EXCERPT

IT WAS NOT an ordinary notebook. I paid no attention to the little executive assistant’s warnings not to read it in public. I had a sense of what this was, the game that was being played. It was another round of the Club of Tedious Frauds.

It was a plain cardboard and grey canvas bound book slightly narrower than the A5 standard, not a Moleskine, at least not a branded one.

Moleskin notebooks are an actual historical thing, but it’s just a generic term used by a French bookseller and immortalized by travel writer Bruce Chatwin in the 80s. In 1997 an Italian stationery company copyrighted the word Moleskine and started producing the notebooks every creative pretender carries like a passport. I have a stack of them myself.

If it were me, I would have sourced actual mole skin. This was just standard oiled canvas, convincingly worn.

I was expecting something ancient and arcane: Nostradamus’ Last Predictions, Robert Fludd’s Alchemical Notebook, Annals of the Tenebrious Temple, Immortal Insights of the Count of Saint Germain. There ought to be bits of mistranscribed Latin and Greek, some cabalistic Hebrew, a selection of magic squares, pentagrams, chiromantic hands or perhaps a sefirot for illustration. I was in on the game. I wasn’t about to be smacked by Foucault’s Pendulum here.

The reality was more mundane and more irritating.

The pages inside were faintly lined with black ink. The writing throughout was in watery shades of blue, a fountain pen or a simulation thereof, but it was unreadable, not because the handwriting was poor, the ink smudged. It was unreadable by design. It was meant to be impenetrable. Not a single character used a recognized alphabet. It might have been a variation of Moon’s glyphs intermixed with some fanciful runic characters. It might and most likely was total gobbledygook.

I leafed through it, right there on the train, not caring who saw. The notebook had a few blank pages towards the end but was otherwise crammed tightly from margin to margin. There were no paragraph indents, no visual structure to suggest a narrative, just the occasional daggered or double-daggered endnote. It was evidently meant to be some sort of code – those characters, each one different and a wild variety of styles, some slashing and angular, like Kanji or a pile of random serifs, some round, ovoid, lopsided blobs, often coloured in, like Miro had made his own alphabet. There were sections that looked like Norse runes, configurations of dots that might be braille or Morse code and others that quite frankly might be just exotic emoji. I could make no sense of it. I wasn’t meant to, but I was meant to want to.

I leafed through the notebook, just scanning it for more and less frequent repetitions as you would as the first step in decoding something, but no patterns jumped out. You’d need to count characters to be sure, and that would take forever and require a system, maybe some sort of custom character recognition script. I hated myself for thinking of ways of trying to solve it. Just leafing through it, I ought to be able to pick out a few duplicates, but no two characters appeared the same. It was an endless variety of unintelligible shapes except for three or four places, where the invented characters stopped like a chapter break and a series of Arabic numbers followed on a line of its own. These numbers were followed by two blank lines, then the invented characters resumed. If this was steganography and the numbers were the whole point, then it was pretty weak. They had to be a misdirect.

The whole train ride back home I tried not to guess what I was supposed to think this was. Codes to decommissioned Soviet nuclear sites? Banking transactions? I hated that I was even speculating.

The tell on this fraud was the recipient I was supposed to deliver it to:

Brother Victor

Abbey of Saint Eutychius

Norcia, Umbria, Italy