that were not already faked being changed in any way during the typing? It wasn’t possible to read what was being typed. Only one line of words was visible at a time, the rest hidden within the typing machine. The question was of vital importance to Puskis. He spent the morning planning a way to find out.
Before lunch, he paused out of view of his minders and read the file on a White gangster named Lezner. He then took the file, along with the others he had collected, and gave them to the typists.
At noon, he told his minders that he was not interested in eating lunch and that he just wanted to rest, as the day had already been more physically taxing than an entire normal day. The minders didn’t seem to care, and they sent a guard from the lobby to fetch them lunch to eat in the Vaults. Puskis collapsed in a chair at the desk in the Stable—where the reference tomes were kept—with a blank white piece of paper and a pencil. On the sheet he drew a diagram of a typewriter keyboard. Then, with his fingers on the paper, he determined what movement was made by which finger in order to type a particular letter. Right index finger up is a u. Right index finger up and left is a y. Right index finger down is an m. And so on.
Puskis sat back in his chair with his eyes closed in complete concentration. From afar he must have looked asleep. In his mind he spelled out words in finger movements. Left index finger right; right index finger up; right index finger down and to the left. That spelled gun. Right pinkie up; right ring finger up; right ring finger; right middle finger up; left middle finger down; left middle finger up. Police. He made the words more complicated and began to formulate sentences. When he felt comfortable with this, he sped it up, his goal to process fifty words in a minute. It took him twenty minutes of intense mental effort before he could do this consistently.
The challenge, he knew, would be in trying to interpret what someone else was typing.
He used the fatigue excuse again to take a break for a cup of tea. It was not much of a stretch. He was both mentally and physically exhausted, and the prospect of the brief but intense mental challenge ahead seemed to sap him even more. He leaned against the wall behind the two typists and watched as the Lezner file rose to the top of the pile.
The typist on the left took it and opened it on a stand. For the first few seconds Puskis merely watched her type, getting used to the cadence of her fingers. The key, he determined, was to watch the space bar. That indicated a change of words. When it came time to actually “read” her fingers, he found that she moved too fast for him to identify both the letters and the order in which they were typed. Instead, he was getting anagrams. He would remember these and decipher them later.
He wanted to memorize three paragraphs in the first section of the report, potentially the most damaging section to someone in City government. The case involved a construction company that had been giving favorable rates to some of Red Henry’s cronies, then receiving no-bid contracts with the City.
He watched and memorized the three paragraphs’ worth of anagrams. One sentence was committed to memory like this: The ssucpet was bsorvde meetngi with two kownn rbitslo ssaocaties and xehcaginng tsaclehs in a amnner sgguesitgn secrecy. Finished, he left his cup at the front desk and retreated into the aisles to where he had left himself paper and a pen. He wrote quickly. When he had all the acronyms down, he found that he could read the paragraphs without spending time to decipher the words on paper.
It was as he had feared. These new files were being altered. This one had subtly shifted the language so that the construction company was involved with the White Gang instead of the City government.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Sirens in the distance stirred Poole from his moment of thought. He didn’t like his options. Knowing that police reinforcements would shortly arrive, he had to get off this block. But making a run for the far end was suicidal.
Behind him, concrete steps led down to the door of a basement apartment. He tried the knob. Locked. He pulled off