by Bill Doyle
Lucy scurried over to him and whispered something in his ear. He hesitated for a moment. “Oh, right,” he said quietly to her. And then to the rest of us, he bellowed, “And a doctor! Someone call a doctor for this girl! Her leg is broken!”
JULY 16, 1977
7:30 PM
R.T. and I were in our room in the trailer. We were ready to move on to the next city, Chicago. But the King Tut exhibition was taking longer than usual to pack up, so we were waiting for all the crates and boxes to be carefully loaded into the special trucks.
With my back against the wall, I sat on one end of my bed. R.T. was on the other end, playing with his electronic football game. It was highly advanced—like the new calculators that could fit into your backpack. The football players were little green blips that blinked on a screen. Almost as good as playing pong at the arcade.
But this was no time for games.
“Concentrate!” I said and threw a pillow at him.
“What?” he said. “I am! This is how I think!”
“Well, all that beeping and clicking isn’t helping me.” I stared at the hieroglyphs I had sketched from memory. “How are we going to crack this?”
“Crack what?” R.T. said without looking up. “It’s from a piece of paper you saw on the dirty floor of the backstage area. It’s like Mr. Myles said. The whole thing was an accident. And Carla told me on the way to the hospital that she was glad in a way, because now she’ll get to go home.”
“There could be a connection between what happened to Carla and Richard,” I said. “Do you really think they were both accidents?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You’ve got the brains. I’m dumb as a rock.”
R.T. was just finding an excuse to be lazy, but it did get me thinking.
“Dumb as a rock…,” I repeated. “Or a stone!”
“Hey!” he shouted. He hadn’t expected me to agree with him and fired the pillow back at me. I tried to block it, but it knocked me off the bed. It didn’t matter, though, the idea was already lodged in my head.
CHAMPOLLION’S ROSETTA STONE
In 1822, Jean-François Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to translate this text: King Ptolemy, the beloved of Ptah… the gods have given him health, victory and power… and all other good things.
“If I use the Rosetta Stone,” I said still lying on the floor, “I can read what these hieroglyphs say.”
“So where are we going to find this stone?” R.T. asked.
“Let’s ask our traveling companion.”
“Mr. Myles?”
“No,” I answered. “King Tut.”
R.T. finally looked up from his game.
We rushed into the Cincinnati Museum of Antiquities. This time, though, we went pass the auditorium and toward the King Tut exhibition hall.
Normally, there would be a line of thousands of people trying to get a glimpse of Tut. But because the treasures were being packed up for the move to Chicago, the exhibition was closed to visitors for the day.
“How are we going to get in?” R.T. asked.
Frank
“I’m not sure,” I said. But at the entrance to the hall, I spotted the answer: Frank, the security guard. He was standing next to the Secret Map Box that was still locked up in its case.
“Hi, Frank,” I said. “Mind if we have a quick look in the hall?”
“Hey, boys,” Frank said. “Everything is still locked up tight, so I don’t think it would be a problem. Just be fast, would you?”
We thanked him and hurried past him into the hall. Glass display cases sat under bright spots of light. The gold objects inside glittered and winked as if they were transmitting a message from the past. There were statues, vases, boxes with jewels, jars that held the mummy’s body organs, chests, vessels, thrones, and of course, there was the coffin of King Tut himself.
We were on a mission, but without saying a word, we were both drawn to the mummy of the ancient pharaoh.
King Tut’s mummy
“He looks so together for someone who died more than 3,300 years ago,” R.T said.
I explained that when Howard Carter discovered Tut, the king’s body was undisturbed. The wrapped mummy had been inside a total of three coffins that had been placed inside each other like Russian dolls. While each coffin contained some gold, the third was made a solid gold—240 pounds of it. That makes it the largest piece of ancient gold craftsmanship ever discovered.
R.T. looked impressed. “Carter was a kind of detective.”
“A very patient detective,” I said. “It took him ten years to get everything out of King Tut’s tomb. He didn’t want to miss a single thing.” I glanced up and saw Frank pointing at his watch. “Come on, we have to hurry.”
We made our way to display case two rooms away. Inside was an except copy of the Rosetta Stone. The real stone was in a museum in London, England. But this one would serve our purpose.
I guess I was gazing in awe at the stone, because R.T. asked, “You’re jealous of Champollion, aren’t you?”
“A little,” I said. “I would love the chance to be able to use my code-breaking skills for something so important.
R.T. smiled. “You’ll get your chance. I just know it. So what are we looking at?”
“Hieroglyphs were the ancient language of the Egyptians,” I said. “They were symbols that could be used to represent a sound and as a word. For example, this symbol,” I pointed at the shape of a bird. “It can mean either small or weak… or it can stand for the sound ‘wr.’”
R.T. nodded. “Got it. But how do you know how to use it?”
“If it was meant to stand for the word, there would be a vertical line beneath it. Like this.” I made a slashing motion up and down.
