The Affair of the Fair Trade Gazebo

bout de papier, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2014) — Summer 2014 // Été 2014, pp. 37–39

It started simple. Mrs. Antananarivo was worried her husband was cheating. I had a hard time imagining it. She had the kind of looks that set off fire alarms. Two counties away. But her money was good.

“Please, Mr Dikk,” she said, “Find out what’s going on. Who she is. And why he keeps muttering ‘Fair trade gazebo’ in his sleep.” “Say what?” Effie asked. “He started a couple of weeks ago, around the time he began disappearing evenings and weekends. When I asked him about the words, he turned white as tofu.”

So Effie and I found ourselves tailing this guy. He worked nine-to-five as a trader in kumquat futures at the Fruits and Nuts Derivatives Board. But every evening on the way home he stopped at the same East Side dive — the Triple Gainer with a Twist — where he would meet this woman. They always sat at the same table, where we couldn’t get close enough to overhear them. I called in reinforcements.

The next night, we walked into an Irish pub near the Gainer. As we went in, we saw a guy no more than a foot tall pounding away at the Steinway. Across the room, the barkeep was smacking around a leprechaun, shouting that, no, he hadn’t wished for a 12-inch pianist. “Tough joint,” murmured Effie. I just shrugged and wondered if it would get past the editor.

Seated with his back against the wall was a short man with a long beard. Hairy Harry January greeted us with a nod. I apologized for being late. “No need. Iam happy thinking a little of this and drinking a little of that,” he replied. Effie looked into Harry’s glass, “And what are you drinking?” Harry said, “I believe it is bog water in which are soaked the socks James Joyce is wearing when he dies. I do not take a second sip to confirm.” The waiter came over and we ordered boiled Perrier.

Harry reported. “So like you ask, I am spending time in the Gainer, not the best place I ever go, not the worst. I sit at the table Kid Kumquat always takes, but move when he gets in, leaving a pinhead mike behind. But all they talk about is the weather and fruit. I figure the real dope, other than the guy himself, must be in the notes they pass. But they hold them close, no chance for a gander.”

“So I call up Shimmy the Dip. He is back from a spell in Her Majesty’s guesthouse, looking for a little paying work. He shows up with his lady Knock-knock and I tip them the Kid. As the mark is leaving, Knock-knock distracts him by singing Hava Nagila in Swahili while juggling a school of piranhas naked. Her, not the fish. Well, actually both. Meanwhile, Shimmy is dipping the Kid. He comes back with a big grin, also with the Kid’s wallet, watch and contracts for enough fruit to make a smoothie the size of Mike Duffy. And this coaster I see the Kid and his Jane huddle over.”

Harry handed me a square beermat with the logo of a not very popular brand (“LCBO?s Revenge”) on the front and on the back a grid with the single word “DOUBLE” below.

Effie and I looked at each other and shrugged. “What the hell is this supposed to mean?” “No idea,” said Harry. “But it must be something special because they spend an hour working it like I work the racing sheets. Finally, he checks his watch, they get up real sudden and hurry out.”

“How long ago?” I asked. “About half an hour.” I cursed, “We’ll never find them. We really need to know what’s going on.” “Then it is probably good that I get the waiter to drop a couple or so GPS bugs in their bar snacks.” “Great thinking!” said Effie. “I mean, this too shall pass, but until then we’ve got them nailed.”

A few hours later, Effie and I were striding west down the Esplanade, hot on our suspects’ trail. Up ahead was the revamped warehouse that housed the Cirque de Loon.

As we approached the gaudily-painted doors, Effie pulled at my sleeve, saying, “Hey, over there, it’s Bugbyte, with some people from her office. They don’t look like they’re here for fun.” “Neither are we,” I pointed out. “So I suggest we postpone a social encounter until we’ve dealt with the Kid and Jane.” Our couple were halfway around the arena to our left and just getting seated.

