his gaze outside, but could only see a grey swathe of clouds stretching indefinitely into the distance.

He would also talk about cryptography. 

Ciphered messages had already been commonly used when the First World War occurred twenty years ago. During the war, radio waves had connected troops on land, in air, at sea and underwater into one giant, singular entity. Important military information had often been exchanged through radio signals at that time. 

However, the radio waves could not only be intercepted by your own troops, but also by the enemy. There were radio towers all over England that intercepted such ciphered messages and delivered them to Andemund for deciphering. If we could decipher the German’s messages from their radio signals, then we would be able to accurately know the next steps Hitler and the Nazis were about to take. 

I hadn’t been alive during First World War. By the time I was born everything had already been settled. The economy was already on its first steps of recovery, the population rose, and the towns and villages began bustling with life once more. Time ebbed away in the books and within Edgar’s paintings. I missed my parents greatly, but I wasn’t bitter. If not for Andemund, I wouldn’t have known the looming threats that lurked behind the facade of our apparent prosperity. While everyone basked in peace and comfort, Andemund concluded from his deciphered texts (his conclusions turned out to be correct, in hindsight) that the world was edging closer to war by day. 

“If the world really were to go to war,” he told me, “all we can do is to end it quickly, and emerge victorious as soon as possible.”

I couldn’t deny that every date with Andemund went perfectly. But his subordinate that followed him everywhere was starting to drive me mad. His driver, also his adjutant, was the man who had punched me to the floor back at the church at King’s College. Peter’s expression was always stoic, and whenever you wanted to admire the scenery outside while having dinner you would always see him standing guard outside, back straight as a pole; when I tried to slip my hand around Andemund’s waist during a car ride, he would emotionlessly swerve in another direction all of a sudden.

“The work I do is of too much importance. I can’t not bring my adjutant along when going out.” Andemund apologized after my numerous complaints to him. “Unless you come over to where I live.”

I knew Andemund belonged to the military, but I didn’t know how highly he was ranked there, as I’d never seen him in uniform before. I went to ask Peter about it one day. He thought about it for a while and vaguely replied. “I work as Mr. Garcia’s driver, and I rank as a lieutenant in the military.”

Afterwards we began having our dates at Andemund’s house in urban London. Peter would drive us to the front door, and return alone back to Bletchley Park. 

Andemund often waited for me in front of his piano. His abode was more simple than I thought it was. It was an individual two-story building, complete with a veranda and a garden that was ridden with wild grass and weeds. He lived alone with only an old servant in his house, so the rooms at his house were all empty.

The living room was clean and minimalistic. A patterned woolen carpet was placed over the floor, and on the khaki sofa was a sofa cover that was there because of a lack of visitors. Several famous oil paintings hung on the walls, which I came learn were all genuine later. 

The study and the master bedroom were both on the second floor, and the room next to them contained the piano. The massive room was awfully empty save for the black grand piano that stood silently next to the windows. 

I looked around at my surroundings. “You live quite modestly, don’t you?” 

“This is only a temporary residence. My family’s mansions are located in Newcastle and Darlington. When autumn comes and the weather gets cooler, I’ll bring you over to hunt in the grounds there.” He explained while smiling.

It was then that I knew Andemund could play the piano. He often played the same piece over and over again, its tune soft and mysterious like the sweet nothings whispered between lovers in the dark of night.

“The pieces I’m playing belong to the Enigma Variations composed by Edward Elgar. The inventor of the Enigma machine named it after this orchestral work. The Enigma’s key consists of 3 times 10^114 possible permutations. To put things into perspective, there are only 10^79 atoms in the universe observable by human technology. The Enigma, by logic, is hence theoretically unsolvable.”

Whenever Andemund played the piano, he would always appear completely immersed in the music, his eyes half closed, eyelashes hanging lightly upon his face. Music flowed from beneath his slender fingers as he touched upon the keys, and echoed melodically within the room. 

The ways Andemund entertained himself at home were simple. Either he played the piano, or he read and talked with me on the sofa. Most of the time he stayed in his study calculating until night fell, the notes stacked on his desk written full of words in dark ink. 

When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I began trying to assist him in his work. 

There were other codes aside from the Enigma that needed decrypting, codes retrieved from Germany and Italy. Before decryption, the papers containing the codes piled on the desk were only useless scraps of waste paper. 

Andumund allowed me to decrypt Code S. This code from Germany was used infrequently, but was extremely difficult to decrypt. The few codes that they had managed to retrieve were all locked in the lower level of the safe. 

It was a ridiculous kind of date. We took up a corner each in his study, him attempting to break the Enigma while I attempted to decrypt Code S. We could go hours without speaking to each other, the sound of our pens skidding against paper being the only noise in the room. I had to learn German, too, since the decrypted messages from Germany were all written in their language. 

I would study German aloud while leaning against the window in the study. My German was horrendous, and sometimes Andemund would stop writing to walk over, encircling my waist from my back and pointing out my errors. I would then turn to kiss him, and he would let me. 

Andemund later admitted that he had allowed me to decrypt Code S only because I was a nuisance to his work. He hadn’t expected for me to successfully decrypt it at all. 