Jewel is a rebus for the throne name of Tut—which translates as “the King is the lord of all creations.”
sun disk at the top = symbol of the sun god, Re
basket = hieroglyph for all
scarab beetle = creation, and the three vertical lines underneath make it plural
I did some quick comparisons between the sketch I had made of the hieroglyphs from the scene of Carla’s accident to the chart near the stone.
“Hmmm …,” I said as it started to come together.
“Okay, Enigma,” R.T. said impatiently. “Spill.”
“It’s not like reading a newspaper. There isn’t a direct translation from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to English.”
“But what do you think it says?”
“CAESAR,” I said.
“Caesar?” R.T. asked. “As in Caesar salad?”
“I’m thinking more along the lines of Caesar code.”
TEC TIP
THE CAESAR SHIFT CIPHER
This cipher, developed by the Roman emperor it was named offer, is easy to create. You simply replace letters in the alphabet with other letters. There are over 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations. Even if each person in the world were to check one possibility every second, it was take more than 1,000 times the lifetime of a universe to check them all!.
R.T. looked at the paper in my hands. “So this is some kind of code.”
“Actually. it’s a cipher. Codes are when you switch whole words around. Ciphers are trickier because you are switching letters around.”
“Okay, that’s TMI,” he said, meaning Too Much Information. “But we don’t have a secret message to decipher!”
“Yes, we do,” I told him. “We have—”
“All right, boys!” The sound of Frank’s voice interrupted me. He was standing in the doorway of the room. “You’re going to have to clear the hall. They’re going to start unlocking the display cases, and only authorized personnel are allowed in here at that point.”
We thanked frank and headed out to the parking lot. We found a shady spot near the trailer and sat down on the concrete.
“So what’s the message that we have to decode?” R.T. asked impatiently.
“The jumbled w
ords that were written below the hieroglyphs,” I told him.
I could still see the message clearly in my mind, one of the advantages of having photographic memory.
I took out my pen and wrote down the words.
RJ NUXQ KRJ NBXTJ
“Okay! That’s not helpful.” R.T. said.
“But we can make it clear.” I said. “We just have to use the frequency chart. It shows the most common letters used in the English language. Then we can make a guess about what letters to swap into the cipher.”
“E is the letter we use most. So we can start with that,” I said, “If you look at the coded message, you’ll see J is the most common letter. So J might be the code for E.”
“How do you know all this?” R.T. asked. He looked impressed.
I shrugged. “It’s called frequency analysis, and it was thought up by a ninth-century scientist known as the philosopher of the Arabs. His name was Abu Yusu Ya’qub ibn Is-haq ibn as-Sabbah ibn ‘omran ibn Ismail al-kindi.”
“Say THAT ten times fast,” R.T. joked.
But I was on a roll and didn’t laugh. “The most common three-letter words are ‘the’ and ‘and.’ The most common two letter pairs are ‘ss,’ ‘ee,’ ‘tt,’ ‘ff,’ ‘ll,’ ‘mm,’ and ‘oo.’”
R.T. shook his head. “But there aren’t any letter pairs. There is a three-letter word, though.”
“Let’s try ‘the’ in its place.”
If ‘the’ was right, that would mean that the H, which had been substituted for the R in the three-letter word, would also take the place of the R at the beginning of the message, and the E for the J would swap in for the other two Js as well.
Soon the message looked like this:
HE NUXQ THE NBXTE
“It says ‘He BLANK the BLANK.’”
“who’s he?” R.T. asked. “And what did he do?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Give me a second.” I stared at the page and let myself and go into the code Zone.
After a few moments, I cried, “I think I have it!” I wrote down the words that filled my mind.
“Let me see.” R.T. took the page from my hands and read it out loud. ‘He paid the price.’ What does that mean?”
“It could be talking about Richard or Carla.”
“But Carla’s a she not a he. And you and I saw Richard’s accident. You were the last person to touch the sand. Do you have something you want to confess?” he asked with a smile.
“If only Lucy hadn’t untied the knot from that rope, we might have been able to tell if someone had tied it on purpose.”
“And you would still be swinging from the rafters. Those hieroglyphs could have come from anywhere, Zeke. We’re traveling with a bunch of old Egyptian stuff. Maybe someone got Tut to sign his autograph or something. It’s probably just a wild coincidence.”
I looked glumly down at the paper. It had seemed so clear moment ago, but now I didn’t know. “That would make as much sense as this, I guess.”
Madame Katerina changed the dance again!
JULY 29, 1977
8:20 AM •CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Last night, we pulled into the Windy City, and our caravan parked in the raised parking lot behind the Museum of Ancient Art. Everyone’s a little frayed around the edges. Which isn’t good. Not only will this be our last show but the biggest—the Secret Map Box will be unlocked at the end!
The stage here is the best yet. There is an actual control room up near ceiling behind the audience. Mr. Myles will be able to sit up there and boss people around.
In fact, he shouted from the control room’s window for me to sweep up the stage before the dancers started rehearsal. Madame Katerina had already gathered the dancers on stage as I swept around them. She was giving them a pre-rehearsal pep talk, but it quickly went sour.