The lights went down, the music came up and the fog machine added mystery. Our targets didn’t move a muscle throughout the show. When it ended, they stayed in their seats while everyone else climbed up to the exit level. Except for three men and two women who walked down to the arena floor and strolled around like they were killing time. Bugbyte’s team tagged along, equally casual, not meeting the eyes of the strollers. They were clearly waiting for someone to make a play. Then the Kid and Jane stood up and walked down. And through the archway to backstage, Mrs. Antananarivo waltzed in.

Maybe I shouldn’t have texted her.

Jane and the Kid began a tour of the five strollers. We were mooching over to eavesdrop, but as we got close, Mrs. A came around a tent-pole and glommed onto her husband. “Aloysius, you are such a cliché. Just when I think I’m that one in your world, your heart gets stolen by some mousey little girl. Well, you bet you’d better finally decide.” Wonderful. I try for Mood Indigo and wind up with John Sebastian.

“But dear,” he replied. “Jane here is just a business associate.” Jane flared, “A business associate? You lamer! And you never told me you were married!” She picked up a whiffle bat and let him have it good. He went down. The papers in his hand went up.

Across town, earlier the same day…

“It’s complicated,” said Dryan Tweedie, the Centre’s former archivist and now Sultan of SuWaNi. Ace logician Ludwig Liebnitz nodded. Thirty-four million clones of the Prime Minister, half of them female, qualified the situation as significantly wrinkled.

“Our AI, GEODE, has detected a plot to infect the entire Canadian population with a retrovirus that converts them to duplicates of the Right Honourable himself. “Uniculturalism’, some are calling it. The back room boys love it, with the election coming up.” Manitoba Jones broke in, “Yeah, yeah, and I can see strong Charter benefits on the equality front, although reproduction rates and population growth might take a hit.” The others looked at him blankly.

Liebnitz asked, “How is the virus to be introduced?” The Sultan looked up and his turban fell off. “Drat. That’s where the plotters have been clever. Assuming that some details of the plan will be discovered, they have created multiple possible virus sources and carriers — and only the leaders know which one will be used.”

“What are these sources and carriers?” asked Liebnitz. Tweedie replied, “There are five labs, three in my sultanate — at Su, Ni and Wa — and two nearby in Ip and Ro. Each lab has been working with five carriers — hogs, dogs, three-toed sloths (a slow-release option), chickens and a sort of large swallow called a gulp. Sadly, by the time we worked this out, 25 ships had already landed here, five from each lab, each with a different carrier. Only a single ship was carrying the retrovirus, but we have no idea which one.”

“If they have already landed, how can we stop this dastardly plot?” exclaimed Don Gordo. “Caramba, my face, I’ll have to paint over every mirror in the house!” Tweedie replied, “Release of the virus needs an electronic signal to activate an embedded chip in the carriers. If we can determine the activation command and the carriers to which it applies, we can hack a counter-command and deactivate the virus.”

“What do we have to work on?” asked Liebnitz, Tweedie replied, “The agent who will issue the command is one of five people who use the code names Humphrey Bogart, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Lauren Bacall and Scarlett Johannson. We’re keeping them all under surveillance but we don’t want to move against them until we know which one is the real McCoy — they may have a protocol for advancing the release if under threat.”

“The activator doesn’t yet have the activation code. It will be passed to him or her just before release time. But we have no lead on the identity of the messenger, or how and when the code will be passed on.”

Bugbyte turned from the window and lifted a heavy pair of dark glasses from her face. “GEODE gave me these augmented reality shades years ago to keep me online in the field. So I did a little work on the problem. Would you be interested to know that all five of the potential activators have tickets for tonight’s performance at the Cirque de Loon?”

Liebnitz smiled. “Coincidence? We think not. I assume the messenger will pass the activation code to one of them at the show. Would your ticket lists by any chance include other points of interest, like a name for the messenger?” “There’s hundreds of them, from Antananarivo to Zywycky, but no-one stands out. Besides, anyone can show up and pay at the door. I think we’ll just have to be there and keep our eyes open.”

