Chapter 25: Local Venture

“Dude, I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Alan exclaimed. “And you’re telling me that skinny black dude in the suave pimp suits did this?”

It was New Year’s Day, 1992. Peter had just faxed some sample pages from the ledger to the Korean supergeek. He was seated behind Sue’s desk in the run-down trading post. The small store had been filled with miscellaneous items before she hooked up with the trader. Now, there was barely room to move, with the addition of her wares from her Holbrook shop, where she processed and sold petrified wood. She had a computer with a modem to log onto the internet and a fax machine to send the pages to his childhood friend.

“Yep, blows my mind too,” he replied as he sat back in the squeaky swivel chair. “So, what can you make of it?” The phone was next to her keyboard, on speaker.

“Damn, Sonny, give me a sec,” the Asian sensation muttered. “One thing that stands out is those breaks you mentioned. Hold on, dude, let me study this...” After a long pause and a sigh. “I need a minute with this. Let me call you back in a few. That squeaking chair is riding on my nerves.” He hung up abruptly, and Peter ceased his impatient rocking with a guilty expression.

Sue reappeared and handed him coffee in a paper cup. “Did it go through?” she asked casually.

He nodded and sipped his drink. “He’s a bit sensitive sometimes,” he replied. “I made him mad with my squeaking.” He leaned back in the old wooden swivel chair, grinning as it squeaked.

“He’s gotta be pretty smart to make anything out of this,” she remarked, touching the open ledger.

“Calling Al ‘pretty smart’ is like comparing that Kachina doll to a live grizzly,” he smiled, recalling their debates and arguments over the years. “This guy’s brain works on a level utterly...” he stopped when his phone buzzed. He answered it, “Go for Shoe.”

“Dude, a couple of things right off the bat,” the Korean boy answered.

“Talk to me, Goose,” Peter replied, sitting forward carefully.

“First, your pimp-stylin friend was left-handed. He wrote each page from right to left, which is ... mind-boggling crazy when you think about it.”

He caught a faint whiff of Sue’s perfume as she leaned over the ledger beside him.

“Also ... even though he wrote right to left, the pages progress numerically from front to back.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Hell, if I know,” he heard. “But the text pattern gives us a clue, which raises my next question—was Jeremiah a polymath? Was he fluent in any other languages ... besides French? Like maybe Sanskrit?”

Peter furrowed his brow. “I don’t know. Maybe Maggy does. Let’s assume for now that he was and did,” he replied cautiously. “Where are you going with this? Why Sanskrit?”

“I think this is a fracture cipher.”

Peter and Sue exchanged bewildered looks.

“What ... the ... what?”

“You know ... when we were kids, we’d break the alphabet into pieces ... the letter K became a vertical line and a ‘less than’ sign. Except this isn’t English.”

Peter shook his head in amazement as he studied the characters in this new light.

“Take the first page you sent me and the first four characters in the upper right corner,” Alan stated. “When you link them together in the logical pattern as they appear, they become a totally different character.”

Peter grabbed a pen and quickly sketched the first character by placing the ‘fractures’ in place. “Holy shit! How’d you figure that out so fast?”

“Because I’m smarter than you,” came the confident response, making Sue giggle silently.

“Yeah, but I’ve never seen a character like that,” he responded dubiously.

“I have,” his friend replied smugly. “That’s why I asked if he knew Sanskrit or one of its derivatives.”

Peter grimaced and tilted his head sideways at Sue with a thin smile. “Okay, dude, you’ve proven you’re smarter. Now, can you dumb it down for a mere mortal?”

A snort came from the other end. “Look, I’ll be honest, Sonny. I may just be pulling this out of my butt right now. But so far, I’ve worked out ... one, two, three...” he paused for a second, “twelve characters unique to Urdu, or Devanagari, which both use Sanskrit-style lettering. And—from what I can see here—there are dozens more.”

Peter rolled his eyes and saw the woman beside him swipe her hand over her head with a bewildered shake. He covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “Oh, he’s just getting started. Now he wants me to work for it.” Into the phone, he replied, “But there are only twenty-six letters in the alphabet.”

“In the English alphabet,” the Korean boy stated smugly.

Peter sighed. “How many letters are there in Sanskrit?” He glanced at Sue and pointed at the phone, ‘wait for it... ‘ he mouthed.

“Fifty-four,” Alan replied quickly, “Ten vowels, or svaras, and forty-four consonants, called vyansas.”

He whistled. “Still, that doesn’t seem too bad,” he mused. “Only about twice as many letters to figure...”

“Four times,” he heard over the speaker.

“What? Why?” he demanded.

“Because each letter has a masculine and feminine variant in Hindi tradition, or Shiva and Shakti respectively.”

Sue put a comforting hand on his shoulder as he grabbed his face with his free hand. “Dude, you’re killing me here!”

“Hey, I gave you something to go on, didn’t I? I hope it leads somewhere.”

“You’ll help me with this, right?”

“Sonny, I can’t,” his friend replied apologetically. “Seriously, dude. I’m up to my ass in alligators right now. I already spent too much time away from my studying with this.”

“But how do I know if it’s Krav Maga or Urdu or...”

“Devanagari,” Al corrected. “I’d go with Urdu first.”

“Why?”

“Because he wrote it right to left, stupid!”

“What does that have to do with the price of rice in China?” Peter groaned, rubbing his temples.

“You’ll have to ask your friend,” he heard quietly. “But following the traditional Babylonian cuneiforms suggests Urdu instead of Devanagari.”

“Babylonian what?”

They heard a sigh. “Look, it’s not germane, okay? But, in ancient Babylon, scribes etched letters into stone tablets. Most scribes were right-handed ... dig?” They heard the impatience in his voice. “So, the scribe would hold the mallet in his right hand and the chisel in his left. The natural tendency, therefore, was to carve letters from right to left.”

“I ... see,” he replied.

“It’s worse for you because I don’t know of any programming language that translates from Urdu, so you’ll have to do it all with pen and paper until you figure it out.”

Peter buried his face in his hands and groaned.

Fifteen minutes later, he logged off her computer and rose to leave. “Do you mind if I have a few packages delivered here?” he asked as he gathered the ledger and his notes. “I need to build a new computer, and I don’t think UPS or FedEx will go to Len’s.”

“Of course, sweetheart,” Sue replied from the front counter where she was making sandwiches for herself and Bradly. “Why did he keep calling you Sonny?”

Peter smiled, “It’s a stupid thing he made up when Kathy and I started dating,” he explained. “I’m Sonny, and she’s Cher.”

She clapped her hands and giggled, “Oh, I totally see it!”

“You guys are gonna have to expand things a bit if you’re going into business together,” he remarked as he squeezed between two loaded shelving units.

“Actually,” she replied, suddenly reticent, “That was something we wanted to discuss with you.”

Standing at the counter, he could tell her husband didn’t share her enthusiasm. He looked down and appeared uncomfortable.