“My Muse visited again last night,” Madame Katerina told them.
The dancers groaned, and one kid even kneeled down and started pounding the floor in frustration.
“Stop whining!” she shouted, slamming her ballet stick down. And the complaining instantly stopped. “Final show is not for five days. We have plenty of time to get right!”
This time, she explained, the lead dancer must make a massive leap almost all the way across the dance floor without touching the ground. while he’s doing that, the chorus had to mirror this move with shorter—but still near impossible—leaps.
“That’s crazy!” the dancers shouted, Max the loudest.
But Madame Katerina didn’t want to hear it. “You will do the dance exactly as instructed. Now I must speak to Mr. Myles regarding business matter. YOU will rehearse new moves.”
Madame Katerina swept off the stage with the tails of her headscarf flapping behind her. While I continued to sweep, the dancers started flinging their bodies across the stage, trying to follow her choreography. They looked like a bunch of crazed puppets that had their strings cut. It was hard to watch, and I put my head in my hands.
“You think it’s easy?”
I looked up startled. Max was standing in front of me. “Let’s see you give it a try.”
I glanced at R.T. He just grinned and shrugged. He wasn’t going to help me—he had always wanted to get me to try a dance move or two, and now was my chance.
“That’s what I thought,” Max said, taking my silence as a refusal to dance.
Something about the way Max turned away, as if I wasn’t really worth his time, changed mind.
“All right,” I said. I set down the broom and stepped into the rehearsal area.
Surprised, Max said, “Okay, good. Come over here. The dance steps go 1, 2, 3… and then 4.”
Max made the leap but stumbled on the landing and fell to his hands knees.
“Exactly. Except you’re not supposed to fall down,” R.T. said with a small smile.
“No problem,” I said. This is it, I thought. This is the moment that I change my life around. I’m not just some brainiac, I’m disco-dancing boogie machine.
1, 2, 3 …
I could see myself in my mind’s eye flying across the space, and the entire room awestruck and cheering my dancing abilities. But in reality, my feet skittered to halt like a plane suddenly putting on the brakes as it was heading down the runway.
“That’s all right, Enigma,” R.T. said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It’s a tough move.”
“Time to go back to the farm,” Max sneered.
R.T. didn’t say anything, but the smile on his face froze. And without even looking at Max, he walked to the far end of the rehearsal space.
R.T. could do max’s leap.
Max must have thought he was fleeing, because he laughed nastily. “That’s right, go on back to your cows and your—”
R.T. spun around and suddenly, he was dancing. He went through the steps.1, 2, 3—he was flying through the air—and BLAM! He landed on his feet.
Only then did R.T. look at Max. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”
Max was speechless for a second and then said, “Huh. Nice job.”
Madame Katerina and Mr. Myles were arguing.
The dancers went back to rehearsing, and I went back to pushing my broom. I was under the control room when I heard the voices of Madame Katerina and Mr. Myles. From this angle, I couldn’t see thern, but it was clear they were having a heated argument.
“You cannot expect me to work with this amateur any longer,” She was saying.“I want him this instant fired!”
“Why?” Mr. Myles said. “Even if Max only does half the leap, it still looks good. Besides, we signed a contract with the kid, and his parents could sue us. I’m not firing him.”
A moment passed, and I could almost see Madame Katerina trying to control her rage. She nodded and said, “You’re right, of course, Mr. Myles. I am feeling the stress of the situation.”
There was suddenly a huge crash from the stage. I looked up in time to see one of the dancers trip and bounce off a nearby wall.
> I realized Madame Katerina wasn’t the only one feeling the stress.
The next day, I woke up from a nightmare with a code in my head. I’d been reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book THE ADVENTURES OF THE DANCING MEN, where he uses stick figures in different poses to represent letters of the alphabet. Ever since I started reading the Sherlock Holmes book, which Richard had lent me, I’d been dreaming about
Holmes’s mortal enemy—Moriarty—only in my dreams, the evil villain never had a face.
With the code from my dream fresh in my mind, I thought Richard would get a kick out of it. He was still in the New Orleans hospital. And he might be lonely.
Careful not to wake up R.T., I climbed out of bed and began writing down the code that was in my head. A code doesn’t have to use just letters or symbols, it can use pictures or planets—or even a pony named Teddy.
At the bottom of the code, I added a quick P.S. asking Richard if had seen anything strange before or after his accident.
I stuck the code in an envelope and addressed it to King Richard at the New Orleans hospital. This should help keep him busy while he recovers, I thought.
I headed out of the trailer and left the parking lot in search of a mailbox. A fancy hotel stood across the street from the museum, and I spotted a mailbox there.
I was dropping the letter in the mailbox when …
“Hello, Zeke.”
That voice!
Feeling my heart leap, I turned—and came face to face with Judge Pinkerton!
“Judge!” I blurted and threw myself into her open arms. I hadn’t realized how homesick I’d been until this very second.
Judge’s real name is Justine Pinkerton, and she’s an old family friend.