For efficient decryption, it was the best to be in possession of both the plaintext and ciphertext, or even better, expired keys. Yet I only had the ciphertext at hand. I attempted to decrypt it by applying probability theory, attempted countless classic decryption methods, but ended up with nothing. I even tried using the names of several well-known German piano pieces as the decryption key, since there was no way of telling just what the encryptor had set the key as. One day, while having a chat with Andemund, he mentioned that Code S was most frequently used for weather reports within the German military. In order to ensure safety at sea, the German navy would send out weather reports from the shores of Norway to patrolling ships. Military vessels often went out for one to two months at a time, during which they kept in contact with each other through radio signals encrypted with Code S. 

“Then the contents of the messages must be unvaried.” I said. “Reports on the weather, humidity, wind direction… and what else?”

Andemund thought about it. “Not only would the content be unvaried, but the items reported each time must be standardized.”

He grabbed me. “What exactly did you find out?!”

I hastily flipped through the ciphertexts I was holding and compared each page meticulously. I grasped Andemund’s shoulder. “Are there any more intercepted messages? The more the better!”

Inspiration always struck when you were on the verge of giving up. 

It was simple. The way I tried to decrypt the messages before was by utilizing letter frequency analysis, which meant that I had to first retrieve the frequency of letter distribution within the German language, and by comparing the distribution to that of the ciphertext, assign each letter in the ciphertext a corresponding letter in plaintext so as to decipher its message. 

I had been wrong, in fact. Turns out the frequency distribution I had to find wasn’t the letter distribution, but the distribution of phrases.

I had to collect the most common phrases used in weather reports, such as ‘wind direction’, ‘cloudy’, ‘north wind’ et cetera, compare them with the weather conditions of the Norwegian shore during the month in which the ciphertext had been intercepted, and guess the meanings of the repeated phrases within the ciphertext by the data collected.

What allowed me to be so certain of this way of decryption though, was the fact that Andemund told me that all items reported had to be standardized. It was very likely that the item to be reported was stated at the start of the message.  

The first sentence I managed to decipher was a phrase repeated thrice at the beginning of the ciphertext:

To the respected Colonel Lyon

Decrypting Code S took me three months. Andemund wouldn’t let me bring the ciphertexts back to Cambridge, so I had to memorize small phrases of ciphertext each time before I returned, transfer them onto a notebook, and carry them around on me as I continued to ruminate over them. 

Edgar said I had changed. I’d gotten thinner, too.

Before, when we used to kill time beneath the willow tree next the River Cam, it was always him sketching on his canvas while I appraised the faces and bodies of the women passing by. Now, as I laid on the grass looking through my notebook, he aimlessly talked about nothing in particular.

“Have you been smitten by math lately?” He asked.

“No, I’m smitten by Andemund.” I replied. “You’ll never understand how it feels to fall in love at first sight.”

“But you and I, it was also love at first sight, too.” He protested.

“Bug off. Who was the one who said he was going to devote the love of his life to oil painting again?”

As I broke in the last lines of the ciphertext, I leapt up from the library desk. Everyone in the reading room stared at me, but I didn’t care. I dashed out into the curved corridors of the library, yelled three times at the sky, and went on a car headed for Bletchley Park. 

I heard Edgar call for me from my back, and I excitably turned to wave back at him.

Though I did get blocked at the entrance of Bletchley Park, as I didn’t have an invitation this time around. Without Andemund present at his office, the guards called for his assistant Anne. A blonde beauty came out shortly and told me to wait for Andemund in the room I’d waited for him previously. 

“You falsely introduced yourself as Lindon last time.” She glanced at me as if to give me a warning. “This is the MI6. If it weren’t for Mr. Garcia, you would have been arrested as a spy.”

I leaned on the leather sofa while waiting for Andemund. He had a picture frame on his office desk that showed a photo of him in his youth, the Lindston* Medal hanging above his chest. He hadn’t changed much since then. His expression in the photo was serious, the verdant colour of his eyes bringing out a grim air about him that was unusual for people his age. 

I picked up the frame to take the photo out for a better look. Another photo that had been stacked behind it fell out.

I was shocked.

The hidden photo was a woman with chestnut curls. She was standing alone beside a window, smiling with her head tilted towards the camera. Her smile was warm and sweet, her blue-grey eyes eyes gentle.

I knew these eyes very well; I had been looked upon by them for five years.

Because that was my mother.

Andemund had once told me, “The reason why I made you give up on cryptography, was out of respect for your deceased parents.”

*Original text “林斯頓數學勳章”, pronounced in Mandarin “lin si dun”. I was unable to find its real world equivalent. 

[4/2/2021] Translator’s notes: (Good old fashioned lover boy plays at the start of the chapter)

Not too much to say because this chapter was a nightmare. The amount of cryptology terms that I had to google made me want to cry and I’m sure I also made some mistakes along the way, though I can’t spot them out with my limited knowledge. Going off on a tangent though, I recently listened to the audio drama and god i love them so much

This chapter came 1 week late because of my exams. Future chapters will probably come at even worse intervals– or not, depending on how painful the chapter is to translate and the amount of deadlines I have to fight.