bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1997) — Summer 1997 // Été 1997, pp. 46–48
The Puzzle Ace logician LDC Liebnitz burst into the office of the Centre’s archivist, Dryan Tweedie, his vigorous entrance raising clouds of dust from the shelves and cabinets that flanked his friend’s desk. “Tweedie,” he said urgently, “I need your help on a case.” Coughing wildly, the archivist gestured him to a chair. “Of course, Liebnitz,” he said. “What’s up?”
“We just got a report from Mabel Stanley,” the logician replied. “She’s in Shanghai with her grunge group, Edible Granite. She was approached yesterday in the Huxinting Teahouse by an old Chinese man, a retired gardener named Ah Q, who said he had a message for the Centre. His mind was wandering a bit – he thought Mabel was her grandmother Barbara Undershaft, who worked for us in Shanghai between the wars. Mabel does look like her. The man said he worked with Major Undershaft’s network on something called Operation Jester in 1927. The operation was a success, but the local criminal syndicate, the Green Gang, uncovered the network as a result and broke it up. Ah Q was left with some object important to the operation, but was unable to get in touch with anyone from the Centre to discuss it, and has kept the object hidden ever since. He told Mabel that it was near one of the network’s contact points, but when she pressed him for details, he suddenly tensed at the sight of an approaching policeman, passed her a slip of paper with the cipher message: ISP VZUHRD XEIS ISP LJUHRD’Y ED ISP GEDP DPUJ ISP YSJEDP, and disappeared into the night.”
“Without background, Mabel was stymied — and so am I,” Liebnitz went on. “I don’t even know whether to take the case seriously. Does it ring any bells with you, Tweedie?”
“Dear Mabel,” mused the love-struck archivist, gazing off with a fond smile on his face. Then he snapped to attention. “Of course we must help her at once. Operation Jester … yes, I think I remember a file of that name in the Unfinished Business cabinet.” He disappeared down a gloomy corridor, returning shortly with a folder bound in fading red tape. He leafed quickly through the pages, then placed the file in front of the logician.
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“Let me summarize for you, Liebnitz,” he said. ’In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army was approaching Shanghai, then held (except for the foreign settlements) by warlord Sun Chuantang. At that time the Nationalists and the Communists were allies, but Chiang was about to break the partnership by force. To take the city, the Nationalists needed the help of the Communists under Zhou Enlai; once that was done, Chiang wanted to move against them. But Zhou lived in the French Concession, protected by extraterritoriality from Chinese action. So a deal was made with the Green Gang. The Chairman of the Municipal Council, Stirling Fessenden, would be killed under highly dramatic circumstances, poisoned at the Shanghai Costume Ball, and evidence planted to implicate the Communists. As a result, the Council would turn a blind eye when the Gang took action against Zhou and his colleagues.”
“The Major stumbled across this plot in the course of another operation, but the Centre’s presence in Shanghai was top secret, and she was forbidden to contact the authorities. So she had to plan direct action. She learned that the poison would be put in one of the two antique cups taken to the head table at the Ball for the toast to the King. One cup was from the imperial residence in Hangzhou, the other was from a medieval apothecary’s guild and marked with its symbol. The poisoned cup would go to Fessenden, the other to the Green Gang-affiliated businessman who was his co-host. Which cup would have the poison would only be decided on the day of the ball. To make sure that information got through, the Major told her inside man at the Green Gang to pass it to all the members of the network, as soon as the decision was taken.”
“The network had three men and three women, numbered one to six; each had a different code-name and cover occupation, carried a different passport, and had a different contact site. Each knew how to contact some members of the network but not others. (The Major was not one of the six; as the field director she did not normally carry out operations.) When the Green Gang informant sent his final message to the network, he enciphered it as ordered. But he misunderstood the other part of his orders: instead of passing the whole message to each member, he divided it in six parts and sent one part to each member. In order to get the full message, the Major had to get data from all six.”
“So she asked network member #1 to initiate a “circle call” ’. Member #1 called another member, who called another and so on until the call got back to #1. The circle call was set up so that each member would be called once and would make one call (there is only one way this can be done). By coincidence, the pieces of the ciphered message from the Green Gang informant fit together in the same order as the circle call: member #1 had the first piece, the member who made the last call had the sixth, etc.”