A few hours later, Liebnitz, Bugbyte, the sultan, Don Gordo and Manitoba Jones were striding east up the Esplanade toward the revamped warehouse that housed the Cirque.

As they approached the heavy doors, Bugbyte saw Effie and Shamus. As she swung her head to look more closely, the GEOglasses flashed the words FAIR TRADE GAZEBO above a tall blond man just ahead of the detectives. She filed the moment for later evaluation.

Stationed by the grand doors, the agents identified the potential activators from their surveillance photos and tracked them to their seats. Soon the show began. Although the darkness, fog and laser flashes made observation difficult, the team managed to keep them in sight through the whole show.

When the lights went up, the activators rose and walked down to the floor of the arena, loitering around the edge of the main ring. After a few minutes, a young couple rose from the nearly empty stands and descended the stairs. At a nod from Liebnitz, so did the team. On his way down, Manitoba noticed a striking blonde slink in from the left, focusing so hard on the couple that she tripped on a rubber chicken.

The couple started to make the rounds of the activators, shaking hands with each one. Liebnitz said, “Must be the messenger. He’s using casual conversation to get their code names, so he can pass the activation key to the right one.”

After finishing the round, the messenger reached into his pocket and pulled out a small envelope. The team tensed. But then the mysterious blonde strode over, spoke harshly to the messenger and slapped him. The messenger replied, then his young companion clobbered him as well. The envelope sailed out of his hand and landed in the dolphin pool.

Intermezzo with clowns…

Don Gordo and Manitoba Jones exchanged a glance. The young man jumped into the pool while his boss pushed a long-handled net out over the rim of the pool. The dolphins decided it was a game of defend-the-flag. Coming up on each side of Jones, two pinned him between them and ran him at high speed straight into the wall of the tank. At the last minute he grabbed the rim and flipped over it. In doing so, he jostled the high stool on which Don Gordo was balanced, before planting his own head in bucket of whitewash. The net flew out of Don Gordo’s hand and hit the switch that turned on the clockwork orchestra. The Don himself fell into a self-driven clown car and was soon careening wildly around the ring, feet waving in the air. Jones staggered to his feet in time to be clipped by an eight-foot contra-bassoon in the hands of a mechanical hippo. The car with Don Gordo swerved and climbed a steep ramp before coming to a sudden stop and tipping the ex-dictator over a sharp drop. He bounced off a staircase of trampolines before a giant boxing glove swept in and knocked him whooping into a giant basket with no floor. Swept through a huge pipe full of day-glow orange paint and then showered by pink glitter, Manitoba staggered back into a big green chair. Don Gordo lost his grip on the basket and slammed down onto a mattress at the upraised end of a large teeter-totter. Manitoba, whose chair was (of course) at the other end, shot screaming into the high reaches of the tent and found himself holding desperately onto a trapeze bar as it swung lower and lower over the main ring. Don Gordo had found the net and was trying for the envelope while the dolphins were distracted. Instead, the avocado armchair in which Manitoba had been hoicked completed its arc, came hurtling down and knocked Don Gordo into the pool. The resulting tsunami scattered dolphins everywhere and knocked the envelope into the bell of a passing euphonium, from which it was soon blasted by a particularly pompous passage of Wagner. Arching upward, it flew into the wide-open mouth of Manitoba Jones, whose descent was rudely halted moments later by a popcorn stand. He lay dazed in a puddle of whitewash, paint, glitter and stale Crackerjacks, beside a giggling dolphin. Liebnitz took the envelope gently from between his agent’s teeth, adding that FedEx or an email would be fine next time.

Getting it together….