“The rest was played out at the Ball. The Major arranged for a man named Ah Q, an employee of the Centre but not a member of the Jester network, to be hired as a waiter. It must be the same Ah Q who met Mabel. The Green Gang waiter who was to serve the special cups of wine to the head table was coshed in the corridor and Ah Q took his place. When he got to the head table, he gave the poisoned cup to the Green Gang boss and gave Fessenden the safe one. When the gangster refused to drink, people the Major had planted at the ball began to shout “poison”. The boss ran out in panic and the whole plot dissolved. The Gang later wiped out the Shanghai Communists anyway, but Zhou and other key leaders were able to escape.”
“The Green Gang took its revenge for Operation Jester. When the Major’s inside man cracked, he fingered everyone in the network. Even the Major barely escaped with her life. Ah Q just disappeared into the crowd, and we thought until this week that he was dead. But I do know what he has hidden. The antique cups, which were recovered and returned to their owners, were valuable enough. But the carafe from which the wine was poured, given by a Ming emperor to the missionary Matteo Ricci and decorated with the imperial symbol, was almost priceless. Stolen many years earlier, it had been brought to the Ball by the Green Gang leader. The Major, who was attending the ball in disguise but was by training an antiquarian, recognised it and decided to try and restore it to its owners. under close observation by the Special Branch and couldn’t keep it herself. So she took it from the sideboard during the chaos after the poisoning attempt and gave it to Ah Q with instructions to hide it until contacted. He in turn seems to have been waiting, ever since that night in 1927, for contact from a network that no longer existed. He’s 90 now if he’s a day, and he must have seen Mabel as his last chance to keep faith. So we’d better try and find it. What do you think, Liebnitz?”
“The whole affair reads like Hollywood,” replied the logician. “Do we have anything on the individual members of the network and their contact pattern? How about the famous message from the Green Gang informer?” Replied the archivist, “When the network collapsed, all its local records were destroyed. And the major had a temporary breakdown which affected her memory of the events. All the Centre was able to pur togetner is the tollowing (code names in capitals).” He handed Liebnitz a piece of paper.
(a) Mme LITVANOFF, member #1 of the network and the person at the start and end of the circle call, could contact only the policeman, the woman with the bookstore, and the man with the Japanese passport. Her part of the message was ’ISP GPZZPI XEIS”. (b) Network member #5 was contacted at an apartment on Kiangse Road (decorated with aluminum bamboo and other metal plants). She could in turn contact only the reporter (at the Mingxing establishment on Guizhou Road). Her part of the message was “ISP WSUZEWP VJRK”. (c) Ms HAHN, network member #4, was a fortune teller. She could contact only the actress, the man with the Chinese passport and Mr DUKE. She was contacted in the lobby of the anonymous grey building at 185 Foochow Road. (d) Mr UCHIYAMA could contact only the woman with the French passport (in the forest shrine near the old Jesuit cathedral on the Route de Zikawei) and the woman with the White Russian papers (whose part of the message was “MJPX ISUI EY IJQP”). His own part of the message was “ISP GUZUWP SUY ISP”. (e) The Catholic priest, who was network member #6, was contacted at a store on North Szechuen Road (near the writer Lu Xun’s house on Shanyin Road) and could contact only Mr JACQUINOT, the woman with the British passport and network member #3. His part of the message was “ISP GREYRD’Y ED ISP”. (f) The man who was contacted at an office on Nanking Road (above a Chinese herbal doctor’s) could contact only the layman with the American passport and Miss RUAN. His part of the message was “APYYPZ XEIS ISP GPYIZP;”
“That’s more like it,” said the logician. “Okay, let’s say that Ah Q used the same Operation Jester cypher as the Green Gang informant — a simple alphabet substitution. Is there anything else we know about the code, Tweedie?” Replied his colleague, “The Major did note one coincidence — if you put together the first letter of the code names of the six members of the network, in order from #1 to #6, and treat them as a message in the Operation Jester cypher, then it deciphers as DRAGON.”
“Wonderful! That makes it easy!” said Liebnitz, who proceeded in short order to sort everything out and determine the location of the missing flask.
How Does He Do It?