Things eventually calmed down and dried off. Liebnitz and Shamus briefed the combined teams. Kid Kumquat sat uncomfortably between Shamus’ client and Jane, with Effie guarding them. The five potential activators sat on the sawdust under close watch by Dryan Tweedie, carrying an elaborately engraved antique-pattern pistol. Bogart sneered at the sultan, “That old handgun is single-shot, mister — if it still works at all. One bullet and five of us. Not bad odds.” He grinned wolfishly. Tweedie pulled the trigger. A thin beam of light evaporated the cigarette hanging from the corner of Bogart’s mouth. The sultan said, “The SuWaNi Snapdragon Laser Blunderbuss, Mark 1. We combine the best of the old and new.” The five went quiet. “To be honest, I was trying for the feather in Miss Johannson’s hat, but I hope you get the message.” The group went even quieter.

Liebnitz said, “So, we have the players but not the score. We don’t know which of the five was the activator, or the wording of the release code, or which of the 25 possibilities is the real virus carrier.” The detective replied, “I have this grid we got from the Kid. No idea what it means, but it was important to him.” He handed the beermat to Liebnitz. The ace logician, who replied, “OK, and here’s what was in the envelope we rescued from the pool.” He handed the detective a sheet of paper with the message: “INX GFUKI FJR CTQ PCZL QGT RKEP KD VF (Fair play, now)”.

Brows knitted. Then they called over Effie and Bugbyte. Bugbyte snorted at the beermat. “Simple. It’s an alpha-Sudoku. There are nine different letters. The goal is to fill in the blank squares so that each row of nine, each column of nine and each three-by-three coloured section of nine squares uses each letter only once. I’ll bet that filling in the bottom row will give you a nine-letter word. You could also get it by treating the nine letters as an anagram.” Liebnitz nodded, “But what about the ‘double’?”

Effie turned to the other paper. “Hmm. Probably a letter-for-letter substitution cipher. But the text is too short for frequency analysis. Fortunately, the ciphermaker liked puns. ‘Fair play’ must refer to a Playfair cipher. You start out with a keyword or phrase. For example, RHUBARB JELLO. First you boil that down by deleting duplicate letters, leaving you with RHUBAJELO. Then you add the unused letters of the alphabet in order, and place the result over a regular alphabet, like this:

So, for example, BATTLESHIP is ciphered as HRSSFAQLOM. And the reverse for deciphering.” “That computes,” said Bugbyte, “But what could the keyword be?” Just then Shamus and Liebnitz drifted back from a noisy exchange with the Antananarivos. The detective asked Effie, “She’s bending my ear about that sleep-talking thing. He denies everything. Did we ever work out what those words meant?” Effie looked at Bugbyte and said “Bingo”. Soon they had the activation code and carrier.

They also worked out the nine-letter word from the beermat. Liebnitz looked at the result. “This must identify the real activator, but how? They all use one as a cover.” Bugbyte mused, “Maybe one of them is a double, like it says. A cover based on a cover.” She used the GEOglasses and confirmed her suspicion.

As the conspirators were led away by the Centre’s security team, Shamus nudged Liebnitz and pointed to the middle of the main ring, where a group of the Cirque’s clowns were pinning awards on the lapels of Don Gordo and Manitoba Jones with exaggerated ceremony. “I guess they were impressed,” the detective added. Liebnitz nodded. “I agree. But they’re the first medals I’ve ever seen with squirt bulbs attached.”

Can you duplicate Effie’s and Bugbyte’s feat by providing (a) the nine-letter word from the bottom row of the alpha-Sudoku; (b) the name of the real activator; (c) the five-letter activator key-word; and (d) the carrier (species and location of lab). bout de papier will declare a winner by drawing from all correct answers received by November 30, 2014. The winner will receive a book autographed by A Aalto.

Free-lance prestidigitator and troublemaker-at-large A Aalto is considering an assignment that would take him close to Tannu Tuva. Friends wonder what syllables of the words “kumiss” and “critical mass” the authorities don’t understand. Meanwhile, thanks to Shakespeare, the Loving Spoonful and Cirque de Soleil for inspiration. Thanks also to the ever-inspiring Mrs. Aalto, inter alia for advice on format.