“Easy??” fumed Tweedie after Liebnitz had cabled Mabel where to look. “I have seldom seen a more laboured and confusing report, and you just toss off the answer. I wouldn’t know where to start or how to proceed. How do you do it?”’ His friend replied, “It’s all a matter of how you look at these puzzles. Would you like me to explain how I solved this one, for example?” At the archivist’s nod, he continued. “The first step is to separate out the puzzle itself from all the junk around it. Most of the stuff you told me is interesting but much of it is irrelevant to the solution. The second step is to see how many puzzles you are actually dealing with, and how they connect. You do all this by considering your goals. Here the goal is to find the flask. To do that, you have to break the cypher. To do that, you need to work out the order of the circle call. To do that, you need a table with everyone’s name, network number and other data — especially the identity of the people they can contact. So you start with the table and work your way up, paying attention only to the information you need for each step and ignoring the rest.”
“Now, all the information you need for the table is found in the six clues (a to f), plus the confirmation that there are three men and three women, and the fact that each had a different code-name, cover job, passport nationality and contact site. Create a table with the network numbers (#1 to #6) along the left side and the categories of information across the top (code name, passport, job, contact site and the network members each can contact). Then fill in the table using the information from the clues. Much of this will be by deduction, often by elimination. For example: the code name of member #6. He is a man (inter alia ; because he is a priest), so he is not LITVANOFF, RUAN or HAHN. He cannot be JACQUINOT, since Jacquinot is listed as one of his contacts, and he cannot be UCHIYAMA, since UCHIYAMA has only two contacts and the priest has three. Member #6 must thus be DUKE. Continue in this manner until the table is complete.”
“Once you have the table set up, look at the contact information in the last column. With this data and the fact that there is just one way to create a sequence of calls starting and ending with member #1, in which each member is only called once and makes only one call, you can determine the order of the circle call. (It may help to draw six dots in a circle, number them and connect them with arrows representing the contacts possible for each member.) This will give you the correct order of the original cypher message.”
“Only now should you worry about the cypher. All you need is the two messages (they can be deciphered together, since they use the same cypher), the first letters of the network code names in order (which you will recall form the cypher-equivalent of DRAGON) and some knowledge of the alphabet substitution cypher. This cypher is probably the simplest around: each letter of the alphabet is replaced by another, consistently through the message. Thus for example if A=X, B=Y and C=Z, then the message text word CAB would always be ciphered as ZXY.”
“So to solve the cypher, first write down the two messages in big letters with space between the lines. Also do a table with one column of letters from A through Z. (these are the letters as they appear in the ciphered text) and an adjacent blank column (for the corresponding actual message letters, as you find them). The first thing you can put in the second column are the letters D-R-A- G-O-N, each letter beside the letter from the code-names to which it corresponds. Then go to your copy of the cypher messages and put in all the Ds, Rs, As, Gs, Os and Ns underneath their corresponding letters in the cypher text. From there, deduce what the missing letters are. Hints: (a) The most common letter in an average English text is E. In addition T, A, O, N, I, R, S and Hare usually common, although in a message this short there may be exceptions. (b) The most common two-letter combination is TH. (c) Look at the short words, especially those of one or two letters — there are comparatively few possibilities. (d) Keep an eye out for double letters, which make a word easier to guess.”
“Finally, look at what you have deciphered and work out what it means. The original Green Gang message is of largely historical interest, but the message that Ah Q passed to Mabel, plus the information that it refers to one of the network’s original contact sites, make it easy to deduce where Ricci’s flask has been all these years.”
“In a way, Tweedie, the key thing about these puzzles is that they are much like lite, where the important elements of a problem are so often lost in a jungle of unnecessary data and a complexity more apparent than real.”
The Challenge Can you duplicate Liebnitz’s feat by providing: (a) for each member of the network, their own membership number, code-name, cover occupation, passport nationality and contact site (a single street-name will do) plus the network membership numbers of those whom they can contact; (b) the order of the circle call by membership number, beginning and ending with #1; (c) the text of the two deciphered messages; and (d) the location of the Ricci flask. bout de papier will decide the winner by drawing from a box containing all correct entries received by September 15th. The winner will receive a CD of Tuvan throat singing (the national music of Aalto’s homeland) and a book on 1920s China.
As a further challenge, but not necessary for the entry, do you know: (a) the identity of the original Ah Q; (b) the force in which Ms Undershaft was a Major; and (c) the 1955 movie whose plot bears a certain resemblance to the events at the Costume Ball?
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1997) — Summer 1997 // Été 1997, pp. 46–48. Read the rest of this issue →
